God Against the Gods (32 page)

Julian was utterly serious and characteristically single-minded about the campaign. Booty taken from the Persian towns and cities along the line of march was distributed among the soldiers, according to Ammianus, but Julian took for himself only “three gold coins and a young deaf-mute who expressed himself gracefully with his hands.”
⁶⁶
And the chaste and ascetic young emperor, who may have believed that he was the bearer of the soul of Alexander the Great, followed the famous example of the philosopher king: Julian refused to lay eyes, much less hands, on the beautiful young women who were taken as prizes of war.

“Thou Hast Conquered, Galilean”

The next day, however, the omens went suddenly sour. Ten bulls had been brought along to serve as offerings along the way—nine of them dropped dead before they could be slaughtered, and the last one escaped altogether. “The skeptical historian may hazard the guess that someone had poisoned the sacrificial animals,” offers Browning, “for reasons of his own.”
⁶⁷
The exertion and privation of a long march over rugged terrain supplies an equally plausible explanation. Whatever the actual cause, Julian himself was alarmed and unsettled—he was, after all, the most pious of pagans.

Still, the army now resumed its march in the direction of the Persian capital, Ctesiphon. Again, the Persians resorted to harrying tactics—they burned the crops and the grassland that stood along Julian’s line of march; they fired stones and spears from catapults; and they sent small detachments of cavalry to ride down on the long columns, strike a sharp blow and then ride off again. At last, a new and terrifying sight presented itself on the far horizon to Julian and his comrades in arms—the cloud of dust and the occasional glint and sparkle of light on polished armor that revealed the presence of a sizable fighting force. On the next morning, as the sun rose, the Romans could plainly see the army of Shapur II, the emperor of Persia, arrayed for battle.

Julian fought again—and he won again. The soldiers who had once refused to cross the Alps at the command of Constantius II had done so at the command of Julian, and they now followed him into battle against the archers, cavalry and battle elephants of the Persian emperor. They drove off the Persian army but they did not succeed in destroying it. His tactical victory presented Julian with a new crisis—he was deep in enemy territory, far from any source of reinforcement or resupply, his provisions were depleted, his men were underfed and tired and he was at risk of yet another attack by a fresh Persian army.

Alone in his tent, Julian comforted himself in the same way he had done as a frightened child at Macellum—he opened a book and read by lantern light. But the book failed to work its old magic. He lay awake, anxious and fretful, and he wondered what he might have done to displease the gods and goddesses who had so far favored him so richly. At his darkest moment, he imagined that he saw a spectral figure cross the floor of the tent and exit into the darkness outside—the tutelary god of the Roman people who had once championed the pagan emperor but was now abandoning him to his fate.

Julian promptly summoned the band of seers who were formally attached to his army, and he demanded that they perform the ancient ritual of divination by which the gods might reveal their will. The Haruspices consulted their sacred texts and reported that all signs were against him—Julian must not engage in battle on that day. But Julian, a seasoned soldier as well as a pious pagan, apparently decided that the risk of a new Persian attack outweighed the risk of defying the auguries. At his order, the army marched at first light—and, just as he had feared, the Persian horse and elephant cavalry promptly began to strike the Roman formations here and there along the whole line of march.

Julian, like Josiah and Constantine before him, was not only a king but also a fearless general who insisted on showing himself where the fighting was fiercest. When word reached him that the Persians were striking his left flank and his men were falling back, he abruptly turned toward the skirmish. Julian moved in such haste that he forgot or neglected to strap on the breastplate that his armor bearer carried, and he moved so fast that his bodyguard lost sight of him in the clamor and chaos of the fighting. And so there was nothing—and no one—to stop the soldier who charged the emperor, thrust a long spear into his side and left it there, the spear point lodging between his ribs and piercing his liver.

Suddenly and grievously wounded, Julian struggled to pull the spear out of his body but succeeded only in wounding his hand on its sharp edge. When his comrades in arms finally reached him, they drove off the Persian cavalry and sought out Oribasius to care for the fallen Augustus. Maximus and Priscus, too, were summoned to comfort their old friend during his final agony. Julian bravely called for his weapons so he could resume the fighting, but his bandaged wound broke open and began to bleed again. “He delighted in his wound,” insists Libanius, “gazing joyfully upon it, asking those who were weeping if his lot was not preferable to growing old.”
⁶⁸
At last, Julian called for cold water, swallowed it with difficulty, and died without uttering another word.

