nomenon as cause of the former? Again, how could his philosophic and widely philanthropic nature fail to be shocked by the bitter feelings existing among the various Christian factions, often on grounds which must have seemed to him entirely frivolous? And above all, the imperial family which had publicly eschewed the former gods of the nation and given to the new doctrines official recognition and approval, had caused the destruction of his father, his brothers, and almost all his kindred, though closely related to the murderers themselves, and had done all that was possible to blight his own hopes and cripple his activities. As Gibbon "The names of says, Christ and of Constantius, the ideas of slavery and of religion, were soon associated in a youthful imagination which was susceptible of the most lively impressions." This view is partially borne out by the writings of Julian. In the Misopogon and in The Cæsars he identifies the cause of Christ with that of Constantius and of Constantine. In the Contra Christianos he rebukes the Christian leaders for their quarrelsome and intolerant behaviour towards one another,1 and throughout his writings he evidently judges of Christian morality by the very worst specimens of Christians whom he has met. Yet, after all, several considerations should lead us not to lay too much stress on these circumstances. Even if Julian were more easily prejudiced and more apt to hasty generalisation than was consistent with pretensions to philosophy, we may observe that among those also who held to the old religion he did not find a very high level of morality. In more than one passage he complains of the lukewarmness and selfishness of the professed Hellenes.2 Yet in questions relating to the Pagan priesthood, he shows a remarkable power of discriminating between the office and the person of those to whom respect is due. This same faculty 1 Especially Contra Chris., § 206. 2 Letter 49, &c.

No 287.- -VOL. XLVIII.

should have led him, had no counteracting tendencies existed, to distinguish between Christianity as it is in its essence and as it is imperfectly shown forth by its votaries.

Several writers attach importance also to the unpleasing, even violent way in which Christian doctrine and discipline were forced on him as a boy. Gibbon dwells on the dulness of Julian's life at Macellum, in Cappadocia, from his eighth to his fifteenth year, where his only recreation was to take part in some religious ceremony, and the whole aim of his education to fit him for an unambitious ecclesiastical life. That this life was exceedingly disagreeable to him we have his own testimony, yet if we consider that childhood of painful memory, it would seem that religious instruction was not presented

to

him under more unfavourable auspices than some other branches of knowledge to which he became passionately attached. His first acquaintance with Homer was made through a hard, unsympathetic preceptor, who had the charge of him during his childhood in Constantinople. By this man he was kept so strictly that he might have thought there was only one way to school, for he never took but one, and along that the child must walk with downcast eyes. If he expressed a desire to see games or dances, or even green trees, he was bidden to take his Homer and read about the funeral games of Patroclus, the dances of the Phæacians, the groves of the isle of Calypso. But since in later years, Julian was able entirely to dissociate the thought of Homer from these dreary remembrances, there must have been some deep underlying

4

λήθη δὲ ἔστω τοῦ σκότους ἐκείνου. (Oration concerning King Helios.)

I follow Mücke, who says that Julian speaks of Mardonius, immer nur mit Abscheu und Widerwillen. Talbot, on the other hand, calls him an homme savant et honnête. Both writers seem to have their opinions on passages in the Misopogon, where Julian is speaking in a vein of banter, so that his real meaning is hard to discern.

E E

cause to prevent his shaking himself free from the unpleasant associations of his early study of the Gospels.

Dr. Mücke urges as a further apology for Julian's apostasy that he had been educated, not in pure Christianity, but in the Arian heresy. But even if the Arians were as black as their orthodox opponents have painted them, why in abjuring them should not the young theologian have turned to a purer form of Christianity rather than to an outworn superstition? From early youth he was well acquainted with the Gospels and Epistles, and from his writings we can clearly see that his quarrel was with those elements of Christianity professed by all the sects of his day, and by most of those of our own, not with any corrupt form which happened to be in the ascendant during the reign of Constantius.

