THE EMPEROR JULIAN THE APOSTATE

CHAPTER IV.

JULIAN'S THEOLOGY.

 

"In the silent mind of One all-pare

At first imagined lay

The sacred world, and by procession sure

From those still deeps, in form and color drest,

Seasons alternating and night and day,

The long-nursed thought to north, south, east, and west,

Took then its all-seen way."

 

The ground is now cleared for examining Julian's scheme of religious revival. The first step in this will be to master its intellectual basis, in other words Julian's theology.

Julian nowhere in his surviving works develops his doctrine concerning the One with any fullness or precision. In the incidental allusions which occur, he wavers as to the rightful title to be assigned; whether this highest original principle is to be regarded as ineffable and to be described simply as that which is beyond or transcending Nous, or as the One, or in Platonic terminology as the Good, or lastly as the Idea of all Existences, by which he explains himself to mean the Intelligible in its entirety.

So far as he goes, he agrees with Plotinus in either assigning to it negative determinations only, or allowing it by courtesy the imperfect title of the Good, or finally treating it positively through the medium of its effects as absolute causality. On the exact relation of the One to Nous Julian is silent: in the above there seems a tendency to confuse the highest Deity with either the first or second members of the trinity of Plotinus. On the essential being of the One Julian is sufficiently orthodox.   

It transcends all human description or conception: it is from eternity pre-subsistent; it includes within itself all Being; its very essence is unity. Itself incomprehensible it is the sole unique in-Composite cause of the whole  universe. Julian most frequently denominates it the Good. Itself the crown and source of every existence, it enters into transcendental relations with the subordinate orders of Being. These are three in number, and carefully differentiated by Julian.

To distinguish them in English, recourse must be had to terms of formal philosophy.    The first and highest order is styled the Intelligible; the  second, the Intellectual; the third, the Cosmic. This strict trinitarian conception runs through the whole system: the triad involves a pantheistic belief, since the lowest member of the trinity includes the material world. It is with the first and most spiritual alone that the Good has direct communication. In that order, in other words in the Intelligible Gods, it becomes the author of the beauty, the essential being, the perfectness and the unity which characterize them. Thus through them it is said  to originate in all existences their beauty and perfection, their unity and power inexplicable. These Intelligible Gods are not generally conceived to issue from the supreme One, though such language is in loose usage admissible. More strictly they cluster round the One, being as it were with all creation a part of his ever-emitted radiance. He transcends all things, round him are all things, and for his sake all things are. The One is not so much a creator, as an everlasting well of existence: in the case of the Intelligible Gods, immediately, elsewhere mediately, by virtue of essence transmitted to the Intelligible Gods. To such demiurgic functions committed to these last, and by them in turn transmitted to the inferior grades of deities, all orders of being are due, until contact is finally attained with mortal perishable forms of matter.

The Gods, those at any rate of the two higher orders, the Intelligible and the Intellectual, are unsubstantial and immaterial. Goodness, and that which is good, is an inseparable part of their essence, and  remains ever inherent in their very nature. No duality of nature, corresponding to the spiritual and carnal elements in man, is conceivable in the Gods. They are not to be regarded as non-natural magnified men: for in truth the divine nature is radically different from the human. It is indivisible, and does not admit the analysis or the modifications to which man's nature is liable.

The kind of personality which they possessed in Julian's eyes is a difficult matter to settle. They combined strangely the impersonal nature of the Platonic Ideas with the personality attributed to  the  polytheistic deities. There is a confusion of their persons one with an­other, and a necessitarianism attributed to their whole mode of being and acting, that converts them into forces rather than living wills. Both the limitations and the powers of strict personality seem not seldom denied to them. But, on the other hand, they are habitually feared, addressed, adored and propitiated as though gifted with  personal will, and  the power to put it into effect. With the Gods, will, power, action, are one and the same thing, a part of their essence and inseparable.    “Whatsoever a God wills, that he is and can and does: he neither wills what he is not, nor is thwarted in what he wills, nor is of the mind to do what he cannot”. Good being a constant element of their essence, or rather actually constituting their essence, they are in action, whether towards one another or towards man, entirely and invariably beneficent. This description, though vouchsafed primarily of the higher orders of Gods, is applicable also to the lower Cosmic Gods—the visible and sensible as contrasted with the invisible and spiritual  Gods—whose functions will be considered in due course. For to depict their true relations, it is essential to treat of the Gods according to their proper grades.

The highest sphere is, as has been repeated, the Intelligible. The Intelligible World is characterized by what Julian speaks of as an exuberant superabundance of life-producing fecundity. As the superfluous energy of the One produced the Intelligible World round about the One, so too does it in its turn manifest a like exuberance.   All that belongs to it enjoys pure, uncontaminated immaterial being; nothing of alien nature inheres in it, nor ever has or can approach it from without. In attributes of beauty, eternity, absoluteness, spirituality, or, if the term be allowed, intellectuality, it corresponds to the Platonic world of Ideas; it  is full  of its own proper untainted purity. It is peopled by the Intelligible Gods, and by them alone.

Essentially the Intelligible Gods exist around the Good, by eternal emanation from him. From the Good they inherit direct all their gifts and powers; he supplies them ungrudgingly with beauty, with being, with perfection, with unity, in Neo-Platonic language he contains them all, and illuminates them with inherited element or faculty of the archetypal Good, in which their majesty consists, and which they transmit in measure to subordinate orders of being. Among these Intelligible Gods, and highest of them all, is ranked Helios, King Sun.

