had died a few months after his birth. His father had perished, as we
have seen. For some years after the massacre, he appears to have
resided at Constantinople. Of his brother Gallus we hear nothing
during this period. Julian himself was placed under the charge of an
old family servant--a Scythian, Mardonius by name, a strict and
pedantic disciplinarian, but also a man of culture, as the sequel
shows. Mardonius taught his pupil to keep his eyes fixed on the ground
as he took his walks. He led him always to and fro to school by the
same way, knowing no other himself, and preventing the lad from
discovering any other. He strictly prohibited him from going to the
theatre or the circus, and altogether filled his mind with a distaste
for the popular amusements of his age. We hear nothing of
companionship, nothing of outdoor exercise, nothing of the
cheerfulness and the sympathy which are equally necessary with the
moral discipline and the intellectual training for the proper
expansion of child's faculties. Julian was not like other children.
Whatever may have been his natural disposition, his education had
never allowed him to be a boy. Human nature, more especially childish
nature, must seek relief somewhere from hard conventional restraints.
Where all the usual outlets are closed, the buoyancy and the
enthusiasm of the child will devise some means of escape. The paradise
of Julian's childish existence was made up of two things. First, his
tutor Mardonius was an enthusiastic admirer of Homer. If he prevented
him from playing in the field he took him to the leafy islands of
Calypso, to the Cave of Circe and the Gardens of Alcinous. With a less
intelligent child this might have bred a feeling of disgust; but
Julian was quick, imaginative, absorbing, and here was field for his
sensibility. And, again, though his walks might be confined to one
city, and to one street in that city, yet no bounds could shut out the
glories of the heavens above. We have Julian's own authority for
saying that his childish imagination was profoundly impressed by their
contemplation. "From my earliest days," he wrote long afterwards, "a
strange yearning after the rays of the God, the Sun God, sunk into my
soul; and thus from the time I was quite a little child, when I looked
at the light of heaven, I was beside myself with ecstasy, so that not
only would I look eagerly and fixedly on the sun, but at night also,
when there was a cloudless and clear sky, I gave up everything at
once, and was rivetted by the beauties of the heavens, no longer
understanding anything that any one spoke to me, nor giving heed to
myself what I was doing." These, then, were the two bright spots which
relieved the gloom of his childish life--the literature of Greece and
the contemplation of the heavens. How large an influence these early
memories had on his later apostasy, it will not be difficult to
imagine.
This went on for some years with slight interruptions, and then there
was a complete change. It was apparently about the year 344, when
Julian would be thirteen or fourteen years old, and Gallus eighteen or
nineteen, that, by the Emperor's orders, the two brothers were carried
away to Macellum, an imperial castle in the mountain districts of
Cappadocia. There they spent the next six years of life in strict
retirement. What may have been the reason of this change we are not
told, but we can easily suspect. Gallus was now growing up to manhood.
He was tall, well made, and handsome, with flowing auburn hair; not
unlike his uncle, the great Constantine, as we may infer from the
description of the two men. The suspicious temper of Constantius might
take alarm lest this young man should become the centre of
disaffection and treason. But, however this may be, the seclusion was
complete. Julian speaks of it as banishment. To himself it was the
worst kind of banishment. He was banished not only from the city and
the court, about which probably he knew little and cared less, but he
was banished also from his books and his teachers. The two brothers
saw no one of their own rank; their domestics were their only
associates. Gallus was no companion for Julian. He had no literary
taste; notwithstanding his handsome looks he was coarse and violent,
even ferociously brutal, in his disposition, as the sequel shows. The
treatment of Julian during this critical period of his life must have
been altogether injurious to the healthy development of his character.
A cramped boyhood almost certainly produces a one-sided manhood.
At length, after six years of seclusion, the brothers were again set
free. What was the motive of Constantius--whether he considered that
they had been sufficiently restrained, or whether some conscientious
scruples found their way into his heart--we cannot say. Gallus and
Julian were summoned to Constantinople. Soon after this a formidable
insurrection broke out in the West, and Constantius found it necessary
to associate some one with him in the cares of the empire. Accordingly
Gallus, then twenty-five years old, was nominated Caesar, and appointed
to the command of the East. The appointment was most disastrous. Now
that he was free from control, the innate ferocity of his disposition
revealed itself. He has been compared, and the comparison does him no
injustice, to a bloodthirsty tiger, who has broken through the bars of
his cage, and, enraged by long confinement, fiercely attacks every one
who comes in his way. Complaints of his savage, turbulent
administration came thick upon the ears of Constantius. There were
also rumours of a disloyal conspiracy on the part of the new Caesar.
