JULIAN THE APOSTATE 361-363
...how many of you are awake..?
*sigh*
You know what, just prop your heads up on your desks and pretend to listen as I stand up here and talk to myself about one of the most fascinating Roman emperors of them all.
So, the shadow of Constantine loomed long and his conversion to Christianity was as unexpected as it was unprecedented, but it did not definitively establish the Christian faith as the religion of the empire. Constantine was for Christians what Barack Obama was for black folk, he didn't place them at the pinnacle of society, but for them to look up and see one of their own occupying the seat at the head of the table... no one would have ever imagined that such a thing could have been remotely possible.
Christianity was acceptable, but it was not preeminent. It was on its way, but it was not unassailable, and Julian the Apostate made it a priority to assail Christianity with a wholehearted vigor that had not been seen since the decline of Galerius.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves...
You'll recall from our previous discussion that the sons of Constantine fought amongst themselves to decide who would be the top dog following the death of Constantine in 337CE. Constantius II was the most ruthless of the brood and by 350CE he had essentially claimed the entire empire for himself. In the process of consolidating power, Constantius II killed his uncle, Julius Constantius, who was the father of the six-year-old Julian.
After his father was killed, Julian was sent away to Nicomedia where he was cared for by his grandmother and tutored by the bishop Eusebius (the man who baptized Constantine). In those days, rich kids who were educated in the Bible also studied classic Greek literature. Julian became a Christian (and was apparently a lector in the church at some point) but it was paganism that truly captured his imagination.
(It's worth noting that all of Constantine's sons, the one's that spent all of their time fighting and killing one another, they were Christians. I imagine the poor example they set was at least partly responsible for Juilan's combative stance towards Christianity...)
By the time Julian was 18, he was travelling around Turkey exploring pagan teachings and philosophy under various teachers and scholastics. Eventually, he fell into the company of a Neoplatonic philosopher/magician named Maximus of Ephesus who made a statue of the goddess Hecate light a couple of torches and smile.
Julian was initiated into the cult of Cybele and the cult of Mithras, but was not yet in a position to openly denounce Christianity.
In the meantime, Constantius II was having a hard time plugging up all of the holes along the frontier and he decided that he needed to appoint someone to take care of all the pesky Franks and Germans along the Rhine.
The bookish and nerdy Julian turned out to be a surprisingly competent military man and he gained a positive reputation as a commander and leader. In fact, when Constantius II started to feel threatened by Julian's increasing popularity and made moves to curtail the young man's power, Julian's troops (in February 360CE, in Paris) declared that Julian was the rightful emperor and followed him into an uneventful kind of civil war that lasted until November 360CE when Constantius II unexpectedly fell ill and died.
Suddenly, Julian was the sole emperor of the Roman Empire and there was no reason for him to be shy about his break with Christianity in favor of paganism.
When the news that a practicing pagan once again occupied the Roman imperial throne, polytheists and anti-Christians all over the empire were excited and emboldened. In Alexandria, for example, a Christian bishop named George, a man who had been particularly inimical toward the local non-Christian population, found himself surrounded by a vengeful mob of unbelievers.
Reportedly, after the mob had beaten George to death, Julian looted the bishop's library and used the proceeds to fund the rebuilding of several ruined pagan temples.
Officially, Julian was tolerant of all religions, including Christianity. He reacted punitively when Christians stepped out of line and, say, destroyed a pagan temple, but he knew Christianity too well to lash out and make a bunch of martyrs. Julian used other measures in his effort to undermine Christianity. He rebuilt and reestablished neglected pagan temples. He discriminated against Christians seeking employment in civil administration. He barred them from teaching the Greek classics (which effectively kept Christians out of the teaching profession altogether).
Julian had been a Christian, he knew the playbook, and he knew that the best way to attack the faith and the faithful was to poke and prod at their most sensitive points.
