MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

THE EMPEROR JULIAN THE APOSTATE

CHAPTER XI.

VICISTI GALILAE !

Basilius.   Here lies a splendid broken tool of God.

The Emperor Julian, Act v.   H. Ibsen (transl. by C. Bay).

There are few principal actors on the great world-stage of whom history has passed more discordant verdicts than on Julian. In the case of those few it is generally true either that the records of their lives are meagre and conflicting, that they lived in a dark age, or else that the very profundity of their aims or maybe some inscrutable blending of good and evil purposes have wrapped them in impenetrable obscurity. They have lived and died enigmas which defied the skill of the historian to produce an authoritative solution. Neither excuse can be pleaded in the instance of Julian. Contemporary records are superabundant.

Histories, speeches, letters alike of friends and enemies, throw on him a glare of light from every side. His laws, his written or reported orations, his public dispatches and private correspondence are a body of evidence of the best kind, and of unimpeachable veracity. These exhibit Julian as no bewildering oracular genius, driven like Mohammed by fitful gusts of inspiration, or remorselessly 'ploughing his way' like Cromwell unscrupulous in his means from intensity of belief in his end, but rather as a sincere busy garrulous ruler, whose whole life nothing but self-deceiving subtlety could fail to construe aright. Prejudice and intense religious bias have certainly done their utmost to misstate or misinterpret simple truths.

It would be more amusing than instructive to compare venom from Gregory's 'Invective' with flowers from the 'Panegyric' of Libanius. It would be easy to quote from writers, whom lapse of time might have made impartial, strange contrarieties of judgment the fruit of theological prepossessions. But what shall we say to more deeply-seated contradictions?

If it is explicable that Schlosser should detect only the inveterate dissembler, where Hase discovers next to Athanasius the greatest figure of his century, how explain that while the most eminent of English Roman Catholics allows the Apostate to have been 'all but the pattern man of philosophical virtue,' in whom must be recognized 'a specious beauty and nobleness of moral deportment which combines in it the rude greatness of Fabricius or Regulus with the accomplishments of Pliny or Antoninus, the founder and high priest of Positivism has linked his name with Napoleon Buonaparte’s to denote in the Comtist calendar one day of solemn reprobation. To have attained this twofold distinction argues something remarkable in the man.

Nor is it solely modern caprice straining after originality, nor any spurious nourish of tolerance that has dictated these judgments. It was a Christian successor of Julian's, who chose for his epitaph Homer's tribute to Agamemnon lord of man.

At Julian's accession to the throne, for the second time in the history of the Roman Empire, Plato's darling wish was gratified, a philosopher was made king. Nor as Emperor did he show himself untrue to his professions: he was but too eager and proud to carry out his philosopher's convictions, little by little approximating Rome to the Ideal State. The movement which he headed ought to be one of profound his­toric and even dramatic interest.

For the last time for more than fourteen centuries civilized Europe by state decree proclaimed Christianity a lie, and deified Wisdom in its stead. It was the final stand made by Hellenism against its great rival. Hellenism was represented at its best, the best at any rate of which it was at that age capable; Christianity, when the conflict began, in some respects at its worst. It had lost its pristine earnestness: it was giddy at its new and dangerous elevation: in its new development as connected with the state, it was still in infancy; and was suffering from all the maladies to which such an infancy was necessarily prone: it had not yet had space or experience to learn wisdom; nor was its constitution yet formed to natural robustness.

The combatants then might seem well-matched, the naturally weaker having on his side the advantage of age and experience and past prestige. There might have been expected a struggle of prolonged and thrilling interest, a battle of giants, a rocking to and fro of battalions locked in the death-grip as on Julian's own field of Strasburg, where the din of fight grew ever louder and louder, “fierce as waves beating upon rocks”, where daring outdid daring and courage rose with failure hardly less than with success, and every gap was filled by a more impetuous foe. As a matter of fact the drama presented to us is nothing of the kind. It is flat and tame: the result is foreseen from the beginning. There is not even incident enough to construct an exciting plot to postpone the irreversible denouement. There is more sober truth than usual in Gregory's declamation when he describes Julian’s revival as a tragic burlesque. And this not because opportunity failed, still less because Julian's own powers were slight or efforts feeble.

