God Against the Gods (30 page)

“If the reading of your scriptures is sufficient for you, why do you make such a fuss about the learning of the Hellenes?” writes Julian in
Against the Galileans
, a work that is both a tract against Christianity and a manifesto of paganism. “Now, this would give you clear proof—select children from among you and educate them in your scriptures, and if when they come to manhood they prove to have nobler qualities than slaves, you may believe that I am talking nonsense.”
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At the heart of Julian’s case against Christianity is the old grievance that had afflicted him since early childhood: the willingness of Constantine and his sons to murder their kin in order to protect the imperial crown. Christian baptism, he argues, “does not take away the spots of leprosy, nor the gout, nor the dysentery, nor any defect of the body,” he writes in
Against the Galileans
, “but it can take away adultery, rapine, and all the crimes of the soul.”
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Julian makes the same point in an elaborate satire titled
The Caesars
, a work in which he imagines that all of the dead Roman emperors are invited to a heavenly banquet by the gods and goddesses of Olympus. The guest list begins with Julius Caesar and ends with Constantine the Great, who is asked to reveal to the gods what his ambition in life had been.

“To amass great wealth,” Constantine replies, “and then to spend it liberally so as to gratify my own desires.”

“If it was a banker you wanted to be,” replies one of the gods, “how did you so far forget yourself as to lead the life of a pastry-cook and hairdresser?”

Thus did Julian indict Constantine for his greed, his gluttony and his garish wigs, all at once. But the more serious charge is yet to come. Each of the emperors is invited to choose a god to serve as “his own guardian and guide,” and Constantine runs to the goddess of pleasure. “Dressing him in raiment of many colours and otherwise making him beautiful,” she passes him along to the goddess of incontinence.

There too he found Jesus, who had taken up his abode with her and cried aloud to all comers: “He that is a seducer, he that is a murderer, he that is sacrilegious and infamous, let him approach without fear! For with this water will I wash him and will straightway make him clean. And though he should be guilty of those same sins a second time, let him but smite his breast and beat his head and I will make him clean again.”

Here we have a haunting and even heartbreaking suggestion that Julian cared rather less about Christianity in general than he did about one or two particular Christians: Constantine, who had murdered his own wife and son, and Constantius II, who had murdered Julian’s father and half brother. At the very end of
The Caesars
, Constantine and his sons go “gladly” to Jesus and avail themselves of his offer of easy salvation from sin. “But the avenging deities none the less punished both him and them for their impiety,” Julian writes, “and exacted the penalty for the shedding of the blood of their kindred.”
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The Priest and His Goose

Perhaps the most poignant of the many tales that have come down from antiquity about Julian is the one told about his visit to an ancient temple of Apollo. Here was one of those “uncanny places” where pagans had long gathered to worship—a grove of trees, a waterfall and a shrine where sacred songs were sung, incense was burned, libations were poured and a hecatomb was slain and burned on the altar fire in honor of the high god. Once Julian had restored the right to openly worship the gods, he made a pilgrimage to the shrine on the day of the sacred festival when all of these solemn but joyous festivities were to take place. A whole lifetime of reading and dreaming, starting in the library at Macellum and continuing through his secret initiation into the mystery cults at Ephesus, had prepared him for this glorious day.

“I pictured to myself the procession, as if seeing visions in a dream,” Julian writes, “sacrificial victims and libations and choruses in honour of the god, and incense, and the youths of the city gathered round the shrine, their souls arrayed with all holiness and they themselves decked out in white and splendid raiment.”
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On his arrival, however, Julian was disappointed at what he saw— or, rather, what he didn’t see. A hecatomb required a hundred oxen, but he saw not a single one. No fire burned on the altar, no incense wafted through the shrine, and no cakes or libations had been prepared. No beautiful young women or handsome young men were waiting at the shrine. The whole desolate place was empty but for a single priest and, remarkably, a single forlorn goose.