But after all, Julian needs no apology. If, with open mind, and after deliberate reading and meditation, he preferred the Theogonies of Hesiod to the Book of Genesis, the heroes of Homer to the judges and kings of the Jews, the morality of Plato and the Stoics to that of the Epistles and the Sermon on the Mount, it does not follow that his preference was due to a radical vice either of head or of heart. The ideas of Hellenic mythology and philosophy so entirely possessed his mind as to make the reception of Christianity a total impossibility to him. And when we consider how potent those ideas still are in minds which can yield to their dominion, even after a widely different system of belief has prevailed for so many centuries-when we read how the half-apprehended principles of classical culture seemed, in the time of the Renaissance, almost to lead to a spurious paganism in educated society-when we see the deep and strong influence exercised by Greek ideas on sober minds like that of Wordsworth 1 and of Schiller 2

1 See his sonnet beginning, "The world is too much with us, late and soon-"

2 See the poem, Die Götter Griechenlands.

-when we see in our own day a still more remarkable effort to recover the beauty and joyousness of life which prevailed under the gods of Hellas, we cannot wonder at the indignation which was felt by a young and enthusiastic mind, saturated with the very principles of Greek culture, when he saw those principles giving place to others which were totally foreign to his whole view of life. For the fact that Julian lived and moved in a world peopled with the imaginations of the Greek poets, and illumined by the splendid speculations of the Greek philosophers, no one can doubt who sees the readiness with which, on every possible occasion, illustrations from Greek literature come forward to support every thesis he would maintain, to heighten the praise he bestows, or to intensify the effect of any representation which he desired to make vivid. Nor is there any doubt that, whatever may have been the case with less ardent souls or more quiet minds, with him at least no compromise between Hellenic and Christian culture was in any degree possible. He regarded as contemptible charlatans men whose influence over mankind has been greater even than that of Homer or of Plato, and their noblest sayings found no response in his heart. Even the character of the Christian ideal caused in him neither reverence nor admiration. The Christian doctrine of sanctification seemed to him to attribute magic power to ceremonial ablutions.3 The disciple of disciple of Marcus Aurelius considers the Agony in the Garden as unworthy of a manly, not to say of a divine character; and the call of Christ, "Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," is to him but the invitation of Wantonness to throw aside all burdens and responsibilities, and repose in slothful

ease.5

It must not be supposed, however, that the Hellenism of Julian con3 Con. Chris., 245. 4 Ib. Fragment. See the closing paragraphs of The Casars.

sisted merely of that free, joyous, life-loving spirit which has ever and anon asserted itself in opposition to the more austere and ascetic types of Christianity. On the contrary, his notions of the binding force of moral laws, even in the realm of thoughts, of the duty of kindness to all men, even to enemies, and of the entire dependence of man on the help of God, may seem to some to be borrowed from the very religion he was endeavouring to crush. But we must remember that the doctrine of universal brotherhood, and of the sacredness of duty, were the most prominent articles of the creed of the Stoics before they were at all influenced by Christianity. And this sober, earnest type of paganism which Julian wished to put in the place of the advancing religion of Christ, was as different from its rival in many important respects as was the religion of Homer. Julian believed as heartily in the universal beneficence of the gods, and the divine origin of the human reason, as the Christians of his time believed in the exclusive privileges of the Jews with their spiritual descendants, and the entire depravity of the human heart. Nowhere is he more bitter in his denunciations of Christian impostures than where he is exhorting to what are now considered as peculiarly Christian virtues.1

All biographers of Julian blame his want of foresight in not perceiving that the effete system of polytheism could never be galvanized into life, and that under no circumstances could it afford sanctions for a high code of moral duty. But they do not all of them perceive how in another direction Julian displayed remarkable foresight. In the triumph of Christianity he foresaw the Dark Ages. There can be little doubt that even had there been no barbarian inroads, the substitution of the Bible for the works of classical Greece, as the first requisite in the education of every cultivated

