Julian the Apostate: cage-stage pagan

From Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor, by Philip Freeman, a concise and insightful passage that I want to file away for teaching Western Civ.

Of Julian’s attempts to use his imperial power to reform and reinvigorate paganism and to craft a “universal paganism he hoped would defeat Christianity”—a paganism filtered through his highly symbolic philosophical interpretations that would be applicable everywhere, a rather condescending vision of “the common people of every village” in “childlike innocence” offering “an occasional pigeon to their local gods and pray[ing] for gentle rain and health . . . while philosophers and intellectuals would seek the higher mysteries of the Good”—Freeman writes:

But [Julian’s] austere form of Neoplatonism was not a belief system that had wide appeal to the pagan masses. The worship of the traditional gods of Greece and Rome had always taken a multitude of forms and had never been unified. It was not even exclusive. A good pagan might celebrate a solemn sacrifice to Zeus at a city temple in the morning followed by an afternoon visit to a shrine at a local spring and a frenzied festival honoring the goddess Cybele that same evening. The concept of a centralized set of doctrines was completely foreign to paganism. Pagans as such had no defining creeds, no universal priesthoods, and no canonical scriptures in the Christian sense. Julian was not only fighting Christianity but promoting a religion that had never existed.

This is one of the hardest things to impress upon a group of students when teaching ancient Greek and Roman religion. Even the non-religious among people today are so deeply influenced by the last fumes of the Abrahamic faiths that they struggle to conceive of a “religion” with no scriptures, no ethical content, and no standard “beliefs” to speak of. Alternately, often simultaneously, they struggle to conceive of ancient paganism as having any practices either. To them paganism is a set of myths, which they’ve probably gotten third-hand from Percy Jackson anyway.

I’ve commonly heard of religious converts, especially within Christianity to different doctrinal camps and especially to Calvinism, described as going through a “cage stage”—i.e. a period when they would be better off locked in a cage until they can calm down—in which they are rabidly, irrationally, monomaniacally obsessed with studying and sharing their new theological framework. Certainly Freeman’s description of Julian seeking “to lay out in sometimes tedious intellectual terms the philosophical foundations behind his religious reforms” sounds like some of the Calvinists I’ve known.

As a convert from Christianity back to paganism via the urbane schools of Hellenistic philosophy, he seems to have come to the imperial purple in his own sort of cage stage—from which he never returned.