How Apostate Was Julian?

In the 21 Feb. 2019 issue of the London Review of Books, there is a long and fascinating review of H. C. Teitler's recent book, The Last Pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate and the War against Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2017), 312pp.

What I find fascinating is how--according, that is, to the reviewer, Christopher Kelly, master of Corpus Christi College at Cambridge--Teitler's book demonstrates the extent to which the things said of Julian were largely invented after his brief twenty months on the imperial throne by a re-ascendant Christianity, whose propensity for triumphalist and tendentious constructions of history has in some ways remained undimmed from then until now. The uses and abuses of historical memory, about which I have written so often, are not inventions of the twentieth century, but seem to be built into the human condition. We all want to find patterns in the past, and if they need to be finessed a bit to become patterns in which our enemies turn out to be justly slayed losers, and our tribe glorious victors and moral heroes, then fiat iustitia. 

Julian was not held in great favor even by non-Christians, many of whom regarded him as something of a crank and loser. He seems to have had the common fetish among those of his class for esoterical and ascetical labors proving superior discipline of character over the obese peasants. So when it came time to traduce his reputation it was not a hard sell. As Kelly ends his review, "for a Christianity triumphant, the invention of 'Julian the Apostate' was a godsend."

Julian the Apostate

Evelyn Waugh's satirical portrait of the Emperor Constantine, noted here, is a wonderful mockery of the tendency of some Christians to glamorize the "co-equal to the apostles." No such mockery is necessary for, nor does that grandiose title apply to, one of Constantine's near successors, treated in a new book by H.C. Teitler: The Last Pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate and the War against Christianity (Oxford UP, 2017), 312pp.

About this new study the publisher tells us this:

Flavius Claudius Julianus was the last pagan to sit on the Roman imperial throne (361-363). Born in Constantinople in 331 or 332, Julian was raised as a Christian, but apostatized, and during his short reign tried to revive paganism, which, after the conversion to Christianity of his uncle Constantine the Great early in the fourth century, began losing ground at an accelerating pace. Having become an orphan when he was still very young, Julian was taken care of by his cousin Constantius II, one of Constantine's sons, who permitted him to study rhetoric and philosophy and even made him co-emperor in 355. But the relations between Julian and Constantius were strained from the beginning, and it was only Constantius' sudden death in 361 which prevented an impending civil war.

As sole emperor, Julian restored the worship of the traditional gods. He opened pagan temples again, reintroduced animal sacrifices, and propagated paganism through both the spoken and the written word. In his treatise Against the Galilaeans he sharply criticised the religion of the followers of Jesus whom he disparagingly called 'Galilaeans'. He put his words into action, and issued laws which were displeasing to Christians--the most notorious being his School Edict. This provoked the anger of the Christians, who reacted fiercely, and accused Julian of being a persecutor like his predecessors Nero, Decius, and Diocletian. Violent conflicts between pagans and Christians made themselves felt all over the empire. It is disputed whether or not Julian himself was behind such outbursts. Accusations against the Apostate continued to be uttered even after the emperor's early death. In this book, the feasibility of such charges is examined.