“They call us unspiritual, common, and ecclesiastic.” That’s a bishop talking, around the year 180. Irenaeus of Lyon is complaining about Valentinian Christians who still sat in his congregation and took communion with everyone else. They just treated him as a man who couldn’t follow the conversation.

If you’ve spent any time with Gnostic texts, you’ve probably met the charge that grows out of complaints like his. Gnosticism, it goes, split humanity into the saved few and the hopeless many, and the few decided they were the few. I want to give that charge its full weight, because some of it lands. Then I want to show you a few texts that pull hard the other way.

Three Kinds of People

The scheme at the center of the dispute comes from the Valentinians, the school that grew up around Valentinus in the second century. They sorted human beings into three kinds, and the pneumatics, the spiritual people, carry a seed of the divine. Psychics (from psyche, soul) have souls but not that seed, and the hylics are made of matter and nothing more. Bentley Layton translates that last group as “those consisting of dust.”

Irenaeus’s summary of the system attaches a fate to each kind. The material element necessarily perishes. The psychic “will proceed in whatever direction it has an inclination toward,” up or down depending on its choices. The spiritual will be gathered into the fullness of God.

So far it sounds like a ranking with the outcome fixed at birth. According to Irenaeus, the Valentinians put themselves at the top and put him in the middle.

The Case for the Prosecution

Here’s the passage that does the most damage. Irenaeus says the Valentinians taught that ordinary church members like him needed good conduct to be saved, while they themselves were spiritual “not by behavior, but by nature.” Then he gives their image for it:

For a piece of gold does not lose its beauty when it is put into the filth but rather keeps its own nature, since the filth cannot harm the gold.

If that’s an accurate report, it’s about as elitist as religion gets. Salvation becomes a substance you either have or don’t, and if you have it, nothing you do can scuff it. Irenaeus goes on to accuse them of ignoring the moral rules that bound everyone else.

There’s more. Elaine Pagels notes that the Eastern branch of the school, led by a teacher named Theodotus, said the true church was made of spiritual people only, “the chosen race.” The Gospel of Thomas, which isn’t Valentinian but was read by Gnostic Christians, has Jesus say, “I shall choose you, one from a thousand and two from ten thousand.” Pagels sets that line beside the orthodox believer’s sense of being one member of a universal family, and the comparison isn’t flattering.

Even Ptolemy, the most patient Valentinian teacher we have, ends his letter to a student by promising more teaching “if you are deemed worthy of the apostolic tradition.” I don’t think any of this should be explained away. A teaching that divides people into kinds will always tempt the ones who sorted themselves into the best kind.

Consider the Source

Still, look at who’s describing the gold in the filth. Layton’s notes on that passage say scholars have cast doubt on some of its details, and that many reject the sexual accusations Irenaeus attaches to it as malicious rumor. We’re hearing the Valentinians through an opponent who wanted them out of his church.

When we get them in their own words, the picture shifts. The Tripartite Tractate, a long Valentinian treatise found at Nag Hammadi, uses the same three categories but adds something Irenaeus leaves out:

Each of the essences of the three races is recognized from its fruit. They were not recognized at first, however, but only at the advent of the savior.

Nobody could tell who was spiritual by looking. The categories became visible only when people responded to the savior, and the text describes the responses. The spiritual race “ran toward him immediately.” The psychic race “hesitated” before it came to him in faith, and the material race “did not accept his advent.”

It’s still a sorting, and the material race comes off badly. But a category you can only see after someone answers a call is closer to a stage than a caste. You’d have no way to know, standing in a crowd, which person beside you was which.

A Seed That Keeps Being Planted

Even Irenaeus’s hostile summary carries traces of this. In his account, the spiritual seed is “sent hither as an infant and grows to maturity in this place.” Wisdom, he reports them saying, has kept sowing it into just souls down to the present day. A seed that’s still being planted in good people is an odd foundation for an aristocracy.

