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| Julian |
50 years ago Gore Vidal, whose brilliant career was
celebrated in a recent documentary film, published an unlikely best seller
called Julian, a novel based on the
life of the 4th century Roman emperor who attempted to revive
paganism or, as he preferred to call it, Hellenism. For those who, like Vidal, view Hellenism and
the Greeks as the essential and vital strand, the core of Western Civilization,
and the Judeo-Christian strand as the Johnny-come-lately interloper, the perennial
thorn in the side and obstacle to cultural self-realization, Julian may only be
seen as a quixotic hero. Still, it’s
hard to credit Vidal’s contention, through the character of Julian, that Hellenism
was more rational than Christianity. The
latter, after all, made exhaustive attempts to render itself at least somewhat coherent,
whereas Hellenism was always quite heterodox, more of a mythic atmosphere than
an internally consistent belief system: different towns and different people
worshipping different gods in different ways.
In rereading Vidal’s novel this time I decided to accompany
it with one of his primary sources for the history of the period, Ammianus
Marcellinus, the last historian of the Western Roman
Empire. The 4th
century, when Christianity was striving to gain control of men’s minds and the
empire that had endured for half a millennium was coming apart at the seams, is
a fascinating, pivotal era: corruption and greed were endemic, decadence rife,
and the barbarians closing in on every side.
Julian was certainly the central figure of this period and his attempt to
restore Hellenism might have succeeded had he not been skewered with a spear while fighting
the Persians near Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia, (now
Iraq,
that cemetery of so many dreams). Marcellinus
is clearly a partisan of the old gods, yet takes pains to suppress this
partisanship and, cognizant of the new religion’s ascendency, avoids saying
anything overtly critical of Christianity.
Nevertheless, he provides a pagan perspective that is contextualized by
an awareness of Christian doctrines. Every
once in a while it’s intriguing to listen to someone who’s been dead for over
1600 years tell you about the world he lived in.
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| Ammianus Marcellinus |
What you notice reading Marcellinus is that ancient
societies were saturated in fate. The
belief in fate was of a piece with the importance ancient men assigned
themselves, a part of their position at the center of the universe. The belief in destiny is another aspect of
their conceit, their delusional vanity. Greek
tragedy depended on its immutability. The
arts of divination and astrology plumbed its nuances. Much of the actual practice of paganism had
to do with efforts to divine the future and virtually everything in nature, the
flight of a bird, the appearance of a meteor, the shape of the entrails of a
sacrificial animal, was seen as having an occult meaning. Legions of soothsayers were employed to
divine these secret meanings and reveal what everyone wanted to know, namely,
what was going to happen tomorrow, next week, next year. In this sense, the world was experienced as
full of import. Things were not merely
what they appeared to be, they were also full of hidden significance. Reality was overwhelmed by the
imagination. Compared to this
all-encompassing superstition, Christianity seems relatively rational. Marcellinus calls it “a simple religion,” and
it is, compared to the diffuse, unstructured complexity of Hellenism, which was
pluralistic and tolerant and had no creed to swear allegiance to. Hellenism had an inchoate quality, like
childhood. And this, perhaps, was what
made it such a fertile milieu.
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| Constantine |
In the period before Constantine the
Great, Christianity was one of a number of competing monotheistic
cults whose relative orderliness may have been called up as
compensation for the chaos of the times. Mithraism, whose adherents
were baptized in the blood of a bull, was popular in the army. The
cult of Dionysus emphasized the imbibing of wine and the notion of a
world savior. Christianity was opportunistic and syncretic, picking
up elements of its doctrines and practices from these competitors.
The effect of these cults was to concentrate the mystery of divinity
within a set of rituals, draining it from the world at large. In
paganism the natural world was permeated with meanings, chock full to
overflowing with them. These meanings were all imaginary of course,
completely spurious, but nevertheless subjectively the world felt
numinous and full of purport, whereas in Christianity transcendent
meaning was restricted to the church and its rituals and could only
be experienced through the mediation of a priest while the natural
world was seen as fallen and thus emptied of purpose, since the
divine no longer infused it to the degree it had in pagan experience.
It took a long time for pagan numinousness to be scrubbed
from the world. In the early days of the
scientific revolution science and magic, astronomy and astrology, chemistry and
alchemy, were all mixed up. People were
interested in astronomy because they thought it would enable them to do
astrology better; that is, enable them to predict the future, and not just the
astronomical future. But nowadays science
and magic have separated into 2 distinct entities. Science has become serious business while
magic has become entertainment, and consequently the pagan notion that the
natural world is full of hidden messages, occult significances, has come to
seem a child’s game. I still hear people
say “it wasn’t meant to be” or “everything happens for a reason,” but such
statements sound like leftovers from an archaic, pre-scientific mindset. In the scientific universe there is no
author, no plan, no destiny. There are
merely competing natural powers, like gravity and centrifugal force, working
through time. These workings may
resemble fate, but they do not constitute intentionality, and they are not
oriented around human desires. Fate now appears
as a shelter and refuge from this terrifying specter of randomness. The old fated world lacked the scary freedom
of our fateless one. Now the tragedy is
not, as it was in Hellenism, that you cannot escape the rule of fate, but rather
that there is no fate. The world has been drained of transcendent intentionality,
and thus, in Hellenic terms, rendered meaningless, and Christianity, it turns
out, was just a phase and instrument of that process. Perhaps the proto-science of Epicurus
couldn’t really take hold until Christianity had purged the material world of
pagan animism.
It was against the background of Hellenism that Thales of
Miletus, around 600 BC, became the first human to emerge from the mists of
mythological thinking and see the natural world as explicable without resorting
to the supernatural. It’s difficult to
overstate the importance of this achievement.
It is monumental. But neither the
Greeks nor their heirs the Romans were able to take the next step of
establishing the experimental method for determining scientific truth. Hellenism, it would seem, lacked an essential
element for that. Perhaps because
educated men were not supposed to work with their hands?
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| Gore Vidal |
Vidal, our American Voltaire, loved to
sound the call to “Ecrasez l’infame!” His wit and
irreverence are sorely missed. He suggested that we would have been
better off had Julian succeeded, because his success would have
precluded the darkness of the Middle Ages. But perhaps Christianity
was a necessary phase, scrubbing animism from the physical world,
freeing educated men to apply their hands to physical experiment and,
with its concept of the equality of souls before God, undermining the
ancient institution of slavery and laying the groundwork for a more
compassionate civilization.
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