No More Learning



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87
CHAPTER IV.
THE TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY.
The old or official religions of Greece and of Rome had lost most of
their power long before Constantine first declared that Christianity was
henceforth to be recognised as a religio licita and then proceeded to
bestow the Imperial favour on the faith which his predecessors had
persecuted. Hellenism had destroyed their influence over the cultivated
classes, and other religions, coming from the East, had captivated the
masses of the people. If temples, dedicated to the gods of Olympus,
were still standing open; if the time-honoured rites were still duly and
continuously celebrated; if the official priesthood, recognised and largely
supported by the State, still performed its appointed functions; these
things no longer compelled the devotion of the crowd. The Imperial
cult of the Divi and Divae, once so popular, had also lost its power
to attract and to charm; the routine of ceremonial worship was still
performed; the well-organised priesthood spreading all over the Empire !
maintained its privileged position ; but crowds no longer thronged the
temples, and the rites were neglected by the great mass of the population.
Yet this did not mean, as has often been supposed, the universal
triumph of Christianity. It may almost be said that Paganism was never
so active, so assertive, so combative, as in the third century. But this
paganism, for long the successful rival of Christianity and its real
opponent, was almost as new to Europe as Christianity itself. Something
must be known about it and its environment ere the reaction under
Julian and the final triumph of Christianity can be sympathetically
understood.
During the earlier centuries of the Roman Empire the process of
disintegration was completed which had begun with the conquests of
Alexander the Great. Instead of a system of self-contained societies,
solidly united internally and fenced off from all external social, political
and religious influences, which characterised ancient civilisation, this
age saw a mixing of peoples and a cosmopolitan society hitherto un
known.
If fighting went on continuously somewhere or other on the extended
frontiers of the great Empire, peace reigned within its vast domains. A
CH, P.


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88
Cosmopolitan Society
system of magnificent roads, for the most part passable all the year
round, united the capitals with the extremities, from Britain and Spain
on the west to the Euphrates on the east. The Mediterranean had
been cleared of pirates, and lines of vessels united the great cities on its
shores. Travelling, whether for business, health or pleasure, was possible
under the Empire with a certainty and a safety unknown in after
centuries until the introduction of steam. It was facilitated by a common
language, a coinage universally valid, and the protection of the same
laws. Men could start from the Euphrates and travel onwards to Spain
using one lingua-franca everywhere understood. Greek could be heard
in the streets of every commercial town-in Rome, Marseilles, Cadiz
and Bordeaux, on the banks of the Nile, of the Orontes and of the
Tigris.
With all these things to favour it, the movements of peoples within
the Empire had become incalculably great, and all the larger cities were
cosmopolitan. Families from all lands, of differing religions and social
habits, dwelt within the same walls. National, social, intellectual and
religious differences faded insensibly. Thinking became eclectic as it had
never been before.
This growing community in habit of thought and even of religious
belief was fed by something peculiar to the times. The soldier of many
lands, the travelled trader, the tourist in search of pleasure, and the
invalid wandering in quest of health were common then as now.
But a special characteristic of the end of the third and the beginning
of the fourth century was the widely wandering student, the teacher
far from the land of his birth, and the itinerant preacher of new
religions.
The Empire was well provided with what we should now call
universities. Rome, Milan and Cremona were seats of higher learning
for Italy; Marseilles, Bordeaux and Autun for Gaul; Carthage for North
Africa; Athens and Apollonia for Greece; Tarsus for Cilicia ; Smyrna for
Asia; Beyrout and Antioch for Syria ; and Alexandria for Egypt. The
number of foreign students to be found at each was remarkable. Young
Romans enrolled themselves at Marseilles and Bordeaux. Greeks crossed
the seas to attend lectures at Antioch, and found as their neighbours men
from Assyria, Phoenicia and Egypt. At Alexandria the number of
students from distant parts of the Empire exceeded largely those from
the neighbourhood. At Athens, whose schools were the most famous in
the beginning of the fourth century, the crowds of Barbarians (for so
the citizens called those foreign students) were so great that it was said
that their presence threatened to spoil the purity of the language.
Everywhere, in that age of wandering, the student seemed to prefer
to study far from home and to Ait from one place of learning to
another.
Nor were the professors much different. They commonly taught far