Constantius might, perhaps, have forgiven the misgovernment; but the
treason could not be overlooked. Gallus was recalled, stripped of the
purple, and put to death without a hearing. Constantius had dyed his
hand once more in the blood of Julian's kindred. Julian was left alone
in the world, confronted by the tyrant. This happened in the year 354.
But while the caged passions of Gallus had sought compensation in this
savage outbreak, the caged intellect of Julian was running riot in its
own way. For a time he seems to have enjoyed comparative freedom. At
Constantinople, at Nicomedia, at Pergamos, at Ephesus, we hear of his
attendance on philosophers, on rhetoricians, on teachers of all kinds.
The jealousy of Constantius could look with complacency on his
philosophical and literary ardour. An ungainly, enthusiastic,
unpractical scholar was the last man whom he need fear as a rival. It
was during this period of turbulent, energetic, unreflecting,
intellectual activity that the change came upon him. Whatever might
have been the religious feelings of his boyhood, it was only now that
Paganism asserted its power over his mind. The incident that decided
his apostasy is eminently characteristic of the man and of the period.
It happened in the year 351, the same year as that in which Gallus was
invested with the purple, when Julian himself was twenty years of age.
In the course of conversation one of his teachers happened to speak of
Maximus, a famous philosopher, whom he described as possessing great
natural gifts, and as accompanying his teaching by demonstrations.
Julian's curiosity was excited. He demanded an explanation. He was
told that on one occasion Maximus, in the presence of the speaker and
others, had burnt a grain of incense in the temple of Hecate and
chanted some mysterious hymn, when suddenly they saw the statue of the
goddess smile upon him. On their expressing surprise, he told them
that they should see a greater marvel than this--the torches in the
hands of the goddess should burst out into flames of their own accord.
He had scarcely said the word when the lights burst out from the
torches. "Stay with your books," said Julian, "and I wish you joy of
them; I have found the man I have been seeking for." He sought out
Maximus, and was initiated in his philosophy and his magic.
This grotesque and unnatural combination was, as I have said,
characteristic of the man and of the age. In earlier times philosophy
and popular superstition were deadly foes, but in face of Christianity
both the one and the other had learnt their weakness, and this unequal
alliance was patched up. The new Platonist philosophy adopted not only
the mythology of Greece and Rome, but the nature-worship and the magic
of the East. A true theology must appeal at once to the intellect
which demands a reason for its allegiance, and to the religious
instinct which is conscious of dependence on a higher power.
Christianity recognises both these claims. Greek philosophy appealed
to the one faculty; Pagan religion to the other. Thus divided they
could do nothing, though the alliance was formed. It was well
conceived, but it was impossible, because it was a fundamental
violation of truth. Julian, the champion of heathendom, advanced to
slay Christianity with philosophy in his right hand and superstition
in his left, and both weapons shivered in his grasp.
Julian was a Pagan now, but he carefully concealed the change. During
the next ten years, until the death of Constantius, this cloak of
dissimulation was never thrown aside. The immediate outward effect of
his conduct was a stricter attention to the services of the Church.
The old fable, said his heathen friend Libanius afterwards, was here
reversed, and the lion was clothed in the ass's skin. Only one or two
most intimate friends were in the secret, but it was more widely
suspected. Ardent Pagans began to look to him as the future restorer
of Paganism; old prophecies were banded about that Christianity was
soon to come to an end. One such oracle fixed the limit of 365 years
for the worship of Christ. The term was fast drawing to a close. I
shall not undertake the task of arraigning Julian as before the bar of
the Eternal Righteousness. All such attempts to anticipate the verdict
of the Great Judge must be as vain as they are presumptuous; but it is
due to the nobler features of his character--and these were neither
few nor insignificant--to dwell on the extenuating circumstances of
his case. And surely no man's education was more faulty, or more
likely to produce a disastrous revulsion. Christianity was associated
in his memory with everything that was gloomy, terrible, repulsive.