“When I began to enquire what sacrifice the city intended to make in celebration of the annual festival in honour of the god,” Julian relates, “the priest said, ‘I have brought with me from my house a goose as an offering to the god, but the city has made no preparations.’ ”
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Julian was disappointed, but he should not have been surprised. Classical paganism as it is enshrined in the pages of Homer, as we have seen, was already in decline when Christianity first arrived in Rome. The official cults had long been reduced to formulaic prayers and hollow ceremonies. All of the exotic mystery religions into which Julian had been initiated—the cults of Mithra and the Great Mother of the Gods as well as the mystical and magical rites of the Neoplatonists—flowered in Rome precisely because Apollo and the other gods and goddesses of the Greco-Roman pantheon no longer seemed to provide their worshippers with a sense of wonder. To turn back the river of monotheism, Julian understood, he would have to restore the faded glory of polytheism that was now found only in the brittle pages of Homer.

Julian found ways to satisfy his own spiritual longings. He personally presided over the offering of hecatombs, drawing the sacrificial blade across the throats of the oxen and hacking them into quarters with a sacred axe. “He was called a slaughterer rather than a priest by many who ridiculed the number of his victims,” admits the pagan orator Libanius, now one of Julian’s intimate friends.
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“Men said that if he returned victorious over Persia,” writes Robert Browning, “there would soon be a shortage of cattle.”
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And, according to the pagan historian Ammianus, “Julian presumptuously delighted in carrying the sacred emblems instead of the priests and in being attended by a band of women,”
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a sight that inspired only shock and disgust in his former schoolmate from Athens, Gregory of Nazianzus. “Julian was habitually followed by a train of prostitutes, libertines, and perverts,” insists the bitter and ever critical Gregory, “who assiduously assisted at his functions.”
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Julian installed a Mithraeum, a shrine for the worship of Mithra, in his palace on the shores of the Sea of Marmara, and there he submitted again to the ritual of the taurobolium. He made pilgrimages to pagan shrines, including the temple of Zeus on Mount Casios. He sent to Egypt for an Apis bull that was regarded as sacred to the god Osiris. He composed a tribute to King Helios—“May Hermes, the god of eloquence, stand by my side”
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—and another one to the Great Mother of the Gods: “I am well aware that some over-wise persons will call it an old wives’ tale,” he concedes. “But for my part I would rather trust the traditions than those too clever people, whose puny souls are keen-sighted enough, but never do see [anything] that is sound.”
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In fact, Julian suggests in his own writings that he was granted more than one divine vision, and Libanius is willing to affirm that these suggestions are more than merely rhetorical or metaphorical: “You alone have seen the shapes of the gods, a blessed observer of the blessed ones,” writes Libanius. “You alone have heard the voice of the gods and addressed them in the words of Sophocles, ‘O voice of Athene’ or ‘O voice of Zeus.’ ”
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The Church of the Gods and Goddesses

Julian was an authentic and earnest pagan, and he embraced the core value of polytheism—the willingness to recognize and respect the divinity of
all
gods and goddesses. Thus, even though he practiced a kind of “pagan monotheism,”
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as Browning puts it—that is, he believed that King Helios was the greatest of all the gods, if not the one and only god—he offered worship to all the traditional deities of the Greco-Roman pantheon as well as to such imports as Mithra and the Great Mother. But it is also true that Julian had learned a lesson from his Christian upbringing—he admired and envied the superior organizational skills that the Christians brought to bear in setting up and running their churches. To overcome the advantage that they enjoyed, Julian proposed to copy what the Christians did best and apply it to the pagan restoration that was now in progress.

