MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

THE EMPEROR JULIAN THE APOSTATE

CHAPTER IX.

JULIAN AND CHRISTIANITY.

Out of this stuff, these forces, thou art grown,

And proud self-severance from them were disease.

Julian's treatment of the Christians has been investigated at length: the personal opinions that he entertained of Christianity and the Christians demand a separate examination. Obviously the two questions are different. In the first case he acted as Emperor: in the second he thought as an individual. In the former his hands were in great measure tied by the mixed responsibilities of power; in the latter he was free as the unlettered peasant or the cultured philosopher.

It is not too much to say that intellectually, morally and practically he totally misconceived Christianity. Before the death of Constantine, and in a still greater degree of course at the death of Constantius, Christianity had attained a position sufficient to prove that it was the conquering force then present in the world, that in its hands lay the future.

During the half-century preceding Julian's accession it had gone forward with leaps and bounds: its numerical strength, its moral earnestness, its intellectual self-justification all entitled it to at least respect as an antagonist, if not to acceptance as a master. Yet Julian treated it with unconcealed and miscalculating contempt. He professed and probably felt disdain as much as dislike. How could this be?

In the first place he was singularly unfortunate in his contact with it. Alike in the court of Constantius, and in his early education and youth, Christianity came before him in the person of most unworthy representatives; on the throne hardly less than in the schoolroom the same ill-fortune dogged him. The cordiality and impartiality of his numerous invitations availed him nothing.

It was high time to prove that not all bishops were dissimulators, and not all prelates politicians: so the worthier with one consent held aloof from the Apostate. Athanasius indubitably represents the highest consciousness of the Christian Church of Julian's day. If there was one episcopal appointment more grievous a scandal to the Church than another, that of Aetius might probably be singled out. First a peddling tinker, next a quack, next a sophist, the coryphaeus of heretics land the bane of the Church, he had won his spurs as 'the Atheist" before in Julian's reign he attained the bishopric of Constantinople. Such were the two men. Athanasius Julian can scarcely mention without bad language: Aetius above every ecclesiastic he delighted to honor; not content with receiving him at court he conferred upon him in addition an estate in Mitylene. Can facts speak plainer?

In this respect Julian certainly deserves commiseration, but must not therefore elude just blame. If not in boyhood, at least as a man he had ample opportunities for forming a judgment from fairer specimens of Christianity than an Aetius or a Hekebolius. Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus were his college associates; will rather than occasion must have been lacking if he never met Christian leaders such as Hilary of Poitiers or Eusebius of Vercellae: doubtless their society would have been distasteful to him. The sequel to Julian's vain endeavors to pervert the young Caesarius was his retirement from court, a practical commentary neutralizing pages of trim professions.

Julian's primary misconception of Christianity was in regarding it as a sheer contrivance, a kind of mutual benefit society set up solely in the interests of the managers. He had found so much hypocrisy among Christians that he assumed of them all.  S. John's attribution of divinity to Christ was a clever fraud: the whole fabric of sacerdotalism was so much ingenious mechanism: the clergy were ambitious schemers; if deprived of the power to tyrannies and dictate and appropriate other men's goods, they at once became centres of faction, professional incendiaries, whose work it was to inflame party against party in their own selfish interests.

The monks—except indeed in those cases where they had been driven by devils into the wilderness and provided with manacles and collars—were no better; their assumed self-renunciation was a sham. At a small sacrifice for the most part, they had made a lucrative investment. In exchange for the paltry property or positions they had surrendered, these so-called 'Renouncers' were everywhere courted, caressed, and obsequiously followed, besides recouping themselves in hard cash into the bargain. Monasticism was in Julian's eyes a low type of the false Cynicism he so hotly denounced. To him almsgiving and charities were but ingenious devices to support the ascendancy of a ruling caste. He compares the Christians to kidnappers who tempt children by mouthfuls of cake, and finally catch them, and fling them into confinement, to spend a life of misery as the cost of the transient sweet that tickled their palate for the nonce. If Pagans did but imitate the cunning of the Christians on more magnanimous motives, they would soon occupy the same position of influence.

Besides this arrant and pervading duplicity with which he charges them, Julian attributed a variety of other vices to the Christians. Not content with condemning individuals, he regards envy, strife and slander as characteristic of the Christian profession, a mistake which cost him not a few practical blunders. He represents Christians as drawn from the lowest and most degraded portions of society. He extends this reproach to primitive Christians as well as his own contemporaries, and avails himself of S. Paul's black catalogue of crimes to prove that from the very first the Church had been recruited from the criminal ranks.