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Oriental Religions
89
.
from their native land. Even at Athens it became increasingly rare to
find a teacher who belonged by birth to Greece. They too travelled from ,
one university seat to another. Lucian, Philostratus, Apuleius, all who
portray the age and the class, describe their wanderings.
Missionaries of new cults went about in the same way.
Bands of
itinerant devotees, the prophets and priests of Syrian, Persian, possibly
of Hindu cults, passed along the great Roman roads. Solitary preachers
of Oriental faiths, with all the fire of missionary enthusiasm, tramped,
from town to town, drawn by an irresistible impulse to Rome, the centre
of power, the protectress of the religions of her myriad subjects, the
tribune from which, if a speaker could only ascend it, he might address
the world. (The end of the third and the beginning of the fourth
century was an age of religious excitements, of curiosity about strange
faiths, when all who had something new to teach about the secrets of
the soul and of the universe, hawked their theories as traders their
merchandise.
This mixture of peoples, this new cosmopolitanism, this hurrying to
and fro of religious teachers, brought it about that Oriental faiths, at first
only the religions of groups of families who had brought their cults with
them into the West, made numerous converts and spread themselves
over the Roman Empire. These Oriental religions prospered the more
because from the middle of the third century onwards Rome was looking
to the East for many things. From it came the deftest artizans and
mechanics who gave to life most of its material comforts. It largely con-
tributed to feed Rome with its grain. Its philosophy (for most of
the greatest stoical thinkers were not Greeks but Orientals) gave the
substructure to Roman Law; and the most famous Law School in the
third, fourth and fifth centuries was not in Rome but at Beyrout.
Ulpian came from Tyre and Papinian from Syria. The greatest non-
Christian thinkers of these centuries were neither Greeks nor Romans
but Orientals. Plotinus was an Egyptian; Iamblichus, Porphyry and
Libanius were Syrians; Galen was an Asiatic. Oriental ideas were
slowly changing Rome's political institutions themselves, and the
Princeps of a Republic, as was Octavius, became, in the persons of
Diocletian and Constantine, an Oriental monarch. Rome, by the
discipline of its legions, by the mingled severity and generosity of its
rule, by the justice of its legislation, had conquered the East. Eastern
thought, wedded to Hellenism, was in its turn subjugating the Empire.
Its religions had their share in the conquest.
Among those Oriental faiths which spread themselves over civilised
Europe some were much more popular than others. All entered the
Empire at an early date and won their way very slowly at first. Most
of them seem to have made some alliance with the survivals of such
Greek mysteries as those of Eleusis and of Dionysos. All of them, save
that of Mithras, had been affected and to some extent changed by
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Oriental Religions
Hellenism before they entered into the full light of history in the beginning
of the third century.
From Asia Minor came the worship of Cybele with its hymns and
dances, its mysterious ideas of a deity dying to live again, its frenzies and
trances, its soothsayings, and its blood-baths of purification and sanctifica-
tion. From Syria came the cult of the Dea Syra, described by Lucian the
sceptic, with its sacred prostitutions, its more than hints of human
sacrifices, its mystics and its pillar saints. Persia sent forth the worship
of Mithras, with its initiations, its sacraments, its mysteries and the
stern discipline which made it a favourite religion among the Roman
legionaries. Egypt gave
Egypt gave birth to many a cult.
cult. Chief among them was •
the worship of Isis. Before the end of the second century it had far
outstripped Christianity and could boast of its thousands where the
religion of the Cross could only number hundreds. It had penetrated
everywhere, even to far-off Britain. A ring bearing the figure of the
goddess' constant companion, the dog-headed Anubis, has been discovered
in a grave in the Isle of Man. Votaries of Isis could be found from
the Roman Wall to Land's End.
The worship of Isis may be taken as a type of those Oriental faiths
before whose presence the official gods of Olympus were receding into the
background. The cult had a body of clergy, highly organised, a book
of prayers, a code of liturgical actions, a tonsure, vestments, and an
elaborate impressive ceremonial. The inner circle of its devotees were
called “the religious," like the monks of the Middle Ages; those who
were altogether outside the faith were termed “pagans"; the service of
the goddess was a “holy war," and her worshippers of all grades were
banded together in a “militia. " Apuleius, himself converted to the faith,
has, in his Metamorphoses, described its ceremonies of worship and
enabled us to see how desires after a better life drew men like himself to
reverence the deity and enrol himself among her followers. He has
described, with a vividness that makes us see them, the stately processions
which moved with deliberate pace through the crowded narrow streets of
oriental towns, and drew after them to the temple many a hitherto
unattached inquirer. We can enter the temple with him and listen to
the solemn exhortation of the high-priest; hear him dwell upon the past
sins and follies of the neophyte and the unfailing goodness and mercy of
the goddess whose eyes had followed him through them all and who now
waited to receive him if he truly desired to become her disciple and
worshipper. The initiation was a secret rite and Apuleius is careful not
to profane it by description; but we learn that there was a baptism, a
fast of ten days, a course of priestly instruction, sponsors given to the
neophyte, and, in the evening, a reception of the new brother by the
congregation, when every one greeted him kindly and presented him with
some small gift. We can penetrate with him into the secret chamber
reserved for the higher initiation where he was taught that he would
а


