I have been thinking about the figure of 'Philumena' who is associated with the Marcionite Alexandrian leader Apelles. Φιλουμένη is either the feminine nominative or vocative form of the participle φιλούμενος. As Socrates notes in one of his dialogues:
“When someone loves (φιλῇ) someone, which one becomes a friend (φίλος) of the other, the loving (φιλῶν) of the loved (φιλουμένου), or the loved (φιλούμενος) of the loving (φιλοῦτος)? Or is there no difference?”
As such the Φιλουμένη is the being loved by 'the friend' (φίλος). Moses and Abraham are both described as the 'friend of God.' The people are presumably the ones loved. So it was for the Valentinian community as Clement notes:
“Many of the things written in public books are found in the writings of God’s church. For these common matters are the words from the heart, the law that is written in the heart. This is the people of the beloved, the one who is loved and which loves him.” [Valentinian Fragment 6 = Clement, Strom. 4.52:3–53:1 (SC 446:166–68): Πολλὰ τῶν γεγραμμένων ἐν ταῖς δημοσίαις βίβλοις εὑρίσκεται γεγραμμένα ἐν τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ τοῦ θεοῦ τὰ γὰρ κοινὰ ταῦτά ἐστι τὰ ἀπὸ καρδίας ῥήματα,νόμος ὁ γραπτὸς ἐν καρδίᾳ οὗτος ἐστιν ὁ λαὸς ὁ τοῦ ἠγαπημένου, ὁ φιλούμενος καὶ φιλῶν αὐτόν]
Kreps notes:
The phrase, “this is the people of the beloved” (οὕτος ἐστιν ὁ λαὸς ὁ τοῦ ἠγαπημὲνου), has presented interpretive challenges for the modern reader. Here, οὕτος does not seem to have a logical referent. Proposed scholarly solutions include amending λαὸς to λόγος, to read, “this is the word of the beloved,” or suggesting that οὕτος refers forward either to the “one who is loved and loves him” or abstractly to the Valentinian “spiritual church.”107 Because Clement provides no context for the quotation, it is also possible that there is a break in the quotation, and the meaning is unrecoverable.108 The lack of context means that attempts to make sense of this fragment are speculative. However, it is possible that the textual problem can be resolved without textual emendation, by assuming some consistency in Valentinian writings. In light of the way that Valentinian sources routinely bring together flesh and book, there seems to be no reason not to accept the original and natural reading of this fragment. That is to say, “this is the people of the beloved” refers back to the elect as “laws of the heart.” In this case, the gist of the fragment would read: “[the law written in the heart] is the people of the beloved, the one who is loved and which loves him.”
At the very least the passage shows that the people - the body of Valentinians - were referenced as the φιλούμενος of the beloved friend. In a community where individual members were thought to be 'brides of Christ' it would stand to reason that they would be referenced as Φιλουμένη.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
After looking at this again ὁ φιλούμενος might refer to the beloved not the people.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
EXCURSUS I
“FRIENDS” (οἱ φίλοι).
The name φίλοι (οἰκεῖοι) τοῦ θεοῦ (“amici dei,” “cari deo”) was frequently used as a self-designation by Christians, though it was not strictly a technical term. It went back735 to the predicate of Abraham, who was called “the Friend of God” in Jewish tradition. It signified that every individual Christian stood in the same relation to God as Abraham736 had done. According to two passages in the gospels,737 Jesus called his
disciples his “friends.” But in after-years this title (or that of of οἱ γνώριμοι) was rarely used.
The term οἱ φίλοι is to be distinguished from that of φίλοι τοῦ θεοῦ (χριστοῦ). Did Christians also call each other “friends”? We know the significance which came to attach to friendship in the schools of Greek philosophy. No one ever spoke more nobly and warmly of friendship than Aristotle. Never was it more vividly realized than in the schools of the Pythagoreans and the Epicureans. If the former went the length of a community of goods, the Samian sage outstripped them with his counsel, “Put not your property into a common holding, for that implies a mutual distrust. And if people distrust each other, they cannot be friends” (μὴ κατατίθεοθαι τὰς οὐσίας εἰς τὸ κοινὸν· ἀπιστούντων γὰρ τὸ τοιοῦτον· εἰ δ᾽ ἀπίστων, οὐδὲ φίλων). The intercourse of Socrates with his scholars—scholars who were at the same time his friends—furnished a moving picture of friendship. Men could not forget how he lived with them, how he laboured for them and was open to them up to the very hour of his death, and how everything he taught them came home to them as a friend's counsel. The Stoic ethic, based on the absence of any wants in the perfect wise man, certainly left no room for friendship, but (as is often the case) the Stoic broke through the theory of his school at this point, and Seneca was not the only Stoic moralist who glorified friendship and showed how it was a moral necessity to life. No wonder that the Epicureans, like the Pythagoreans before them, simply called themselves “friends.” It formed at once the simplest and the deepest expression for that inner bond of life into which men found themselves transplanted when they entered the fellowship of the school. No matter whether it was the common reverence felt for the master, or the community of sentiment and aspiration among the members, or the mutual aid owed by each individual to his fellows—the relationship in every case was covered by the term of “the friends.” We should expect to find that Christians also called themselves “the friends.” But there is hardly any passage bearing this out. ‘In one of the “we” sections in Acts (xxvii. 3) we read that Paul the prisoner was permitted τρὸς τοὺς φίλούς πορευθέντι ἐπιμέλειαs τυχεῖν. Probably οἱ φίλοι here means not special friends of the apostle, but Christians in general (who elsewhere are always called in Acts of οἱ ἀδελφοί) . But this is the only passage in the primitive literature which can be adduced. Luke, with his classical culture, has permitted himself this once to use the classical designation. In 3 John 15 (ἀσπάζονταί σε οἱ φιλοι· ἀσπάζου τοὺς φίλους κατ᾽ ὄνομα) it is most likely that special friends are meant, not all the Christians at Ephesus and at the place where the letter is composed. Evidently the natural term οἱ φίλοι did not gain currency in the catholic church, owing to the fact that οἱ ἀδελφοί (cp. above, pp. 405 f.) was preferred as being still more inward and warm. In gnostic circles, on the other hand, which arose subsequently under the influence of Greek philosophy, οἱ φίλοι seems to have been used during the second century. Thus Valentinus wrote a homily περὶ φίλων (cp. Clem., Strom., vi. 6. 52); Epiphanius, the son of Carpocrates, founded a Christian communistic guild after the model of the Pythagoreans, and perhaps also after the model of the Epicurean school and its organization (Clem., Strom. iii. 5-9); while the Abercius-inscription, which is probably gnostic, tells how faith furnished the fish as food for (τοῖς) φίλοις. Clement of Alexandria would have had no objection to describe the true gnostic circle as “friends.” It is he who preserves the fine saying (Quis Dives, xxxii.): “The Lord did not say [in Luke xvi. 9] give, or provide, or benefit, or aid, but make a friend. And friendship springs, not from a single act of giving, but from invariable relief vouchsafed and from long intercourse” (οὐ μὴ οὐδ᾽ εἶτεν ὁ κύριος, Δος, ἢ ΙΙαράσχες, ἢ Ἐυεργέτησον, ἢ Βοήθησαν· φίλον δὲ ποιῆσαι· ὁ δὲ φίλος οὐκ ἐκ μίας δόσεως γίνεταί, ἀλλ᾽ ἐξ ὅλης ἀναπαύσεως καὶ συνουσίας μακρᾶς).
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote