Other Natural Religions

[Husky]

My best post ever.

That's 'cause it's not even my stuff.



But I do agree with 99.999% of the writer's view in the following. Est-ce que c'est possible? <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ohmy.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':o' /> (Well, it's *accurate*. Impossible *not* to agree...)



Worth re-reading many times over - for many reasons, but especially because a lot is said.

To be read in full or not at all. The ending could be deja-vued, but it's always worth it.



Have inserted a comment - it's in purple - and have made a few items bold. Would have done far more, but fortunately stopped myself at that point. The interference can only mar.

Italics are as in original.





Obviously from a source entirely different to that of #69 and #70 -

THE ANTI-CHRISTIAN POLITICS OF JULIAN



The criticisms made of Christians in the Against the Galilaeans, and the tone in which they are made, owe an evident debt to conventions of polemic. That does not mean they did not go deep. But polemic deals in extremes; it is impatient of distinctions between the wholly and the partly bad in what it attacks. To appraise Julian's criticisms properly, we need to measure what he said about Christianity against what he did about it. The debate on this score has tended to centre on two related issues: Did the underlying motivation behind his policy towards Christians change significantly in the course of his reign? And do the measures taken in the later part of it amount to persecution?



The notion that the policy underwent a significant shift assumes that when Julian first became Emperor he supposed that it would be possible to restore the fortunes of paganism in the cities of the Empire without recourse to actively repressive measures against the Christians. That was the view of Bidez. In support, he pointed first to edicts issued by Julian very shortly after his arrival at Constantinople in December 361, or perhaps even earlier.111 They declared religious toleration throughout the Empire, and an amnesty for all Christians exiled by the former regime. On this view, Julian started out in the belief that, provided the cults were free to compete with Christianity without hindrance, a pagan restoration would follow, and continued to work on that basis for several months. For Bidez, the education law of 17 June 362 marked a fundamental shift from that assumption:112 Julian now acted on the basis that the disseminators of a Christianized Hellenism were working serious harm and must be checked, that Christian youth was sick and could only be cured by true paideia. 113 His later experiences at Antioch, the argument runs - not least the destruction by fire of the temple at Daphne - gave his dislike of Christians an increasingly sharp edge: 114 there were churches summarily shut, their property confiscated;115 soldiers bribed to sacrifice, sometimes even compelled on pain of death;116 Christians excluded from public office,117 forbidden even to bury their dead by day;118 orders that they should be henceforth called Galilaeans';119 anti-Christian pogroms left unpunished. 120 In short, Julian's policy became more and more repressive and pettily vindictive, and seemed to imply that outright persecution was not far off by the time he set out against Persia in spring 363.



For the moment, I set aside the matter of Julian's credentials as a 'persecutor', and focus on the larger argument that his policy involved a turn-about from a tolerant stance to a conviction that Christianity must be actively repressed. This widely accepted interpretation of the policy was crisply rejected by Bowersock: in his view, Julian's view of Christians was utterly intolerant from the first and he never contemplated any other solution to the problem they posed than their total elimination.121 That claim is very strong and needs to be qualified, but in my view Bowersock was right to reject the basic notion of a slide from toleration to persecution in the reign: as a general interpretation, it is highly misleading. In the first place, there is an elementary distinction to be made between ends and means. Even if we suppose that Julian did not intend at first to pursue the Christians actively, that does not mean that his underlying purpose was to change in any way. At the heart of Against the Galilaeans there lay a compelling sense that Christianity was damaging the fabric of civilized life. Julian did not arrive at that conviction at Antioch, however. It is plain to see in two works composed in close proximity122 in the early spring of 363. The Helios myth in the Against Heraclius casts Constantine and his sons as the sowers of monstrous discord: 'there was a general slaughter ... and everything was thrown into confusion. The sons demolished the ancestral temples which their father had dishonoured ... and the laws of the gods and men alike were profaned.'123 The Fates foretold that if nothing were done, 'this wicked zeal for impious deeds will prevail universally.'124 The criticism elsewhere in the same work of men who 'subvert the common customs' we have discussed much earlier. Ostensibly, it was a description of Heraclius and his friends, but I have argued that they hardly merited the title and that Julian was well aware of the fact. For the sake of an argument and a vivid image, Julian had likened the Cynics to subversive 'pirates': his audience, I suggested, will have known how to take that remark, but to help them he went on to deride Heraclius as 'very like a monk': the men who 'subvert[ed] the common customs' for real were not the hairy Cynics who hung about the imperial court but the Christians in the cities of the Empire.125 The prayer which closed the hymn to the Mother pointed the same way: 'Grant all men knowledge of the gods, and grant to the community of the Roman people that they may cleanse themselves of the stain of godlessness.'126



That prayer and the warning of the Fates in the Helios myth give reason to suspect that Julian intended from an early point to take steps to render Christianity impotent as a social and political force. That need not entail a general persecution. 'I swear by the gods', a letter runs, 'that I do not wish Galilaeans either put to death or unjustly beaten'. 127 But the sentence that follows reveals the author's principal assumption: 'None the less·, I insist that those who revere the gods should be given absolute preference to them; for by their folly almost everything has been destroyed.' In any case, persecution had not succeeded in the past: the Tetrarchic persecution sixty years before had for the most part failed to excite the mass of pagans in the cities, and the opportunity it had given the Church to add to the roll of glorious martyrs was arguably better avoided.



The possibility may be allowed that Julian came to feel in the course of 362 that an initial 'tolerant' stance had proved inadequate for his needs and that a change of tack was needed. But it is not necessary to think as much. There is a political factor to consider. In his early days as Emperor, he had to proceed with caution. Above all, he needed to win and retain the loyalty of the Constantinian legions and the generals who commanded them. There is no cause to think that either the generals or the rank and file will have been much upset by the mere fact of Julian's paganism,128 but the commanders in question had been active supporters of Constantius. 129 Julian's ground for manreuvre was accordingly restricted: he could not safely launch an immediate frontal attack on the memory of his hateful uncle and the Christian system that he had worked to promote.



Julian's hatred of Constantius is a fact that must be kept firmly in mind if we are to catch the mood of his policy in the early months of 362. The Christianity he set himself against was not an abstraction. It was intimately linked in his mind to members of his own family, to 'a bad dream of two generations of impious rule by a Christian dynasty': barely fifty years had passed since Constantine had converted, less than forty since he had eliminated his pagan colleague Licinius - and the most vehement anti-pagan measures undertaken by the dynasty were still more recent, post-dating Constantius' elimination of the usurper Magnentius (350-3); in Julian's mind, the problem was perhaps reducible to manageable proportions, and he need not be supposed to have been trying anything so desperate as to 'put the clock back' to the age of Marcus Aurelius. 130 And in some ways at least, he approached the task shrewdly. Men who came to the purple were expected to act according to a pattern: one purpose of the edicts proclaiming religious toleration and an amnesty for Christians who had fallen foul of Constantius was to give a symbolic show of civilitas and praotês at the start of the reign. That Julian's first step towards a restoration of paganism was taken in this fashion tells a good deal about his political nous. It does little, however, to show that he was really willing to let the Christians alone at the start. If Ammianus is believed, the amnesty for Christian exiles was proposed with an ulterior purpose: to foment discord between Christian sects, above all between the Arians and the supporters of the Nicene creed. 131



Bidez allowed that Julian's motives here were less than pure, but he minimized the import of Ammianus' comment. He looked for support to the honorific inscriptions set up by cities far and wide throughout the Empire - 'même dans les cités les plus christianisées'.132 It will hardly surprise that the new Emperor was formally congratulated by Christian as well as pagan communities: to do that much was only politic. But Bidez gave less weight than was due to the striking titles of Julian in some of the pagan inscriptions he adduced. 'To the Restorer of the Cults'; 'To the Lord Julian, Born for the Good of the State ... on Account of the Wiping Away of the Ills of the Former Time'; 'Restorer of Liberty and the Roman Religion'.133 A hundred years before, the persecutor Decius had been hailed as 'Restorer of the Cults'; now, Julian was 'Restorer of the Temples'.134 Titles of this sort respond to more than a mere declaration of religious toleration ensuring that paganism should no longer be hamstrung in competing for men's sympathies. They anticipate, or recognize, a concrete plan to weigh the balance decisively in its favour.



The most effective way for Julian to further his cause was to do all he could to ensure that the worship of the gods was firmly linked to the material prosperity of the Empire in the minds of his subjects. That, above all, was what Constantine had done for the Church. Behind the success of his reforms had stood the brute force of money.135 Vast sums were spent on the building of basilicas, and there were grand endowments of land to the Church. That land, moreover, was to be exempt from tax. Clerics were excused the burden of costly public offices, even personally subsidized. There were food allowances for Christian widows and nuns. To pay for it all, Constantine looked to a source of funds accumulated over centuries: the huge treasure house of precious metals lying to hand in the ancestral temples. Pagans, it has been nicely said, had financed their own destruction. 136 Julian's most pressing task in this connection was to do the same in reverse, to restore the temples as the perceived focus of public beneficia at the expense of the Church.137



A clear step in this direction came as early as 4 February 362. An edict decreed that temples of the gods that had been put to improper use should be rededicated, and that those which had been destroyed by the Christians should be rebuilt at the Church's expense.138



Owners of land which had formerly belonged to the temples were to give it back, and a special tax was levied on those who had used the fabric of sacred buildings in the construction of new ones. The importance Julian attached to the issue is clear from a further edict of 29 June: the rebuilding of temples was to take priority over all other building projects in the provinces. 139 In parallel, in March, the clergy's tax exemptions were revoked, and their judicial power and exemption from service as decurions withdrawn.140



Whatever practical difficulties, confusions and objections the edict of 4 February raised in its local application - and the sources show that these were considerable -, it is very revealing of Julian's basic intentions. If the restoration programme and the withdrawal of the clergy's privileges need to be seen in the light of his general aim to increase the sources of revenue available to the cities, they also highlight the integral part he envisaged for cult in civic life. I have discussed earlier the importance he attached to the virtue of philanthrôpia, and the strong appeal such a stance could hold for the upper classes in the East. In political terms it demanded a respect for the legal processes and privileges of the cities, and generous public spending; and it linked these with a traditional cultural ideal - in short, with paideia. 141 In this connection, cult piety could certainly find a place. Temples had been a medium of pagan euergetism and munificence, 'a common resort for people in need,'142 and a centre for banquet and spectacle. Julian repaired the finances of the cults with this in mind. The priests of the cults 'must exercise philanthrôpia before all else, for from it come many other blessings, the greatest of all the goodwill of the gods.'143 In making that demand, Julian had a keen eye to the popularity the Church had won through the charitable provision which bishops had been able to make for local communities in the wake of Constantine's reforms.[color="#800080"]*[/color] 'The impious Galilaeans discerned that the poor were neglected by the priests and applied themselves to philanthrôpia, and the result is that they have led many into atheism.'144[color="#800080"]**[/color] To counter which, priests were to establish hostels and were allocated corn and wine to be distributed to the needy: this too was 'reverence to the gods'.145 Needless to say, the Church's grain allowance was to be revoked. 146

(* Reforms like those mentioned three paragraphs earlier and emphasised in bold. Where have Hindus seen all this...

** "Atheism", "impiety" etc.: oft-used GrecoRoman terms for specifically christianism - the denial of the True Gods is what the GrecoRomans were referring to.)



Philanthrôpia was a virtue central to Julian's imperial vision, and closely bound up with his ideal of paideia. In his view, the Christians had seized upon it in one of its aspects and used it to their own ends; and in that respect their practice of it found a parallel in his eyes in the use they made of Greek education. By a notorious edict of 17 June 362, Christian teachers in the schools were forbidden to teach literature, rhetoric or philosophy. The measure was distasteful even to Ammianus, 147 and its promulgation was the point at which Bidez discerned a major change in the thinking behind the policy. For him, it began a 'bloodless persecution' and a move towards a principle of pagan theocratic rule. 148 On a similar assumption, it has been held to mark Julian's coming more heavily under the influence of his theurgic mentors. 149 On either judgement, the implication is that the measure was quirky, that it is to be explained as the act of a ruler whose personal enthusiasm for culture or theurgic theory was coming to infect his political judgement in ways which were likely to put him increasingly at odds with the social and political realities of the time: as if Julian had begun to sense that, despite all his efforts, the pagan restoration was badly faltering, and now reacted in frustration with an ill-directed measure whose autocratic overtones were quite incompatible with the ideals of philanthrôpia and civilitas that he had lauded earlier in the reign.



Another view can be offered, however. The edict unquestionably marks a significant development in Julian's policy, but not necessarily any deep shift in intention. If we attach due weight to the financial measures directed against the Christians earlier in the year, it will not indicate the point at which Julian first turned to active pursuit. Attention has focused on the measure most of all because of the explicitly ideological terms in which Julian justified it; but there is a sense in which that may mislead. The edict as issued on 17 June says nothing about the gods or the classical authors and the need to respect them: it states briefly that those who teach should be of good character and proven competence, that with this in mind their appointments should be confirmed by civic decrees in the cities and that the decrees should be referred to the Emperor for approval. 150 A great deal is left unsaid, and we can assume that requests were sent to Julian for guidance on points of practical application. The document in which he expands on the ideological basis of the edict 151 looks to be a rescript written in reply to one such request and given general circulation: in a formal sense, the statement was elicited. The rescript is undeniably striking for the stress it puts on ideological statement, but the ideological content of other Julianic edicts is no less significant for the fact that it is not spelt out: measures directed in the same month of June to strengthen the finances and councils of the cities were equally 'ideological' in their implicit appeal to the virtue of philanthrôpia: the difference is one of emphasis.



Nor is it clear that Julian's close concern with the running of the schools discloses a man whose political priorities had been rendered markedly eccentric by the company of theurgists: the historians of late antiquity who now study its 'rhetoric of Empire' as a pointer to a 'discourse' in a 'web of power' will take another view. 152 Hand-outs to the needy notwithstanding, the principal aim of the philanthropic measures which Julian demanded was to ensure that the activities of the dominant classes of the cities should be intimately linked with the bedrock of pagan cult, and should be clearly seen to be so linked. The education edict was exclusively concerned with the same classes and looked to the same end. It hardly touched the mass of Christians; it furthered Julian's plan to reverse the progress of Christianity as a social and cultural force in the upper levels of society. 153 It was well directed to a sensitive point, and precisely for that reason it bulked large in the complaints of educated Christians.



To understand the full intention behind it, we need to dwell on the close of the rescript, where it is made clear that Christian students are free to attend the schools if they please: they are sick rather than wicked.154 Bidez regarded this as an empty gesture, assuming that compromise on the question would not be tolerated by the Christian community at large. On that reading, the aim of the edict was to cut off Christians from education tout court. But on one view,155 Julian may not have intended that. A man without the benefit of the enkyklios paideia would find himself virtually debarred from a public career in his city, and generally diminished in status in a milieu in which the claims of paideia clearly continued to count.156 Well-todo Christians faced a stark choice: to put their sons at a severe social disadvantage in their prospects, or to let them be taught by pagans. Julian's own experience, it may be guessed, will have given him no small faith in the transforming power of such an education. Whether he misjudged the numbers of Christian students who would be willing, or allowed, to attend the schools is another matter.



Despite the provision it made on this score, the edict can plainly count as an emblem of a 'totalizing discourse'; for Ammianus at least, and perhaps for many cultured pagans, the remedy it proposed was much too drastic. Julian can hardly have failed to see that it would lead to bitter controversy. But that just serves to show how convinced he was that Christianity must be rooted out from the upper levels of society, and how far he was prepared to go to secure that result. A long-sighted view was needed: in Julian's view paideia without the gods was nothing and worse than nothing, and professors who did not sacrifice were no true professors.



The measures taken against Christians in the months following the education edict need to be judged in the light of Julian's stay at Antioch. He arrived there in July 362 prepared 'to make the city greater and more powerful';157 when he left it in March 363, he declared he would transfer his headquarters to Tarsus, and appointed as its governor a man whom he knew to be vicious. 158 Several factors contributed to the change of mood, but not least was the fact that the city was predominantly Christian. Julian became markedly unpopular there, and came to look on the place as a city of ingrates. 159 It is reasonable to think that this will have made him impatient for clear signs that elsewhere the pagan revival was faring better, and there are hints in his Antiochene letters of unease on that score: 'Hellenism does not yet prosper as I intend.' He demanded more strenuous efforts from those he relied upon to promote it,160 and his dealings with Christians took on a harsher note. Whole cities were penalized for their Christian affiliations. Palestinian Constantia was stripped of its civic status and merged with pagan Gaza.161 When the Caesareans destroyed the last functioning temple in their city, there was not only a fine, but civic demotion, with higher taxes to boot.162



