Pagans under the Emperor Julian
Creators: name: Swist, Jeremy
Publisher: name: Database of Religious History (DRH)
Year: 2022

description: Practitioners of traditional, indigenous, and non-Abrahamic religions and mystery cults under the Roman Empire, even during the brief reign of Julian (r. 361-363), were hardly a unified group, except in the mind of the emperor himself and his circle of intellectual elites. Although the term "pagan" originated as a Christian pejorative for non-Christian gentiles, it is more adequate than either "polytheist," which excludes non-Abrahamic monotheists, or "traditionalist," which erases groups that are relatively more recent than the familial and state cults of, for instance, Athens or Rome, i.e. Mithraists and Manichaeans. Individuals’ participation in religious practices, moreover, is not always consistent with inner convictions that are usually impossible to discern. Julian's religious beliefs and policies, nevertheless, attempted to integrate the rich diversity of Roman pagans into a single, artificial category in contradistinction to Christianity, which he regarded as an anti-religion, tantamount to atheism, that worshiped corpses rather than gods. Julian saw legitimate religions, Judaism included, as necessarily tied to ethnicity and geography. The "ethnic god" of each polis or ethnos accounted for their essential characteristics, e.g. the Romans were descended from Mars and so were warlike, while the Athenians inherited their philosophical tendencies from Athena. Julian called the Christians by the demonym "Galileans" in order to deny the religion's universality and restrict it to the ethnos of Jesus. As pontifex maximus and Hellenic Neoplatonist, the emperor not only treated Roman culture and religion as “from beginning to end, Greek;” he also placed all cults throughout the empire under his purview in a syncretic and henotheistic manner: every ethnic god was an emanation of the supreme god, which the emperor identified with the sun-god Helios. Basing his theology on the Neoplatonism of the Syrian Iamblichus of Chalcis, Julian’s Helios manifested itself in a triune hierarchy: at the top was Helios the King of All (pambasileus), which is “beyond being,” source of all being, and equal to the Plato’s Form of the Good and the One of Plotinus; King Helios (basileus) occupies the middle rank, the father of the gods and creator of the cosmos identified with Zeus and Plato’s Demiurge; lowest is the visible Sun, the conduit of Helios’ blessings upon the sensible cosmos. Julian and his inner circle also drew from Iamblichus the conviction that contact and spiritual union with Helios and the other gods cannot be achieved through intellectual contemplation (theoria) alone; divine blessings must be secured suprarationally through ritual practices such as prayer and blood sacrifice, while mystical ascent can be achieved only through the “hieratic art” of theurgy, in which the celebrant made suitable through purification participates in the “god-work” (theourgia) that sustains and renews the cosmos. In Julian’s quasi-ecclesiastical vision of ecumenical paganism, theurgists functioned as high priests over provincial congregations of local cults, and organized philanthropic relief of the poor and sick in competition with Christian charity. Although generally supportive of the emperor’s program of temple reconstruction, religious toleration, and redirection of imperial subsidies back to traditional cults, very few of the empire’s pagans shared their emperor’s radical vision. While the Iamblichean school of theurgic Neoplatonism persisted into the sixth century among pagan elites such as Proclus and Damascius at the Athenian Academy, in Julian’s day it was represented by a minority of philosophers. Even the majority of Neoplatonists were heirs more to Plotinus and Porphyry, who valued rational contemplation above ritual practice, and especially rejected blood offerings. Likewise, animal sacrifice had already been falling out of fashion by the fourth century, such that toothless prohibitions by Christian emperors such as Constantius II caused little trouble and did not extend to offerings of incense or cakes. On a political level, Julian’s ideological polarization of Christianity versus a united front of paganism rarely corresponded to reality. While the Altar of Victory that Constantius had removed from the Curia was restored under Julian, the largely traditionalist Roman Senate had not supported Julian’s revolt against Constantius, while the army’s initial choice of Julian’s coreligionist Salutius to succeed the dead emperor in 363, which Salutius refused such that the Christian Jovian was elevated instead, suggests that an emperor’s personal religious affiliation was not so high a priority. It is telling of general attitudes at the time that the pagan soldier turned historian who served in that fateful Persian campaign, Ammianus Marcellinus, praised Julian highly for his military and political virtues, but largely criticized his zealous religious policies, such as his extravagant slaughter of sacrificial animals and edict forbidding Christians from serving as public school teachers. Although Julian did not violently persecute Christians, he nevertheless resembled the likes of Decius and Diocletian in that his divisive rhetoric of militant paganism largely clashed with the tolerant attitudes of the vast majority of the empire’s citizens, to a similar degree as the fulminations of Christian bishops such as Ambrose and John Chrysostom did not reflect the feelings of most Christians toward their pagan compatriots. The lynching of one such bishop in Alexandria, George of Cappadocia, by a pagan mob inspired by Julian’s accession in 361, should therefore not testify to pagans’ general attitudes towards Christians during his reign. In sum, the brevity of Julian’s 18-month career as sole Augustus precluded any potential success, and thus had little effect on the continuity or discontinuity of traditional practices in communities and households, which were largely maintained as a matter of civic pride and duty to ancestors. The pace of conversion to Christianity accelerated as much for its social and political opportunities as the religion of the new establishment as for its promises of spiritual reward on earth and in heaven.