THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 058
The Apostate Unveiled
4-9. The Apostate Unveiled
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 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 seances, 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 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 commands 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 professed 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 acclamations, 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 professions.
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 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. Ammiamis 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 shows 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 were to cease. Constantino'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.
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