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Oriental Religions
91
endure a voluntary death which he was to look upon as the gateway into
a higher and better life. We can dimly see him excited with wild
anticipations, dizzy with protracted fasting, almost suffocated by surging
vapours, blinded by sudden and unexpected flashes of light, undergo his
hypnotic trance during which he saw unutterable things. “I trod the
confines of death and the threshold of Proserpine; I was swept round all
the elements and back again; I saw the sun shining at midnight in purest
radiance; gods of heaven and gods of hell I saw face to face and adored
in presence. " We can understand how such an hypnotic trance marked
a man for life.
Isis worship, humanised by Hellenism, extracted from the crude wild
legends of Egypt the thought of a suffering and all-merciful Mother-
Goddess who yearned to ease the woes of mankind. It raised the
beast-gods of the Nile and the tales about them into emblems and
parables. It captured the common man by its thaumaturgy. For the
more cultured intelligences it had a more sublime theology which appealed
to the philosophy of the day. In all this it was a type, perhaps the
best, of those Oriental cults which were permeating the Empire.
All those religions, whatever their special form of teaching or variety
of cult, brought with them thoughts foreign to the old official worships
of Greece and Rome; though not altogether strange to the Mysteries
which had for long been the real people's religion in Greece nor to the
cult of Dionysos which in various forms had preserved its vitality.
They taught (or perhaps it would be more correct to say that the
action of the subtle Greek intellect, playing upon the crude ideas which
these Oriental religions presented to it, evolved from them) a series of
religious conceptions foreign to the old paganism, and these became
| common parts of the newer non-Christian intelligence which was powerful
in the third and fourth centuries.
A sharp distinction, much more definite than anything previous, was
drawn between the soul and the body. The soul belonged to a different
sphere and was more estimable than the body. The former was the
inhabitant of a higher and better world and was therefore immortal.
The thoughts of individuality and personality became much clearer.
In the same way the thoughts of Godhead as a whole and of the
world as a whole-conceptions scarcely separate before—were distin-
guished more or less clearly. Godhead became what the world was not,
and yet Something good and great Which was the primal basis of all
things.
The earlier philosophical depreciation of the world of matter became
more emphatic, and raised the question whether the creation of the
he?
whole material world and of the body which belonged to it was not after
all a mistake; whether the body was not a prison or at least a house of
correction in which the soul was grievously detained; whether the soul
could
become what it really was until it had undergone a deliverance
a
ever
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92
The New Paganism
from the body. Such deliverance was called salvation, and much
practical thinking was expended on the proper means of effecting it.
Might not knowledge and the means it suggested of living purely or
with as little bodily contamination as possible while this life lasted, be
the beginnings of entrance into the real and eternal life of the soul ?
Was it not most likely that souls had been gradually confined in bodies,
and must not the process of delivery be gradual also ? The gradual
Way of Return to God became a feature in almost all those Eastern cults,
by whatever means they sought to accomplish it.
Perhaps however the most novel thought was the conviction that
something more than knowledge, beyond any means of living purely
which human wisdom could suggest, something outside man and belong-
ling to the sphere of divinity, was needed to start the soul on this gradual
Way of Return and sustain his faltering footsteps along the difficult
path. Contact with the Godhead was needed to save and redeem.
Such contact was to be found in a consecration (mysterium, sacramentum,
initiation) wherein the soul, in some hypnotic trance, was possessed by
the deity who overpowered it and for ever afterwards led it step by step
along the path of salvation or Way of Return. Perhaps something more
than any such consecration was needed ; might not some surer way be
found if only diligently sought for? It might be in one of the older
cults whose inner meaning had never been rightly understood; or in some
mystery not yet completely accessible; or in a divinely commissioned man
who had not yet appeared. It might even be found within the soul
itself, if men could only discover and use the true powers of the human
soul (Higher Thought). At all events it was held that true religion
really implied a detachment from the world, and included a strict
discipline of soul and body while life lasted.
Such a paganism was very different from the polytheism with its
furred, feathered and scaly deities which first confronted Christianity and
was attacked by the early Christian apologists. The later ones recognised
its power. Firmicus Maternus, writing in the time of Constantine, dismisses
with good-humoured scorn the deities of Olympus and their myths, but
criticises with thorough earnestness the Oriental religions. It had, in
spite of its external multiformity, a natural cohesion in virtue of the
circle of common thoughts above described. It hardly deserves the name
of polytheism; for its idea of one abstract divinity, separate from the
world of matter, made it monotheism of a kind; and evidence shews that
its votaries regarded Isis, Cybele and the rest more as the representa-
tives and impersonations of the one godhead than as individual deities.
Inscriptions from tombstones reveal that worshippers did not attach
themselves to one cult exclusively. The varying forms of initiation
were all separate methods of attaining to union with the one divinity,
the different ceremonies of purification were all ways of reaching the
same end, and, as one might succeed where another failed, they could be
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The New Paganism
93
all tried impartially. Just as we find men and women in the beginning of
the sixteenth century enrolling themselves in several religious associations
of different kinds (witness Dr Pfeffinger, a member of thirty-two religious
confraternities), so in the third and fourth centuries members of both
sexes were initiated into several cults and performed the lustrations
prescribed by very different worships, in order to miss no chance of union
with divinity and to leave no means of purification and sanctification
untried. The tombstone of Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, the friend of
Symmachus, who took part in the Saturnalia of Macrobius, records that
he had been initiated into several cults and that he had performed the
taurobolium. His wife, Aconia Paulina, was more indefatigable still.
This lady, a member of the exclusive circle of the old pagan nobility of
Rome, went to Eleusis and was initiated with baptism, fasting, vigil,
hymn-singing into the several mysteries of Dionysos, of Ceres and Koré.
Not content with these, she went on to Lerna and sought communion with
the same three deities in different rites of initiation. She travelled to
Aegina, was again initiated, slept or waked in the porches of the small
temples there in the hope that the divinities of the place in dream or
waking vision might communicate to her their way of salvation. She
became a hierophant of Hecate with still different and more dreaded
rites of consecration. Finally, like her husband, she submitted herself to
the dreadful, and to us disgusting, purification won in the taurobolium.
A great pit was dug into which the neophyte descended naked; it was
covered with stout planks placed about an inch apart; a young bull was led
or forced upon the planks; it was stabbed by the officiating priest in such
a way that the thrust was mortal and that the blood might flow as freely
as possible. As the blood poured down on the planks and dripped into
the pit the neophyte moved backwards and forwards to receive as much as-
possible of the red warm shower and remained until every drop had
ceased to drip. Inscription after inscription records the fact that the
deceased had been a tauroboliatus or a tauroboliata, had gone through this
blood-bath in search of sanctification. Evidence from inscriptions seems
to shew that in the declining days of paganism, the energy of its votaries
drove them in greater numbers to accumulate initiations and to undergo
the more severe rites of purification.
This multiform and yet homogeneous paganism had the further
support of a system of philosophy expounded and enforced by the
greatest non-Christian thinkers of the age. Neoplatonism, the last
birth of Hellenic thought, not without traces of Oriental parentage, has
the look of a philosophy of hesitation and expectancy. It had lost the
firm tread of Plato and Aristotle, and feared that the human intelligence
unaided could not penetrate and explain all things. The intellectual
faculty of man was reduced to something intermediate between mere
sense perception and some vague intuition of the supernatural, and the
whole energy of the movement was concentrated on discovering the
CH, TP.