A letter to the Edessenes gave a menacing slant to a cherished concept: in response to internal bickering between Christian sects, Julian confiscated the entire wealth of the community - it was easier for the poor, he said, to enter the kingdom of heaven - and warned them to desist from riot 'lest you provoke my philanthrôpia against yourselves and pay the price for upset of the common good by being sentenced to the sword and exile and fire'.163 More disturbing still, he seemed to condone violent pagan riots at Emesa and elsewhere.164 In the last months of his reign, there were apparently laws barring Christians from certain public and military posts, and a declaration that much more was to come on his return from Persia. 165 A change in mood is obvious. But how deep a change in policy and intention need it imply? It deserves to be said that the actions taken against Caesarea and Edessa were responses to particular events that had come to Julian's notice; and that in the case of Constantia, he merely revoked a privileged status granted by the hated Constantine.166 It is perhaps too easy to proceed to a generalizing explanation on the strength of Julian's exasperation with the Antiochenes. As early as 1 August 362, he was prepared to connive against a bishop in at least one city; 167 as early as January 362, he had all but condoned the murder of George of Cappadocia.168 Financial measures were being directed against the Christian authorities from the start of the year. As the year proceeded, the policy was intensified; in cases where notable resistance by a Christian community came to Julian's attention, particular actions were taken in response. From the beginning, though, he envisaged the eradication of Christianity as a social force in the Empire, and worked steadily to that end.



Specific measures taken by Julian are not the whole story, however. The leading pagans in a number of cities were quick to sense the Emperor's hardening mood and took advantage of the situation. Gaza, for instance, apparently petitioned Julian to condemn the celebrated monk Hilarion as an outlaw.169 The initiative behind the pagan riots that occurred there - and likewise, the initiative behind such episodes of mob-violence as the murders of Bishop Mark at Arethusa and of the holy virgins at Heliopolis 170 - came from the local pagans, not from the imperial authorities. 171 Against this background, Julian's status as a persecutor is reduced to a question of definition. If persecution is to entail the authorization of mob violence, then Julian will be found 'not guilty': he was a cultured man with a genuine regard for civic order, and he had no wish to shed the blood of Roman citizens. But that leaves a lot unsaid. Julian sought the obliteration of Christianity as a social and cultural force, not the physical destruction of Christians. If he eschewed violent measures of repression, it was partly because he thought that there were other means to hand, more likely to be effective in the longer run. That left room enough for vindictiveness; on the terms the Apostate set, the fight against the Church was a fight to the finish.



Specific measures against Christians were one side of a larger design. 'Restorer of the Cults', the dedication is likely to have read:172 the one implied the other. And if the long-term fight was to win men's minds, the weapon was very concrete. 'Prayers divorced from sacrifice,' wrote Julian's friend Salutius, 'are only words; prayers with sacrifices are animated words.'173 My account of Julian's anti-Christian politics conforms with my reading of his anti-Christian critique: its core lay in the restoration of the temples and of public worship at them as the inescapable corner-stones of civic life. In the streets of the cities there were to be many gods. On New Year's Day in 363, to celebrate the start of Julian's fourth consulship, Libanius delivered a public speech commissioned by the Emperor. 'The gods,' he said, 'were bound to be your friends, Sire, for you have neglected none of their altars on your journey here .... This is the bulwark you have made for the Roman Empire.' A later speech picks up the theme:

This city ... has given many gods to be your allies. You have sacrificed and made invocation to them, you have soldiered with them: Hermes, Pan, Demeter, Ares, Calliope [Patroness of Antioch], Apollo, the Zeus of the Mountain and the Zeus in the City in whose presence you entered into your consulship ...174

No adequate account of Julian's stay at Antioch can ignore his high profile worship at local shrines or his determination to repair major temples and oracular centres throughout the East. That is the setting against which we must place the Emperor's abortive plan to restore the Temple at Jerusalem. Three centuries earlier a catastrophe had razed the Temple to the ground, but the Jews of the Roman State had once offered sacrifices to an ancestral God on High, and prayers for the safety of the Roman Emperor. Julian planned to repair the Temple and make it possible for the Jews to honour their god with sacrifice again. If that dismayed the Christians and falsified a cherished prophecy of the Gospels, so much the better in Julian's eyes. Constantine had built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to proclaim Jerusalem a Christian city, the centre of Christian pilgrimage: now the Jews would worship in Jerusalem once more. In policy, as in debate, they could serve as a weapon against the enemy.175