At this point a digression becomes necessary. One of Julian's surviving works is a kind of devotional rhapsody—addressed to Salustius—in honor of King Sun. The address is manifestly an effort of rhetoric rather than a spontaneous effusion of devotion. Hastily, often confusedly put together, and too pretentiously embellished, it yet remains the most fruitful quarry from which to extract Julian's dogmatic beliefs. No doubt it exaggerates the functions and pre-eminence of Sun, or rather throws them out of just proportion as compared with those of other deities. Sun, his position and his work, are in the foreground; the rest are aside or in the background, jumbled, slurred, and out of focus.

But from sources quite independent of this elogium, it is plain that Julian did elevate King Sun, under one representation or another, to the first place among Gods. Neo-Platonism hailed from the East, and most grew and flourished there; it became deeply tinged with influences of the Mithras cult and various forms of fire-worship, every one of which sprang from, while most still acknowledged, Sun adoration as the groundwork of religion. Julian espoused the worship with devotion: it appeared to him instinctive; it dovetailed with his philosophy, no less than it charmed his imagination. King Sun was the supreme deity, whom under many various names all peoples of the world combined to worship. He was the most tangible link by which Neo-Platonism gave unity to Paganism, rendered Polytheism philosophical, and by aid of which, minds like Julian's became reconciled to the incongruous superstitions or bizarre confusions of popular beliefs. Julian regarded him moreover as in a special sense his patron; and delights to call himself his follower, his liege­man, or his devotee.

Exaggeration or displacement of relations it will be easy in the main to rectify. More misleading than either is a lack of lucidity and inconsistency, the inevitable result of a pervading mysticism of tone. If the writer himself was mystified, it became his penalty, or perhaps duty, to mystify his reader. The action of King Sun in the Intelligible and Intellectual spheres has to be spiritually derived from the analogous action of the phenomenal Sun in the world of sense. Julian is at great pains to work out these analogies, and contributes both knowledge and ingenuity to the task: but he is forever confounding metaphor with fact, and con­verting analogies into modes of action; much in the same spirit as when to the Alexandrians he insists upon the alternations of summer and winter, the blessings of sunlight and growth of plants, as evidences of the existence of Serapis (the Sun God), constituting in his behalf a claim to adoration. At times he seems purposely to confuse phenomenal faction with its spiritual counterpart, and throughout leaves a vast deal to be interpreted by the spiritual intuitions of the reader. Happily, a large residuum of solid information is left.

King Sun himself, most frequently entitled “King of the Universe”, is himself primarily one of the Intelligible Gods, and chiefest among them all. He is the immediate and trueborn offspring of the Good, emanating by eternal procession from the One, or as it is elsewhere phrased, around the fruitful essence of the Good.  By virtue of its abiding and initiative essence the Good produced from its own being and in all things like itself Sun the most high God.  This emanative production must not be looked upon as an act of creation, or as realized in time. To every Neo-Platonic deity, and to Sun if any, belongs eternal procession: he subsisted from Eternity around the abiding essence of the Good, and thus is legitimately spoken of more than once as self-subsistent.

Among the Intelligible Gods, or as they are sometimes styled, Intelligible Ideas, he not only himself shines with pure uncontaminated radiance, but primus inter pares, as incapable of admixture or impurity as light in the sensible world, holds predominance. He is the centre of the Intelligible system; he  almost usurps  functions  which  are elsewhere attributed to the One; at any rate, his action begins at the point where the direct activity of the One ceases; to his centrality is imputed the emanative multiplication of the divine Intelligible essence, which without thereby receiving diminution or increase or any kind of affection gives rise to the Intellectual order of existences.

It is not a little curious that in more than one passage Julian speaks of Sun apparently as one of the Intellectual Gods. His language, taken alone, hardly admits another interpretation. Yet that Sun's position is such as has been just described is undeniable. The fact is, that Julian has three separate Suns, or phases of Sun in his mind, and is not sufficiently precise in distinguishing them. In the actual passage where he alludes to this tripleness, he makes it perfectly clear that the third Sun is the phenomenal Sun: for the two others, he leaves the reader in obscurity. Both from the immediate context however and from the whole oration the obvious interpretation is, that the first Sun is King Sun himself, the Intelligible Deity, whose harmonizing office in his own sphere almost intrudes upon that of the Good itself; while the second Sun is the Sun regarded in his action on the Intellectual sphere. This forms the subject of whole pages of the treatise, and it is his sovereignty and most intimate action among the Intellectual Gods of which Julian is thinking, when he loosely classes Sun as one of them rather than one above them.

Each of the three orders, Intelligible, Intellectual and Cosmic enjoys perfection after its own kind. In the Intelligible World there is a pervading unity, the gift of the One, which contains, conjoins or confederates the whole into a One or perfect harmony. This unifying principle in the Intelligible World is analogous to that Quintessence or Fifth Substance, which, in constant motion round and round the heaven, by virtue of such periphery contains and welds together all the parts of the Cosmic order, and forbids separation or dissolu­tion. The corresponding harmony that rules the Intellectual World, is the immediate work of Sun, whose energies in that sphere are as all-important as those of the Good in the higher sphere, or of the visible Sun in the lower. This is the place to examine these in detail.

