It asserted the Gods, the great stars and luminaries of the Inner World; it asserted the Divinity of Man,—superior, truly, as the Encyclopaedia says to (the lower) Nature, but of the Higher, one part or factor in the whole. It came into Europe trailing clouds of splendor and opening the heavens of Vision. The huge menace and perils of the age, the multiplying disasters, were driving men to seek spiritual refuge of some kind; and there were, in the main, two camps that offered it:—this of Neo-Platonism, proclaiming Human Divinity and strong effort upward in the name of that; and that other which proclaimed human helplessness, and that man is a poor worm and weakling, originally sinful, and with nothing to hope from his own efforts, but all from the grace, help, or mercy of Extracosmic Intervention. It was a terribly comfortable doctrine, this last, for a race staggering towards the end of its manvantara under a fearful load of detritus, a culture old and thoroughly tired. No wonder Europe chose this path, and not the Neo-Platonist path of flaming idealism and endeavor. Ammonius, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus,—they had worked wonders; but not the crowning wonder of that which could save the age and the age to come: Plotinus had failed of that, because there no tool at hand for the Gods, but a silly, weak Gallienus.—So now Constantine has made the great change; and the empire that was Roman is now Roman no longer: You owe your first allegiance now, not to the state or to the emperor at its head, but to an imperium within the state which claims immunity from laws and duties: the kingdom is divided within itself, and must look for the fate of divided kingdoms. Zeus on Olympus now weighs the Roman empire in his scales,—and finds the fate is death, and no help for it: there are to be thirteen decades of moribundity, and then Christian burial, with Odoacer and sundry other the like barbarians to be mourners and heirs; and then,—blackest night over the western world for God knows how long: night, with nightmare and horror, and no Vision, no beautiful dreams, no refreshment, no peace. For the party that Constantine has now made dominant despises cordially all the ancient light of Hellenism; Aeschylus, Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Euripides,— everyone you could in any sense a light-bearer that came of old, to bring mankind even the merest brain-mind culture,—these people condemn and abhor for heathen, and take pleasure in the thought that they are now, and have been since they died, and shall be forever, frizzling in the nether fires: they condemn the substance of their writings, and will draw no ideas, no saving grace, from them whatever;—will learn from them nothing in the world but grammar and eloquence with which to thunder at them and all their like from barren raucous pulpits. So, Vision having gone, culture is to go too, and all you can call civilization; and therewith law and order, and the decencies of life: all that soap stands symbol for is to be anathema maranatha; all that the Soul stands symbol for is to be anathema maranatha;—a pretty prospect! Zeus sighs in heaven, and his sigh is a doleful thunder prophetic of the gloom that is to overspread all the western skies for many centuries to come.
—And then comes Helios, the Unconquered Sun, and lays a hand on his arm, and says: "Not so fast!; Never despair yet; look down—there!"
And the Gods look down: to a gloomy castle upon a crag in the wild mountains of Cappadocia; and they see there a youth, a captive banished to that desolate grand region: well-attended, as befits a prince of the royal blood, but lonely and overshadowed; —not under fear, because fear is no part of his nature; but yet never knowing when the order for his death may come. They read all this in his mind, his atmosphere. They see him deep in his books: a soul burning with earnestness, but discontented, and waiting for something: all the images of Homer rising about him beckoning on the one hand, and on the other a grim something that whispers, These are false; I alone am true! —"What of him?" says Zeus; "he too is a Christian."—"Watch!" says Sol Invictus; "I have sent my man to him."—And they watch; and sure enough, presently they see a man coming into this youth's presence, and pointing upwards towards themselves; and they see the youth look up, and the shadow pass from his eyes as a great blaze of light and splendor breaks before him,—as he catches sight of them, the Gods, and his eye meets theirs, and he rises, illumined and smiling;—and they know that in the Roman world there is this one man with the Grand Vision; this man who may yet (if they play their cards well) wear the Roman diadem;— that there is vision in the Roman world again, and it may be the people shall not perish.
