“It lies under Andromeda, like Rome,” answered Maximus, “but Perseus hangs over the Holy Land, so that Algol stands over Jerusalem.”
“Why do you call that cursed land ‘holy’?” broke in Julian, who could not control his generally quiet temper as soon as any subject was mentioned connected with Christianity, which he hated.
“I call the land ‘holy’ because the Redeemer of the world was born there. And you know that He was born without a father, like Perseus; you know also that Perseus delivered Andromeda, as Jesus Christ will deliver Rome and Lutetia.”
Julian was silent, for, as a Neo-platonist, he liked analogies between the heavenly and the temporal, and a poetic figure was more for him than a rhetorical ornament.
Educated in a convent by Christian priests, he had early gained an insight into the new teaching of Christianity; but he believed that his philosophic culture had shown him that the seed of Christianity had already germinated in Socrates and Plato. After he had made the acquaintance of the Neo-Platonists, he found nothing to object to in the recently-promulgated dogmas of Christianity. But he felt a boundless hate against these Galilaeans who wished to appropriate all the wisdom of the past ages and give it their own name. He regarded them as thieves. The doctrine of Christ’s Divine Sonship seemed to him quite natural, for as a Pantheist he believed that the souls of all men are born of God and have part in Him. He himself acknowledged the dogma recently promulgated at Nicaea, that the Son is of the same essence as the Father, although he interpreted, it in his own way. As to miracles, they happened every day, and could be imitated by magicians. He acknowledged the truth of the Fall of Man, for Plato also had declared that the soul is imprisoned in matter—in sinful matter, with which we must do battle. And this had been confirmed by St. Paul’s saying in the Epistle to the Romans, “The good which I would, that I do not, but the evil, which I would not, that I do,” and again, “I delight in the law of God after the inward man. But I see another law in my members, which warreth against the law of my mind.... O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” That was the lament of the thinking sensitive man regarding the soul’s imprisonment in matter; the disgust of human nature at itself.
Julian, as a sensitive and struggling spirit, had felt this pressure, and had honestly and successfully combated the lusts of the flesh. Grown up though he was, among murderers and sybarites, in the extravagant luxury of the Byzantine Court, where, for example, he had at first possessed a thousand barbers and a thousand cooks, he had abandoned luxury, lived like a Christian ascetic, acted justly, and was high-minded. He had a perfect comprehension of the soul’s imprisonment in the flesh or of “sin,” but understood nothing of the Redemption through Christ. Three hundred years had passed since the birth of Christ, and the world had become continually more wretched. The Christians he had seen, especially his uncle Constantine the Great, lived worse than the heathen. As a young man he had tested the new teaching in his own internal struggles; he had prayed to Christ as to God, but had not been heard. When he had lamented his plight to the devout Eusebius, the latter had answered, “Be patient in hope! Continue constant in prayer.”
But the youth answered, “I cannot be patient.”
Then Eusebius said, “The deliverance comes, but not in our time. A thousand years are as a day before the Lord God! Wait five days, then you will see.”
“I will not wait,” exclaimed the youth angrily.
“So say the damned souls also. But look you, impatience is one of the torments of hell, and you make a hell for yourself with your impatience.”