His opportunity was nothing short of magnificent. The curse of the race of Pelops had seemed to dog the doomed the house of Constantius Chlorus. The death of Gallus in 354 A.D. left Julian, except the reigning Emperor, sole male survivor of that great stock. Thereupon the fortune of the house seemed to accumulate all her bounties for his service. Fortune won to his cause Eusebia's heart: she tamed the jealous savagery of Constantius himself: she invested her darling with the purple: she mated him with an imperial consort: she led him past perils of false friends and perils of indomitable foes; she stood by him at the council board and in the field of battle; she wafted him on wings of victory from Strasburg and the lower Main to the German Ocean and the Zuider Zee: she crowned him with honor and glory and the gifts of good government: she named him sovereign Augustus: not even then did she desert him. Seldom has pretender thrown a more desperate stake than when in violence to his own judgment and against his will1 Julian was forced to play for Empire, and plunged through the Black Forest eastward. But Fortune was not wearied: for Julian she seemed furnished with a cornucopia of blessings.

Ere the crisis came, the crisis whose approach was to be measured by weeks not months, Constantius lay dead, Julian was lord of the world. And his power lay not in sounding titles: he was dowered with a magnificent prestige: he was the leader of a devoted army. Six years before, almost to a day, the soldiers at the coronation ceremony had rattled their shields upon their knees in enthusiasm for their new Imperator: in the interval every promise, every hope had been more than realized. Julian was now the emperor of their own choice and manufacture; Celts and Petulante were eager to follow the star of their Augustus even to the hot and hated East. Nor did the army alone exult. Hellene philosophers maybe or grateful Gaul or harried Nisibis and Mesopotamia praised God more loud than others, but a chorus of universal acclamation went up throughout the empire. Its echo reached further still. Southward from the unknown regions of the Phasis, westward from Armenia and beyond the Tigris, northward from the tracts of Mauretania, nay even from Ceylon and the Maldive Isles, hurried embassies to do homage to the risen Sun. There was not one boon left to crave from fortune.

      So much for Julian’s opportunity. What of his own powers, and earnestness of purpose? It would be idle repetition to dilate again upon these. He was a brilliant general, whose Gallic and German campaigns for largeness of result as contrasted with paucity of means might compare with those of the great Caesar, or of Gustavus Adolphus. He was a successful financier, an industrious and conscientious ruler; he was endowed with rare intellectual gifts, and unfailing fixity of moral purpose. Taken all in all he possessed a  combination of qualities such as might have secured him a place more than respectable among the world's great rulers. He bent every faculty of body and mind, every energy of his richly endowed nature, towards the end in which he sincerely believed. He spared no pains; grudged no outlay; held nothing in reserve; spent and was spent for his cause. More than this, he worked with singular wisdom and moderation. It is easy to say that in particular instances a little extra leniency or some additional severity would have been more judicious: but on the whole it would be hard to point out any salient defects either in the plan proposed or the execution effected.

Whether then we look at the start accorded to Julian by fortune, or at his own personal powers, he must be allowed to have the advantage over the great Constantine. He surpassed him in validity and security of title, in  strategic ability, in financial skill, in literary and intellectual power, in capacity for application, in moral purity. Yet in spite of all Julian failed egregiously where Constantine splendidly succeeded; failed not only eventually and in the long run, but visibly there and then. There was one quality in which Julian did not surpass Constantine, in common sense and the power to read the spirit of his age. Constantine was the first Christian, Julian the last Pagan Emperor.

The numerical details of his success or failure offer matter for endless contention. No certain statistics are procurable. The truth must be gathered from a priori reasoning, eked out by scattered hints in the pages of contemporary writers. There are authors who represent Julian's efforts as triumphantly successful. Such a view appears unhistorical.

It is true that there were perverts. Hekebolius the apostate Sophist represents to some extent a class; Julian, uncle to the Emperor, another; he earned by his compliance the Prefecture of the East: and there was no doubt many another man who found it as easy to shift his religion as his dress. It appears that Julian once found even in a bishop a Pagan in disguise. But to jump from these individual instances to the facile generalisation that all soldiers and civil functionaries who, to please the sons of Constantine went over en masse to Galileism, during Julian's eighteen months of empire returned en masse to Hellenism, is quite inadmissible; the facts belie it. If it comes to mere counting of pips, there are a Proeeresius and a Victorinus to set against Hekebolius, a Valentinian and a Valens against Count Julian. From Julian's own works quite another impression is derivable.