First then the Intellectual Gods were derived from Sun essentially. To Neo-Platonist thought the one mode  of origination was eternal emanation. But emanation was carried on by successive stages. At the head of all being, the one original Demiurge, from whom every entity and essence is primarily derived, stands the One or the Good. He becomes immediately the principle or first cause of the whole intelligible order. From that point his demiurgic work is carried on mediately. Later refinements of Neo-Platonic theology subtilised the demiurgic succession into a series of triads, each issuing from a monad. Phanes was selected in the Intelligible triad as the term from which  emanated the Intellectual triad, Kronos, Rhea and Zeus. From Zeus issues the supramundane triad: at the extremity of which comes Apollo, who produces a triad of so-called liberated gods. Their extreme becomes the generative monad of a triad of mundane gods. Julian nowhere endorses in detail these refinements; he retails, by his own confession, but few out of many of the inventions of the divine Iamblichus: in his classification of Gods there are marked divergen­cies; but the general principle is strongly asseverated.

King Sun, the arch-demiurge in the Intelligible World, Sun and plays towards the Intellectual the same part that in the higher sphere is played by the Good, who there causes and directs all things aright in accordance with presiding intelligence or Nous. Thus, though metaphysically the Intellectual Gods share original co-procession and co-subsistence with Sun, they are yet said to owe their being to him. This. means that without his agency their being would never be realized.  He supplies them, and in constant unfailing measure, with what to the Intellectual God is the very condition of being. Without this  active and apprehended intelligence, their existence is but potential; they are as eye-sight without light. Nor does his task end here with this creation, or more strictly actualization of their essential being and attributes. Having received from the Good dominion among the Intellectual Gods, he actively and incessantly exercises it: they are as subordinate and inferior to him as the stars are to the natural sun; their whole being is directed by his providing guidance. It is Sun that imparts its unity to all Intellectual being throughout the universe. In technical phraseology he contains them intellectually in himself, fills all heaven with them, and himself becomes a unifying centre about which their action is harmonized. He may be called a harmonic mean or centre; not (Julian is careful to explain) as a mean between extremes, but as a central  principle everywhere infusing unity of action, perfecting and harmonizing diverse energies, and  combining otherwise conflicting extremes into a single identity. Like the phenomenal Sun he controls, adjusts and regulates the centrifugal forces of the system.

In addition to his originative and regulative functions, he exercises distributive powers on a royal scale. He is directly commissioned to dispense to all Intellectual forms of being the rich endowments of perfectness  and beauty which the Good originates and imparts among the Intelligible Gods. Being, unity, illimitable  beauty, productive fecundity, perfected  intelligence, all the divine attributes Analogy to proceed from great Sun. His counterpart or image in the visible world acts imitatively as a revealing medium whereby men may adore and understand the analogous work of sovereign Sun  in the Intellectual order. Just as the phenomenal Sun imprints harmony upon the visible universe, of which he forms the centre, as he regulates the concentric motions of the spheres, guides the circling orbits of the planets at measured distances, and no less the changeful phases of the moon, as with creative energy he ministers to earth her unbroken power of being, as he gives the beauty of day for work, and in turn the terror of night wherein men rest from their labors, as he brings to pass storm and wind and cloud and all atmospheric changes, so does the royal Sun act in the Intellectual world. The sincere  uncontaminated radiance of light, which Sun ever sheds abroad in this world, which gives sight to the eyes as the artist gives form to the marble, is but the counterpart of that undefiled illuminating Truth in which he bathes the Intellectual forms of being. Light is to the visible as Truth to the Intelligible.

Thus King Sun originates, impels and harmoniously adjusts, endows and equips with appropriate excellences and energies. He continues too to exorcise a providing control. But he is often mythologically represented as performing this by deputy. Thus he is said, having controlled the gods to a single unity, to hand them over as a mighty army to Athene Pronoia to do at her bidding their appointed work. She acts as his subordinate consort.    Elsewhere his guiding control finds a different personification as Prometheia, identified with the Mother of the Gods, and constantly in concert with the higher deity assuming preservative direction of the Intellectual Gods.

Sun's influence does not end with the Intellectual sphere, and pass from thence by transmitted emanation only into the Cosmic order. He exercises a direct palpable influence over the Cosmos. His demiurgic power is active there. He is said to have called the Cosmos into being, reserving for his representative the central place, so as to secure ready and equal distribution of goods and ordering of the heavenly bodies, the subordinate co-proceeding Gods. His demiurgic action in the Cosmos occupies a central place between that of the primal demiurge and the numerous lower demiurgic deities: but no delimitation is attempted of the provinces in which each acts. Relatively to the Cosmos these inferior creative agencies exhibit themselves in diverse and multiplied activities; relatively to Sun they are uniform, crowning the uncontaminated essence of the deity. In regard to the origination of the Cosmos one warning deserves repetition. Its creation is not a chronological event. It might appear such in the bold representations of Plato and Iamblichus. It is convenient to describe it so; indeed hardly possible to do otherwise. But the strict theological conception is that things proceeded or rather were produced from eternity. Sun procreated things visible from the invisible in the infinite present, by the ineffable celerity and unsurpassed power of the divine will.

