The idea of some sort of tripartite division to the human subject is at least as old as Plato, and similar divisions can be seen in the writings of later Platonists such as Plutarch and Philo. Building on this philosophical tradition as well as the anthropological speculations of Paul in 1 Corinthians, certain so-called “Valentinian” Christians in the second and third centuries posited three specific kinds of human beings: material/choic, psychic, and pneumatic. Scholarly conversation around this topic has focused primarily on the degree of eschatological determinism that the division entails—with recent scholarship making a convincing set of arguments for a more fluid or dynamic understanding of the three classes of human beings in question (Buell 2005, Dunderberg 2008). While agreeing with the ways in which this work has complicated the notion of a “saved by nature” theology in Valentinian texts, this paper takes up a different set of questions, beginning not with eschaton/salvation, but rather with creation—and the implications of various creation stories for the constitution of the human subject. Here I explore the ways in which different deployments of tripartite categories in early Christian creation myths function to demarcate and delimit the contours of “the human” in specific and theologically significant ways. That is to say, Valentinian texts mobilize the distinction between material, psychic, and pneumatic bodies variably in order to articulate where the human starts, where it stops, and where its limits interact—both licitly and illicitly—with the registers of the non-human (divine, archonic, bestial). To make this case, the analysis offers brief examples from three representative texts: the Tripartite Tractate, the Excerpts from Theodotus (as preserved in Clement of Alexandria), and On the Origin of the World (the last text not being strictly Valentinian but containing a tripartite anthropological scheme commonly identified with a Valentinian redactor).
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