Library › Greek: Early Christian Writings › Summer Harvest (Psalm)
Summer Harvest is a short psalm by Valentinus, the Christian teacher of the second century AD who taught in Alexandria and Rome and gave his name to the Valentinian school of Gnosticism. The poem, only a few lines long, is preserved by Hippolytus in his Refutation of All Heresies. It describes a chain of dependence in which flesh hangs from soul, soul from air, and air from the upper ether.
It is the only poem by Valentinus to survive, and one of the few texts from his own hand. Hippolytus quoted it to expose Valentinian doctrine, but the psalm itself gives a glimpse of the mystical and cosmological vision of an influential early Christian thinker in his own words.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Hippolytus, Refutatio 6.37.7; Völker fr. 8). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).