It was Julian, "the Dragon, the Apostate, the Great Mind"; I thank thee, Gregory of Nazianzus, for teaching me that word!—and the one that came to him there in Cappadocia was Maximus of Smyrna, Iamblichus' disciple. His story has been told and re-told; I expect you know it fairly well. How he was a son of Julius Constantius, son of Constantius Chlorus,—and thus a nephew of Constantine the Great, and a first cousin to the Octopus-Spider-Maiden Aunt Constantius then on the throne;—how he because of his infancy, and his half-brother Gallus because of a delicate constitution which made it seem impossible he should grow up, were spared when Constantius had the rest of the family massacred;—how he was banished and confined in that Cappadocian castle;—of Gallus' short and evil reign that ended, poor fool that he was, in his being lured into the spider-web of Constantius and beheaded;—how Julian was called then to the court at Milan, expecting a like fate;—how he spent seven months there, spied on at every moment, and looking for each to be his last;—how he was saved and befriended by the noble Empress Eusebia (a strangely beautiful figure to find in those sinister surroundings);—and sent presently to the University of Athens, there to spend the happiest moments of his life;—then called back to be made Caesar: he who had never been anything but a student and a dreamer, called from his books and dreams at twenty-four, and set to learn (as Caesar) his elementary drill,— which he found very difficult to learn indeed;—and then sent to fight the Germans in Gaul. How Constantius tried always to thwart him while he was there: setting underlings over him with power to undo or prevent all he might attempt or do;—how in spite of it all he fought the Germans, and drove them across the Rhine, and followed them up, and taught them new lessons in their own remote forests; and took the gorgeous Chnodomar, their king, prisoner; and sent for him, prepared to greet friendlily one so great in stature and splendid in bearing; but was disgusted when the gentleman, on coming into his presence, groveled on the floor and whined for his life,—whereupon Julian, instead of treating him like a gentleman as he had intended, packed him off to his (Chnodomar's) old ally the Maiden Aunt at Milan to see what they would make of each other;—how he fought three campaigns victoriously beyond the Rhine; restored the desolated Cisrhenish No-man's land, and brought in from Britain, in six hundred corn-ships, an amount Gibbon calculates at 120,000 quarters of wheat to feed its destitute population.—And this fact is worth nothing: if Britain could export all that wheat, it surface was not, as some folks hold, mainly under forest: it was a well-cultivated country, you may depend, with agriculture in a very flourishing condition,—as Gibbon does not fail to point out.
—And you know, probably, how Julian loved his Paris, and governed Gaul thence in civil affairs in such a manner that Paris and Gaul loved him;—how his own special legions, his pets, his Tenth, so to say, were the Celts and Petulants, and after these, the Herulians and Batavians (or shall I say Dutchmen?);—how Constantius tried to deprive him of these, ordering him to send them off to him for wars with Sapor in the east;—how Julian sorrowfully bade them go, judging well by Gallus his brother's experience (whom Constantius had treated in the same way as a first step towards cutting off his head) what the next thing should be;—but how they, (bless their Celtic and Petulant and Herulian and Dutch hearts!) told him very plainly that that kind of thing would not wash with them: "Come!" said they; "no nonsense of this sort; be you our emperor, and condemn that old lady your cousin Constantius!—or we kill you right now." Into his bed-room in Paris they poured by night with those terms,—an ultimatum; whether or not with a twinkle in their eyes when they proposed the alternative, who can say?—What was a young hero to do, whom the Gods had commissioned to strike the grand blow for them; and who never should strike it, that was certain, if Constantius should have leave to take away from him, first his Celts and Petulants, and then his head? So he accepts; and writes kindly and respectfully to his Maiden Aunt— Spidership the Emperor telling him he must manage without the legions, and with a Co-Augustus to share the empire with him,— ruling (it was to be hoped in perfect harmony with himself) the west and leaving the east to Constantius. However, all will not do: Constantius writes severe and haughtily, Send the men, and let's hear no more of that presumptuous fooling about the second Augustus!—So Julian marches east; whither, accompanying him, the lately rebellious Celts and Petulants are ready enough to go now; and Constantius might after all have fallen in battle, and so missed his saving baptism; but his plans had gone agley, and the whole situation was extremely disturbing; and you never knew what might happen: and really, when you thought how you had treated this Julian's father, and his two brothers, and numberless uncles and cousins, you might fear the very worst;— and so, good maiden-auntish soul, he fell into a sadness, and thence into a decline; and while Julian and his Petulants were yet a long way off, got baptized respectably, and slipped off to heaven.