Who delivered the fatal spear thrust? His fellow pagans suggested it was not one of the Persian cavalrymen but rather a treasonous and treacherous Christian zealot serving in the ranks of the Roman army, “an idea that was not displeasing to some Christians,” according to Pierre Chuvin.
⁶⁹
Whether it was a Roman or a Persian, a Christian or a pagan, however, the Christian true believers welcomed his death as a miracle and a blessing. Indeed, one Christian chronicler, writing a century or so after the fact, imagines that Julian conceded defeat to the Christian god at the moment of his death, collecting the blood from his battle wound in his cupped hand and casting it toward the heavens as he cried: “Thou hast conquered, Gaililean!”
⁷⁰

The tales are purely legendary. But surely, as he lay dying, Julian must have wondered—and so can we—what he might have been able to accomplish if he had reigned, like Constantine the Great, for thirty years. Would he have fulfilled the promise of religious toleration that is implicit in polytheism, or reverted to the uglier practices of religious persecution that both Christians and pagans had more recently embraced? All we know for a fact, however, is that when Julian died on June 26, 363, he was barely thirty-two years old, and only eighteen months had passed since the day when he replaced the Christian emperor on the imperial throne and the pagan restoration had begun.

EPILOGUE

THE HANDLESS SCRIBE

The Price of Victory of the Only True God

What should be said of us, who are forced to live piously, not by devotion but by terror?

—Maximus of Turin

Sometime around the year 1000, an artful but curious reliquary was put on display in a village church in southern France—a near-life-sized statue that was used to preserve the relics of a martyr known as St. Fides. In life, she was famous for having resurrected a dead mule and, after her death, her body parts were believed to possess the same miraculous power. The face is fashioned out of gold, and the figure is richly embellished with precious stones. She is a martyr, not a monarch, but she sits on a throne. This simple fact reveals something remarkable about the origins of the image. “The devout had somewhere found the image of an emperor of Julian’s time or thereabouts,” explains Ramsay MacMullen, “and used it to make a reliquary.”
¹

The reliquary of St. Fides is doubly ironic. An image of the man whom Christianity condemns as Julian the Apostate may have been recycled into the resting place for the bones of a revered Christian martyr. Yet Julian himself, as we have seen, detested the Christian adoration of “corpse-pieces.” Nonetheless, the reliquary is a wholly appropriate symbol of what happened after the death of the last pagan emperor of Rome. The whole of the Roman imperial government, in fact, was put in service of the Christian church in the crusade to exterminate both paganism and what the orthodox church regarded as Christian heresy. Within a generation after Julian’s death on a battlefield in Persia, the Roman empire was once against a Christian realm.

Christian tradition salutes Constantine as “the Great” and condemns Julian as “the Apostate.” According to Bishop Gregory of Nazianzus, who knew Julian when they were both students in Athens, Julian “concealed his evil character under a mask of goodness,” and Constantius II stopped too soon when he set out to murder his uncles and cousins: “He did not realise he was training up an enemy of Christ,” writes Gregory in
Against Julian
. “In this one thing he did not do well, in showing kindness, saving the life and giving rule to him who was saved and crowned for evil.”
²
Edward Gibbon, by contrast, saluted Julian as a man of impressive and even exalted qualities: “The throne of Julian was the seat of reason, of virtue,” insists Gibbon, and “the apostate Julian deserved the empire of the world.”
³
For later historians, he presents “a baffling problem in psychology,” as historian Edward J. Martin wrote in the early twentieth-century.
⁴
But, whether we admire Julian or detest him, Bishop Athanasius correctly predicted that he was “only a little cloud that would soon pass.”
⁵

“Behold, the rivers are running backwards,” writes Julian—but the nineteenth-century historian August-Arthur Beugnot insists that “Julian’s life was an accident, and at his death events reverted to their natural channel.”
⁶

Both the pagan restoration and the dynasty of Constantine the Great died with Julian. The Roman officer who was elected by the army to take Julian’s place on the throne, Jovian, was unrelated to him by blood. Donning the purple robe that had belonged to Julian, Jovian promptly sued for peace with the Persian king. When the treaty was signed, he hastened back to Rome, carrying the embalmed body of Julian to his birthplace, Constantinople, where it would lay in state before it was interred among the graves of his mother’s family. An old monk approached the corpse, pierced in the side with its Christ-like wound, and composed a hymn to celebrate the triumph of the Only True God over “the unclean one.”