A growing despondency pervades them. The boast to Maximus about the public celebration of services and the religious disposition of the soldiers may count for nothing, for it was penned from Illyria when Julian was little better than an adventurer, fighting for empire with a halter round his neck, and heading soldiers of fortune who would as lief serve Gods as God, or the devil as either, if he proved the best paymaster. There is indeed one utterance, to which undeserved weight has been attached. It runs:—“the gifts of the Gods are great and splendid, passing all prayer and all hope; for (be Nemesis propitious to my words) a short while back none would have dared pray for so complete a change in so short a time”. Taken alone the words seem strong. But what is the context?

The statement which these words are used to enforce is—“Hellenism does not yet succeed as I reckoned, from the fault of those who profess it”. The “great gifts of the Gods” are put in contrast to the little use made of them: the “complete change” alluded to is evidently, as elsewhere, the liberty of worship now allowed to Pagans, of which unfortunately they availed themselves so meagerly. The letter itself is on the surface of it an address to the high priest of Galatia, meant to encourage him and give suggestion in his uneven struggle with Christianity. It is really in complete accord with other more despondent notices preserved.

Few of Julian's letters can be localized with certainty at Constantinople: such as do demonstrably belong to that first six months of sovereign power are in great part invitations to Court or complimentary notes or official despatches, containing not much of interest—unless indeed it be their silence—concerning the Hellenic reaction. Perhaps the Eastern capital was too Christian by tradition and every antecedent to offer a fair field. When Julian set out on his progress through Asia Minor, he perhaps hoped that Pagan indifference had been merely local. If so he must have been not a little chagrined. From Cappadocia comes a plaintive lament that there is not one “genuine Hellene to be found; most won't sacrifice, and the few who will don't know how”. Julian writes expressly to his friend Aristoxenus, begging him to import himself and show them the way. At Pessinus, though Julian promoted a faithful priestess, though he praised her zeal with his own hand royal, though he religiously kept the fast of Cybele, though he indited for the use of devotees a pious charge, yet faith was not to be elicited from Pessinus, nay not even to be purchased by the promise of hard cash. At Antioch things were worse still: to restore Paganism was “to turn the world upside down”: the Chi and the Kappa, Christ and Constantius, were everywhere rampant: the issue of Julian's endeavors was a priest and one goose at the high festival of that wealthy city. The post from Alexandria brought news of nothing but reverses: the council of Beroea openly turned the cold shoulder to their sovereign's exhortations:  not even little Batnae could quite conceal the hypocrisy of efforts prompted by loyalty or self-interest.

The records of persecution under Julian prove not a few ebullitions of local anti-Christian spite, but none at all of Pagan devotion. When priests could not keep their own wives and children in the path of outward orthodoxy, it could hardly be expected of the laity to make sacrifices for the cause. If there was any one class with whom as a whole Julian was successful, it was the army. He petted it, he bribed it, he purged it, he made it to a man his own. That very army, albeit with slaughter of victims and inspection of entrails, elected a Christian his successor.

It is no hard problem to diagnose his failure. Christians by instinct grasped the truth. They fabled how, when Julian had taken the fatal step, and declared himself apostate, there appeared in the entrails that he was inspecting the Cross encircled in a crown: how on his march from Gaul, as he passed by the ripening vineyards, the dew that fell upon his chlamys took drop by drop the form of the Holy Sign: how, once again, as the blood spurtled from the fatal javelin-wound, he took of it, and flinging it away as the emblem of the wasted life, cried “Vicisti, Galilaee! Galilean, thou hast conquered!”

Fantastic tales like these embody a pictured truth. In the fullness of the promise, as in the weariness of the disappointments of imperial sway, Julian was constantly haunted by that mysterious ever-present power, which though he reverenced it not, by the spell of its dominion frustrated all his most cherished hopes. Against it he fought well, but fought in vain. The legends parable aright. From the first day of professed apostasy, from the hour when he instituted aggressive tactics against Christianity, at his departure from Vienne no less truly than at that later departure from Antioch, “already the carpenter's son was at work making a coffin”.

