The religious reforms, for which Julian is best
known, died with him. Like other rulers who tried to swim against the religious
flow of the time – the Pharaoh Akhenaten with his worship of the sun Aten
before him, or the Mughal emperor Akbar and his regicentric creed Din Ilahi
after him – the tide turned even before his body was cold. Indeed, the
following year Libanius was able to acknowledge the battle was over. ‘[Christianity]
has quenched the sacred flame; it has stopped the joyful sacrifices, it has set
them on to spurn and overthrow your alters; it has closed, demolished, or
profaned your temples and sanctuaries are given to harlots to live in. It has utterly
undone the reverence that was yours and has established in your inheritance a
dead man’s tomb; he weeps.
Nonetheless, despite ( or perhaps even because of) the fact he was a failure,
it is his personality as a man that comes through. His impulsive nature that
made him attempt anything and everything as and when it came to his attention,
while a flaw in an emperor, is a human failing. For all his defects ,his
impatience, his credulity and his arrogance, power did not corrupt him. He
listened other people, whether or not he took their advice. From Oribasius who
told him he needed more self-control and his praetorian prefect in Gaul who advised
him not to invade Persia, to Salutius Secundus who told him not to persecute the
Christians in Antioch, Julian was never the unapproachable despot.
So how should we remember Julian?
Until the late Middle Ages, Julian was a caricature,
a cipher used in literature and art that
was instantly recognizable a shorthand for evil, a pagan foil to Christian
holiness. IT was not until the sixteenth century and Hans Sach’s five-act play Julian the Emperor while Bathing, that we
begin to see Julian s anything other than purely evil but the first genuinely
positive view of the emperor is that of Michel de Montaigne from the
mid-sixteenth century. Editions of Ammianus Marcellinus’s history had been
around since its first printing in 1474 and by the end of 1533 there had been
at least five editions of his history. In an essay that was to have tremendous
significance entitled “On Freedom of Conscience,” the French essayist compared
Julian favorably to Alexander the Great and Scipio. ‘ He was a truly great and
outstanding person, appropriately enough for a man whose mind was steeped in philosophical
argument by which he claimed to order all his activities. And indeed he left
behind examples of model behavior in every field of virtue,’ he writes.
But the end of the seventeenth century, Julian is to be found embroiled once
more in a fight against the Church. Rather confusingly, however, the emperor
was adopted by English Protestants both as a symbol of resistance and as a
symbol of repression. By far the most vociferous party were those who used Julian
as medieval thinkers had done, used the emperor as a stick with which to beat
Catholics as Parliament argued whether it was possible to prevent James II, who
had converted, from ascending the throne. Rather more subtly, at the same time,
Julian was being reborn as a pagan witness to the truth of Protestantism .Rather
than being perceived as an apostate from the Protestant faith, a cabal of
thinkers who had been influenced by Montaigne’s humanism They saw Julian as a philosophical
hero opposing the tyranny of the Church, they portrayed Julian as a charitable
and intellectual man.
Despite the often still fatal consequences of anything that smacked of atheism
or blasphemy, By the mid-eighteenth century, some people went so far as to
consider Julian’s as a success story. Influenced
by the thinking of John Locke and his colleagues, it is not surprising that the
French political philosopher was moved to write that ‘there has not been a
prince since his reign more worthy to govern mankind, ’even if he did cover his
basses with the aside ‘a commendation thus wrested from me will not render me
an accomplice of his apostasy. But it was the French philosopher Voltaire who
rehabilitated Julian as an ideal of toleration, the enlightened sovereign, and
it is he who shaped how most Europeans saw Julian.
Following Voltaire’s rehabilitation of the emperor’s reputation, the English-speaking
world went down a similar path. Edward Gibbon, the English language’s greatest historian,
was hugely influenced by Voltaire (who he knew). Published only twelve years
after The Philosophical Dictionary,
in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Julian’s transformation to the hero of the Enlightenment was complete and it is
through Gibbon’s eyes that the English-speaking world has come to understand
the emperor.
