 | Julian the Philosopher
by Julian X  /  poetry  /  9 Dec 2007
In his times, he was Julian the Philosopher. We call him a slander, a betrayer of faith, Apostate, which implicates the true criminal clear enough.
Imagine him as a child, born in 311, that Galilean creed forced upon him by zealous Arian relatives: he took solace in neoplatonism, in Theurgy, and watched as Constantine the Apostate’s successors let the temples burn and their priests be killed in the name of the god of jealous love.
Julian ascended the throne without a fight in 361, stopped Galilean bishops traveling on the state’s dime, sought to make the Galilean church return those monies and lands that it had stolen, promulgated freedom of religion in early 362 and equality of religions under the law, wanted a religiously eclectic Rome, tried to rebuild the Jewish Temple, wrote hymns and panegyrics, was initiated into the ancient mysteries at Eleusis and sought to restore this venerable tradition of two millennia, envisioned a public welfare system to reduce the poor’s dependence on biased Galilean charities.
He wrote a humorous comparison of emperors, The Caesars, that took Constantine to task both as emperor and as Galilean.
Though hated by them, he strengthened the Galileans, sought to remove its corruption, its theft, sought to divorce it from state sponsorship, was said to have prohibited worship of relics, called back bishops exiled by church edicts, wanted Galileans who could function alongside the old gods, a Galilean creed accepting of diversity of thought within itself, in toleration with that ancient philosophic, natural polytheism.
He tried to retake lands from the Sassanid Persians, lands his Galilean predecessor had let fall and had not taken back. A column stands, fifteen meters high, still commemorating his arrival in Ankara, now in Turkey, in 362. When he arrived in Antioch, in preparation for this war, that great prime function of the state, the Galileans burned down Apollo’s temple in anger. Those conformists mocked his beard and scruffy appearance as unbefitting an emperor, and he humorously wrote of it in his Misopogon.
He wintered there, and upon his departure for war in 363, he released his Against the Galileans, showing that the Torah shows no sign of the Galilean creed, focusing on how Galileans defy Old Testament commandments, demolishing the their claim to be the logical development of that ancient religion, which Julian respected, though he still criticized Jewish insularity, how Moses was for Jews only while the pagan gods were universal, and he ridicules that Galilean sect’s claims to universality, which rankled him most. He seems to want to strengthen Judaism, to understand the Galileans in their historic place as this odd little non-Jewish Jewish outgrowth, all wrapped within the polytheism that embraces all. He cleverly steals adjectives and descriptions applied to the Nazarene and applies them to Dionysus and Heracles, showing a pagan alternative to such singular savior-worship, even implying, rhetorically, which came first.
As he continued in his quest to recapture lands abandoned to Persians, he reclaimed city after city for Rome, defeating a superior force at the walls of Ctesiphon, the Persian capital. The walled city lay before him, ready for the taking. But where was his general, Procopius, with his thousands of reinforcements? Time, abandonned and betrayed, drug on, and, with it, he had to abandon the capital and retreat.
During this retreat, not wearing armor, the Sassanids struck, but Julian won, pursuing his retreating attackers with a light force. A fleeing Persian let loose a spear that sailed though the air and found its mark in Julian’s side, piercing, his liver and intestines like some or other martyr. He suffered. His personal physician, Oribasius, probably sutured the intestine, but great Julian the Philosopher died that year, 363, emperor for but three years.
Rome had no more pagan emperors, no more toleration, no more acceptance for gods of dance and sex, gods of poetry without didactic point, gods of art and science and light and thunder and currents who would not banish each other for heresy, no more Rome, eternal city, only kingdoms in air. His was the last gasp, the last great hope for Hellenism, for the culture of all those values, against the dark conservatism that reigned the next thousand years.
Though not without precedents, Julian’s tract of real philosophy is today preserved only through quotations by his later opponents.
There is some blessed shore, not far, wherein Procopius arrived with reinforcements, wherein one unfortunate spear did not change the course of Western history. There, Julian the Restorer lived, pushed on the bounds of empire; there, the Jews had again their Temple and flourished in their own Pax Romana, while the Galileans fell back, their privilege interrupted by Julian’s long, great reign, into one of many accepted religions, increasingly seeming odd, a strange cult that made little sense to later historians but had once seized the empire and plunged it into state religion and intolerance. There, speculative histories are written, though with smiles, wherein Julian the Great died in youth, never rose to power, and this strange religion held tight its grip on Rome and learning for a thousand years and more. There, we imagine, Rome still fell, victim of poor large-scale management, though perhaps a bit later, a bit less undermined, and in those dark ages to come, humanity, genitals and all, was hardly so hated, nor philosophy reduced to exegesis, nor classicism burned and fig-leafed, and so the Renaissance comes the sooner, and Michaelangelo paints frescoes of Apollo chasing Daphne and Dionysus gallivanting, and Dante takes Virgil as friend in hand through the Hades of Aeneis and the Isle of the Blessed, while Galileo is not placed under house arrest. There, trade, not hateful crusades, brings back Plato and vaulted ceilings, if there they were ever lost, with new spices and colors, and trade too inspires colonization and discovery without the pretense of genocidal missionary zeal nor need for Puritans’ religious freedom, something guaranteed since the time of Julian, Philosopher, Restorer, Redeemer, Savior.
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