Church History (Vol.1-3). J. H. Kurtz
Patriotism and manly spirit came to be identified with the maintenance of the old religion.114
§ 42.3. Julian the Apostate (A.D. 361–363).—The sons of Constantine the Great began their reign in A.D. 337 with the murder of their male relatives. The brothers Julian and Gallus, nephews of Constantine, alone were spared; but in A.D. 345 they were banished to a Cappadocian castle where Julian officiated for a while as reader in the village church. Having at last obtained leave to study in Nicomedia, then in Ephesus, and finally in Athens, the chief representatives of paganism fostered in him the conviction that he was specially raised up by the gods to restore again the old religion of his fathers. As early as A.D. 351 in Nicomedia he formally though still secretly returned to paganism, and at Athens in A.D. 355 he took part in the Eleusinian mysteries. Soon thereafter Constantius, harassed by foreign wars, assigned to him the command of the army against the Germans. By affability, personal courage and high military talent, he soon won to himself the enthusiastic attachment of the soldiers. Constantius thought to weaken the evident power of his cousin which seemed to threaten his authority, by recalling the best of the legions, but the legions refused obedience and proclaimed Julian emperor. Then the emperor refused to ratify the election and treated Julian himself as a rebel. The latter advanced at the head of his army by forced marches upon the capital, but ere he reached the city, he received the tidings of the opposing emperor’s death. Acknowledged now as emperor throughout the whole empire without any opposition, Julian proceeded with zeal, enthusiasm and vigour to accomplish his long-cherished wish, the restoring of the glory of the old national religion. He used no violent measures for the subversion and overthrow of Christianity, nor did he punish Christian obstinacy with death, except where it seemed to him the maintenance of his supremacy required it. But he demanded that temples which had been converted into churches should be restored to the heathen worship, those destroyed should be restored at the cost of the church exchequer and the money for the state that had been applied to ecclesiastical purposes had to be repaid. He scornfully referred the clergy thus robbed of their revenues to the blessedness of evangelical poverty. He also fomented as much as possible dissension in the church, favoured all sectaries and heretics, excluded Christians from all the higher, and afterwards from all the lower, civil and military offices, and loaded them on every occasion with reproach and shame, and by these means he actually induced many to apostatise. In order to discredit Christ’s prophecy in Matt. xxiv. 2, he resolved on the restoration of the Jewish temple at Jerusalem, but after having been begun it was destroyed by an earthquake. He excluded all Christian teachers from the public schools, and also forbade them in their own schools from explaining the classical writers who were objected to and contested by them only as godless; so that Christian boys and youths could obtain a higher classical education only in the pagan schools. By petty artifices he endeavoured to get Christian soldiers to take part, if only even seemingly, in the heathen sacrifices. Indeed at a later period in Antioch he was not ashamed to stoop to the mean artifice of Galerian (§ 22, 6) of sprinkling with sacrificial water the necessaries of life exposed in the public market, etc. On the other hand, he strove in every way to elevate and ennoble paganism. From Christianity he borrowed Benevolent Institutions, Church Discipline, Preaching, Public Service of Song, etc.; he gave many distinctions to the heathen priesthood, but required of them a strict discipline. He himself sacrificed and preached as Pontifex Maximus, and led a strictly ascetic, almost a cynically simple life. The ineffectiveness of his attempts and the daring, often even contemptuous, resistance of many Christian zealots embittered him more and more, so that there was now danger of bloody persecution when, after a reign of twenty months, he was killed from a javelin blow in a battle against the Persians in A.D. 363. Shortly before in answer to the scornful question of a heathen, “What is your Carpenter’s Son doing now?” it had been answered, “He is making a coffin for your emperor.” At a later period the story became current that Julian himself, when he received the deadly stroke, exclaimed, Tandem vicisti Galilæe! His military talents and military virtues had shed a glory around the throne of the Cæsars such as it had not known since the days of Marcus Aurelius, and yet his whole life’s struggle was and remained utterly fruitless and vain.115