Pagels also points to the Western teachers Ptolemy and Heracleon, who disagreed with Theodotus. As she reads them, the church held both spiritual and unspiritual Christians, and Christ combined the two “so that eventually all may become spiritual.” Heracleon said the gnostic Christians had their understanding for the sake of the rest, so they could teach them. Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora shows what that looked like in practice, a teacher walking a newcomer through hard questions one step at a time.

You can still call that condescending, and fairly. “We’ll explain it when you’re ready” can be a kindness or a put-down depending on who says it. But it’s the condescension of a teacher, and teachers expect their students to catch up.

A Sermon Against Spiritual Snobs

The text that changed my mind most is a short homily from Nag Hammadi called the Interpretation of Knowledge. Marvin Meyer’s introduction says it offers “a rare glimpse into the social dynamics of a Gnostic Christian community,” and what it shows is a congregation fighting over exactly this problem. Some members had spiritual gifts and others didn’t. The gifted ones were pulling away, and the rest were jealous.

Borrowing Paul’s image of the church as a body, the author turns it on both groups. To the ones who feel left out, he says:

Do not accuse your head for not having made you into an eye but rather a finger. Do not be jealous of the one who has been given the part of an eye or a hand or a foot.

Then he goes after the gifted. “Someone has a prophetic gift. Share in it without hesitation.” How can you have knowledge, he asks, if you’re ignorant of your brothers?

He even voices the person in the pew stewing over who gets to preach, “Why does that one speak but I do not speak?” The homilist’s answer is that whatever the speaker says belongs to the listener as well.

Nobody preaches that sermon to a community without a snobbery problem. Meyer places the homily in the Eastern Valentinian school, the same branch Theodotus led. So the exclusive wing of the movement produced its own rebuke of exclusiveness, and someone thought it worth copying.

Equality Inside the Circle

Pagels describes a circle of initiates who, according to Irenaeus, drew lots at every meeting to decide who would act as priest, who would read scripture, and who would speak as a prophet. Men and women drew alike, and the roles changed every time. Tertullian complained about heretics who ran things this way, where “today one man is bishop and tomorrow another.” He also grumbled that among them “they all have access equally,” and he added, “even pagans, if any happen to come.”

So the movement accused of snobbery was also accused of letting anyone do anything. I think both charges have some truth in them. Inside the circle, there were no ranks at all. The wall stood around the circle itself, at the moment of initiation, while the orthodox church drew its walls in other places, between clergy and laity, bishop and flock.

Living With the Question

If you read Gnostic texts, the elitism question isn’t only historical. It’s a temptation built into any path that prizes inner knowledge, and I’ve caught it in myself more than once. Here’s how I try to keep it honest.

When you catch yourself filing someone under “not ready” or “asleep,” remember the Tripartite Tractate’s point that nobody was recognized at first. You don’t know what someone will do when the call reaches them. You probably didn’t know it about yourself, either, until it reached you.

If you’ve learned something, pass it on the way the homily asks, without hesitation and without charging a toll. Sitting on an insight because others haven’t earned it is the exact behavior the homilist calls ignorance.

And when someone else seems to have a gift you lack, try his line on yourself for a week. Whatever they say belongs to you as well. I find that one hard, and I suspect it was hard in the second century too.

For the vocabulary behind all this, the glossary of twenty Gnostic terms covers hylic, psychic, and pneumatic in a few lines each. And Did the Gnostics Hate the Body? takes on another charge in this series.

Picture the meeting Tertullian hated. A woman draws the lot for bishop tonight. Next week she reads, and the man who preached last time sits near the back and listens. Whatever else you make of the Gnostics, they had a way of keeping anyone from getting comfortable at the front of the room.

Irenaeus’s summary of Ptolemy’s system (Against Heresies 1.6 and 1.7), the Tripartite Tractate, and Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora are quoted from Bentley Layton’s translations in The Gnostic Scriptures (2nd ed., Yale, 2021). The Gospel of Thomas and the Interpretation of Knowledge are quoted from The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, ed. Marvin Meyer (HarperOne, 2010). Irenaeus’s complaint about being called unspiritual (conflated from Against Heresies 3.15.2 and 2.16.4), the account of the drawing of lots, and Tertullian’s remarks are quoted from Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979).