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94
Neoplatonism and Christianity
means to follow out this intuition and to attain by it not only com-
munion but union with what was completely and externally divine.
Its great thinker was Plotinus (d. 269). His disciples Porphyry
(233–304) and lamblichus (d. circa 330) made it the basis and buttress of
paganism when it was fighting for its life against a conquering Christianity.
If the Universe of things seen and unseen be an emanation from
Absolute Being, the Primal Cause of all things, the fountain from which
all existence flows and the haven to which everything that has reality in
it will return when its cycle is complete, then every heathen deity has its
place in this flow of existence. Its cult, however crude, is an obscure
witness to the presence of the intuition of the supernatural. The legends
which have gathered round its name, if only rightly understood, are
mystic revelations of the divine which permeates all things. Its initia-
tions and rites of purification are all meant to help the soul on the same
path of return by which it completes its cycle of wanderings. The new
paganism can be represented to be the collected flower and fruit of all
the older faiths presented and ready to satisfy the deeper desires of the
spirit of man. Neoplatonism could present itself as a naturalistic,
rational polytheism, retaining all the old structures of tradition, of thought
and of social organisation. The “common man” was not asked to forsake
the deities he was wont to reverence. The Roman was not required to
despise the gods who, as his forefathers believed, had led them to the
conquest of the world. The cultured Hellenist was taught to overstep,
without disturbing, creeds which for him were worn out and to seek and
find communion with the Divine which lies behind all gods. The very
conjuror was encouraged to cultivate his magic. Pantheism, that
wonder-child of thought and of the phantasy, included all within the
wide sweep of its sheltering arms and made them feel the claim of a
common kinship. Jesus Himself, had His followers allowed, might have
had a place between Dionysos and Isis ; but Christianity, which according
to Porphyry had departed widely from the simple teaching of the mystic
of Galilee, was sternly excluded from the Neoplatonist brotherhood of
religions. Its idea of a creation in time seemed irreligious to Porphyry;
its doctrine of the Incarnation introduced a false conception of the
union between God and the world; its teaching about the end of all
things he thought both irreverent and irreligious; above all things its
claim to be the one religion, its exclusiveness, was hateful to him. He
was too noble a man (philosophus nobilis, says Augustine) not to
sympathise with much in Christianity, and seems to have appreciated
it more and more in his later writings. Still his opinion remained
unchanged: “The gods have declared Christ to have been most pious ;
he has become immortal, and by them his memory is cherished.
Whereas the Christians are a polluted set, contaminated and enmeshed
in error. ” Christianity was the one religion to be fought against and if
possible conquered.
I


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The growing strength of Christianity
95
What Neoplatonism did theoretically the force of circumstances
accomplished on the practical side. The Oriental creeds had not merely
gained multitudes of private worshippers ; they had forced their way
among the public deities of Rome. Isis, Mithra, Sol Invictus, Dea
Syra, the Great Mother, took their places alongside of Jupiter, Venus,
Mars, etc. , and the Sacra peregrina appeared on the calendar of public
festivals. As most of these Oriental cults contained within them the
monotheist idea it is possible that they might have fought for pre-
eminence and each aspired to become the official religion of the Empire.
But they all recognised Christianity to be a common danger, and
M. Cumont has shewn that this feeling united them and made them
think and act as one.
Such was the paganism which faced Christianity in the fourth
century-a marvellous mixture of philosophy and religion, not without
grandeur and nobility of thought, feeling keenly the unity of nature,
the essential kinship of man with the Divine, and knowing something of
the yearning in man's heart for redemption and for communion with
God. It was able to fascinate and enthral many of the keenest intellects
and loftiest natures of the time. It laid hold on Julian.
Christianity was the common opponent of all these cults. It had
entered the field last and seemed easily outstripped in the race. In its
beginning it was but a ripple on the surface of a Galilaean lake. Now,
in the fourth century, it had compelled Imperial recognition and alliance.
In strength and in weakness its claim had been always the same. It
was the one, the only true, the universal religion.
,
From its beginning it had never lacked at least a few wealthy and
cultured adherents, but during the first two centuries the overwhelming
majority of its converts had come from the poorer classes—slaves,
freedmen, labourers. It had early drawn upon itself the contempt of
society and the hatred of the populace. It was held to be something
inhuman. Its votaries were “ the third race. They had all the un-
social vices of the Jews and even worse vices of their own. Christians
had appropriated the epithet Aung at them in scorn. They were “ the
third race," a peculiar people, separate from the rest of mankind, a
natio by themselves.
The last decade of the second century witnessed the beginnings of a
change. Men of all ranks and classes became converts-members of the
.
Senatorial and Equestrian Orders, distinguished pleaders, physicians,
officers in the army, officials in the civil service, judges, even governors
of provinces. Their wives, sisters and daughters accompanied or more
frequently preceded them. Then the tone of society began to change,
gradually and insensibly. Scorn and contempt gave place to feelings of
toleration. Before the end of the third century no one gave credit to
the old scandalous reproaches which had been Hung at the followers of
Jesus, even when an Emperor tried to revive them. Statesmen were
99
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96 (#126) #############################################