And you know, too, probably, how Julian, being now sole emperor, reigned: working night and day; wearing out relays of secretaries, but never worn out himself; making the three years of his reign, as I think Gibbon says, read like thirty; disestablishing Christianity, and refounding Paganism,—not the Paganism that had been of old, but a new kind, based upon compassion, human brotherhood, and Theosophical ethics, and illumined by his own ever-present vision of the Gods;—how he reformed the laws; governed; made his life-giving hand felt from the Scottish Wall to the Nile Cataracts;—instilled new vigor into everything; forced toleration upon the Christians, stopping dead their mutual persecutions, and recalling from banishment those who had been banished by their co-religionists of other sects;—made them rebuild temples they had torn down, and disgorge temple properties they had plundered;—and amidst all this, and much more also, found time in the wee small hours of the nights to do a good deal of literary work: Theosophical treatises, correspondence, sketches….—And you will know of the spotless purity, the asceticism, of his life; and how he stedfastly refused to persecute;—whereby his opponents complained that, son of Satan as he was, he denied them the glory of the martyr's crown;—and of his plan to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem, and to re-establish Jews and Judaism in their native land:—of his letter to the Jewish high priest or chief Rabbi, beginning "My brother";—of the charitable institutions he raised, and dedicated to the Lord of Vision, his God the Unconquered Sun;—of his contests with frivolity and corruption at Antioch, and his friendship with the philosophers;—and then, of his Persian expedition, with its rashness,—its brilliant victories,—its over-rashness and head-strong advance;—of the burning of the fleet, and march into the desert; and retreat; and that sudden attack,—the Persian squadrons rising up like afreets out of the sands, from nowhere; and Julian rushing unarmed through the thickest of the fight, turning, first here, then there, confusion into firmness, defeat into victory;—and of the arrow, Persian or Christian, that cut across his fingers and pierced his side; and how he fainted as he tried to draw it out; and recovered, and called for his horse and armor; and fainted again; and was carried into a tent hastily run up for him:—and of the scene there in the night, that made those who were with him think of the last scene in the life of Socrates; Julian dying, comforting his mourning officers; cheering them; talking to them quietly about the beauty and dignity of death, and the divinity of the Soul; then suddenly inquiring why Anatolius was not present,—and learning that Anatolius had fallen,—and (strange inconsistency!) the dying man breaking into tears of the death of his friend.—And you will know of the hopeless march of the army back under ignominious Jovian, all Shah Sapor's hard terms accepted;—and the doom of the Roman Empire sealed.
That was the Man: that is the record, outwardly, of a Soul fed upon the immensities of Vision. Vision is the keynote of him: the intense reality to him of the ever-beautiful compassionate Gods…. It is true there was a personality attached; and all his defenders since have found much in it that they wished had not been there. A lack of dignity, it is said; a certain self-consciousness… Well; he was very young; he died a very boy at thirty-two; he never attained to years of discretion:—in a sense we may allow that much. You say, he might very well have followd the reaonable conventions of life; and condescended, when emperor, not to dress as a philosopher of the schools. So he might. They laughed at his ways, at his garb, at his beard;— and he went the length of sitting up one night to write the Misopogon, a skit upon his personality. Only philosophers wore beards in those days; it was thought most unsuitable in an emperor. I do not know what the men of Antioch said about it; but he speaks of it as unkempt and,—in the Gibbonistic euphemism,—populous; indeed, names the loathsome cootie outright, which Gibbon was much too Gibbonish to do. In the nature of things, this was a libel.
I read lately an article, I think by an Irish writer, on the eccentricities of youthful genius. It often happens that a soul of really fine caliber, with a great work to do in the world, will waste a portion of his forces, at the outset, in fighting the harmless conventions. But as his real self grows into mastery, all this disappears, and he comes to see where his battle truly lies. Julian died before he had had time quite to outgow the eccentricities; but for all that, not before he had shown the world what the Soul in action is like.
Every great soul, incarnating, has still this labor to carry through as prolog to his life's work:—he must conquer the new personality, with all its hereditary tendencies; he must mold it difficultly to the perfect expression of the glory and dignity of himself. Julian had to take up a body in which on the one side ran the warrior blood of Claudius Gothicus and Constantius Chlorus, on the other, the refinement and culture of the senatorial house of the Anicii. Two such streams, coming together, might well need some harmonizing: might well produce, for example, an acute self-consciousness,—to be mastered. What he got from them, for world-service, was on the one hand his superb military leadership and mastery of affairs; on the other, his intense devotion to learning and culture. Thus the two streams of heredity appeared, dominated by his own quality of Vision. The paternal stream, by his generation, had grown much vitiated: it was pure warriorism in Claudius Gothicus, and even in Constantius Chlorus; it was warriorism refined with subtlety and cruelty in Constantine I; it was mere fussy treacherous cruelty in the Spider-Octopus,—and sensual brutality in Julian's brother Gallus. The vices of the latter may indicate how great a self-conqueror the unstained Julian was.
He was a Keats in imperial affairs, dying when he had given no more than a promise of what he should become. He laws, his valor, his victories, his writings, are no more than juvenilia: they are equal to the grand performance, not the promise, of many who are counted great. He came out from his overshadowment and long seclusion, from him books and dreams; was thrown into conditions that would have been difficult for an experienced statesman, and won through them all triumphantly; was set to conduct a war that would have taxed the genius of a Caesar, a Tiberius, or an Aurelius,—and swept through to as signal victories as any of theirs. He learnt the elements of drill, and was straight sent to conquer the conquering Germans; and did it brilliantly. He came to a Gaul as broken and hopeless as Joan of Arc's France; and found within himself every quality needed to heal it and make it whole.