 Welcome everyone to another episode of we are being transformed the podcast that contrary to popular rumor is not a Transformers oriented show We do not do unboxings of Rodimus Prime here We discuss the myriad of ways in which people interact with and are changed by their culture whether that be ritual myth lore legend or Religion for lack of a better term and our guest today is a man who knows a thing or two about the emperor Julian Dr. Jeremy Swiss welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing pretty well. It's been a busy week, but I always am happy to talk about Julian and his world Yeah, it's kind of like me with Lution of Samo Sada like there's there's never a time not to talk about Lucian, right? So Yeah, exactly true story is awesome So we're gonna talk about a figure who is very polarizing strangely enough also somebody who While being used for this person or that person's personal agenda. We know very little like in terms of The general public about this person's life We just when we hear something like Julian the emperor Julian the apostate We have a certain idea in our head that's created through, you know church fathers The accidents of transmission through history. So if you could just kind of give us a little Overview of who Julian was then we can kind of get more into the The weeds with it so to speak you're right that you know Julian the emperor or Julian the apostate As I think he's being called less and less now because that is a derogatory term that Christianity Christian authors did impose on him Is not a household name and you can say that's kind of a general thing with late antiquity, right? a lot of people are brought up at least traditionally on this idea that you know There was antiquity then the Roman Empire fell and then there were the Middle Ages you know starting with the so-called Dark Ages and late antiquity is a when people start learning about it there they kind of Realize wait a minute. History doesn't quite work that way. You don't just you know Suddenly we're in the Middle Ages, right? This is a period of very gradual transition in which a lot of elements from the past from you know, Braco-Roman antiquity are coming into some sort of Dialogue fusion conflict with some new ideas new movements new aesthetics that are Kind of early versions of what you will see in the future certainly by the Middle Ages and of course one of the main things is Various types of Christianity and theology which you know at that time was one of many similar Takes on religion that existed at the time including kind of the form of Pagan Hellenic religion that Julian subscribed to so you know when we talk about him as an apostate As he was called, you know, he was not necessarily just You know pulling a 180 You know going to a different spiritual tradition that kind of offered a lot of similar answers to him and the thing about Julian is he saw that what These other cults had to offer him Had grounding in precedent of of being a much older tradition and they were also compatible with The various types of platonic philosophy that he was studying and he did not see Christianity as being able to be reconcilable with these With these other forms of religious and philosophical thought So that's a kind of roundabout way to talk about well Julian himself he was an Interesting situation because you know if you think of one household figure from Chris from late antiquity You think of the Emperor Constantine, you know the guy who because he He didn't convert The Empire to Christianity overnight or make it the official religion, but mainly because he started favoring Christianity And he reigned a long time and his sons reigned a long time by the time you get to the 350s 360 CE which would be about half a century after Constantine had the vision of the Milvian bridge and started favoring Christianity as the god who gives him victory And who will unite the Empire? Christianity really becomes the Establishment religion for a lot of the political elites because that's the religion the favored religion of the of the imperial court Yet Constantine had a nephew named Julian who comes along and While he You know as he's kind of rising up through the ranks so to speak of his of his imperial career. He is nominally a Christian and he but by the time he becomes sole emperor after various for tuitous events He Says well, wait a minute Christianity is actually not You know the religion of the future here. It's a temporary aberration You know my uncle and my cousin, you know at that who ruled before me they were misguided And so I am going to basically reverse course here and return to the traditional And so I am going to basically reverse course here and return to the traditional civic cults of the Empire I'm going to promote all of these traditions that people celebrate in the various cities and in the country founded in much Older precedent than Christianity, which he sees as a recent Innovation in fact, he thinks of it as a sort of Jewish heresy Started as Jews and then they develop this whole new theology where they essentially take this one guy and who died but they believe he resurrected and He says it himself that they worship corpses, right? They worship one man who died one corpse, but they also worship the relics of saints as Having some sort of power and so he refers to churches as you know Ossuaries or charnel houses or tombs where people tend to worship these corpses including the corpse of Of the Galilean as he calls them and he calls them all Galileans in order to for to the origin of this religion in this kind of provincial backwater Galilei because his concept of religion at this time is very much Classically based where a religion is not something that is revealed from above You know and a kind of a universal thing. It is something that is very much particular to To Specific places and specific peoples. Okay, so the Athenians have their civic cults of Athena, right? And then the Romans, right? They have their particular cults of Jupiter and Mars and the Jews have their own kind of ethnic God who Overseas them and he did not think of that God as the universal God He is just simply a God who is Particular to that region