Its champion, in his eyes, was his most deadly enemy, Constantius, who
had shed the blood of his nearest kinsmen, and who was ready at any
moment to shed his own blood when the occasion might demand. Writing
of himself at a later date in apathetic allegory, he describes himself
as a youth who, looking back upon the mass of evil that had befallen
him from his own kinsmen and cousins, was so astounded that he
resolved to throw himself down to Tartarus, but was rescued by Helios,
the Sun God. This throws a flood of light on the personal influences
which coloured his views of Christianity, and finally led to his
apostasy. Moreover, the form of Christianity which was presented to
him was not calculated to impress him deeply or favourably. The
coldness of asceticism would take no firm hold of his ardent and
enthusiastic nature. Its representatives, the Arian bishops, would not
recommend the cause; the exceeding bitterness of theologic controversy
called down his contempt, and the superstitious reverence for the
bones of the martyrs aroused his disgust. In the allegory to which I
have already alluded he speaks of himself as a child covered with
filth and dirt, on whom the Sun God at length took pity. Whatever rays
of light had burst the gloom of his earlier life were associated with
the glories of nature.
While this strange revel of philosophy and fanaticism was going on in
his mind, Julian visited Athens--Athens at once the home of Greek
literature and the sanctuary of Pagan idolatry. No place more
congenial to his temper could have been chosen than this. Here it was
that he fell in with two devout Christian students, Gregory and
Basil--names destined hereafter to be famous in the history of the
Church. Gregory has left a description of the future emperor as he
appeared at this time--a speaking likeness we cannot doubt. The
convulsive movements of the shoulder, the half-scared, half-frenzied
glance of the eye, the grotesque contortions of the face, the
tumultuous, hesitating speech, the loud, immoderate laughter, the
restlessness of the whole man from head to foot, seemed to Gregory to
bode no good. Much of this was natural to Julian, but much, also, may
have been due to the consciousness of the secret seething within his
soul. We know what Gregory did not know--that Julian was a Pagan
already when he was discussing Christian topics with Christian
students.
But Julian's studies were rudely interrupted. Constantius again found
the burden of the empire too heavy for his shoulders, and again he
resolved to divide it. Julian, very reluctantly on his part, was
appointed Caesar, and charged with the administration of Gaul. He was
now twenty-five years of age. The courtiers of Constantius laughed at
the new Caesar, and certainly the appointment did not give any fair
promise of success. But this enthusiastic philosopher, this student
recluse, soon showed that he had in him the making not only of an able
ruler, but also of a consummate general. In vain the flatterers of
Constantius ridiculed Julian's petty triumphs, as they were pleased to
call them; in vain they dubbed him a scribbling Greek. Campaign after
campaign added to his reputation. His administration of Gaul was
unmistakably brilliant. So matters went on for five years, till the
jealousy of Constantius brought about a crisis. An ill-judged attempt
to withdraw Julian's best Gaulish troops produced a mutiny; the
soldiers proclaimed him emperor, and he accepted the title. Having
assumed the imperial purple, he marched to force his recognition on
Constantius; but he was saved the peril of an appeal to arms. Fever
anticipated the conflict, and carried off Constantius opportunely.
Julian was now absolute emperor, master of himself and master of the
world. He could throw off the mask at length; he was free to carry out
his long cherished design for the restoration of Paganism. With what
energy, with what devotion, with what fanaticism, with what futility
he worked for this end it will be my business in my next and
concluding lecture to describe.
III.[10]
The history of Julian has been employed as an apologue by more than
one writer when satirising some religious reaction of his day. A
well-known living theological critic of Germany uses it as a cloak for
an attack on the late King of Prussia, and English clergymen under the
reign of James II., assailing the religious tendencies of the King,
denounced him as another Julian the Apostate. Such comparisons may
serve their immediate purpose, but they are almost always misleading,
and may be very unjust. I think, however, that we may, with advantage,
compare this Pagan reaction in the Roman empire under Julian with the
Papal reaction in England under Mary. The two sovereigns, indeed, have
little in common except their manifest sincerity, but the general
relations and the ultimate effects of the two movements are not so
very dissimilar. They both interposed after a very decided
predominance of the opposite cause; they both were a return to the
forms of the past; they both involved a reversal of the traditional
policy of the reigning house; they both were short in duration, but
resolute, uncompromising, energetic in action; and they both proved
utterly futile in the result, because they were unsupported by any
deep feeling in the mass of the people. So far as they produced any
effects at all, they served only to nerve the energies and reassure
the confidence of their antagonists.