96
The growing strength of Christianity
a
compelled to consider the movement-not now because it affected a
town or a province, but as something pervading the Empire. They
found that it possessed two characteristics which were enormous sources
of strength-a peculiar power of assimilation and a compact organisation.
From the first Christianity had proclaimed that the whole life of
man belonged to it. This meant that everything that made man's life
wider, deeper, fuller; whatever made it more joyous or contented;
whatever sharpened the brain, strengthened and taught the muscles,
gave full play to man's energies, could be taken up into and become
part of the Christian life. Sin and foulness were sternly excluded; but,
that done, there was no element of the Graeco-Roman civilisation which
could not be appropriated by Christianity. So it assimilated Hellenism
or the fine flower and fruit of Greek thought and feeling; it appro-
priated Roman law and institutions; it made its own the simple festivals
of the common people. All were theirs; and they were Christ's ; and
Christ was God's.
Then the Christian churches were compactly organised. Their polity
had been a natural growth. Its power of assimilation had enabled
Christianity to absorb what was best in Roman civil and temple organi-
sation, to exclude the worst elements of the bureaucracy, and to preserve
much democratic popular life. Its local rulers belonged to the people
they at once ruled and served. No over-centralisation crushed the local
and provincial life. Christian societies formed themselves into groups,
more or less compact, and made use of the synod to effect the grouping.
One common life throbbed through the network of synods. The feeling
of brotherhood did not exhaust itself in sentiment. If one part were
attacked all the others were swift to help. Nothing within the Empire
save the army could compare with the compact organisation of the
Christian Church.
In the middle of the third century the Emperor and the Empire
learnt to dread this organised force within their midst. The despised
" third race" had become indeed a natio within the Empire. The
first impulse was to exterminate what seemed to be a source of danger.
One well-organised universal persecution followed another. From each
Christianity emerged with sadly diminished numbers (for the lapsed
were always a larger body than the martyrs), but with spirit unbroken
and with organisation intact and usually strengthened.
/
Constantine himself had watched the last, the most prolonged and
relentless of all—that under Diocletian and his successors—and had
marked its failure. From his entrance into public life he made it plain
that, while his rivals clung to the method of repression, he had com-
pletely abandoned it. Christianity won toleration and then Imperial
patronage.
It cannot have been difficult for Constantine to carry out his policy
towards the Christian religion. We cannot ascertain the proportion of


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337–361]
Legislation against Paganism
97
Christians to pagans at the close of the second decade of the fourth
century, but it may be assumed that, when their organisation is taken
into account, they were able to control public opinion in the most
populous and important provinces of the Empire. All he had to do
was to let the leading provinces have the religion they desired”; the
rest of the Empire would follow in their wake. He was content
to adopt the principle of toleration ; though for himself Christi-
anity became more and more the one religion in which “crowning
reverence is observed towards the holiest powers of heaven. ” He
probably carried the public opinion of the Empire with him. The
paganism of the fourth century was for the most part quiet and desired
only to be left in peace. Perhaps Ammianus Marcellinus, himself a
pagan, expressed the general opinion of his co-religionists when he
praised the Emperor Valentinian because he tolerated all creeds, gave
no orders that any one divinity should be worshipped, and did not
strive to bend the necks of his subjects to adore what he did.
The sons of Constantine changed all this. They proposed to destroy
paganism by legislation. Their laws, doubtless, inflicted much injury on
individual pagans, and, in the hands of such unprincipled Imperial
sycophants as Paulus and Mercurius, were the pretexts for many exe-
cutions, banishments and confiscation of goods; but they remained
inoperative in all the greater pagan centres. The worship of the gods
went on as before in Rome, Alexandria, Heliopolis and in many
other
cities. But they could not fail to irritate. If the laws were inoperative,
they remained to threaten. Proposed destruction of temples and pro-
hibition of heathen ceremonies meant in many cases the abandonment of
the games and spectacles to which the careless multitude were strongly
attached.
Scholars saw in the advancing power of the Church the
destruction of the old learning which gave its charm to their lives.
Christianity itself, troubled by the meddling of the heads of the State,
seemed to be rent in pieces by its controversies, to have lost its original
purity and simplicity, and to have degenerated into “old-wife superstitions”
(Ammianus). So wherever paganism abounded, and in places too where
it only lingered, there was a general feeling of discontent ready to
welcome the first signs of a reaction and eagerly listening to whispers
that the last of the race of Constantine, if he lived to assume the
Imperial purple, would undo what his kinsmen had accomplished.
At the death of Constantine his nephew, Flavius Claudius Julianus,
was six years old. The child escaped, almost by accident, the massacre
of his family connived at if not ordered by Constantius. He lived for
more than twenty years in constant peril, in the power of that suspicious
cousin who scarcely knew whether he wished to slay or to spare him,
He was kept secluded, now in one or other of the great cities of the
East, for long in a palace far from the haunts of men, solacing himself
with hard uninterrupted studies. Then for seven brief years he startled
7
9
C. MED. H. VOL. I. CH. IV.