1 See especially Fragment to a Priest and Letter 63 to Theodorus.

8

man, must have led to a lessened regard for the latter works, and perhaps to the total loss of many of them. It was because Julian saw this that he issued his celebrated edict against Christian schoolmasters,2 one of the very few measures of persecution against the fomerly dominant sect, and stigmatised as "inclemens" even by the impartial Ammianus. But from Julian's point of view, these enactments were justifiable and even necessary. More than half a century before his time, Tertullian had desired to substitute Christian for Pagan authors in schools. True, the classics held their own for a time even after the empire had again become Christian. Augustine speaks of his early delight in Virgil, yet he regards that delight as something to be ashamed of, and blames Christian parents for bringing up their children on such absurdities. But even if Homer had been permanently retained as a text-book, no earnest believer in his mythology

could have endured to see it handled and interpreted by teachers who represented it either as a tissue of empty fancies or as an ensnaring web of idolatry and deceit. He would regard any toleration of such teaching in much the same light as a French Catholic might regard a permission given to Positivist or Atheistic schoolmasters to teach children the creeds and formularies of the Christian faith.

To return, however, to the question of Julian's apostasy;-it follows from the above remarks that the cause thereof should be sought less in the negative than in the positive deter

2 The edict (as given by Mücke from the Theodosian code, with which, however, cf. Letter 42) does not mention the Christians by name, but merely reserves appointments to the magistrates and the emperor. It was evidently regarded by Ammianus, however, as directed primarily against them, and Augustine (Confessions, Bk. viii.) tells of a professor of rhetoric who had to give up his post or else abjure Christianity.

3 Bk. xxv.

4 Conf. (Bk. i.) Augustine's account of his education affords an instructive commentary on Julian's edicts.

minants of his creed; the question is not so much why he was not a Christian, as what made him such an ardent Hellene. To answer this question fully, it would be necessary to detail all the events of his childhood and youth, and even then we should leave a large residue of the phenomena to be explained by peculiarity of temperament. We should have to observe the child Julian drinking in Homer with his mother's milk-or rather instead of it, for it is one of the pathetic features of Julian's life that he was motherless from infancy.' We should follow him into his dreary exile at Macellum, where, with no companionship but that of his brother Gallus, from whom, though he seems to have loved him tenderly, he can have experienced but little sympathy, he developed an almost morbid sensitiveness to the glory of the starry heavens, and at the same time derived a more healthy moral influence from writings of Xenophon and Plato, and learned to accept the duties of life as the part assigned to each man in the divine government of the world. should have to see how in his student life at Nicomedia and at Athens he came to add to his ethical principles the strange metaphysical and theological system of the Neo Platonists, in which the Platonic doctrine of ideas and the Platonic myths of the emanation of souls become parts of a mystic representation of the whole divinely-ordered universe. We should have to trace the influence on his mind of the study of Iamblichus, of the oracular verses attributed to Apollo, and of the mythology of the East. In the "Oration concerning King Helios," Julian's positive views on theology, sometimes sublime, oftener subtle and

the

We

1 His mother seems to have been a cultivated woman, for she studied Homer, under Mardonius.

2 See in Letter to the Athenians, § 276, a most pleasing account of the considerations which determined him not to shirk the duties imposed on him by Constantius. It reminds one of the Crito, but still more, perhaps, of Marcus.

obscure, may be traced, and there as in other writings we may observe the freedom with which he learned to handle the myths that had amused his childhood so as to turn them into vehicles of spiritual truth. Here, however, it is his negative ideas, his objections to Christianity, that chiefly concern us, though these cannot be understood without an effort to obtain some grasp of his own views as to religion and theology.