Julian envisioned, and promptly invented, something that had never before existed—a pagan “church” with its own all-encompassing theology and its own unified clerical hierarchy.
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He commissioned the composition of a work titled
On the Gods and the Universe
, a “manual of pagan theology.”
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He established a unified pagan priesthood—one of his first appointments was Pegasius, the former Christian bishop who had conducted him on a tour of the pagan temples of Ilion—and he even adopted the same title of office,
archiereus
, that was used to identify Christian clergy of comparable rank. He encouraged the Hellenes, the term he uses to describe what Christians called “pagans,” to follow the Christian example in both chastity and philanthropy. Pagan priests were to avoid the excesses of the tavern, the distractions of the theater and the seductions of erotic literature, and they must shun the company of actors, jockeys and dancers. He even prescribed a set of dietary laws that he extracted from the cult of the Great Mother—root vegetables, pomegranates and pork were forbidden, and fish was to be eaten only when prescribed.

Julian sought to impose order on the chaos of paganism. All of the gods and goddesses who were worshipped across the vast stretches of the Roman empire—some of them stately and solemn, some of them wild and raucous—were to be accommodated in the new pantheon, but all of them would be subservient to the most high god whom Constantine had once worshipped, the solar deity variously called Apollo,
Sol Invictus
and King Helios. “There exists no man who does not stretch out his hands toward the heavens when he prays,” writes Julian, “and whether he swears by one god or several, if he has any notion at all of the divine, he turns heavenward.”
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In that sense, the unified and orderly pagan church that Julian envisioned was the perfect counterpart to the orderly Christian church that Constantine tried to create at the Council of Nicaea.

Yet the very notion of a pagan church is a contradiction in terms. The “spongy mass of tolerance and tradition” could not be so readily molded into a single set of approved beliefs and practices. Julian’s experiment in “pagan monotheism,” scholars have argued, was doomed to failure because it violated the core value of polytheism: the freedom of every man and woman to choose among any, all or none of the gods. Indeed, by a strange irony, Julian’s vision of a pagan church betrays how deeply he had been imprinted with the most dangerous features of monotheism—the idea that there is one god who must be regarded as the best of all gods, and the impulse to impose the Only True God on everyone else.

The Skulls in the Crypt

Julian’s pagan counterrevolution was intended to be a nonviolent one, but the emperor in Constantinople found that he could do nothing to suppress the religious extremists, both Christians and pagans, who continued to battle one another in the streets of cities across the Roman empire. Shortly after Julian came to the throne, for example, the Christian bishop of Phoenicia was denounced for his role in the destruction of a pagan temple. Bishop Marcus, it was said, was the same man who had rescued young Julian from the blood purge that ended his father’s life so many years before. Now, perhaps out of gratitude, Julian imposed a punishment that was mild enough by comparison with Roman criminal justice—the old man was ordered to rebuild the temple.

Like the confessors of the Great Persecution, however, Bishop Marcus stubbornly refused to put his hand on what he regarded as the demon-tainted stones of a pagan shrine. That act of Christian zeal was enough to rouse the pagan mob to vengeance. First, they dragged him into the street, plucked out his beard, hair by hair, and turned him over to “the refined cruelty of schoolboys, who amused themselves by piercing him with their [pens],” according to Giuseppe Ricciotti, an abbot as well as a biographer of Julian.
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At last, they smeared his body with honey and left him to be stung to death by insects.

The pagan equivalent of zealotry was also at work in the death of George of Cappadocia. Constantius II had appointed George, an Arian bishop, to serve in place of the exiled Athanasius in the see at Alexandria, and he had turned over an abandoned Mithraeum to George for use as a church. When workers broke into the crypt of the old temple, they found an accumulation of human skulls—and the discovery was the flash point of a clash between Christian and pagan rigorists.

To Bishop George, the skulls were evidence that the site had once been used for rituals of human sacrifice. To the pious pagans, they were the sanctified remains of men and women who had been properly buried there—and they saw the conversion of the Mithraeum into a church as an act of desecration. George only managed to make matters worse for himself when he was overheard making a dismissive remark about the temple of Agathos Daimon, the tutelary god of Alexandria: “How long will
that
tomb continue to stand?”
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