By common consent, the episode of the short pagan “revival” under Julian is the most interesting chapter in the later history of the Roman Empire proper. The one emperor after Marcus Aurelius who attracts us as a human being and as a mind, he set himself a task which, whether he failed or succeeded, must lift his name high in the annals of a decadent civilization: his failure, in fact, makes him the most living figure in the long line of autocrats from Constantine to Charlemagne. It is by such contrast, indeed, that he becomes eminent. Measured by the standards of progressive civilizations, against the great minds of the pre-imperial world and the best statesmen of later realms, he is neither a great ruler nor a great intelligence. To look for a ruling mind of the highest order in that environment of decay would be to miss the first and last lesson of the history of the empire. Supposing a potentially great faculty to be born in such a society, it could not conceivably grow to efficiency: the intellectual and the emotional atmosphere forbade. Before there can be all-round minds there must be all-round men; and the empire had made an end of the species. Intellectual originality had long disappeared from a world in which the topmost distinction stood for mere brute force, cultured men grovelling before it like scourged animals. The brooding intensity of Lucretius and the large sanity of Cæsar were become as impossible to men of the Roman name as the life of the forum of Coriolanus’ day, or the Greek literature of the age of Aristophanes. The process of putting a yoke on the world had duly ended in a world of yoke-bearers, whose best leaders could but harness them.
Julian, a wistful child, saved from the massacre of his house, and growing up in a library whose lore there was no man competent to comment for him, became finally a believer in every religion save the one which sought to exterminate the rest. Steeped in theosophies, he was capable of exulting in the disappearance of the Epicureans, the sanest because the least credulous of the philosophic sects. Yet the lore he loved, such as it was, had sufficed to make him or keep him a model of temperance and self-control; chaste and abstemious while master of the world; just and magnanimous under provocations which, if he would, he could have met by wholesale slaughter; caring above all for the inner life while wielding capably the whole armed power of the State. If we talk of moral success, it must still be said that Christianity never gave any section of the Roman Empire a ruler worthy to stand by Marcus and Julian; and that on all the thrones of the world to-day there is no man who can be put above them for moral nobility. If, again, we keep our eyes on the age of Constantine, we cannot but be struck by the fact that Constantius “the pale,” the father of Constantine, a monotheist but not a Christian, and Julian, who turned away from Christianity to polytheism, are by far the best men in the series of rulers of that house. Christianity attracted the worse men, Constantine and his sons, and repelled or failed to satisfy the better; and the younger Constantius, who was bred and remained a Christian, is the worst of all. The finer character-values are all associated with paganism: on the Christian side there is a signal defect of good men.
Julian’s short life was crowded no less with experience than with study. Educated as a Christian, he learned, while his life lay at the mercy of Constantius, to keep his own counsel as to the creed of which he had seen such bloody fruits. It seems to have been before the murder of his brother (354) that he was secretly converted to paganism, during his studies at Pergamos. When he was appointed Cæsar (355) it was under strict tutelage; and during his five years of able generalship as Cæsar in Gaul and Germany—even after the legions had proclaimed him Augustus (360)—he concealed his creed. It was only when marching against Constantius that he avowed it, and offered sacrifices to the ancient Gods; but when the death of the terror-stricken emperor left him in sole power (361) he at once proceeded zealously to reinstate the old rites. Himself an ardent idealist and practical ascetic, he yearned to make paganism a ministry of purity and charity, which should copy from the Christians their primary Judaic practice of feeding the poor, and set its face against popular ribaldry as steadfastly as they once had done, but with a Stoic temperance rather than a gloomy fanaticism. To this end he built and endowed new temples, re-endowed the priesthoods where they had been robbed, and forced the return or repair of such of their lands, buildings, and possessions as had been stolen or wrecked; at the same time taking back the privileges and endowments accorded to the Christians. For all this, and no less for his antipathy to the vulgar side of paganism, he was scurrilously and insolently lampooned, notably by the pagan and Christian mobs of Antioch; but he attempted no vengeance, though he was sensitive enough to reply by satire. The intensely malignant attacks on his memory by churchmen leave it clear that he never descended to persecution, unless we so describe his action in excluding Christians from teaching in the schools of rhetoric, for which he had at least the pretext that they constantly aspersed the pagan literature there studied, and ought in consistency to have left it alone. Some of them indeed had earnestly desired the total suppression of those very schools. What most exasperated his Christian assailants, it is clear, was his sardonic attitude to Christian quarrels. Instead of persecuting, he protected the factions from each other, restored exiled heretics, and invited rival dogmatists to dispute in his presence, where their animosities served to humiliate their creed to his heart’s content. It was the sting of such a memory that drove Gregory of Nazianzun, bitterly conscious of Christian hates, to such a passion of hate against Julian, whose body he would fain have seen cast into the common sewer.
