Il divino senza veli - La dottrina gnostica della 'Lettera valentiniana' di Epifanio, Panarion 31 5-6. Testo, traduzione e commento storico-religioso.

[Autom. eng. transl.] The work makes available for the first time in an autonomous form one of the rare original Gnostic documents, a letter in Greek of mid II century. AD, transcribed from Epiphanius of Salamis. It presents itself as an esoteric revelation of a very peculiar Valentinian Gnostic doctrine. The anonymous author accurately illustrates the 'modalities' of the manifestation of the supreme god, reorienting for his own purposes a terminology and a conceptual baggage derived from the medioplatonic context and above all from the New Testament writings, in particular those of Pauline extraction. It therefore proposes a rereading of the doctrine of Valentino characterized by the tendency to understand the divine supreme in a very compact way; in this way he distances himself from other widespread interpretations among the followers of Ptolemy, a continuator of Valentino, who seemed inappropriately to accentuate the hypostatization of the different 'modes' with which the divine wanted to show 'without veils'. "The Valentinian doctrinal letter, once adequately understood and re-evaluated, promises to make a significant contribution to the clarification of some aspects of the development of the first Valentinianism, in the middle of the second century still contiguous to the Great Church, preserving a first-hand version so far for many verse lost ". (from the 'Conclusions')