Beyond this point it is hard to push with precision any account of the functions of King Sun. They mingle inextricably with those of his mundane representative. Julian is so busy with tracing affinities, with extorting spiritual correspondences from scientific analyses of the nature and uses of light, with wresting astronomical arrangements and speculations into allegorical representations of higher truth, and so often veils the transition from the sign to the thing signified under an ambiguous 'Sun', that it is impossible without arbitrariness to decide whether the agency of the higher or the lower deity is intended. Sun, for instance, is described as being with man the joint and universal begetter of men: he gathers souls from himself and from other Gods, and sows them on earth: in life he ministers to them every good, he judges, he directs, he purges them; finally, he liberates them from their bodily tenement, reunites them to the kindred and divine essences, converting the ethereal activity of his divine rays into a vehicle for their conveyance. These  might seem duties worthily ascribed to the sovereign Sun; yet are almost unmistakably transferred to his lower representative. Can any other interpretation be placed on these words: “Just as Sun is author of day and night, and of winter or summer by his approach or retrocession, so is the most venerable of the Gods; to him are all things and of him are all things; he appoints us  rulers during life, and after death apportions us governors”. Julian is either enhancing the dignity of the cosmic Sun, or purposely giving him the advantage of his name and confounding him with his better.

It would be tedious to rehearse all Julian's praises of the Sun apparent. He is leader and lord in the sensible world. He is the originative cause of heaven and the stars, and upholds them with sustaining force. His vast productive fertilizing power is dwelt upon persistently. He supplies a never-ceasing stimulus of life to the earth by alternate approach and retirement. He enriches men with equable unceasing distribution of blessings, material and spiritual. The simplicity of his motion betokens the excellence and superiority of his power beyond that of all planets and stars and heavenly bodies. His appearance, his position, his work, his action upon natural phenomena proclaim his majesty.

This is the barest outline of Sun's specific work: but it will be more instructive to view the Cosmos as a whole, and range its different parts according to their proper dignity. “The divine and all lovely universe from the highest arc heaven to the utmost ends of earth is from everlasting to everlasting. It is a single animate whole, everywhere instinct with Soul and Intellect, perfect and of perfect parts”. It is not the immediate work of the great First Cause, but of those Intelligible Gods to whom he has committed his Demiurgic Functions. Its origin is emanative, and it subsists around the supreme God Helios or Sun. It is ruled directly by the so-called visible or apparent Gods, of whom phenomenal Sun is the chief. Moon, planets, stars are all such apparent Gods, emanating from primal Sun, and coun­terparts in the Cosmic sphere of the Intelligible Gods corre­sponding to them in the higher order. Between  the supramundane and mundane Gods Julian draws no plain line of demarcation.

Immediately beneath the Gods come the so-called divine kinds of being. These ubiquitous spirits exercise superhuman agencies, and are distributed in various classes, Angels, Daemons, Heroes and Separate Souls. The precise differentia of daemons, heroes and souls respectively had been one of Porphyry's perplexities, and Julian does not emulate the extravagances of Iamblichus by any scientific analysis. He teaches in general terms that all alike owe their innate energy to Sun. Of Angels there are various classes; the highest are Solar Angels, who are the first creation of Sun about the Cosmos: there are also Lunar Angels. One at least of their functions is to act as guardian spirits. The Daemons too are active agents of the Gods.

Porphyry had assigned to them superintendence over distinct animal or vegetable or meteorological departments of nature; had honored them as patrons of particular arts, and commissioned ambassadors between Gods and men. But they are of uncertain character: exceptional daemons may be altogether beneficent, but as a rule the daemon is not absolutely pure or perfectly good, like the Gods, but participates in some alloy of evil: some are no better than imps or bogies. Daemons of distinct characters preside over nations, acting under the superintendence of the patron God, and helping to mould and perpetuate their national characteristics. Conversely there is an appointed tribe of malicious daemons who, guarding the honor of the eternal and saving Gods, delude the apostate Christians with dreams of heaven after death, or drive them out as anchorites into the wildernesses far from their fellow-men. The Separate Souls are products or effects of the great central Soul, which pervades the All. Though in contact with matter temporarily individualized, they are yet one and the same, just as Knowledge or Light though divisible into parts remain nevertheless essentially wholes. So the Soul of the Universe remains indivisible, though each individual soul derives from it its proper complement, when it accepts the self-imposed limitations of time, space, and quasi-personality involved in the combination with matter.

At this stage the world of matter is reached. Matter, in  Julian's belief, is eternal, subsisting beside the procreative essence of the Gods, and generated by eternal co-procession with the Gods, by virtue of that superfluous energy of procreative and constructive powers, with which the Gods, no less than the First Cause himself, are endowed. Matter in its raw form consists only of negations ; it is the substratum void of all attributes and incomprehensible to sense: it is utterly lifeless and sterile, the filth, the refuse, the dregs of existence;  no language can be too strong to express its demerits. Potential determination of being is the sole attribute allowed to what is in itself “the absolutely non-existent”. It requires to be animated by divine essence before it is raised to that degree of passible being, in which we apprehend it by sense. It then becomes materialized form. Thus the material world consists of so many junctions of matter with immaterial cause, which confers on it sensible being. Matter and spirit alike are primary and necessary assumptions; the union of the two is inexplicable; neither the mode nor agent of the combination is discoverable: we only see the result. Some cause of the union there must of course have been. That it was not blind chance we may rest satisfied. Any Epicurean theory of fortuitousness may be dismissed at the bare mention. Peripatetics attribute the conjunction to the action of the Quintum Genus or Fifth element. But this merely pushes the difficulty a step back, not solving it. The earth is supported on the elephant, the elephant on the tortoise, and the tortoise—on what? It remains a final fact that soul is united with various forms of material being. The mode or cause of union transcends reason. It is best regarded not as an act of free-will on the part of animating soul, but as necessarily arising from the natural constitution of things. Soul in a figure lying on the outskirts of the suprasensual world could not but illuminate the darkness on which it bordered, formless matter, and thereby brought into being before all time the phenomenal world. The only reasonable explanation of the final dualism that everywhere meets the philosopher is offered by the Neo-Platonic scheme of eternally existent spirit and eternally existent matter connected by emanative processes! The union is brought about solely for the improvement and elevation of matter. Much as it may have to endure in the union, soul the superior nature, akin to God, can take no hurt or hindrance from contact with its baser companion.

