An Answer to Libanius about Julian

“When winter had lengthened the nights,” he says, “the emperor made an attack on those books that make the man from Palestine both God and the Son of God. In a long series of arguments he proved that these writings, so revered by Christians, are ridiculous and groundless, and so showed himself wiser and more skillful than the old man of Tyre. But may this sage of Tyre be gracious to me, and bear calmly with what I have said, since he has been outdone by his son!” So says Libanius the Sophist. I grant that he was an excellent rhetorician. But I am convinced that if he had not shared the emperor’s religion, he would not only have said everything that Christians have said against Julian, but would have magnified every ground for blame, as a rhetorician naturally does. For while Constantius was alive, Libanius wrote speeches in his praise; but after his death he brought the most insulting and abusive charges against him. So if Porphyry had been emperor, Libanius would certainly have ranked his books above Julian’s; and if Julian had been a mere sophist, he would have called him a very poor one, as he calls Ecebolius in his Epitaph on Julian. Since, then, he has spoken as a pagan, as a sophist, and as the friend of the man he praised, we will try, as far as we are able, to answer what he has put forward. [a]

In the first place, he says that the emperor undertook to “attack” these books during the long winter nights. Now to “attack” means to make it one’s task to write a refutation of them, as the sophists commonly do in teaching the first lessons of their art; for Julian had read these books long before, but he attacked them at this time. But throughout the long contest he entered into, he did not try to disprove anything by sound reasoning, as Libanius claims. Having no truth on his side, he resorted to sneers and scornful jokes, of which he was excessively fond, and so tried to hold up to ridicule what is too firmly established to be overthrown. For everyone who enters into a dispute with another, sometimes trying to twist the truth and at other times to hide it, misrepresents his opponent’s position by every means he can. And an adversary is not content with doing malicious things against the one he is at odds with; he will speak against him as well, and charge the object of his dislike with the very faults he knows are in himself.

That both Julian and Porphyry, whom Libanius calls the “old man of Tyre,” took great delight in mockery is plain from their own works. In his History of the Philosophers, Porphyry ridiculed the life of Socrates, the most eminent of all the philosophers, saying things about him that neither Meletus nor Anytus, his accusers, would have dared to say. I mean Socrates, whom all the Greeks admired for his modesty, his justice and his other virtues; whom Plato, the most admirable of them, and Xenophon, and the rest of the company of philosophers not only honor as one loved by God, but are also accustomed to think of as gifted with more than human understanding. And Julian, imitating his “father,” showed the same diseased state of mind in his book called The Caesars, in which he slanders all the emperors before him, not sparing even Mark the philosopher. Their own writings, then, show that both of them took pleasure in taunts and abuse. I have no need of a flood of clever words to show it; what has been said is enough about their temper in this respect. I write these things using each man’s own speeches as witnesses to his disposition. But of Julian in particular, Gregory of Nazianzus, in his Second Oration against the Pagans, says this:

“These things became plain to others by experience, once imperial power had left him free to follow his inclinations. But I had foreseen it all from the time I came to know him at Athens. He came there, with the emperor’s permission, soon after the change in his brother’s fortunes. His visit had two motives. One did him credit: to see Greece and attend the schools there. The other was more secret, and few knew anything about it, for his ungodliness had not yet dared to declare itself openly: to have the chance of consulting the sacrificers and other impostors about his own destiny. “I remember well that even then I was no bad diviner concerning this man, though I by no means claim to be one of those skilled in the art of divination. But the fickleness of his character and the unbelievable extravagance of his mind made me a prophet, if indeed ‘the best prophet is the one who guesses right.’ For it seemed to me that nothing good was foretold by a neck seldom steady; shoulders constantly shrugging; an eye scowling and always roving, with a wild look; a walk irregular and tottering; a nose that breathed nothing but contempt and insult, with ridiculous twistings of the face that said the same; loud and unrestrained laughter; nods as if in agreement, and jerks of the head backward as if in refusal, with no visible cause; speech that hesitated and was broken by his breathing; questions disorderly and senseless, and answers no better, all jumbled together without the least consistency or order. “Why go into every detail? I foresaw beforehand that he would be what I later found him to be by experience. And if any of those who were present then and heard me were here now, they would readily testify that when I saw these signs I cried out, ‘Ah, what an evil to itself the Roman empire is rearing!’ And when I had said these words, I prayed God that I might be proved a false prophet. For it would have been far better for me to be shown wrong in my judgment than for the world to be filled with so many disasters, and for such a monster to appear as had never been seen before. And this although many floods and fires are recorded, many earthquakes and chasms, and descriptions are given of many savage and inhuman men, and of monsters among the beasts, made up of different kinds, in unusual forms that nature produced. His end has indeed matched the madness of his career.” [g]