There was considerable truth in the remark as a fact. The lowest and the highest strata of society were still, as at the first, those from which Christianity derived its strength. Content with this fact, and keenly alive to the shortcomings of Christians, Julian precipitately inferred a condemnation of the religion itself. He was blind to the moral power of Christianity upon the life. Bigotry and prejudice revealed to him only the narrowness, violence and duplicity so rife amid contemporary Christians.

In his belief they greedily assimilated all that was bad, rejecting what was good: and this no less in the religious and intellectual than in the moral and social sphere. Having abandoned the worship of the eternal Gods they preferred to worship the Galilean carpenter who died as I a felon: disdaining to adore King Sun, they deified a Jewish corpse; nay, not content with one man or one corpse, they worshipped  many  corpses  and dead men's bones without number. As in worship, so too in ceremonial. Even in the law they still professed to revere, they rebelliously rejected all that was most venerable and estimable. Like leeches they sucked only the bad blood out of the Mosaic code, leaving the purer portion. The same principle of perverse assimilation ruled their intellectual tastes. To the Greeks belonged science and culture; to the Christians unreason and stolidity. Their own literature was stuff fit only for slaves; Greek literature with all its exquisite beauties they at once reprobated and pursued; here as elsewhere, taking a perverse delight in culling from it what was worst instead of what was choicest, and so weaving therefrom a web of mischief.

Not satisfied with such general denunciations, Julian probed deeper, and was at great pains to refute the Galileans by argument as well as abuse or contempt. His controver­sial objections to Christianity were committed to seven books, denied to us by the orthodox anxieties of his successors. Happily the three earlier books survive, embedded in the elaborate refutation by Cyril.

To begin with the metaphysical objections, the origin of evil, the creation of matter, the creation of mortal natures directly by God are all handled, and contrasted unfavorably with the Platonic theory of creation by mediary agents. Between the Christian and the Neo-Platonist system lies the fundamental difference that  whereas Christians regarded evil as entering into the world through the Fall, as a supervening accident therefore and not an inherent necessity in the constitution of things, Neo-Platonists accepted a Manichean belief in the precedent eternity and with it the final indestructibility of evil. The creation or even sufferance of evil in a world created by God they deemed incompatible with the absolute unity and holiness of the Godhead. This line of attack, however, is so slightly pressed, compared with what might naturally be expected, that it is a safe conjecture that either Cyril's report is imperfect or that the subject was reserved for treatment in one of the lost books.

Relying mainly on the anthropomorphisms of the Old Christian Testament Julian further asserts the moral obliquity of the Christian conception of God. Human passions are assigned to him. He is represented as a jealous God, not above anger and indignation, as confounding the innocent with the guilty; and in his blind passion taking an indiscriminate revenge upon tens and hundreds of thousands, out of all proportion to the offence committed, in retaliation for the sin of a few. Again, he is meanly envious, he forbade man I to take of the tree of wisdom, and yet more reprehensibly tried to deny him the knowledge of good and evil. Truly the imitation of such a God (which philosophers commend) [would have strange and disastrous results. The unsightly representation is doubtless due in part to willful dissembling on the part of Moses.

The Christian or Jewish God is not only immoral, but curiously impotent and short-sighted. He created Eve as man's helpmate, and she turned out his seducer and worst enemy. He tried to debar men from the knowledge of good and evil, and was then outwitted by them. Next, becoming frightened of men, be adopted the awkward device of producing a confusion of tongues. In his dealings with Gods he betrays equal helplessness: he cannot prevent that worship of false Gods of which he is said to be jealous.

Once again the Jewish conception of God's partiality in confining his solicitude and government to a special people most injuriously limits both the power and the sphere of his working. To the enlightened philosopher such an  idea must appear no less false in fact than it is petty in conception. The polytheistic idea of God's superintendence of the whole world by appointed agents is a far nobler one. And what is more, it alone is borne out by history: if history proves anything, it proves both in ancient and modern times that the Jews are a God-forsaken race, not the special favorites of the Deity. In material prosperity their career is little more than a succession of captivities; Egyptians, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Syrians, Romans have one after another triumphed over them; while as for general enlightenment they fall hopelessly behind the Chaldeans, the Greeks, and many other nations.