But a nearer insight into the stage, so to speak, at which the connection was divinely consummated is granted to us in the myth of Attis. Therein it is recounted how Attis exposed beside the eddies of the Gallus grew to the perfect flower of beauty; how the mother of the Gods conceived a passion for him, loaded him with gifts and crowned him with stars; how afterwards false to that love he went down into the cave and had intercourse with the nymph; whereupon followed his mutilation, and the visitation with madness. In this pregnant myth the initiated will discern the true account of the union between spirit and matter, and the origination of the material world.

The Mother of the Gods is the faithful handmaid of King Helios. She personifies his providing control. As such she directs and preserves the lower orders of Gods. She dispenses to them Sun's gifts, among others the prime gift of demiurgic power, which she at once stimulates and guides. Of this there are various grades corresponding to the grades of Gods. Attis  represents the lowest stage of demiurgic productiveness, that namely at which the divine comes in contact with the material. He is the last link in the chain which unites earth with the superabundant fertility of the productive principle. The Gallus beside which Attis lay blooming is the Milky Way, which is confessedly the junction of passible substance with the impassible Quintessence. The Mother's love, her gifts, the crown of stars show her at her proper work, elevating, stimulating, etherealizing the demiurgic force and desire of the lower God, so as to win it and wean it from its perilous inclination towards matter. Spite of that preserving love Attis goes down into the cave, forsaking heaven for earth, and impregnates the nymph, who typifies the immaterial cause which converts matter into material being. Such declension from divine continence might argue Attis less than divine. He has been called a demigod. But in reality it was a gracious, generous condescension, a sacrifice for the sake of outcast matter. His end achieved he returns to heaven. His emasculation has a most real meaning. It signifies the restraint of his infinite productive power, in other words the fact that in the material world generation is limited by the demiurgic Providence to definite forms. So too has his ensuing madness. The generative cause at the last stage, where the divine is brought into contact with matter, loses self-control: that is to say, the material world is not self-subsistent, but subject to never-ceasing change and decay.

Such, temporally depicted, is the origination of the material world. The combination remains ever active: otherwise every organism, matter that is to say informed with spirit, being neither uncreate nor self-subsistent, would revert to abstract indeterminate. Its whole Being is but Becoming; in other words life depends on constant change of conditions, the means towards which is supplied from without. There is need of constant, outward sustainment, or as the Neo-Platonists prefer to say containment, by divine power. Primarily this must be conferred by the action of the sovereign One, secondarily by the Intelligible order, but immediately the world is preserved or contained by nothing else than that “fifth substance” or Quintessence, of which the principal component is the sun's ray. This pericosmic Quintessence, not seldom spoken of as the cyclic substance, is incessantly busy at the borders of the universe coercing and welding together all the naturally dispersive elements. It belongs to the divine impassible portion of being, being that part of it which comes in contact with lower passible existences. The Milky Way marks the border line, where the creative reign of the higher Gods ends, and that of Attis commences.

The Quintessence conserves being: it is not said to originate it. This function is constantly attributed to Sun.  The necessary influx and efflux of Being, which is essential to an active existence, is provided by his ordered approach and retirement. To take a specific instance man is, as Aristotle says, the offspring of man and of Sun, the former transmitting the mortal material element, the latter providing for the indwelling presence of Soul.   

The procreative Gods produced man, having from the beginning received souls from the prime Demiurge. As to the act of creation, while admitting as an alternative the Scripture account, he prefers to believe that numerous couples and not one merely were created. It would have been as easy to create many as one, and the distinctive characteristics of race, features, laws, customs, and the like, no less than the vast numbers existing, point decidedly to the former as the true hypothesis. And not the nobler parts of the Universe alone, not man or the celestial bodies only, but every stick or stone is animate with its proper complement of soul, without which  it would be mere formless undetermined matter. At the same time the nature of the soul animating man, living creatures, plants and inanimate matter differs with the respective differences of the body animated. Inanimate objects  possess qualities only, plants a living organism, animals soul, man a reasonable soul: though it is a grave question whether the superiority is not one of energy rather than of essential kind.

As a brief summary of what may be called Julian’s doctrinal theology, the grand ascription of praise which closes his Hymn to the Sun deserves quotation. There he addresses him as before all Gods Sun himself, monarch of the universe:

“Who proceedeth from everlasting around the procreative essence of  The Good, midmost and in the midst of the Intellectual Gods,  

Who before time was fulfilleth them with cohesion and infinite beauty  and procreative abundance and perfect intellect and all good gifts together,  

Who in time present radiateth light from everlasting into His visible and proper seat that hath its course in the midst of the whole heaven,

Who imparteth of the intelligible beauty to all the universe,

Who fulfilleth the whole heaven with all those Gods whom He Himself intellectually containeth within Himself, multiplying around Him in indivisible fellowship and joined to Him in single unity,

Who not less containeth also the sublunar space by perpetual generation and the good gifts ministered from His cyclic frame,

Who careth for the whole common race of men and for Rome our city in peculiar wise, even as He hath supplied the substance of my soul that is from everlasting, and hath made me His own devotee”.