Fortune might still lavish gifts, but all were useless, so long as the fundamental weakness was uneradicated. The Apostate's powers remained all they had been; his energy grew with the increased demands upon it. Yet a vital paralysis laid hold of all his schemes and efforts. He threatened and he thrust at an enemy or rather enemies that seemed slow and yielding and not always brave; yet the despised antagonists needed hardly so much as to parry the thrusts; they fell innocuous, exhausting chiefly the strength of the assailant. Weight of numbers and some secret impetus kept pressing them forward. It was hard work for the attack to gain a single inch, while confidence, harbinger of victory, waned visibly. Sooner or later too the solitary fighter must retire, and leave the arena to his adversaries.

Failure was indeed a foregone conclusion. The cause was already lost when Julian took up cudgels for it. He might make proselytes, even in some numbers, of a more or less worthless kind: ambition, self-interest, superstition, hatred of Christianity, and a hundred other motives were busy tempt­ing men to avow the Imperial creed. But into not one of his proselytes could he infuse the genuine sincerity and enthusiasm which animated himself. A pedant dreamer still, even in the stir and push of busy action, he lived in a past world. His thoughts, beliefs, aspirations, all belonged to another date, and centered in a bygone age. He cast in his lot with all that was in the truest sense stale and unprogressive. Less practical and clear-sighted than his great exemplar, Marcus Aurelius, he made a gross miscalculation of the forces round about him: he transposed and inverted them everyone. He turned his face to the past, and his back upon the future. No wonder that he failed so unequivocally and irremediably. He supposed that Hellenism was a principle of recreative life, whereas in reality its roots were all decayed, and its last flowers already beginning to droop.

Christianity was a living plant, which imparted its vitality to the foreign suckers grafted upon it; the dead and sapless trunk of Paganism withered even the living boughs which were blended with it, by its own inevitable decay. Julian essayed to head a reaction which if successful would have revolutionized the world's history. So disastrous would it have been that it becomes difficult even to figure the result to the imagination.

Had Julian's cultured Hellenism triumphed over despised and rejected Galileism, the sole power would have been annihilated, which was destined to tame the barbarian, establish law, save learning, elevate humanity, and construct from the debris of the empire European civilization. No greatness, no self-sacrifice, no singleness of aim, no accumulation of merit in the leader can atone for the demerits of his cause.

Newman's eulogium and Comte's imprecation are alike justi­fied. Julian was as near as might be the vir sapiens; Julian's cause was Antichrist. Herein lies the infinite pathos of his career. Viewed on the religious side it must remain always manqué, abortive, disappointing whether to portray or to ponder. History shows few sadder samples of noble views distorted, great powers misapplied, and high aims worse than wasted. There is a twice-told tale how in youth Julian essayed to raise a memorial shrine to the holy Mamas; but as he built, the earth at the foundations crumbled, for God and his holy martyr deigned not to accept the labor and offering of his hands. It is an allegory of his life. He toiled on rotten foundations. The edifice tumbled before it could be reared; nay its weight sapped the substructure.

Julian's life was an accident, and at his death events reverted to their natural channel. Such is the brief summary of Julian's reign which a calm and generous writer has set down. Of the main issue involved the words are literally true. But it is impossible that no side-issues should have been determined by so pretentious and so decisive a conflict. The more important of these may be briefly indicated.

First then, on the negative side, Hellenism as a religious creed was finally discredited. It was tried and found wanting. It was well—perhaps necessary—that this should be so. Above all it was well that it should receive a fair trial: that Neo-Platonism should rally all the available forces of intellect and religion for a life and death struggle, fought under a captain of such consummate power and discretion as Julian. In that way Pagans learnt quicker and more conclusively that it was irretrievably doomed, that all hope of restoration was chimerical: in that way Christians attained to more solid assurance that God's cause was their own.

Short as was Julian's reign it was long enough to make its verdict most explicit. Dreamers to be sure there were, fatuous pedants self-blinded by their own conceits, who against hope, almost against light and knowledge, hoped still that Hellenism had a future in store; who persisted that nothing but Julian's death had postponed the eventual triumph; who hugged the baseless fancy that the accident of some new Emperor's creed could change the current of history, and traced in Julian the antitype of the coming Messiah of Neo-Platonism. But such fools or fanatics dwindled fast.