Julian was now thirty years old when the death of Constantius left him
sole master of the Roman empire. In stature he was rather below the
average height; his frame was muscular and strong; his shoulders were
unusually broad; his neck was thick and arched; he had a bright and
piercing eye--the family characteristic which was so remarkable in his
uncle Constantine; the upper part of his face, the brow, and the nose
were fine and well chiselled; his mouth was too large, and his lower
lip hung disagreeably. He wore a rough, pointed beard, the usual
appendage of philosophers. Of his personal appearance he was
studiously careless. It would almost seem as though the courtly
dignity and scrupulous neatness of his cousin Constantius had produced
a revulsion in him. He ostentatiously vaunts his unpolished manner and
his slovenly habits. He was signally undignified in all his gestures.
Of his excitability and his restlessness of manner I have already
spoken. He was a hurried, reckless talker. His tongue, we are told,
was never at rest. His energy was enormous. During his administration
of Gaul, when his days had been spent in the anxieties of government
or in the toils of war, he would sit up half the night studying or
writing. When he became Emperor his energy seemed only to increase.
The great purpose of his life, the restoration and reform of Paganism,
was now definitely before him, and he worked at it with a
determination which never slackened. Into a short reign of eighteen
months he crowded an amount of work which probably no sovereign has
ever surpassed. He had on his shoulders the undivided weight of a
great empire; he was preparing for a difficult and dangerous campaign;
he was busied with the hopeless task of restoring an effete religion;
he was writing hither and thither to the representatives of
heathendom, scolding, stimulating, encouraging; and yet he found time
for a vast amount of literary work besides. He corresponded with
rhetoricians and philosophers; he composed orations and hymns in
praise of heathen deities; he wrote a lengthy and elaborate attack on
the Christian religion, and threw off light squibs on his
contemporaries and on his predecessors. If his one fatal act of
apostasy had not perverted and spoiled everything, he might have
ranked among the greatest of princes. As it was, he has no claim to
the title of greatness. He did nothing which has lived, because he did
nothing which deserved to live. He left nothing, absolutely nothing,
behind which has tended to make mankind happier, or better, or wiser.
Julian, if his own account may be believed, assumed the imperial
diadem with the greatest reluctance; it was forced upon him by the
soldiers before he knew where he was; and yet there is reason to
believe that his coyness was in great measure affected. It is quite
clear that he was already possessed of the idea of a Pagan
restoration, and that he considered himself as having a special call
from his gods for this work. The Genius of Rome, we are told, appeared
to him in a vision. He reproached the reluctant Caesar with having so
often driven him from his doors, and threatened to depart for ever if
he were excluded this time. Thus warned, Julian responded to the call;
but he still continued to dissemble. We read of his praying to
Mercury, of his receiving admonitions from Jupiter; we are told of his
consulting auspices and using divination in private; and yet on the
festival of the Epiphany, many months after he had been proclaimed
Emperor, we find him entering a Christian Church, and there solemnly
offering up his prayers to Almighty God. His heathen biographer and
admirer assigns as the reason, that he might secure the allegiance of
his Christian subjects. The strange thing is that neither Julian, nor
Julian's friends, seemed to think any apology needed for this
dissimulation. Much, indeed, should be forgiven to one who, from early
childhood, had been driven by the cruelty of his lot to shield himself
under an impenetrable reserve; but it is hard to understand the moral
blindness which fails to see that this flagrant violation of truth had
need to sue for forgiveness. Those martyrs whom Julian derided and
despised held it a glorious gain to sacrifice life and all things
rather than consent even to a momentary act which might be interpreted
as a denial of their faith. I need not ask which is the loftier
spectacle of the two.
