Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The empire from Constantine the Great to Justinian

Julian the Apostate (361-363)

Page 11

Julian left a number of writings which afford an opportunity to become more closely acquainted with him. The center of Julian's religious convictions was the cult of the sun, which was created under the direct influence of the cult of the bright god, Mithras, and the ideas of a degenerated Platonism. From his very early childhood Julian loved nature, especially the sky. In his discourse on the King Sun, the main source for his religious philosophy, he wrote that from early childhood an extraordinary longing for the rays of the divine planet penetrated deep into his soul. And not only did he desire to gaze intently at the sun in the daytime, but on clear nights he would abandon all else without exception and give himself up to the beauties of the heavens. Absorbed in his meditations he would not hear those who spoke to him and would at times be unconscious of what he himself was doing.

According to Julians own rather obscure account of his religious theories, his religious philosophy reduced itself to a belief in the existence of three worlds in the form of three suns. The first sun is the supreme sun, the idea of all being, the spiritual intelligible (νοητός) whole; it is the embodiment of absolute truth, the kingdom of supreme principles and first causes. The visible world and the visible sun, i.e. the material world, is only a reflection of the first world, but not an immediate reflection. Between these two worlds, the intelligible and the material, there lies the intellectual (νοερός) world with a sun of its own. Thus, a triad of suns is formed: the intelligible or spiritual, the intellectual, and the material. The intellectual world is a reflection of the intelligible or spiritual and in its turn serves as an example for the material world, which is thus only a reflection of a reflection, an inferior reproduction of the absolute model. The supreme sun is too inaccessible for man. The sun of the physical is too material for deification. Therefore Julian concentrated all his attention on the central intellectual sun. He called it the King Sun and adored it.

In spite of his enthusiasm, Julian understood that the restoration of paganism involved many great difficulties. In one of his letters he wrote: I need many to help me to raise up again what has fallen on evil days. But Julian did not understand that the fallen paganism could not rise again because it was dead. His undertaking was doomed to failure. His schemes, Boissier said, could afford to be wrecked; the world had nothing to lose by their failure. This enthusiastic philhellen, Geffcken wrote, is half Oriental and Frühbyzantiner. Another biographer said, The Emperor Julian seems as a fugitive and luminous apparition on the horizon beneath which had already disappeared the star of that Greece which to him was the Holy Land of civilization, the mother of all that was good and beautiful in the world, of that Greece which, with filial and enthusiastic devotion, he called his only true country

Cf. Ancient Greece and Christianity (text in Greek only) ||| Byzantium : heir to the Graeco-roman antiquity ||| The worst persecution of the Church 

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/vasilief/julian-apostate.asp?pg=11