Julian further impugning the defects of Scripture finds that the revelation of God therein contained is not only false and immoral, but also strangely incomplete. For instance there is hardly a word as to the creation or function of angels, and intermediary spirits. Though they are again and again mentioned—whether obscurely, as in Gen. vi. 2, 4, or directly—it is left altogether undetermined whether they are created by God, or emanant from some other source, or unbegotten. Neither are proper distinctions drawn between acts of creation and acts of arrangement of pre-existent material. Various rationalistic objections are next brought against the credibility of Scripture. In what language, it is scoffingly asked, did the serpent talk? How is the account of the tower of Babel  less fabulous or ridiculous than Homer's myth of giants piling Pelion upon Ossa? In a similar tone the  discordance between the genealogies in Matthew and Luke is commented on. Further the literary defects of Scripture receive severe animadversion, and are elaborately contrasted with the excellencies of Greek litera­ture. The prophets are derided, and the Hebrew tongue maligned. Julian likewise assails the want of unity between the different parts of Scripture. The ceremonial law for instance was given by God. Moses expressly says that it is to be eternal; 'Ye shall keep it a feast to the Lord, throughout your generations; ye shall keep it a feast by an ordinance for ever;' and to the same sense elsewhere. Christ reiterated a similar injunction; 'Think not I am come to destroy the law and the prophets;  I am not come to destroy but to fulfill,' and yet Paul has the audacity to say that 'Christ is the end of the law,' and Christians with one consent system­atically neglect every one of its provisions. Again, Moses' entire ignorance  of Christ, whether in Moses or elsewhere, are completely at fault:  and it is again and again repeated that the worship of Christ is a defiant breach of the first command­ment of the Jewish Law. Passing to the New Testament, we find Julian persistently endeavouring to depreciate the character of the witnesses. He speaks scoffingly of Matthew  and Luke, and in more general terms of the  fraudulent machinations of the Evangelists. While the Jewish prophets are in his eyes foolish babblers, who but chattered to old women, in S. John he discerns a scheming and audacious impostor, who ventured to intrude  upon the credulity of Christians novel and blasphemous beliefs as to the divinity of Christ, his person, and his relation to God the Father. S. Peter is a hypocrite, and the differences between him and S. Paul are enlarged upon, while the latter, the arch-impostor and magician, is said, “as occasion suits, like a polypus on the rocks, to shift his doctrines about God”.

Of our Lord himself Julian speaks in a slighting rather than bitter or blasphemous tone. He recognizes neither novelty, nor beauty, nor force in his teaching, comments on his ill success in converting his own kindred and nation, and concludes that he did nothing worthy of mention, except perhaps a few miracles of healing or exorcism in out-of-the-way villages of Palestine. He looked upon the 'carpenter's son' with an aristocratic disdain, that must for ever discredit his power of moral insight. Christ's teaching appeared to him weak, unpractical, and subversive of society. He did not think him a bad man, or a scheming man, or a deluded man, but just an unlettered peasant, who had lived some three hundred years ago, when Augustus and Tiberius were great. There are times when a peevish jealousy breaks out as though Christ were pitted in a personal rivalry against Caesar, and defrauding him of the tribute due; but ebullitions of that kind are casual and kept out of Julian's set polemics against Christianity.

The highest mysteries of the Christian faith he treats with unsparing contempt. He of course rejects the divinity of Christ; he unsparingly denounces the whole doctrine of the Trinity, which originated in the obscure imagination of 'the good John'; and special taunts are directed against the dogma of the Miraculous   Conception, of Atonement by Christ's death, and of the premundane existence of Christ.

Christian 'faith' put him out of all patience. Against the sacramental efficacy of baptism he indulges a special spite: in his satirical Caesars he jeers at the thought of Constantine deserting the ideal of holy life, and after being lapped in the arms of luxury and self-indulgence, turning at last to Jesus, and being washed in baptismal water pure from the taint of sin. “Baptism”, he exclaims in his work against the Christians, “does not take away the scales of leprosy, nor ringworm, nor scurvy, nor warts, nor gout, nor dysentery, nor dropsy, nor the whitlow, nor bodily ailments small or great, but will clean drive out adultery and theft, and moral transgressions one and all”. The taint of his own baptism he endeavored, we have seen, to wash out by initiatory rites, and each Christian pervert was bidden to undergo some such purificatory process.