But indeed Julian, notwithstanding the many noble features in his
character--his justice, his moderation, his strict temperance, his
unsparing energy--was wholly wanting in those higher graces which are
the crown of the Christian character. He was egotistical in the
extreme; his self-consciousness rarely, if ever, deserts him; he will
let all the world know that he is a model philosopher; he is always
thanking his gods that he is not as other men are. Even when he
satirises himself his irony is only a veil--a very thin veil, which
rather suggests than conceals his self-complacency. He is always
standing before the mirror, always soliciting the admiration of
mankind. Of the childlike humility which is the main portal to the
kingdom of heaven, he knows nothing. And yet with all this
dissimulation and all this acting we should do the man a gross
injustice if we imagined that he was insincere. Of his sincerity in
the work which he undertook he gave every proof which it is possible
for a man to give. He showed himself ready to spend and be spent for
it. This strange combination of the enthusiast and the dissembler, of
the fanatic and the philosopher, may be very difficult to realise; but
there can be no doubt that they did unite in the person of Julian. In
this spirit Julian applied himself to his task.
This task was two-fold. He must depress Christianity, and he must
reanimate and reform Paganism. In his relation to Christianity he
avowed himself on principle favourable to absolute toleration. "I do
not wish the Galileans," he wrote, "to be put to death or to be beaten
unjustly, or to suffer any other wrong. We ought rather to pity than
to hate those who are unfortunate in matters of the greatest
importance." How far this was the genuine dictate of his heart, and
how far it was suggested by principles of expediency, we cannot tell,
but at all events he could not persuade himself to apply his principle
frankly. He restored a heretic bishop because his restoration would
create divisions among Christians, and expelled the orthodox
Athanasius because his presence was a tower of strength to the Church.
The letters of Julian on this occasion betray the weakness of his
position. He has absolutely nothing to allege against Athanasius
except that he had taught men to treat the gods with contempt, and
that he had dared to baptise Greek ladies of rank--in other words,
that he was highly successful as a Christian missionary. Having no
argument, he descends to abuse. He scolds the Alexandrians that
petition him to rescind the decree of banishment: he reviles
Athanasius himself; he calls him an impious villain, a vile Manichaean.
He responds to their petition by expelling him not from Alexandria
only, but from the whole of Egypt. Altogether there is a marked
deterioration in Julian's character from the time when he becomes his
own master. He had plainly supposed that he should carry everything
before him: he had imagined that he had only to proclaim toleration,
and his subjects would be as enamoured of Paganism as he himself was.
He was grievously disappointed. He found in Christianity a strength, a
vitality, a resistance for which he was not prepared. He found in
Paganism a feebleness, an irresolution, an indifference, an utter
absence of self-sacrifice, which contrasted strangely with his own
devoted enthusiasm.
It is infinitely tragical to contemplate his gradually descending from
the high level on which he took his stand at first to mean devices of
all kinds--more tragical than though he had boldly taken up the sword
of the persecutor at once. He would not desert his principle of
toleration; he never ceased to enunciate that to the last; but he
would connive at violations of it. Pagan outrages on the Christians
were condoned or gently rebuked. When assaults on their life and their
property were reported to him, he would say, flippantly, these
Galileans--so he always called them--ought not to resent the
opportunity of being made martyrs when they prized martyrdom so
highly; that they had no just cause for complaint in being condemned
to poverty when poverty was so loudly extolled in their Lord. But,
indeed, Julian showed unmistakably by one enactment that toleration
with him was not an inviolable principle. An edict was issued by him
forbidding any Christian to give instruction in Greek literature under
any circumstances. The reason assigned was that, as they did not
believe in the gods of Homer and Hesiod, they were not fit expositors
on these points. "Let them go," wrote the Emperor, "to the churches of
the Galileans, and there expound Matthew and Luke." Among those
condemned to silence by this decree were not a few of the most
illustrious teachers of the age. It made a profound sensation at the
time. It was most severely criticised by Julian's own heathen admirers
at a later date. "It deserves," writes one, "to be buried in eternal
silence." To what further lengths the intolerance of Julian might have
gone as he realised more and more the bitterness of failure if his
reign had been prolonged, we can only conjecture; but the descent was
sufficiently rapid to suggest that, soured by disappointment, he
might, had he lived, have been found at the last among the most
relentless of persecutors.