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98
Julian's Youth and Education
[332–344
а
the Roman world by his meteor-like career, and died from wounds
received in battle against the Persians at the age of thirty-two. Two
things about him filled the imagination of his contemporaries and have
drawn the attention of succeeding generations: that he a recluse, suddenly
snatched from his loved studies in poetry and philosophy, proved himself
all at once not merely an intrepid soldier but a skilful general, and a
born leader of men ; and that he, a baptised Christian, who had actually
been accustomed to read the lessons at public worship, threw off like a
mask the Christianity he had professed and spent the last years of his
short life in a feverish attempt to restore the old and expiring paganism.
It is this last fact that made him the object of undying hate and
unconquerable love to his contemporaries, and still excites the interest
of mankind.
His own writings which have survived make it plain that from his
earliest years he looked at Christianity and Christians through the
blood-red mist of the massacre of his relations—father, brother, uncles,
cousins. His education did little to remove the impression. The lonely
imaginative, lovable child had never known his mother's care, but he
inherited her fondness for Homer, Hesiod, and the masters of Greek
poetry. Mardonius, who had been his mother's tutor, was his also,
and the boy went through the same course of study. The tutor was
passionately fond of Greek literature and especially of Homer, and he
imbued mother and son with his own tastes. For the rest he was
something of a martinet. The young Julian had the strictest moral
training and never forgot those early lessons. He was taught to be
temperate and self-restrained; to look with dislike on pantomimes,
races, and the other more or less licentious amusements of the populace.
His tutor made him read in Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus and other
pagan moralists, and was unwearied in enforcing pure living after these
examples of antiquity. Julian was all his life a puritan pagan, and this
puritanism of his was perhaps his greatest obstacle in accomplishing the
task to which he subsequently dedicated himself. He never entered
a theatre save when he was commanded to do so by the Emperor, and
was seldom on a race-course in his life. He was naturally a dreamy,
sensitive child, full of yearning fancies, which he kept to himself. He
tells us that from early boyhood he felt a strange elevation of soul when
he watched the sun and saw it dispensing light and heat; that he
worshipped the stars and understood their whispered thoughts. He
was filled with enthusiasm for everything Greek and the very word
Hellas sent a thrill through him when he pronounced it. Seven years
were spent under the care of the kindly, stern preceptor, and the impress
they made was lasting.
In 344 Constantius suddenly sent Julian into obscurity. His
elder brother, Gallus, who had escaped the massacre of 337 because he
was so sickly that he was not expected to live, accompanied him. They


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344–355]
Julian's Youth and Education
99
were sent to Macellum, a palace in a remote part of Cappadocia,
splendid enough with its baths, its springs and its gardens, but which
Julian looked upon as a prison. There he was supplied with teachers
in abundance, Christian clergy who were supposed to teach the faith to
the young princes, and from whose instructions Julian doubtless acquired
that superficial knowledge of the Scriptures he afterwards shewed that
he possessed. Books were granted him, and he seems to have been
permitted to send to Alexandria for what Greek literature he desired.
He mentions specially volumes from the library of Bishop George
because, along with many treatises on Christianity for which he did
not care, they included the writings of philosophers and rhetoricians.
But he bitterly complained that neither he nor his brother were allowed
to see any suitable companions, and he believed that all their attendants
were imperial spies. The boy, reserved before, shrank further into
himself. Outwardly he was a pattern of devotion. He received
Christian instruction ; was taught the “evidences of Christianity” and
used the knowledge later to expose its weaknesses; was trained to give
alms, to observe fasts, to venerate the shrines of saints to the extent of
aiding to build them with his own hands; and occasionally to officiate
as reader at public worship. Privately he fed his mind on the lessons of
Mardonius and studied such books of philosophy and rhetoric as he could
command. Ammianus Marcellinus, who knew him well, says that from
his early years he felt attracted to the worship of the gods.
After six years in the gilded prison of Macellum the brothers were
summoned to ConstantinopleGallus to be made Caesar or Vice-
Emperor, to misgovern frightfully the province entrusted to his care,
and in consequence to meet a not undeserved death, though to his
brother it was another crime to be charged against Constantius, a
Christian and the murderer of kinsmen; Julian to meet soon the
supreme moment of his religious life. He was set at first to pursue his
studies in the capital city and the scholar appointed to take charge of
him was Hecebolius, the fourth century Vicar of Bray, whose religion
was always that of the reigning Emperor. But too many admiring
eyes followed the princely student, and Constantius ordered him to
Nicomedia, the centre of the cultured paganism of the East and the
home of its acknowledged leader, the great rhetorician Libanius. Julian
had promised not to attend the lectures of Libanius; he kept his pledge
in the letter and broke it in the spirit. He got notes written out for
him and pored over them day and night. But more important than all
lectures was the intercourse with men such as he had never met before.
At Nicomedia, Julian first came in touch with those for whom the old
gods were living, who had the gift of "seers," to whom prophecies and
prodigies were matters of fact. He saw and conversed with men who
easy access to the ears of the gods,” who could“
command
winds, waves and earthquakes. " He knew Aedesius who was said to
>
“ had
CH. .
7-2


