Valentinus's premise is that both the world and humanity are sick. The sickness of both has a common root: ignorance. That is, we ignore the authentic values of life and substitute inauthentic ones for them. We believe that we need physical things such as money, symbols of powers and prestige, physical pleasures in order to be happy or whole. Similarly, we fall in love with the ideas and abstractions of our minds. Our rigidities are always due to excessive attachment to abstract concepts and precepts. The sickness of materialism was called hyleticism (worship of matter) by the Gnostics, while the sickness of abstract intellectualism and moralising was known as psychism (worship of the mind and the emotional soul). The true role of the facilitators of wholeness in this world, among whom Jesus occupies the place of honour, is to exorcise these sicknesses by bringing knowledge of the 𝙥𝙣𝙚𝙪𝙢𝙖 or spirit to the soul and mind. The obsessive attachment to material and mental things is thus replaced by spiritual freedom; the inauthentic values give way to the authentic values associated with the spirit.

Gnosticism by Stephan Hoeller