and so he kind of makes fun of the Galileans as Jesus is their God even though he's not Actually a God Also from his study of philosophy. He sees this plurality of religions is also comprising a unity because all of these different gods all these different traditions that In all these different cities throughout the Empire in forms of worship from a philosophical point of view Can all be reconciled and because all of these gods and these traditions are essentially emanating from a supreme God Hey, it's a kind of a You won't it's not monotheism. It's not Pure polytheism it's somewhere in between you might call it hen otheism is Is one thing that might work here where or a soft monotheism where ultimately it's all one God But there are various subordinate gods that emanate and get and receive their being from this higher God And then these are the more particular Gods who oversee these different parts of the Empire and so Julian when he comes to power as emperor He is kind of taking that theoretical framework and trying to put it into practice because he genuinely sees this as The way things used to be whereas Christianity was this religion that was essentially atheism to him because Unlike all these other this other plurality of religions where they accepted You know the fact that people worshiped other gods The Christians believe these all these other gods were either fake or they were demons or they were just not gods You know in the sense of their God and to Julian he thought that that idea was tantamount to atheism And it was also dangerous right one thing I really love about Julian as a figure he comes up at a very Volatile time in the history of the Roman Empire The world is vastly different at the beginning of the fourth century compared to where it ends This is kind of Western civ one class and it's just kind of like Well this happened and there was Polytheism paganism then Constantine Milvian bridge yada yada then everything becomes Christian afterwards But we when you dig a little bit deeper We tend to forget that things weren't always this set in stone Like there was a volatile period of time where this could have gone any other way and Julian was great Example of this because he's coming up in a time not only where these Cults are established this religion is there's no other way many people can possibly think things could be He's coming up at a time where you have things like neopladenism coming up and all these different philosophies and they're taking In this Christian stuff and they're kind of working their own little thing Right the of the pagan holy man is garth found and would say so you have things like the caldean oracles and there's a huge re-emphasis in paideia and in philosophy on the the pagan the helene Religions and things like that so kind of like a reinforcement of identity you have this kind of culture work going on in a sense I just kind of talk a little bit about What the world that Julian inherited was like in terms of these thoughts and these kind of cultural things that are going on you have like Neoplatonic yamblokian theergy, and then you have all this other side You know all this put this more contemplative platinian thought and then you have wild things like what John Dylan would call the the platonic underworld right the tonic underground with like caldean oracles and Hermeticism and it's just this really Exciting time in terms of like culture and thought so maybe we can explore that a little bit Yeah, but there and you know I think one of the most important kind of explanatory mechanisms for why you have that kind of radical change or shift at least in terms of Kind of the religious landscape between the beginning of the third sense of the beginning of the fourth century and the end is It has very much to do with Continuity so as I mentioned Constantine was in power You know for several decades and so were his sons certainly his son can stand just the second Julian comes along he only reigns for 18 months and then all the emperors after him happen to be Christian Right, and so you get to a point where When the religion of the emperor and the court and the religion of the emperor favors, you know is Maintained in and things are maintained that way for a lot of time Then people get used to it people start to start to kind of acquiesce in the idea that this is this is the new normal, right? Especially when it gets to the point where People who remembered what it was like before Say Constantine started favoring Christianity are no longer alive I think a good example is When the Emperor Augustus comes to power at the beginning of the Empire he reigns for over 40 years Antacitus mentions this at the beginning of the annales where he says basically So few people were around by the time Augustus dies Who remembered the old Republic because of that? most people alive when Augustus dies in his 70s the world that they Cook to be normal was a world in which you had Monarchy essentially, right and you also had relative peace and Prosperity during that time at least if you were, you know a Roman within kind of the the center of the Empire and so people were There was there was inertia people just thought this is this is how things are and so Tiberias succeeds and then You know the whole idea of we can go back to the Republic never really Really happens because nobody really knows what it's like to be under anything that isn't the emperors and so Shift back to the you know to the fourth century CE and it's like that with kind of Christianity as the Religion of the establishment, right? when Julian comes to power In three six at the end of 361, right? It has been as I mentioned Almost a little more long as long as Augustus had reigned, right since you last had When Christianity was not favored and so absolutely when he basically says, okay, I'm restoring the old ways Yes, you have some people But they're very few who actually know what it's like for a non-Christian emperor to the emperor and what I rely on is Basically It's almost like he has to reconstruct what that world is based on Literary sources and based on sort of kind of the evidence that's there in front of him He almost has to be like an historian