Gibbon’s view of ‘my friend Julian’ is shamelessly partisan. ‘The last of the sons
of Constantine may be dismissed from the world with the remark that he
inherited the defects, without the abilities, of his father’ gets rid of Constantius,
while Julian is the hero of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: ‘Whatever
had been his choice of life, by the force of intrepid courage, lively wit, and intense
application, he would have obtained, or at least he would have deserved, the highest
honors of his profession, and Julian might have raised himself to the rank of
minister or general of state in which he was born a private citizens. If the
jealous caprice of power had disappointed his expectations; if he had prudently
declined the paths of greatness, the employment of the same talents in studious
solitude would have placed beyond the reach of kings his present happiness and
his immortal fame.’
The most successful of all the nineteenth-century writers to approach the
fourth century for inspiration was Algernon Swinburne – indeed, he is the first
one to refer to the emperor as ‘the last pagan’.
I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep,
even so.
For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for
a span;
A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is
man.
So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again,
neither weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death; and
death is sleep.
His
interpretation of the emperor was so influential that it gives the key to the
character of Sue Bridehead, Thomas Hardy’s heroine in Jude the Obscure, who quotes from Hymn to Proserpine.
Since the Second World War, there have been several major novels written
about the emperor. By far the best known – and rightly the most successful – is
Gore Vidal’s Julian (1964). Presented
in the form of a diary dictated by Julian during the Persian campaign with
harmonies provided by comments from Priscus and Libanius in the form of letters
to each other ,in style it owes something to Thornton Wilder’s novel about the
end of the Roman Republic, Ides of March.
It is racy and entertaining account, the more so because Vidal’s stance is
unashamedly and provocatively pro-Julian. Nonetheless, its strength lies in
Vidal’s understanding of the conflicts within Julian’s character. ‘At heart he was
a Christian mystic gone wrong ’is how he sums up the emperor.
It would be easy to imagine Julian as one of the soldier academics of the last
two world war. It is the direction in which Edward Gibbon, in his famous portrait
of the man, pushes us and it would be easy to romanticize the emperor as a
Patrick Leigh Fermor figure, or even more appositely, a John Pendlebury type.
We should not fall into that trap. British army fatigues would have sat badly
on Julian. If we are looking for a modern parallel it is almost easier to see
him as a Che Guevara figure. Not naturally a soldier, yet forced into that
role; then a rebel and finally an undoubtedly charismatic leader for a system
of beliefs whose resurrection we can now see as having been doomed to failure.
These renderings all force modern interpretations onto the classical mind.
Looking back, only one classical writer appears to have had any sense of
balance about Julian, and his approach remains one of the best. Prudentius was
only fifteen when the emperor died ( and writing a good forty years later), but
he describes Julian almost fondly.
Of all the emperors, one there was
Whom I recall from boyhood –bold in war,
A lawgiver, far-famed in word and deed;
He cared much for his country, but cared not
For the true faith, and loved a host of gods,
False
to the Lord, although true to the world.
Prudentius gets us close to the emperor, but doesn’t get us close to Julian He
fails both him and us. The best way to see Julian is to go to the ground floor
of the Louvre, beyond the flashing bulbs that surround the Venus de Milo and
past the vigilant Victory of Somothrace
to the comparative calm of the late Roman section and look at te statue of
Julian there. It stand both aloof and somewhat lonely, looking over the room.
Almost life-sized, Julian is dressed in the garb of a philosopher. The beard and
stance are those of a pagan thinker while the simple crown and the penetrating
gaze do not let you forget that you are looking at a Constantinian emperor.
But these are merely the accoutrements of power, status, and image. Look
instead into his face. The features are those of a real person. The shock of the
image is on a par with looking at a painting such as Caravaggio’s Jesus at Emmaus. It is the humanity
above all that is portrayed. If we look at statues of Julian’s contemporaries
like Constantine and Constantius, or later representations of emperors such as
the mosaics of Theodosius in Ravenna, we perceive a deliberate distance. We are
there to worship, honor, or fear. This is different. This is a statue not of an
emperor as a defender of the faith, a ruler of all things temporal and
spiritual. It is a statue of a ruler as man.
The Last Pagan; Julian the Apostate
by Adrian Murdoch; Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2003
Adrian Murdoch is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society
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