The life of Julian, which ended in his 32nd year, an emperor who reigned less than two years, is given by Gibbon three full chapters. His plight does occupy portions of earlier chapters:
A young nephew of Constantine the Great, who established Christianity as the state religion of Rome, Julian was orphaned by his blood thirsty uncle and cousins, nearly the entire Christian family murdered by one another, to include, Julian’s brother, who was tortured and killed for the crime of being part if his murderer’s bloodline.
Julian had qualified to be a deacon and very possibly might have become a bishop, which was a powerful and lucrative political position. However, he chose to study philosophy in an attempt to know the divine essence of the Creator, in hopes of joining with God.
Julian was assigned to be Caesar of the Gallic provinces by his cousin Constantius II, in hopes of being killed on campaign. In fact, Constantius bribed the Germans to make war on Julian. The young philosopher modeled himself after Alexander while at war and was unbeatable in Gaul and Germany. He developed a professional corp of companion generals. Then came the plot to have him recalled and murdered, under pretense of sending him to fight the Persians.
It would be his fate to die fighting the Persians, something he seemed to—or at least claimed to—have divined. Julian turned on his plotting master and the army of Christian eunuchs by appealing morally, directly to the various factions of people, marching through Germany to surprise the enemy and even writing numerous letters to civic bodies.
The first of the three chapters that focuses on this brief life presents Julian at his best.
The second chapter is devoted to criticising him from a Christian perspective.
The third chapter dispassionately discusses Julian’s campaign against the Persian Empire, his death in the field fighting as a philosopher in imitation of Alexander and taking a javelin in the liver. On his death bed he delivered his own speech, which seems to have been composed before hand. He reminds his men obliquely, that he had refused to be their leader, their Augustus, until they had threatened to kill him, and that he would not place another man in this position by his recommendation. He suggests an election, asks for water and dies.
Gibbon uses numerous sources to arrive at a fair portrait of the young ruler, who “imbibed the contagion of his age,” which was fanaticism. Gibbon states that the Christians, once come into power, had forgotten their virtues and that the pagans had imbibed the fanaticism of Christianity.
Julian reminds this reader very much of many of the young men I have met over these past ten years, who are reactionary, conservatives, seeking a means of returning to a traditional way of life that has been swept away by new moralities and corrupting absurdities.
But Julian was forced into power, seeming almost like a time traveler that was sent into the past or future as a savior of a failing nation and restorer of a golden age. Much of Julian’s writing is extant, writing I would like to peruse and which I would suggest to young philosophic dissidents, with the caveat, that Julian, even having the power of the state put in his hands, at the head of an enthusiastic military, failed, and was killed in the process.
He knew, I think, that he was trying to fight Fate. A fanatic, who also held himself to ethical standards alien to the Christian Church, where enemies were concerned, Julian seemed to seek heroic death as a means of escaping the burden the world had forced upon his orphan shoulders, in the full belief that he would ascend to Heaven and join with the true God. Julian became a pagan martyr: a slain hero.
Julian was, in one man, a proof that polytheism was, across the civilized world, giving way to theism. His attempts to reform paganism prefigures the Protestant Reformation of the early modern period, only his efforts were doomed. Some examples are included below.
Julian returned the rites of the Isle of Delos as practiced by the Athenians, only done with decency, unlike what the Athenians had done to the Deleans in 430 B.C..
Likely sabotage by Christians of restored Pagan temples and the Temple of Jerusalem, were imputed to miracles and crimes respectively.
Julian feared that his reign would be “tarnished,” with “the taint of persecution,” so his Christian foes used religious violence to goad him, which he seemed only to resist due to the upcoming Persian War.
The primary penalty for Christians was a transfer of their state subsidies and tithes from Christian to Pagan, reversing the policies of Constantine and simply encouraging more violence. With 20 years of Christianity becoming the state religion, it was corrupted into an extortion racket.
George, the parasite and bacon merchant of Capodacia, turned Arrian Christian and Archbishop of Alexandria. Acting as “primate of Egypt,” George oppressed people of all faiths with taxes, spies and corruption. Julian had him deposed and the mob dragged him, “The enemies of gods and men,” including the master of the mint, were thrown into the sea. Since pagans killed him, the “infamous George of Capodocia,” has been transferred into Saint George, by way of the Crusades.
That “The kingdom of heaven,” went “to the poor,” reminds Julian to the Christians, was their portion as he kindly relieved them of their worldly possessions. Julian had recalled but not restored Athenasius and had produced a martyr of a rancid parasitic soul. Arrian, Donatist and other heretics were adopted by Orthodox/Catholic churches as saints due to his reforms.
Julian was driven nearly mad by the evidence that most of the people of Alexandria were Christian. Hellenistic Egypt was the teaming cradle of primitive Christianity, with armies of monks and hundreds of monasteries, sheltering numerous wilderness saints. The “Rights of the Saints alone, to rule over the earth,” was the doctrine of the post Constantine Christians. This fanaticism was simply inflamed by Julian’s attempt at restoring paganism without the reproach of persecution.
Heavenly prodigies continued to plague Rome, with tempests and earthquakes which frustrated his building projects. Famines were used to make money by the rich. When Julian donated his own funds to feed the poor, rich men bought and resold the food at a profit.
“The fear of the common enemy,” typified by Jerome’s “Against the Luciferians,” drove the Christian mobs of the Near East and Egypt as they awaited Civil War, with the return of Julian from his war against the Persians—which seemed to have been his fate.
For Constantius, who died returning from war with the Persians, from a malady, had recalled Julian from the German frontiers to prosecute such a war as would defame or kill him. Thus the very assignment, that had compelled the legions of Gaul to proclaim Julian Augustus and set him on the road to a bloodless victory, now sent him against the fanatic empire of the magi, as a pagan, with the fanatic Christian empire of Rome at his back. In a speech to his men he commented how a random fever could take one any day and that the physical body should not be our object of attachment, contradicting the Epicurian and Christian teachers of his age.
Few men have worked so hard at government, with so much latitude and so much knowledge. Many of his laws were retained by his Christian successors as just. Julian, who was educated by an eunuch, dismissed armies of government barbers, eunuchs [who were forcibly worshiped by common people as they traveled the empire in Christian garb], and declared the government to be a “hydra,” a great, evil serpent with many heads.
Julian exemplified “That unconscious simplicity that…” that resulted “in good humor.”
Julian’s rise and fall were attended by portents such as hurricanes, earthquakes, multiple meteors, storms, floods and famines. For he took the reigns of an empire that was faced with worldwide catastrophe. After his death, which he believed was caused by Mars, who sent a meteor streaking through the sky the night before, Christian Saints declared that meteor to have been an avenging angel of Christ!
The study of Julian the Apostate, in Gibbon’s measured hand, is a fascinating sketch of a rational man trying to navigate a world gone mad for a higher good, only to drown.