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100
Julian's Youth and Education
[355
receive oracles from the deities by night, and whose wife Sosipatra had
“lived from girlhood amid prodigies of all kinds. " He was told
of the wonderful séances presided over by Maximus and of the marvels
which occurred at them. This Maximus was one of the most cele-
brated theurgics or “mediums” of fourth century Neoplatonism. His
favourite occupation, he said, was to live in constant communion with the
gods. He had long white hair, brilliant magnetic eyes, and his disciples
boasted that his influence was irresistible over all those with whom he
came in contact. Eusebius of Myndus, also a Neoplatonist, told Julian
of his powers. “He made a number of us descend into the temple of
Hecate. There he saluted the goddess. Then he said: "Be seated,
friends, see what happens, then judge whether I am not superior to
most men. ' We all sat down. He burnt a grain of incense and chanted
a whole hymn in a low voice. The statue began to smile, then to laugh.
We were afraid at the sight. "Do not be alarmed," he said, 'you will
see that the lamps which the goddess holds in her hands will light of
themselves. ' As he spoke the light streamed from the lamps. ” Julian
eagerly begged to be introduced to the man who was so powerful with
the gods, and Maximus was even more ready to gain one who stood so
near the Imperial throne. No accounts survive of the spiritualistic séances
at which he assisted ; but their effect on the nervous, sensitive young
man was irresistible. Maximus converted him heart and soul to the
new paganism and was the confidential adviser of Julian from that time
onwards. The young man entered into a new life. The religion which
Homer and Hesiod had sung, which Plato and Aristotle had speculated
upon, which he had known as a student from books, became all at once
living to him. His day-dreams of the past vanished, or rather changed
into an actual present. The passion for Greece which had gradually
grown to be the ruling force in his character had now the support of
every-day experience. The gods sung by the old Greek poets, and
many a passionate Oriental deity unknown to them, could be seen and
their presence felt. He could himself have communion with them
through mysterious rites of divination. They had created the noblest
thing on earth, Greek civilisation; they were even now moulding and
controlling events; they could give courage and inspiration to their
votaries. From his sojourn at Nicomedia onwards, Julian believed
that all his actions were determined by divine voices which he heard
and obeyed. This natural religion was not the crude polytheism his
Christian teachers had said. Hellenism had made it a unity. A great
First Cause, the Father and King of all men, had parcelled out the lands
and peoples among the deities, His viceroys. They were the real rulers
of provinces and cities and governed them according to their natural
habits and dispositions. What was Christianity when compared with
this ancient and universal worship, supported by the wealth of civilisa-
tio which had come down from the past ? It was a cult of barbarian


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355]
Julian made Caesar
101
origin, born in an obscure province, ignorant of Hellenic culture, its
very Scriptures written in a barbarous Greek offensive to the ears of
educated men. Was Greece to abdicate in favour of Galilee? Perish
the thought! So Julian believed, and longed to steep himself in
Hellenism at its purest source—the Schools at Athens.
He gained his wish through the sisterly kindness of the Empress
Eusebia. At Athens, as at all the schools of higher learning, the
majority of the teachers were pagans, and Julian with more than his
usual eagerness devoted himself to their lectures and to all the benefits
of the place. “He was continually seen surrounded by crowds of youths,
old men, philosophers and rhetoricians. ” Outwardly he was still a
Christian, for his life depended on his conformity to the Imperial creed;
but inwardly he had consecrated himself heart and soul to paganism, had
already become conscious that he had a divine mission, and that he was
a favourite of the gods. The double life he had to live, the knowledge
that he was surrounded by spies ready to report anything compromising
to his Imperial cousin, must have acted upon his naturally nervous and
emotional temperament and betrayed itself in many outward ways. His
portrait drawn by a fellow-student, Gregory of Nazianzus, though the
work of an enemy, needs only a little toning down-twitching shoulders,
eyes glancing from side to side, something conceited in nostrils and
face, feet that were never still, hasty laugh, sentences begun and never
finished, irrelevant answers. Julian had more to do at Athens than
study philosophy; he had to penetrate to the centre of Greek religion.
He was secretly initiated into the ancient mysteries of Eleusis; and
there are hints of other initiations either there or afterwards-of the
worship of Mithras, of the purifying rite of the taurobolium.
Constantius was childless—the punishment of the gods whose temples
he had despoiled, said the pagans ; a retribution for the slaughter of his
kinsmen, his own conscience sometimes whispered. The needs of the
Empire demanded assistance. It is hard to say whether the Emperor or
the student was the more unwilling, the one to summon and the other to
obey the call. Julian was ordered to Milan where the Court was. He
was made Caesar, was married to Helena, the Emperor's sister, and was
sent to Gaul to protect the province from invading Germans. The
recluse bookworm, the man whose emotional nature had succumbed
without suspicion to the suggestions of spiritualist séances, was suddenly
confronted with one of the hardest tasks that practical life could offer.
He had to restore a half-ruined province and to overcome an enemy
grown bold by success.
He was totally ignorant of the arts of war and
of administration. It need not cause surprise that he proved an intrepid
soldier. He was the last of a race of warriors, and the blood spoke. His
studies had taught him the need of concentration and thoroughness; he
set himself to learn and speedily mastered the elements of drill and
discipline. But what the world did wonder at was that, hampered as he
CH. .