It will now become plain at once that Julian did not decompose the Hellenic mythology into representations of nature worship, detecting in its tales so many transformed and fossilized solar myths. For this he had not the materials with which Sanskrit and Zend mythology have supplied moderns. An  extract  from Cyril's work will  furnish the most compact summary of Julian’s doctrine concerning the popular divinities. “The Demiurge is common father and king of all, but he hath moreover assigned all peoples to Gods presiding over peoples and caring for commonwealths, each of whom governs his allotment conformably to his own nature. For seeing that in the Father all things are perfect and all one, while in the separate deities one or another quality predominates, therefore is it that Ares presides over the bellicose, Athene over them that combine wisdom with war, Hermes over them that are shrewd rather than adventurous, and the nations over which they preside follow each the several  natures of their proper Gods”. The language here is plain; a fuller personality than usual is accorded, and in itself the passage seems clear of ambiguities. But I one question remains. Into what part of this theology were the current Pagan Gods fitted?

How far the Gods themselves, like the stories of Homer concerning them, are mythical, and do but adumbrate the Divine essences with which popular theology confounds them, it is difficult to determine. The question indeed at this point becomes one of terms: in short are the names assigned true names or misnomers? The answer is that the names are of human invention, the beings denoted are real. With very few exceptions they take rank among the Intellectual Gods as subordinate helpers of King Sun. But it would be a vain hope to search Julian's pages for a consis­tent account of their respective relations, functions and priority. He is too enamored of arbitrary allegorizing from Homeric genealogies, of subtle inferences from oracular verses, and of mystic interpretations of popular myths, to adhere to any plain uniform classification of deities. Their relations to King Sun are as determinate as anything, and offer the best standard of comparison.

Zeus is the highest God. In order to accommodate Hellenic beliefs and revelations to the Neo-Platonic theology, he is placed usually on an exact equality with Sun, though here and there slight traces of inferiority are permitted appear. It is only in casual adjuration that great Sun is allowed to stand second. Most commonly the two are identified as sharing single coequal sovereignty over the whole tribe of Intellectual Gods. The  identification  is  actually justified by a Homeric genealogy. To both alike is given the title 'Father of the Gods.'

Incidentally Serapis is identified with Zeus or Sun, mainly on the strength of an oracular verse; he is elsewhere spoken of as the brother of Zeus. The only other God elevated to such rank is Hades. He too must thank the oracle for his representation as the gentle propitious deity whose kindly hand dissolves that union between soul and matter, which it is the reciprocal work of Sun to bring to pass. 

The Muses follow him as the leader of their choir, while Dionysus is the son and consort to whom Sun appoints his proper work. Horus and Mithras are other names for Sun rather than coequal deities. None other can claim a place among Intelligible Gods unless it be Apollo. His identification with Sun can be only of a popular character, but as  consort with him he takes unsurpassed rank, partaking of the same simplicity of intelligence, the same stability of being, the same immutability of energy as Sun himself. It is he who in joint ascendancy instructs men by oracles, inspires them with wisdom, and adorns societies with religions, constitutions, laws and civilization.

The other Gods are definitely inferior to Sun, and assist in special departments of his wide range of activities, personifying as it were those activities. None transcend in dignity Athene and the Mother of the Gods, between whom there is a clear affinity. Each represents Sun's controlling Providence: each may be spoken of as his consort, and acts in full communion with the Intelligible Gods. The Athene myth stereotypes anthropomorphically the direct emanation of Athene from Sun or Zeus, and does not conceal her inferiority. Justice has been already done to their controlling, preservative custodianship of forces imparted to the Intellectual Gods. Athene is moreover the wisest of goddesses, and virtue and wisdom and contrivance and statesmanship are among her bounties to men.    Aphrodite too consorts with Sun, as a busy handmaid in his service. Among the heavenly Gods she acts as a combining principle; she is the concord and unity of their harmony, and goes everywhere with Sun tempering his creative work. On earth she sheds forth rays of purest loveliness, brighter than very gold, melting men' s souls with delight, and becoming to all living things the principle of generation and the source of self-renewing life.

Dionysus represents and shares the disseminative productive power of Sun, and is a loyal fellow-worker and ruler, whom Sun regards with paternal love. Asclepius is begotten of Sun in the Cosmos, to preserve the life and harmony of which he is the author and sustainer. Though enjoying with Sun a premundane existence, he  was made incarnate on earth by the vivifying power of Sun, and endowed with human form to heal both bodies and souls of men, with which beneficent purpose he wandered—whether allegorically or no it is hard to decide—through all the great towns of earth. The Muses and the Graces are the offspring of Sun and serve him as  their  lord. The lower demigods, such as Korybantes, or Satyrs, Fauns, Bacchants take rank as daemons.