We may come now to examine

more in detail the nature of these objections. They are to be met with in various portions of his works, but chiefly, of course, in the treatise written expressly with a view to proving that the whole Christian system is a work of man and an attempt to impose upon human credulity. Unfortunately the greater part of that work has met with the same fate that Julian thanked Heaven for sending on the books of Epicurus and of Pyrrho. There were probably three books, if not more, devoted to this subject. The first contained a comparison of Christianity with Hellenism and with Judaism, and attempted to show that the Christians adopted all that was evil and nothing that was good in both the Greek and the Jewish systems. The second book probably dealt with the Gospels, and the third with the Epistles. All the fragments that have been preserved by Cyril and other Christian writers have been edited with an elaborate introduction in the learned work of Dr. Neumann. The first book is restored almost entirely in an order superior to that followed by M. Talbot, and in such a way as, in spite of obscurities here and there, to be generally intelligible and often very forcible, while the connection is as well maintained as in most of Julian's works, for his impulsive mind is ever ready to fly off at a tangent and subsequently wind its way round again to the original argument.

Let us see what were Julian's views on the dogmatic theory, the

moral practice, and the ritual observances of his opponents.

In approaching Julian's objections to Christian doctrine, we must not expect a similar idea of doctrinal proof to that which prevails in our own age, steeped as it is in the sceptical spirit generated by the study of the inductive sciences, and demanding for every theory, whether of sensible or of supersensuous things, an absolutely verifiable basis of fact. Many of the modern difficulties with which Christianity has to contend are altogether out of harmony with the spirit of Julian. The miracles, for example, recorded in the Old and New Testaments are so far from presenting in his mind a stumbling-block to the faith, that he speaks scornfully of the comparatively small number and unimportant character of the miracles attributed to Christ. But here, perhaps, we may draw a distinction. Where he is dealing with things that are said to have actually happened, or to be about to happen, in the material world, and which are amenable to the evidence of the senses, Julian argues quite in the spirit of a modern sceptic. When dealing with the story of the Tower of Babel, for instance, he naively remarks that if all the earth were made into bricks, it would not furnish material sufficient for a tower reaching only to the orbit of the moon. Again, he asks from what source St. Luke could possibly derive his information as to the presence of an angel strengthening Christ on the eve of the crucifixion. He complains of the confused and contradictory accounts of the resurrection of Christ, and in one fragment, in speaking of St. Paul's promises (1 Thess. iv.) of the Second Advent, he utters the remarkable proposition that not to distinguish, in forecasting the future, the possible from the impossible, is the very climax of mental aberration.

But in judging of those matters of religious theory which lie outside the region of observation and experiment present, past, or future, the proofs

that Julian demands are of another character. In his eyes, any abstruse religious doctrine, handed down by tradition, or thought out by a great original mind, is worthy to be received if it be sufficient to account for known facts, and if it harmonise with our innate ideas of the character of God and the duties of man.

Thus in combating the Jewish account of the Creation of the World, Julian does not ask for evidence or appeal to physical improbabilities,1 but tries to show that it is inconsistent with itself, that it is insufficient to account for the facts, and that it presents unworthy notions as to the character of the Deity. In Genesis, he says, nothing is said about the creation of angels, and certain existences, "the waters," "the darkness," and "the deep," are left wholly unaccounted for as to origin. Again, the Creator is said to have made some things and simply commanded others to be. And in making man-how could an omniscient being form woman to be a help-meet to man knowing all the while that she would be the cause of his fall from Paradise? Still more serious are the two objections to the story of the first disobedience the notion that God would withhold from man so excellent a gift as the knowledge of good and evil, and the malicious jealousy which would keep him from tasting of the Tree of Life. Julian makes no remarks on the origin of evil. He seems, from one or two passages in his works, to regard it as an imperfection due to the connection of soul and body,2 but the absence of belief in an active power of evil is one of the causes of his incapability of appreciating either the Jewish or the Christian religion. In the story of the Confusion of Tongues, again, besides the objection just cited to the possibility of building a sky-reaching

1 Unless we regard as such the rather captious inquiry as to what language could serve as a means of communication between the woman and the serpent.

2 See Fragment to a Priest, § 299.