It has been questioned whether the eagerness of Julian’s desire to discredit Christism would not have made him a persecutor had he lived longer; and such a development is indeed conceivable. His zeal was such that with all the load of empire and generalship on his shoulders he found time in his short reign to write a long treatise against the Christian books and the creed, of which his full knowledge and excellent memory made him a formidable critic; and his tone towards Athanasius seems to have grown more and more bitter. It is hard for the master of thirty legions to tolerate opposition and to remain righteous. On the other hand, Julian gave proofs not only of an abnormal self-restraint, but of an exceptional judgment in things purely political; and the very fact that his young enthusiasm had led him astray, making him hope for a vital restoration of paganism out of hand, would probably with such a mind have counted for caution after the lesson had been learned. Falling in battle with the Persians (363) after only twenty months of full power, he had no time to readjust himself to the forces of things as experience disclosed them to him: he had time only to feel disappointment. Had he lived to form his own judgment instead of merely assimilating the ideas of his Neo-Platonic teachers he would be in a fair way to frame a better philosophy of life than either the polytheistic or the Christian. Such a philosophy had been left by Epictetus, to name no other; and Julian’s passion for rites and sacrifices was really a falling below pagan wisdom and ethics current in his time, as his facile belief in myths was a falling below the pagan rationalism set forth a little later by Macrobius, and not unknown in Julian’s day. No less unworthy of the best pagan thought was his affectation of cynic uncleanliness—an inverted foppery likely to have passed with youth. A few years must have taught him that men were not to be regenerated by pagan creeds any more than by Christian; and to his laws for the reform of administration he might have added some for the reform of culture. Dying in his prime, he has formed a text for much Christian rhetoric to the effect that he had dreamed a vain dream. Insofar, however, as that rhetoric assumes the indestructibility of the Christian Church at the hands of pagan emperors, it is no sounder than the most sanguine hopes of Julian.
To say that Julian had hopelessly miscalculated the possibilities of paganism is to misconceive the whole sociological case if it be implied that Christianity survived in virtue of its dogma or doctrine, and that it was on the side of dogma or morality that paganism failed. As a regenerating force Christianity was as impotent as any pagan creed: it was indeed much less efficacious than one pagan philosophy had been, and had visibly set up in the State new ferocities of civil strife. Under the two Antonines, Stoic principles had governed the empire so well, relatively to the possibilities of the system, that many modern historians have been fain to reckon theirs the high-water mark of all European administration. No such level was ever reached in the Christian empire, from Constantine onwards. Julian himself schemed more solid reforms of administration in his one year of rule than any of his Christian successors ever accomplished, with the exceptions of Marcian and Anastasius; and could he have foreseen how the empire was to go in Christian hands he would certainly have had no reason to alter his course. To take the mere actual continuance of Christianity as a proof of its containing more truth or virtue than the whole of paganism is to confuse biological survival with moral merit. “The survival of the fittest,” a principle which holds good of every aspect of Nature, is not a formula of moral discrimination, but a simple summary of evolution. The camel which survives in a waterless desert is not thereby proved a nobler animal than the horse or elephant which perishes there. Christianity, as we have seen, while utterly failing among the Jews, where it had birth, had subsisted from the first in the pagan world (1) through adopting the attractive features of paganism, and (2) because of its politico-economical adaptations. Paganism—official paganism, that is—disappeared as an institution because such adaptations were not given to it.