These shadowy identities are gleaned submissively from the preserves of Iamblichus. Both in spirit and form Plotinus' identifications had been more philosophic and rational, though open to a charge of tameness from the monotonous recurrence of personifications of the soul as manifested in higher or lower spheres. The obvious vagueness of this survey, which minimizes not exaggerates Julian's own lack of precision, shows how shadowy and unreal his assumed personifications are. They are of a random, kaleidoscopic character. The picturesque stir and life of the old Hellenic Olympus is all gone. It has nothing in common with the new-fangled mysticism but some borrowed names and metaphors. The Gods are no longer living, breathing men and women, active in love and in hate, girded with poetry, ravishing to the sense. All individuality is lost. There is no form and no color left. The vivid lines and outlines are smeared into a neutral expressionless smudge. Personal Gods have been metamorphosed into scientific and theological conceptions or mathematical ideas; mythology has become a philosopho-cosmical and physico-astronomical system. One effect of this is to invest the entire religion with a frigid and labored artificiality that must have chilled piety and lamed all devout enthusiasm, even if it did not suggest a self-conscious insincerity. It showed the very opposite of the free Hellenic spirit; it was forced instead of natural, exaggerated instead of true, constrained instead of free. Amid this misty confounding of deities one positive idea of some interest is discernible. For the old republican constitution of the Homeric Olympus with its independent and often mutually antagonistic powers, with its jealousies and favoritisms and animosities, there has been substituted a strict and ordered hierarchy of graded deities, centering their aspirations and even merging their personality in the supreme divinity, whose sway represented in ideal perfection that absolute dominion to which the Emperor of Rome only in theory attained.

To discover hard and fast identities, or even principles of theology, arrangement in this cloudland, is impossible. But it is easy to define the general position taken up towards the popular theology. This was contained primarily in Homer, Hesiod, and various collections of Hymns of the Gods. These the new religion accepted as of divine authority, and written by direct inspiration. Homer is habitually quoted in Julian's works with the weight of an inspired authority.

How keenly the defectiveness of these as Sacred Books was felt by the Neo-Platonists is shown by Porphyrius' endeavor to supply the lacuna by a collection of the utterances of the Oracles. Such as they were, however, Julian and his confederates accepted them, and adapted them to their purpose by an elastic system of allegorical interpretation. It was in the myths more than anywhere else that the popular religious conceptions were really enshrined. Julian's treatment of these is bold and instructive: so bold that at times he seems almost to stand on his defense against a charge of irreverence. He freely admits that many of the ancient myths were as they stood grossly immoral and impious.

But this very fact goes to prove that they cannot be  actually and nakedly true. Venerable with the dust of antiquity, but stamped with the brand of inspiration, they are handed down to us as apocalyptic glimpses into those truths which the flagging intellect of man can neither accurately grasp nor formulate. They are sign-posts, not termini; their function is to excite the intellectual powers, not satisfy. Myths then, such is his theory, stand to the intellectual sense much in the same relation as images to the spiritual. They are but emblematic representations of the truth, not literal statements of fact. Wrongly regarded they infallibly obscure and misrepresent the inner truth they allegorize. They are so to say concrete mental projections into time and place of that which happened out all temporary or local relations.   

The very contradictions or incongruities with which they abound are meant expressly to stimulate men to look behind the veil and decipher the hidden mystery. From the necessity of the case they are in every particular anthropomorphic in conception, whereas the truths and processes they adumbrate are wholly spiritual. The mythical birth of Helios from Hyperion and Theia is not meant as an account of marriage and processes of generation among the Gods, ideas which are wholly incongruous with their very nature: its real signification is that Helios, first among the Intelligible Gods, sprang by emanation from a Cause yet higher still, that Cause to wit which is of all most divine, and which wholly transcends all comprehension, for Whom and round Whom are all things create or uncreate. So again the procession of Athene from the head of Zeus, which materially conceived becomes meaningless blasphemy, sets forth in a figure the spiritual truth that she came forth entire by immediate emanation from the highest God. The interpretation of the myth of Cybele and Attis, which runs through so much of Julian's Fifth Oration, is a more elaborate and ambitious effort in the same direction. Under Julian's handling it becomes in part a solar myth but primarily a more transcendental revelation.

Myths thus regarded are a testimony to something of a progressive revelation of God to man. As birds fly and fish swim by instinct, with none to teach or guide the way, so man too has his nobler instinct, that will not be denied its satisfaction. The Gods have given him a soul, and that soul, even in man's infancy, could not but flutter and try its wings. Imbued with godlike affinities it tugged at the chain that held it, soaring toward truth. Shadowy images, visions of unknown glories floated before it. As the feathers sprouted upon the infant soul, a strange tingling, half of pleasure half of pain, thrilled it through and through. The soul itching with intolerable desire found relief in myths. They were like nurses rubbing the infant's gums at teeth-cutting, relieving the irritation and quickening the growth. The itching was but the herald of growing powers, myths but the foreshadowing of coming revelations. The full-grown philosopher, while recognizing that they may serve the infant still, knows that they were presages of more solid supervening abilities. They are of use still maybe to spice moral teaching distasteful in its severe simplicity, and so to sweeten nauseous truths. But the perfect man has no need of sweets.

He seeks rather the strong meat and medicine, which the sweet but obscured or rendered ineffective. Popular Such was Julian's abstract dogmatic theology. It is no disparagement of his creed to say that it was impossible to Platonic present its loftier truths to the capacities of popular intelligence. If theology is a science at all, it follows at once that its deeper mysteries will be accessible to those only who are versed in the science. The popular creed will remain a rough and imperfect representation of the truths it but dimly perceives. By what modifications then or adaptations were these religious conceptions commended to the public?