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102
Julian declares himself a Pagan
[355–361
was by the assistants whom the jealousy of the Emperor had forced upon
him, he shewed himself a general who defeated his foes as much by
strategy as by fighting.
The Germans had been driven back; the administration of Gaul was
improved and its finances reformed, when the legions, irritated at com-
mands from the distant Emperor, mutinied and called upon their general
to assume the purple (Jan. 360). After long hesitation Julian consented.
It meant civil war. But the gods encouraged him, his mission called
him, the soldiers rallied round him, and he marched against Constantius.
There was no battle. Constantius died before the armies met, and
Julian became sole ruler over the Roman Empire.
During the whole of Julian's five years' stay in Gaul he publicly pro-
fessed the Christian religion which privately he had repudiated. He
allowed his name to be attached to the persecuting edicts of Constantius,
while in secret he began the day with a prayer to Hermes.
His
dissimulation went the length of joining with Constantius in threatening
anyone with torture who took part in the very ceremonies of divination
which he himself was all the while practising in private. The only
trace of his real feelings is that no Christian emblems appear on the
coins which he struck in Gaul. This double life did not cease when he
assumed the purple. He ostentatiously joined in the public devotions of
the people during the festival of Epiphany (361), while in private he was
practising all manner of secret incantations and divinations aided by an
adept in the mysteries of Eleusis. It may be that he waited until he was
sure of the sympathies of the army. He seems to have taken care that
most of the soldiers who followed him from Gaul were pagans; and
that the Christian troops were left behind to guard the province. At
all events it was not until he reached Sirmium on the lower Danube,
where the magistrates, citizens and soldiers received him with acclama-
tions, that he declared himself a pagan, and could write to Maximus:
“We worship the gods openly; most of the soldiers who follow me
reverence them! We have thanked the gods in the sight of men
with many hecatombs. ” He entered Constantinople a professed pagan,
believing himself commissioned by the gods to restore the ancient religion,
a Dionysos and a Hercules in one, the prophet and king of a pagan
revival.
In his treatment of Christianity he believed that he shewed
impartiality and refrained from persecution, and, if due allowance be
made for his private hatred of those whom he contemptuously called
Galilaeans, it is possible to believe that he was sincere in his pro-
fessions.
His first act was to issue an edict permitting all bishops, exiled by
Constantius for their attachment to the Nicene theology, to return and
resume possession of their confiscated property but not their sees. More
than once the leaders, clerical and laic, of the various parties into which


## p. 103 (#133) ############################################

361–363]
Julian's treatment of Christianity
103
a
were to cease.
Christianity was then divided, were summoned to his palace and told
that they were at liberty to follow and advocate any form of belief they
pleased. Ammianus Marcellinus, himself a pagan and a devoted admirer
of Julian, declares that the Emperor did this in the firm belief that the
Christians were so thoroughly divided that this liberty would end in their
destroying each other by their mutual quarrels. If so the intention
shews how little Julian understood the faith he despised. The bishops
who had thronged the antechambers of Constantius and used backstairs
intrigues against their rivals were very poor specimens of Christianity.
The freedom of discussion which Julian permitted, the absence of
Imperial interference, were the means of uniting not destroying the
Church.
The greater part of the Emperor's edicts against Christianity were
undoubtedly meant by him to make restitution to paganism and to the
State of property and privileges which had been wrongly bestowed. The
churches were commanded to restore the temple-sites and lands which had
been given them for ecclesiastical purposes. If churches had been erected
they were ordered to be demolished and the temples rebuilt at the
expense of the Christians.
The clergy and Christian poor had been
granted sums of money from municipal treasuries; and these grants
Constantine's legislation had given to the Christian
clergy privileges enjoyed by the heathen priesthood. To Julian's mind
paganism was the religion of the State and alone it carried privileges
with it. So the special laws guaranteeing to the Church rights of,
inheritance, and laws exempting the clergy from personal taxation and
freeing them from the obligation to serve on municipal councils, were
abrogated.
Ammianus Marcellinus probably expresses the popular
opinion when he declares that this legislation, however just in theory,
was harsh in practice from its cumulative weight and the haste with which
it was enforced.
No edict of Julian's excited the indignation of the Christians so
thoroughly as that upon education. It enacted that no Christian was to
be allowed to teach in schools where the literature of Greece and Rome
formed the basis of education; that all teachers must expound and insist
upon the religion of the authors studied; but that Christian children
might attend the schools. Perhaps the Emperor's reasons for his legisla-
tion increased their wrath; for pedantry is more irritating than force,
and Julian's pedantic nature is displayed in his reasonings. “Homer,
Hesiod, Demosthenes, Thucydides, Isocrates, Lysias, all founded their
learning on the gods. Did not some of them believe themselves to be
consecrated to Hermes and others to the muses ? It seems therefore
absurd to me that those who explain their works should not worship the
gods they reverenced. ” He did not like to remember that Mardonius,
his own honoured teacher, had been a Christian. His fixed idea was
that Christianity could have no connexion with Hellenic thought or
.
CH, IP.


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104
Julian's treatment of Christians
(361–363
civilisation, that its affectation of interest in ancient Greek literature was
hypocrisy, and that it was his duty as ruler to keep men from occasions
of practising such a vice. From one point of view the edict seemed to
affect the Christians but slightly.