It is reasonable to think that the polemical tone of Against the Galilaeans is all the sharper for its having been composed in a city which had showed itself indifferent to Julian's vision of cult. That does not entitle us to view it as the pathological product of a deeply alienated and isolated man.176 In its central complaints against Christians - their refusal to worship the ancestral gods, their perversion of social values and their travesty of true paideia - it expresses in specious argument the convictions on which Julian proceeded from his first days as Emperor. It expresses also the strength of the polytheist sensibilities of the private man; and whatever that may tell or fail to tell about Julian's 'conversion' in his twentieth year, it certainly tells a lot about the religion of Julian ten years on. A recent study of his Against the Galilaeans closed with a statement of 'the differences between Christian and Hellenic Wisdom': the Julianic godhead, it concluded, was 'a quasi-impersonal source of reality, too far removed to be concerned with human beings'; by contrast the God of his opponents was 'personal, immanent, and actively engaged in human affairs'.177 About Julian, at least, that judgement is utterly wrong. On the second count, too, it claims a lot: in fourth-century Egypt, at any rate, the monks told a different story. A pagan priest was interested to ask one Abba Olympius if he still received visions from his God since taking to the cells. 'No', he was told. 'What?' said the priest: 'When we sacrifice to our god, he hides nothing from us, but discloses all his Mysteries.' 178 Julian would have assuredly applauded that. His world was full of ever-present helpers, 'manifest gods',179 and they lived in the cities' temples as much as in the caverns of the theurgists. They had been neglected, and Augustan verse had warned long ago that neglect had its consequences. 'Guiltless you may be, O Roman, yet still shall you expiate your fathers' crimes until you have rebuilt the ruined shrines and temples of the gods.' Julian looked on Constantius' reign as proof enough of that. Temples had closed and oracles had failed: to restore them was his duty to the Empire and the gods. For himself, an oracle promised that a chariot would bear him to Olympus and 'the halls of heavenly light',180 and the private man could look to a gentler mood in the poet: 'Bits of me, many bits, will dodge all funeral ...'







ENVOI



The care of the temples of the gods was never Julian's sole concern as Emperor. His reputation had been founded on military success, and when he went to Antioch in the summer of 362 he went to prepare for a war against the Persians. In the event, the expedition which left Antioch the following March turned out to be a débâcle. On 26 June 363 Julian was fatally wounded in a mêlée, and died during the night. His body was embalmed and borne back to Roman territory for burial at Tarsus, close by the grave of Maximin Daia.1 There his Christian successor Jovian honoured him with a fine tomb on which was inscribed (so Zosimus tells) a soldierly epitaph that echoed Homer:

Julian lies here, back from fast-flowing Tigris:

At once a noble king and a strong spearman.2

Others remembered him from different perspectives. Within a few years of his death, idealizing memoirs by Libanius were circulating in pagan cliques.3 They dwelt on his love and promotion of learning and literature, the restoration of the temples of the cities.4 In some of those temples, there is reason to think, the dead Emperor was prayed to as a god for favour and protection.5 For their part, the Neoplatonists long cherished the memory of one whose soul had attained 'his father's halls of heavenly light';6 in the late fifth century, the head of the Alexandrian school would recall his opinion on a knotty problem in logic,7 and readers of Marinus' Life of Proclus would learn that the philosopher had died 'in the 124th year after the rule of Julian'.8 Nor were Christians disposed to forget. The invectives composed Against Julian by Gregory Nazianzen (probably within a year of Julian's death)9 enjoyed wide currency and formed the basis of colourful popular legends which told of a tyrant who ordered the slaughter of Christians en masse, a black magician who drew embryos from the womb in occult rites. 10



