Heracleon, (flourished 2nd century ad), leader of the Italian school of Gnosticism, a dualistic doctrine of rival deities conceiving of salvation as an elitist enlightenment by secret knowledge, with fulfillment in the soul’s eventual release from the body.
Diverging from his contemporaries Valentinus and Ptolemaeus, Heracleon sought a conservative expression of Gnosticism divested of radical oriental theories; accordingly, in the first known exegetical commentary on the Gospel According to St. John, he expounded with allegorical emphasis his central doctrine of the three levels of being: Christ as the incarnate form of a fallen spirit or demiurge representing the “psychic” level that is intermediate between the superior or “pneumatic” category (Greek: “spirit,” comprising the “plenitude” of the Father) and the base level of the material world formed by the demigod of evil. Heracleon, moreover, commented on the Gnostic tradition of materializing their philosophical theory in their sacramental rites of initiation and in their interpretative use of early Christian literature.