In the first place, the purely intellectual side was perforce left in the background. The doctrine of a trinity, the relation of emanating Deities to the incomprehensible First Cause, the interdependence of Intelligible and Intellectual Gods on each other and on the primal One were left to the philosophers. But a far more vital modification than this was adopted. Monotheism, which was in a sense the creed of the Neo-Platonist, and the language of which Julian constantly employs in intercourse with his philosophic friends, was in its popular representation wholly abandoned. It is metamorphosed into polytheism, pure and simple. Nor does Julian attempt to conceal it. In temple-worship, lustrations, sacrifices, indeed in everything, he says, the Jews are in exact accord with the Pagans, except in the peculiarity of a monotheistic belief. “Their sole error is in doing a displeasure to the other Gods by reserving their worship for the God whom they with barbarian pride and stupidity regard as their special property, relegating the rest to the Gentiles alone”. Monotheism is positively denounced as “a calumniation of the Deity”. The transformation was as simple as it was necessary to win the popular ear. It merely involved a certain ignoring or rather reticence concerning  higher esoteric mysteries, which is not even chargeable with insincerity. Philosophers  themselves  believed  in the Gods as emanating agents of the One God: nay more believed that through them alone contact with the One was possible for anything short of the highest philosophic intuition.

The whole genius of Neo-Platonism was essentially polytheistic. The Monotheistic element was subsidiary, a satisfaction and a secret for the philosopher, but for the multitude at most a tenet never a belief, a theory not a motive power. The One was incomprehensible, incommunicable, unapproachable by man; the Gods who governed the universe about him, who ruled him and his destiny, who heard his petitions, who shielded him from evil, were subordinate, many in number, diverse in form and desires and powers. This conception had firmly embedded itself in the religion of mankind. “Throughout the whole world you find one single concurrent law and testimony, that there is one God, king and father of all, and Gods many, sons of God and joint rulers with God. This Greek declares and this Barbarian, this the dweller on the mainland and the dweller by the sea, this the wise man and the fool”. In Julian's own language, “The Demiurge of the universe is one; the demiurgic deities, the denizens of heaven, are many”. It was a belief requiring the concentrated forces of Christianity to extirpate it: within the Church, in its last subtle phase of Arianism, it only not prevailed; without, it was seized by Neo-Platonism, coordinated with the highest reason and conscience of mankind, systematized, sanctioned, and wielded in all its versatile applications.

From this standpoint Julian was able to exhibit a ready and generous sympathy with whatever form of cult had commended itself to the people with whom he might be concerned. He assiduously emphasizes the value he  attaches to the preservation of local rites or beliefs. Each is in itself a revelation: to surrender an ancestral rite is to fling away a fragment of revealed truth. Hence a scrupulous reverence for all traditional sanctities. Nations by a curious inversion of facts are regarded as representing, or as molded by, the character of their tutelar Gods.   

To Heliopolis must be given back  its Aphrodite-worship, to the Jews their temple, to the shrine of Serapis the cubit of the Nile. “In things  holy we  do well to  preserve whatsoever ancestral custom prescribes: we must neither add thereto nor diminish a whit therefrom; for that which is of the Gods is everlasting”. High priests were directed to follow the same rule in their visitations, never to extemporize new rites or improve upon old, but to shun innovation above all things. In precisely the same spirit Julian systematically endeavors  appropriately to localize his references to the Gods. If he writes to the Romans, he dwells on the special connection of Helios with Rome, reminding them how the great God by his connection with Venus and Mars becomes through Aeneas  and Romulus respectively the immediate patron of Rome: how further the tale of the miraculous assumption of Quirinus, and not less Numa’s ordinance concerning the sacred fire recognizes him still as tutelar divinity of their favored town; and how they are even reminded of the fact by the measurement of months and the season of the opening of the new year. If it is to the Athenians he addresses himself, it is to Athene, the most wise Goddess, that he appeals.  If he takes up his pen to the Alexandrians, he exhorts them to a better mind by the reverence that they owe their patron-saint and founder Alexander, or adjures them by the name of Serapis their city-holding King and his maiden-consort Isis. To the Jews, to take a yet more interesting sample of the same spirit, he adopts their own monotheistic language. Their God, he says, is the same all-powerful and beneficent ruler of the universe whom we Greeks worship, though under a varying names. After commending their faith and sympathizing with the maltreatment they had endured, he entreats them to offer up prayers for him and for the Empire, “to the most high God and Creator, who has deigned to crown me with his undefiled right hand”; in his treatise against the Christians he says in so many words, “I adore always the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”.

It is droll to watch with what scrupulous consistency Julian carries out  the same principle even in playful and familiar correspondence. If he writes to a philosopher, Hermes of reason,  or the Muses will be the Deity selected; unless indeed he be in poor health, when wishes for his convalescence will be fortified by the name of Asklepius: while in a letter to an Egyptian official the name of Serapis naturally becomes the appropriate vehicle for indignation.    The changes in adjuration that are rung remind the reader of Acres' device for adding point and relevance to the formulas of oath.

In his exoteric teaching Julian is perfectly content to put forward the lower and more popular motive or explanation, where he does not think an appeal to the higher will wake a responsive echo. The appeal he thought must be accommodated to the audience. In the Caesars he gently censures the stern uncompromising Probus for not thus adapting himself to the people. Wise doctors mix bitter draughts with honey to suit the unaccustomed palate: like cows or horses, men are easiest led by what they like. A good instance of this occurs in one of his letters to the Alexandrians: there in exhorting them to the worship of Helios, he says no word of the theological position or relations of that divinity, but appeals simply to the natural power of the visible sun, and bids them as they look on the changing seasons, on the processes of birth and growth, and on the ordered phases of the Moon, fall down and worship the manifested and all-powerful Deity.

His popular as contra-distinguished from his philosophical teaching on the nature and attributes of these Gods, and the manner in which he desired they should be regarded, leads naturally to a consideration of Julian's idea of personal religion.

 

V

JULIAN’S IDEA OF RELIGION.