In modern scholarship, too, assessments of Julian and his reign remain at odds. His latest biographers are agreed in ascribing to him a totalitarian political programme which came to nothing and made of him, in his last months, a deeply alienated figure; but they differ sharply in their judgements of the ideological basis of the policy and in their views of the man himself. One offers us the 'Puritanical Pagan' who tried to found a pagan Church - an ascetic revolutionary at odds not only with Christians but with the majority of his pagan subjects too, a bigot whose Neoplatonist interests are informative of little but the eccentric emotional development of an enfant nerveux.11 Another presents those same interests as an important key to the understanding of Julian's public policy. He is credited with a systematic theory of paideia, a dogmatic syncretism by which Neoplatonic and Mithraic doctrines were linked and given political expression in a theocratic ideology of kingship - an ideology by which Julian sought to impose a pagan monotheism as the religion of the Empire.12 On a warier variant of that view, it is better not to talk of 'monotheism' in Julian's case, but rather of a 'universalism' rooted in a henotheist and Mithraicizing theology which stressed the link between the earthly and the heavenly monarchies.13 On this view, the failure of Julian's cultural programme was uniquely harmful to the pagan cause, because his universalized theory of paganism at last presented the Christians with just the thing they had lacked till then - an all-embracing version of paganism on which they could focus their attack.



Many, too, have seen the key to Julian's paganism in the very religion he set himself against:

Pénétré d'influences chrétiennes malgré son idolâtrie, [il] ressemble à un Augustin platonisant au moins autant qu'aux répresentants de la philosophie archaïsante dont il se croyait un disciple ... l'âme inquiéte et tourmentée de Julien est à beaucoup d'égards animée par l'esprit des temps nouveaux. 14

The very intolerance that he showed towards the Christians has been taken to mark his inability to cut free from the habits of mind forged by a Christian education. 15



These are views I do not share. To my mind, characterizations of Julian as an innovative Neoplatonist ideologue or as a bigot hostile to forms of pagan practice and thinking other than his own are the two sides of a false coin. Philosophy had a central place in Julian's paideia, certainly, but it did not constitute the whole: rhetoric too was crucial in his education, and always remained integral to his conception of culture and to his cultural practice. In this connection, the influence of the 'divine' lamblichus may be judged peripheral: even his devoted admirers readily granted that his works were devoid of literary merit.16 And even where Julian's philosophy is the issue, it is possible to make too much of the debt. Iamblichus was prized above all for his theurgic writings on the divine hierarchy and the Chaldaean Oracles; and while Julian's deep attraction to theurgy is not in any doubt, he conceived of it as only a part of philosophy. In the round, the philosophic ideal to which he subscribed was shared by many cultured pagans in his day: we have met the Plutarchs and Scylaciuses who wrote their poems to Zeus and Pan, and who in their turn were graciously praised for their sophia and beneficia as governors in the poems which like-minded men in the cities of the East composed to honour them.17



The concept of civilitas was central to Julian's philosophic ideal, and it is given much less than its due if we ascribe to him a cosmocratic theory of kingship more evocative of Byzantium than of imperial Rome. There is a distinction, subtle but essential, to be drawn in this connection, and a modern study of the ceremonial modes of fourth-century accessio has drawn it lucidly. Julian certainly believed that the will of the gods had made him Emperor, but he differed markedly from his immediate predecessors and successors in regarding himself as the bearer of divine inspiration not qua Emperor, but in his own person: against the precepts of a Eusebius or a Themistius, he considered that 'the Emperor's nature was not related specifically to the nature of the gods'; an Emperor could indeed be divinely inspired, but in his view 'this was as true of any human being.'18