§ 42.4. The Later Emperors.—After Julian’s death, Jovian, and then on his death in A.D. 364, Valentinian I. († 375), were chosen emperors by the army. The latter resigned to his brother Valens the empire of the East (A.D. 364–378). His son and successor Gratian (A.D. 375–383) at the wish of the army adopted his eldest half-brother of four years old, Valentinian II., as colleague in the empire of the West, and upon the death of Valens resigned the government of the West to the Spaniard Theodosius I., or the Great (A.D. 379–395), who, after the assassination of Valentinian II. in A.D. 392, became sole ruler. After his death his sons again divided the empire among them: Honorius († 423) took the West, Arcadius († 408) the East, and now the partitioned empire continued in this condition until the incursions of the barbarians had broken up the whole West Roman division (A.D. 476). Belisarius and Narses, the victorious generals of Justinian I., were the first to succeed, between A.D. 533–553, in conquering again North Africa and all Italy along with its islands. But in Italy the Byzantine empire from A.D. 569 was reduced in size from time to time by the Longobards, and in Africa from A.D. 665 by the Saracens, while even earlier, about A.D. 633, the Saracens had secured to themselves Syria, Palestine, and Egypt.—Julian’s immediate successors tolerated paganism for a time. It was, however, a very temporary respite. No sooner had Theodosius I. quieted in some measure political disorders, than he proceeded in A.D. 382 to accomplish the utter overthrow of paganism. The populace and the monks combined in destroying the temples. The rhetorician Libanius († 395) then addressed his celebrated discourse Περὶ τῶν ἱερῶν to the emperor; but the remaining temples were closed and the people were prohibited from visiting them. In Alexandria, under the powerful bishop Theophilus, there were bloody conflicts, in consequence of which the Christians destroyed the beautiful Serapeion in A.D. 391. In vain did the pagans look for the falling down of the heavens and the destruction of the earth; even the Nile would not once by causing blight and barrenness take vengeance on the impious. In the West, Gratian was the first of the emperors who declined the rank of pontifex maximus; he also deprived the heathen priests of their privileges, removed the foundations of the temple of Fiscus, and commanded that the altar of Victory should be taken away from the hall of the Senate in Rome. In vain did Symmachus, præfectus urbi, entreat for its restoration, if not “numinis” yet “nominis causa.” Valentinian II., urged on by Ambrose, sent back four times unheard the deputation that came about this matter. So soon as Theodosius I. became sole ruler the edicts were made more severe. On his entrance into Rome in A.D. 394 he addressed to the Roman Senate a severe lecture and called them to repentance. His sons, Honorius in the West and Arcadius in the East, followed the example of their father. Under the successor of the latter, Theodosius II. (A.D. 408–450), monks with imperial authority for the suppression of heathenism traversed the provinces, and in A.D. 448, in common with Valentinian III. (A.D. 425–455), the western emperor, he issued an edict which strictly enjoined the burning of all pagan polemical writings against Christianity, especially those of Porphyry “the crack-brained,” wherever they might be found. This period is also marked by deeds of bloody violence. The most horrible of these was the murder of the noble pagan philosopher Hypatia, the learned daughter of Theon the mathematician, at Alexandria in A.D. 415. Officially paganism may be regarded as no longer existent. Branded long even before this as the religion of the peasants (such is the derivation of the word paganism), it was now almost wholly confined to remote rural districts. Its latest and solitary stronghold was the University of Athens raised to the summit of its fame under Proclus (§ 24, 2). Justinian I. (A.D. 527–565) decreed the suppression of this school in A.D. 529. Its teachers fled into Persia, and there laid the first foundations of the later literary period of Islam under the ruling family of the Abassidæ at Bagdad (§ 65, 2). This was the death hour of heathenism in the Roman empire. The Mainottæ in the mountains of the Peloponnesus still maintained their political independence and the heathen religion of their fathers down to the 9th century. In the Italian islands, too, of Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily, there were still many heathens even in the time of Gregory the Great († 604).116
§ 42.5. Heathen Polemics and Apologetics.—Julian’s