Thus Julian's formal objections to Christianity, so far as they have been preserved, are less metaphysical in kind than might be anticipated. Many of them represent a low range ­of thought, such as far worse and far duller men of the present epoch would disdain. Large extracts from Julian's works are well suited to the National Reformer, and might even repay translation. Briefly his intellectual attitude may be described as that of modern rationalism of the coarser kind with the following modifications. First, in common with almost all thinkers of his day, and more particularly as himself a Neo-Platonist, he takes no exception to the records of miracles in Scripture. Exhibitions of miraculous power were in his view hardly worth notice, much less evidences of divine agency. Secondly, the class of objections commonly called scientific were necessarily as yet undeveloped, though discernible in germ, for instance in the asserted inadequacy of the legend about Babel to explain the diversity of languages found on the earth. Thirdly, criticism had not yet commenced its destructive work; partly that the science was as yet but little advanced; and still more perhaps that at that day materials of proof were too abundant to admit of such statements or theories as at the present day can be plausibly supported, so as at times, even if untrue, to defy refutation. Be that as it may, Julian accepts both Old and New Testament intact, and in particular refers to S. John's Gospel throughout as the undoubted testimony of the apostle. On the other hand, Julian could press far more forcibly than the modern rationalist the recentness of the rise of Christianity and the  lateness of its appearance in the world's history; nor had he to deal in the same way with Church life and development as an evidence for the truth of the religion. He does not fail to taunt Christians with 'having invented new-fangled rites of sacrifice.'  His view of the moral character both of Christ and his disciples is rather that of-the school of Voltaire, than of the more enlightened skepticism of Strauss or Renan.

Underlying almost all Julian's polemics against Christianity there is a covert comparison between it and the Neo-Platonist religion which he desired to substitute. The biblical account of creation is contrasted disadvantageously with that found in Plato: the Jewish idea of God with the philosopher's. The statement that the God of Moses is less gentle than Lycurgus, less forbearing than Solon, less just or benign than Numa, is a typical one. Jewish wisdom, Jewish law, Jewish literature, Jewish history, Jewish life, social or political, are set side by side with their counterparts, as most favorably represented, in Greece or Rome or Egypt. Throughout there is a certain, and in part it must be owned, conscious unfairness. Not only does Julian misunderstand the anthropomorphisms of the Old Testament, not only does he fail to see the principle of progressiveness in God's self-revelation to mankind, not only does he argue sophistically or mock unkindly or blaspheme offensively, but there is this pervading injustice in his attack, that he compares ideal Paganism with ordinary secular Christianity. For the Pagan he assumes that the philosopher's secret is the peasant's creed; for the Christian that the individual's failure is the system's condemnation.

In a word in Julian's judgment of Christians candor is n0 match for prejudice. He misrepresents their character; he denies them the name they adored; in his mouth they are 'Galileans,' or 'infidels,' or 'atheists,' and their religion is the plague-spot of the Galilean mispersuasion; he profanes or curses all they hold most sacred: he breathes a wish that all their literature could be expunged from existence. This bitterness could not but engage him in serious errors: it warped his judgment, and dulled his observation. He saw their factiousness and augured their ruin; he imagined that the interpositions of Constantine and Constantius had alone frustrated suicide: he gave them rope to hang themselves.

Deceived by external symptoms he missed the internal solidity of their religion: he did not comprehend the hold it had upon men's hearts: it appealed, he thought, to all that was puerile, superficial, transient, in the nature of man.  He supposed it to be a charlatanism, better contrived than most, which imposed upon mankind by assumed authority, by stilted gravity, by frowns and by tears, by bribery and by caresses, by mysterious threats and by delusive promises, by all the paraphernalia with which designing men can catch the popular taste. He fell into the error, to which in all ages men of the world are exposed, of mistaking whatever shows itself on the surface of the Apostolic Community, its prominences and irregularities, all that is extravagant, and all that is transitory, for the real moving principle and life of the system.

The truth is that he was continually looking backwards, not forwards. Hellenism and the Roman Empire were the two colossal objects that blocked his line of vision. He failed to discern that their day was done, their strength worn out. In the midst of that world-heaving period storm and stress, he miscalculated all the most valid ford Christianity was to his vision a disintegrating power, fat alike to the power of Rome and the power of Paganism. He was so far right. But he did not discern that it was the force of the future: that if now it rocked the mountains that pressed upon it, it would shortly hurl them to the ground, and freed from the incubus walk forth erect amid the ruins, busy at its nobler creative work of planting the desolate places and renewing the face of the earth. He knew nothing of the struggle he had undertaken.

X.

JULIAN AND HELLENISM.