So too, it seems to me, the religion of Julian is not finally to be explained in terms of his philosophy. That his philosophic interests were deeply felt is not in question, and in this case they strike us all the more forcefully for the fact that they belonged to a Roman Emperor. It was a rare conjunction, and it evoked a beguiling Platonic ideal: the image of Julian as a philosopher-king was to engage historians from Ammianus onwards. For the author of a 'philosophic history' the notion had a special edge, and when Gibbon wrote on Julian he gave close attention to the justice of the Emperor's reputation on this score. Gibbon's verdict, though, was studiedly ambiguous, and when he wished to convey the heart of the man he looked elsewhere: 'A devout and sincere attachment for the gods of Athens and Rome constituted the ruling passion of Julian.'19 In my view, that judgement deserves to stand. As an Iamblichan Neoplatonist, Julian could subscribe to the doctrine of a transcendental First Principle as the sole true source of the real, 'known to the blessed theurgists' alone; but alongside his philosophic monism we find in his writings the traces of an irreducibly polytheist sensibility, with firm roots in ancestral patterns of pagan belief that were far from moribund.20 The key fact of Julian's devotional life is his assumption that a multiplicity of gods was constantly being manifested in the world of men, and that they must be honoured and rendered propitious by acts of cult performed in accordance with established custom. In his case, it is true, we must allow for a special factor: a pagan who had converted away from a Christian upbringing was no doubt likely to stay inclined to systematized expressions of belief. None the less, the assumptions Julian made about the gods and the forms of worship due to them were not the assumptions of one irreversibly permeated, despite his best endeavours, by a Christian education: rather, they mark the gulf which came to separate the mature Julian from the faith into which he had been born. Nor did they make for an innovatory attempt to transform the paganism of his subjects into a 'monotheistic universal faith'. Julian's promotion of paganism was first and foremost what the inscriptions declared: a restoration of the temples and cults of the ancestral gods whose worship his predecessors had sought to check by edict and law.21 And this in turn implies that the ascription to him of a totalitarian religious ideology is subject to a major proviso. His anti-Christian programme was indeed an attempt to consign Christianity to cultural oblivion: but he was not out to impose a uniform pattern on pagan thought and practice; 'He did not feast some [gods] and ignore others,' recalled Libanius, 'but made libation to all the gods whom the poets have passed down, ancestral parents and their offspring, gods and goddesses, ruling and ruled ... worshipping the different gods at different times'.22



Julian's intolerance of Christianity stemmed from a sense of outrage at those who denied the existence of the many gods and did their best to obliterate the worship of them. His determination to strip the Christian movement of the power and influence it had gained in the wake of Constantine's conversion led him to discriminate actively, in some fields anyway, against those who professed the faith. The education edict evoked a protest even from an Ammianus, and we may suppose that many other pagans may have shared his reservations. Conceivably, Ammianus' complaint was emblematic of a deeper disquiet at the degree to which religion had impinged on Julian's public policy, a sense that the rift between pagan and Christian had been exacerbated unnecessarily.23 But if the complaint went deep, it bore upon an aspect of Julian's religious programme, not the whole of it. It need not imply any lack of sympathy with his basic wish to restore the cults to their places of honour, and it gives no cause to suppose that the attempted restoration was a freakish episode which 'perplexed rather than inspired the majority of surviving pagans'.24



Whether or not the attempt had any real chance of making a lasting political impact is quite another matter, and it is not the subject of this book. In the logic of counterfactuals and the state of the evidence, the question can yield no certain answer. We are presented with the brute facts that the early fourth century saw the coming to power of a Roman Emperor determined to promote the Christian and to harm the pagan cause, and that a century later the number of those who professed Christianity had grown remarkably - from five to thirty million, on a recent guess.25 On one celebrated view, 'Constantine's revolution was perhaps the most audacious act ever committed by an autocrat in disregard and defiance of the vast majority of his subjects.'26 There is a sense in which that statement is deeply misleading, but it can still serve to warn us against any easy assumption that 'paganism' was already doomed by the time Julian reigned. If we cannot quantify the relative importance of the factors that led to its demise, there is no ignoring the fact that thirty years after Julian's death, one of them consisted in the coercion of pagans by force, the smashing of temples and their altars and statues, and on occasion the torture and killing of those who held fast to them.27 It may be inferred, at least, from the content and tone of numerous inscriptions set up in Julian's honour - and from the outbursts of pagan violence in several cities in his reign - that his pagan activism struck a deep chord in the minds of some of his subjects. The times were not gentle.



Sixty years earlier, Apollo had spoken through his oracle at Didyma to demand a general persecution of the Christians who hindered his prophecies: in the aftermath, his shrine and his priests had suffered for it.28 With the coming to power of Julian, he could look for better things. The Emperor became his prophêtês,29 and the Milesians were pleased to declare on a dedication in his honour that they tended the Apollo of Didyma.30 At Delphi, too, it is possible, someone who loved the god was willing to let the Emperor know his need:

Go tell the king: Apollo's lovely hall

Is fallen to the ground. No longer has the god

His house, his bay-leaf oracle, his singing stream.

The waters that spoke are stilled.

There is no knowing whether the author of those lines wrote in hope or resignation,31 but the poem bears eloquent witness to the bond that linked the Muses and pagan piety, and to the depth of feeling that the mixture could inspire. It spoke of things that Julian held dear and resolved to preserve.

If the above doesn't move deeply:

check your pulse, I think you might be dead.