Nor is it reasonable to say that Julian’s undertaking was impossible. His plans were indeed those of an inexperienced enthusiast; but had he lived as long as Constantine, and learned by experience, he might have witnessed his substantial success; and a century of intelligently continuous policy to the same end might have expelled Christianity as completely from the Roman world as Buddhism was soon to be expelled from India. No one who has studied the latter phenomenon can use the language commonly held of the attempt of Julian. Buddhism, representing at least as high a moral impetus as that of Christism, had arisen and nourished greatly in direct opposition to Brahmanism; after centuries of success it is found assimilating all the popular superstitions on which Brahmanism lived, even as Christianity assimilated those of paganism; and it was either by assimilating elements of Buddhism on that plane or by such policy joined with coercive force that the Brahmans finally eliminated it from their sphere. Had a succession of Roman emperors set themselves to create a priestly organization of pagan cults, with as good an economic basis as that of Brahmanism, or as that of Judaism was even after the fall of the Temple, they could have created a force which might triumph over the new cult in its own sphere even as Brahmanism and Judaism did. And if at the same time they had left the Church severely alone, allowing its perpetual strifes to do their own work, it would inevitably have dissolved itself by sheer fission into a hundred mutually menacing factions, an easy foe for a coherent paganism. Mere spasmodic persecution had previously failed, for it is not random persecution that kills creeds, though a really relentless and enduring persecution can do much. In the period from 330 to 370, and again in the sixth century, the Persian kings did actually, by sheer bloodshed, so far crush orthodox Christianity in their kingdom (leaving only the Nestorians as anti-Byzantine heretics) that it ceased to have any importance there—a circumstance little noted by those who dwell on its “success” in Europe. And the same Sassanide dynasty, beginning in the middle of the third century, effected the systematic revival of the Mazdean religion, which before had seemed corrupted and discredited past remedy.
Had Julian lived to learn in Persia the methods so successfully used by Ardeshir, he might no less successfully have copied them. Only an idealist like Julian, of course, would have thought the effort on peaceful lines worth while. A much abler and better man than Jovian would reasonably decide in his place that the religion of Mithra, having come from the now triumphant Persian enemy, could hardly continue to be that of the Roman army; and that the most politic course was to revert to the cult which Julian had opposed, and whose champions saw in his death the hand of their God working for them. Nonetheless, the common verdict on Julian as the victim of a hopeless delusion is hardly better founded than the gross fable that on receiving his death-wound he cried, “Thou hast conquered, Galilean.” The Christians, indeed, might well exult and fabulize over his death. It probably made all the difference between prosperity and collapse for their creed, already riven in irreconcilable factions, and capable of a general cohesion only through the coercive power of the State.
§ 4. Re-establishment: Disestablishment of Paganism
It is significant that neither the weak Jovian, thrust on the throne by a cabal of Christian officers at the death of Julian, nor the forceful Valentinian who succeeded him, attempted to persecute paganism, though both were professed Christians. In the assertions of the ecclesiastical historians to the contrary, in the next century, the wish was father to the thought. Jovian’s ignominious retreat from Persia was made after open pagan auguries; the nominally Christian senate of Constantinople sent him a deputation headed by the pagan Themistius, who exhorted him on high grounds of pagan ethics to practise an absolute toleration; and he did, save as regards the continued crusade against secret magical rites, though he re-established the Christians in many of their privileges. Of Valentinian it has been said that he of all the Christian emperors best understood and maintained freedom of worship; and beyond confiscating to the imperial domain the possessions formerly taken from pagan temples and restored to them by Julian, he left them unmolested. Pagan priests of the higher grades he treated with greater fiscal favour than had been shown to them even by Julian, giving them immunities and honours which exasperated the Christians. It may have been the fact of his ruling the still strongly pagan West that made Valentinian thus propitiate the old priesthoods; but his brother Valens, who ruled the East, enforced the same tolerance, save insofar as he, an Arian, persecuted the Athanasians. His forcing of monks to re-enter the curia, that is, to resume the burdens of municipal taxation, may have been motived by dislike of them, but was a reasonable fiscal measure. The cruel persecution of diviners, carried on by both brothers, was the outcome at once of fear and of anger at the rapid spread of divination, to which was devoted at that time an extensive literature: the public or official Roman divination by augury was expressly permitted, as were the Eleusinian mysteries. All the while, Christians were little less given to divination than pagans.