He also knew that one of the key selling points of Christianity was the piety of its adherents, particularly the piety of its priests and virgins (people who set themselves apart as virgins for life played an important role in many churches back in those days). Pagan priests were not obligated to be exemplars of any higher standard of morality, they lived as lasciviously as anyone else. It just happened that they knew which formulaic, ritualistic acts were required in order to receive some beneficial outcome.
Christian priests were supposed to give to the poor and be upright examples of righteous living. Julian wanted his pagan priests to behave similarly.
Around 363, Julian reached out to the Jews. He wasn't especially crazy about Judaism, but he hated it less than he hated Christianity and, in the very existence of Judaism, Julian saw an opportunity to further his attack against Christianity. For Julian (and, indeed, for the Jews as well), Christianity was a bastard hybridization of Judaism. Christians regarded themselves as the true inheritors of the ancient Israelite traditions, and yet Judaism was alive and well. If Julian could find a way to strengthen the claims of Jews against the claims of Christians, he would make the newer religion that much weaker...
In 70CE, Titus destroyed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. In 132, after a Jewish uprising recaptured the city of Jerusalem, Hadrian wiped out the Jewish resistance, banned Jews from the area altogether, built a temple to Jupiter, made the place into a Roman colony, and renamed it Aelia Capitolina.
For Christians, all of this was seen as a concrete sign that the Jewish religion was finished. Without the Temple, the Law of Moses could not be properly or fully observed. Christians found prophecies that foretold of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the book of Daniel and, if that was not enough, Jesus himself predicted that the Temple would be completely destroyed. So Christians tended to believe that it would remain completely destroyed until Judgement Day.
...so, thought Julian, what better way to delegitimize Christianity than by rebuilding the Temple...?
Julian appointed a builder and set aside his own money to fund the rebuilding of the Temple... but an earthquake (or a fire?) caused the project to be indefinitely delayed and the idea was abandoned later that year after Julian died.
Julian... he was like a pagan evangelist, travelling all over the east and holding huge pagan revivals where he'd make a show of offering an absurd amount of animal sacrifices. His zeal for paganism was so unusual that he was often mocked by other pagans.
Many of the empire's pagans did not believe in paganism as deeply as Julian, but they thought it was important because it was venerable and ancient and seemed to keep the empire strong, and they disliked the way Christians dismissed and desecrated and destroyed idols and temples.
It's hard to overstate how menacing Julian was in the eyes of Christians living in the 4th century. He was an insider, a baptized believer, and he abandoned the faith (hence his nickname, The Apostate) in order to become one of its most effective and thoughtful critics. He wrote a multi-volume treatise, called Against the Galileans, specifically for the purpose of pointing out all of the flaws in Christian doctrine and practice.
Throw in the problem of suffering and something about the role of women in the church and you've got yourself a comprehensive attack against Christian belief that covers pretty much everything.
He was galling, he was infuriating, and he was an irritant.
But, just as quickly as he appeared, he was gone.
In June of 363, while campaigning against the Persians, Julian was mysteriously killed. Some sources say that it was a friendly fire incident. Other sources claim that he was killed by a Christian assassin who'd had enough of his blasphemies. Some writers claim that, as he was dying, he reached into his wound and slung his blood up towards the sky saying, "Galilean, you've conquered." However it happened, Christians were happy to see him go.
And they've been arguing against him ever since.
Ultimately, Julian's attempt to stamp out Christianity was a failure. No doubt he caused many Christians to lose faith and many more were profoundly unsettled (as the Congregationalist John Ames said, "It seems to me that some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled."), but his antagonistic questions and arguments ended up refining Christianity. Julian forced Christians to think more critically about their faith. In confronting Julian's objections to Christianity, Christians came to better understand what they believed and why they believed what they believed.
So Julian wasn't exactly successful, but maybe he can claim a seat next to Jefferson Davis in the Hall Of Lost Causes.
Julian was the last male relative of Constantine the Great and he was succeeded by his (secretly Christian) commander Jovian who was chosen and elevated by the soldiers. But we'll save his story for next time...
Cheers.
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