I stood over him and mocked his heathendom and I said, “Is this the one who raised himself against the living name and forgot that he is dust?”
⁷

Jovian reigned as a Christian emperor, but he did not promptly reenact the antipagan decrees of Constantius II. Indeed, he issued an edict of toleration of his own, promising that no one would be persecuted for the practice of any religion, pagan or Christian, with the exception of magic workers and fortune-tellers. The pagans who had enjoyed imperial favor under Julian sought to hide themselves in fear of the expected purge—but it did not come. Or, at least, it did not come quite as soon as they expected.

Men in Black

Even if the first of Julian’s successors stayed his hand against paganism, however, a new kind of Christian zealot took up the banner of the Only True God with a righteous wrath that was now charged with a taste for revenge. The monks who had taken vows of poverty and chastity in imitation of Christ—“men in black,” as Libanius, the fourth-century Sophist, describes them
⁸
—had first appeared early in the fourth century in Syria and Egypt as anchorites and hermits. “They train to live like angels,” as the preacher John Chrysostom puts it,
⁹
and they refrained from all pleasures of the flesh. Indeed, the monastics were rigorists in the purest sense—pious men and women who sought the isolation of the wilderness to punish their bodies and nurture their souls. Thus did one scholar quip that Julian “was probably as proud of the lice in his beard as any monk in Egypt.”
¹⁰

At first, the monks did violence only to themselves. The hermit monk called Anthony (c. 251-c. 356) banished himself to a tomb in the wilderness, where he was famously afflicted by demonic apparitions: “The walls opened, and the daimones appeared as serpents, lions, bulls, wolves, scorpions, leopards, and bears.”
¹¹
The sufferings of Hilarion (c. 291-c. 371), who confined himself to a stone cell only five feet high, were even more lurid—his vows of abstinence were sorely tested by visions of naked and lascivious women, as well as banquet tables richly laden with delicacies. So famous were some of these hermits that they did not remain alone for long—Hilarion, for example, looked out of his cell one day to see a man and a camel, both perfectly real and both a bit cranky. He was called upon by the man to exorcise the evil spirit that had obviously possessed the camel.

Now, however, the monks boiled up out of the wilderness
en masse
and descended upon town and countryside as self-appointed “shock troops” in the holy war against paganism. Urged on by the most militant of the bishops, they took it upon themselves to search for and destroy any expression of paganism that they could find. They delighted in pulling down altars, smashing statuary and ruining shrines and temples. They helped themselves to the treasures of the temples they destroyed, and they set upon any unfortunate man or woman whom they suspected of engaging in pagan rituals of worship. So thorough were the monks that their path of destruction can be traced by archaeological evidence of the pagan shrines that they ruined.

“Men in black, who eat more than elephants and exhaust themselves with the number of cups they drain, who have drink served to them in the middle of their psalm-singing, rush upon the temples,” writes Libanius in a tract titled
In Defense of the Temples
. “Roofs are knocked off, walls undermined, shrines thrown down, altars totally destroyed. And as for the priests: they can choose between silence and death.”
¹²

The riotous monks, as it turned out, were the advance guard of a renewed and reinvigorated Christian revolution, and they set an example that would be followed by revolutionaries who came along many centuries later. “As France long ago had its revolutionary mobs and China more recently its Red Guards,” explains historian John Holland Smith, “so too the empire in the closing years of the fourth Christian century had its propaganda-directed gangs of rioters who went from place to place smashing, burning, looting and destroying in defiance of the laws and defence of their own cultural revolution.”
¹³

The monks were so unruly, in fact, that an imperial decree was issued in 390 in a vain effort to compel them to return to the wilderness from whence they had come. But the zeal of the monks eventually came to infect the Christian emperors who followed the benign Jovian to the throne, and the era of religious toleration finally came to an end. Once again, the machinery of the Roman state—the prison, the torture chamber, the gallows and the executioner’s block—was used to punish anyone who refused to confine his or her worship to the Only True God, as well as anyone who worshiped the Only True God in a manner that the orthodox church regarded as heretical.