It would have been too much to hope that one individual could at a stroke disenchant a whole world of its folly. As it was Julian's career taught all sober Hellenes from Libanius downwards the needed truth that their creed was doomed. It soon slunk away from the towns, and as the reader of Libanius' Oration for the Temples may see, lingered on in harvest-homes and vintage-feasts, and immemorial festivals of peasant folk, till it could incorporate itself unsuspected with Christian observances. Within ten years of Julian's death Hellenism is first officially called Paganism. A longer reign could have scarcely served the purpose better. Increased pressure, or active persecution (had Julian been driven into such a course) might have multiplied proselytes and perverts; but assuredly faithful martyrs would have matched their witness against false apostates. Julian did not err in thinking that his death came at a happy hour: Fortune continued kind to the last. The Gods loved him when they suffered him to die young. He had lived years enough to show how futile an attempt, nay rather how irretrievable a failure, was the consummation of his schemes. Life prolonged could have proved but prolonged disappointment, and perhaps too sullied fame.

 Julian's failure did not merely discredit Hellenism as a creed. It also precipitated its fall as an intellectual system. It is instructive to note how Julian's one salient act of dis­tinct persecution recoiled upon itself, not without reflex mischief to the world at large. Before his time the breach between Christianity and the schools had not become impassable. More than once Christian hands had reached across and taken of their hid treasures, and displayed and praised aloud their beauty and cunning. Julian in short­sighted jealousy repelled and prohibited all such advances. To do so was to sign the death-warrant of Hellenism. He exposed his unshattered aspirations, and opened Christian eyes to their real strength. He made men feel how intensely antichristian was the spirit of the schools, and how great was the possible danger of a like revival. As Hellenic faith died, the sole hope for Hellenic culture was that as the adopted child of Christianity it might find a safe and honored home. It may have been that the times were not yet ripe for such a connection, and that under no circumstances it could have been realized, but at least Julian did his worst to render it forever impossible, when he imposed premature disabilities, and barred every advance under ban of excommunication.

Incidentally however Julian's endeavors were fraught with certain good results. Morally, except by making the unworthiness of Paganism more palpable, they left it little better and little worse than before. Not so with Christianity. For the Church Julian's reign was an unmixed benefit. At his accession it was in terrible distress. The bipartite Acacian Councils of Seleucia and Ariminum had already (359 A.D.) surrendered the Homousion of Nicaea.

Had Constantius gone on to reign much longer, orthodoxy, humanly speaking, would have been extinct. Rapid and unlooked-for success had soiled the Church's purity. The chiefest Christian virtues had fallen into obscurity, or transformed themselves to vices. Humility, charity, forbearance, simplicity and unassuming piety retired from the world's gaze; in times of religious even more than of political embroilment simplicity, however noble, is laughed out and hides its head; too often zeal turned to bigotry, firmness to intolerance, fearless patience to domineering arrogance. In the plenitude of new-won power, the Church was rioting in all the inebriation of success. Julian broke in upon the revels, a monitor no less salutary than unwelcome.

His reign acted upon Christianity as an invaluable purge or disinfectant. Directly and indirectly, in morals and in dogma, it purified the Church, both laity and clerics; it shamed or frightened not a few from their absorption in cavilling disputations; it brought back the orthodox from their banishment to guide once more the helm of council. Even in the short space allowed him by Julian's irritation, Athanasius was able to preside at the Council of Alexandria.

If the Emperor had harbored a shrewd hope that the return of the exiles would be the renewal of squabbles, the verdict of that Council must have been a mortification. All Bishops who had been cowed or surprised into Arianism were suffered to rehabilitate themselves by virtue of simple signature of the Nicene formulary. The Councils that preceded Julian’s accession mark the high tide of encroaching Arianism: his reign sees it waver; the first council that followed his death, when at Lampsacus the Homoean symbol of Ariminum was condemned and fifty-nine semi-Arian Bishops openly subscribed the Homousion, marks its decided refluence. Julian's reign not only sobered factions, and developed reconciliation: it also separated the worldly and the hypocrite from the true man and the believer, sorting and sifting out a purified residue.

It proved that though overlaid with error, and stifled by foul excrescences, and charged with heavy vapours, the vital forces of Christi­anity were potent still. And one other service it partly did. Premature recognition by the State had damagingly paginated Christianity. In art, in ritual and in politics the Church showed traces of too facile accommodation to heathen modes of thought. Men were abruptly reminded that the distinctions between heathenism or Hellenism and Christianity were something more than verbal differences. Even at the cost of some irritation of susceptibilities, and some narrowing of sympathies, it was a lesson most needful to learn. Julian had not lived in vain.

JULIAN: AGAINST THE GALILEANS