This is the portrait Gregory has given of Julian. Moreover, many have shown, by answering their quibbles and exposing their fallacies, that in their various writings these men tried to do violence to the truth: sometimes by corrupting passages of sacred Scripture, at other times by adding to the plain words and putting on them whatever meaning suited their own purpose. Origen in particular, who lived long before Julian’s time, raised for himself objections to those passages of holy Scripture that seemed to trouble some readers, and then answered them fully, and so shut out the spiteful clamor of the thoughtless. If Julian and Porphyry had read his writings fairly and seriously, they would have talked about other subjects, and would not have turned to building blasphemous sophistries. It is also very plain that the emperor in his discourses was intent on deceiving the ignorant, and did not address himself to those who have “the form” of the truth as it is presented in the sacred Scriptures. For he gathered together various expressions in which God is spoken of by way of accommodation, more in human fashion, and comments on them like this: “Every one of these expressions is full of blasphemy against God, unless the phrase contains some hidden and mystical sense, which indeed I can suppose.” These are his exact words in his third book against the Christians. But in his treatise On the Cynic Philosophy, where he shows how far fables may be invented about religious subjects, he says that in such matters the truth must be veiled. “For,” to quote his very words, “nature loves to hide; and the hidden being of the gods cannot bear to be thrown into polluted ears in naked words.” From this it is clear that the emperor held this view of the divine Scriptures: that they are mystical writings containing some deep, hidden meaning. [i]

He is also very indignant that not everyone forms the same opinion of them, and he rails against those Christians who understand the sacred oracles in a more literal sense. But it was not fitting for him to rail so fiercely against the simplicity of ordinary people, and on their account to behave so arrogantly toward the sacred Scriptures. Nor had he any right to turn away in disgust from things that others rightly understood, simply because they understood them differently from the way he wished. But now, it seems, a cause of disgust like the one that worked on Porphyry worked on him. Porphyry had been beaten by some Christians at Caesarea in Palestine, and being unable to bear it, in a fit of unrestrained rage he renounced the Christian religion. Out of hatred for those who had beaten him he took to writing blasphemous works against Christians, as Eusebius Pamphilus has shown, who at the same time refuted his writings. In the same way the emperor, having spoken with contempt of the Christians before an unthinking crowd, fell through the same diseased state of mind into Porphyry’s blasphemies. Since, then, both of them broke out into ungodliness of their own free will, they are punished by the knowledge of their own guilt.

But when Libanius the Sophist says mockingly that the Christians make “a man from Palestine both God and the Son of God,” he seems to have forgotten that he himself has made a god of Julian at the end of his oration. “For they almost killed,” he says, “the first messenger of his death, as if he had lied against a god.” And a little later he adds, “O darling of the gods! O pupil of the gods! O companion of the gods!” Now although Libanius may have meant something else, still, since he did not avoid the double meaning of a word that is sometimes taken in a bad sense, he seems to have said the very things the Christians had said in reproach. If, then, he meant to praise Julian, he should have avoided words with two meanings, as he did on another occasion, when he was criticized and avoided a certain word by cutting it out of his works. Moreover, the divine books of the Christians plainly teach that in Christ the man was united to the Godhead, so that while he was to all appearance only a man, he was the invisible God, and that both of these things are perfectly true. But the pagans cannot understand before they believe; for it is a divine oracle that declares, “Unless you believe, you will certainly not understand.” That is why they are not ashamed to place many men among the number of their gods. And I wish they had done this at least with the good, the just and the sober, instead of the impure, the unjust and those given to drunkenness, like Hercules, Bacchus and Asclepius, by whom Libanius does not blush to swear again and again in his orations. If I were to try to list the unnatural debaucheries and shameful adulteries of these gods, the digression would run on beyond all measure. But for those who want to be informed on the subject, Aristotle’s Peplum, Dionysius’s Corona, Rheginus’s Polymnemon and the whole host of poets will be enough to show that the theology of the pagans is a tissue of wild absurdities.

We could indeed show by many examples that the practice of making human beings into gods was far from uncommon among the pagans; in fact they did it without the slightest hesitation. Let a few examples be enough. When the Rhodians consulted an oracle about some public calamity, the answer told them to pay their worship to Attis, a pagan priest who founded frenzied rites in Phrygia. The oracle ran like this: “Win the favor of Attis, the great god, the chaste Adonis, the blessed, fair-haired Dionysus, rich in gifts.” Here Attis, who had castrated himself in a frenzy of passion, is called by the oracle Adonis and Bacchus.

Again, when Alexander, king of the Macedonians, crossed over into Asia, the Amphictyons sought his favor, and the Pythian priestess gave this oracle: [n] “To Zeus, highest of the gods, and to Athena Tritogenia pay homage, and to the divine king hidden in mortal form, whom Zeus fathered in honor to be the protector and giver of justice among mortals, Alexander the king.” These are the words of the demon at Delphi, who, when he wanted to flatter men in power, did not hesitate to give them a place among the gods. The motive here was perhaps to win favor by flattery. But what could anyone say about the case of Cleomedes the boxer, whom they ranked among the gods in this oracle? “The last of the heroes is Cleomedes of Astypalaea. Honor him with sacrifices, for he is no longer a mortal.” [o]

Because of this oracle Diogenes the Cynic and Oenomaus the philosopher strongly condemned Apollo. The people of Cyzicus declared Hadrian to be the thirteenth god; and Hadrian himself made a god of Antinous, the youth he kept as his lover. Libanius does not call these things “ridiculous and contemptible absurdities,” though he knew these oracles well, as he knew the work of Adrias on the life of Alexander, the false prophet of Paphlagonia. Nor does he himself hesitate to honor Porphyry in a similar way when, after preferring Julian’s books to his, he says, “May the Syrian be gracious to me.” This digression will be enough to turn back the sophist’s scoffing, without following him further in what he has put forward; a full refutation would need a work of its own. We will therefore go on with our history. [p]