“In the long truce between the hostile camps, the pagan, the sceptic, even the formal, lukewarm Christian, may have come to dream of a mutual toleration which would leave the ancient forms undisturbed,” writes historian Samuel Dill. “But such men, living in a world of literary and antiquarian illusions, know little of the inner forces of the new Christian movement.”
¹⁴

Julian has been blamed for the escalation of the war on paganism that was conducted by the Christian emperors who reigned at the end of the fourth century and thereafter. “It was only after the near-catastrophe of Julian’s reversion to paganism that the Christian emperors systematically legislated against paganism so as to destroy it,” explains Jewish historian and theologian Jacob Neusner. “His brief reign brought in its wake a ferocious counterrevolution, with the Christian state now suppressing the institutions of paganism, and Christian men in the streets acting on their own against those institutions.”
¹⁵
Church, state and mob were now fused into a single instrument of terror that was brought down on
all
expression of religious diversity, both pagan and Christian.

With the reign of Theodosius I (c. 346-395), a fierce and even fanatical Christian true believer who ascended to the throne in 379, the war of God against the gods entered its final and decisive phase. The Spanish-born emperor, according to historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, deserves to be regarded as “the first of the Spanish Inquisitors.”
¹⁶
He was the first emperor to formally elevate Christianity to the legal status of the state religion of Rome. As a faithful member of the “orthodox” and “catholic” church, he condemned Arianism and other Christian beliefs and practices that the orthodox church regarded as apostasies and heresies. And he issued a series of decrees that criminalized the practice of paganism: pagan ritual and sacrifice were prohibited, pagan temples were closed and the property of the pagan cults was confiscated. Not only blood sacrifice, but any ritual use of fire, wine, incense, trees or garlands, was now a public offense. The punishment for violation of the new decrees was death.

“It is Our will that all the peoples who are ruled by our Clemency shall practice that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans,” decreed Theodosius I in 380. “We command that those persons who follow this rule shall embrace the name of Catholic Christians. The rest, however, whom We adjudge demented and insane . . . shall be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of Our own initiative.”
¹⁷

In 385, the Christian rigorist Priscillian was put on trial by a Roman magistrate on charges of heresy, tortured to extract a confession of doctrinal error and then executed—the first time a public court enforced Christian doctrine. In 386, the bishop of Apamea in Syria was provided with legionnaires and gladiators by the praetorian prefect to demolish the temple of Zeus. Even the Roman emperor might find himself outranked (or, at least, outflanked) by a cleric. When a band of monks destroyed a synagogue in Callinicum, a town on the Euphrates, in 388, for example, Theodosius I ordered the local bishop to pay reparations to the Jewish community; the bishop defied the order and announced that he would no longer celebrate the Eucharist until it was withdrawn. The emperor ultimately yielded to the bishop.

“I have now learned the difference,” Theodosius later remarked, “between a Prince and a Bishop!”
¹⁸

Akhenaton and Josiah, as we have seen, were monarchs who tried but failed to impose monotheism on their subjects—they were true believers, but they did not possess the terrible power of the totalitarian state. Constantine and Julian were the first monarchs in recorded history to command the whole arsenal of totalitarianism, but neither of them was willing to put it to use in service of true belief. Each of them, to a lesser or greater degree, was willing to tolerate a certain degree of diversity in religious belief and practice. But Theodosius I was not so kind or gentle, and he used what he called “the thousand terrors of the laws” to achieve the final victory of monotheism over polytheism.
¹⁹

“Theodosius appears on history’s stage like a Roman Cromwell, Napoleon, or Stalin,” explains Richard E. Rubenstein in
When Jesus Became God
, “an authoritarian figure whose mission was to consolidate the Christian revolution by conservatizing it, adapting it to existing social realities, and incorporating it into the structure of state power.”
²⁰

Plutarch describes how the passengers on a becalmed ship off the coast of Italy once heard a mysterious voice that cried out in despair: “The great god Pan is dead.” Ironically, the incident supposedly took place during the reign of Tiberius (14-37 C.E.), the same period during which, by tradition, Jesus of Nazareth met his own death on a cross in Palestine. Three centuries later, under the reign of Theodosius I, the plaintive cry of the unseen spirit could be understood in retrospect as an augury of things to come: “The rustic god who for centuries had inhabited the mountain slopes and who typified the simpler and frailer spirit of paganism,” explains Edward Alexander Parsons, “was as the symbol [for] the death of
all
the gods.”
²¹