rather than just consulting people being like how did how were things used to be? how did things used to be right and So, you know some people Will say that Julian came onto the scene too late It was already at that point the inertia had already set in if Julian had reigned for You know much longer and had a successor, you know who maintained his policies Regardless of what those policies were they were just were not Christian You know things could have been very different and you even see something like with Julian's policies like religious reforms Are almost like he's taking the cue from the ecclesiastical structure. He's seeing every day right around him So in a way, he's kind of like he's almost like Like when I was younger, I was a little bit after the Goths, you know, I grew up in the 90s, but I was really Influenced by a lot of like 80s like goth bands So like I would look at the magazine the old magazines and the old books And I kind of tried to recreate that my own little myth, you know of that So I think Julian's kind of doing something similar. He's he's in vogue kind of Neoplatonic Theurgical holy men, but he's also like looking back at a past that maybe is kind of romanticized And he's just really kind of he's being like like I was kind of like a hipster with that goth stuff He's like he's kind of like doing that with like the pagan stuff. So I love that Use kind of your analogy here kind of with my with kind of my counterculture like I think Here in the 2010s and now the 2020s You know, there's a revival in the heavy metal scene of like old-school 80s style Right, and there's been a real renaissance of that and all all the vast majority of people who are into it are people who Were either too young or not born in the 80s But because they're listening to the bands and being influenced from the styles from the 80s They're kind of bringing it all back versus, you know, the people who are actually Part of the 80s, you know, golden age a lot of them are still around and they're taking part in it but discontinuity of evolution and so I kind of think of kind of Julian as someone who was not as someone who was young and therefore not part of kind of the Pagan golden age, if you will, right? He's trying to bring it back basically based on What he has read about it, right? Right, and then what having actually known what it was like cool parts of romanticism versus like a genuine desire I think on his part to really interact with these Rites and everything and he's really being influenced. So it was Julian's relation to philosophy and religion What was his paideia like? Who was he kind of who is he the stand for you know in the paideia sense, right? Who's he going to be the here or two and you know, the one he wants to be like who's the person? He wants to be the heteroid to the most like yeah, you mentioned a few minutes ago kind of all the different things going on in this milieu of the mid-4th century and you mentioned the idea of a culture war and You know while there were certainly tensions there was certainly conflict at you know, it's sort of a similar Dynamic to what you might call the culture wars today where We have strident voices on the extremes that are controlling the discourse and sort of creating the idea that you know, there's this clash of incompatible paradigms Whereas the majority of people who are you know, not at least not participating or in that those extremes on either side of this discourse, right are actually Somewhere in the middle and they're you know, they're they're they don't they're not at war with each other Right, they don't have the sense of the same. We're especially with historical documents and evidence We're not always seeing like the full picture. Yes, life was like for the everyday person. Yeah And thankfully in the fourth century, you know, we don't just have the extreme views We also have people who are in the elites who were you know, who were You know politically and intellectually, you know Very high up there who are also sort of in these more middle moderate positions And so there were there were radical pagans and there were radical Christians You know, you had fire and brimstone bishops who you know, like Gregory Nazianzis, John Chrysostom and all of those who you know Wanted to stamp out paganism and Judaism and kind of get everybody to be believing the same thing about the nature of Christ And you know, he thought that the vast majority of people in the Empire, even if they were nominally Christian You know, they were morally, you know, debauched people and all of that all of that rhetoric that you still hear You know today, you know, we also have radical pagans who you know were Kind of on the other end and Julian was actually a part of this more radical part Kind of faction of pagans. I'll get to that in a moment But the vast majority of people who were either Christian or non-Christian They didn't necessarily define their whole identity in terms of their religious affiliation Hey, so for a lot of people at all levels of society even at the very top in the court You know in the Roman Senate or the Constantinopolitan Senate, right? You had a mixture of pagans and Christians. Hey, and What mattered to them was they had solidarity of class they had solidarity of kind of politics We were all Romans. Hey before we're all pagans or Christians, right? It was kind of economic You know and idea And the pie day is the other thing, right? We have we have a common culture based around this education system in rhetoric that Is fueled by this canon of classical literature? Okay, and even though this canon is by pagan non-Christian authors the Christians are still Engaged with it and working with it very much like people who are Christian today are classicist, right or are Reading and learning and engaging with classical text same idea. We have people like Themistius, right? You know he is kind of represents kind of this tall. He's like a tolerant pagan who is You know he see he works with the Christian emperors to kind of create this environment in which everyone really in which there's this There's this harmony, right? and You also have Christians. Okay, who you know are not churchmen who are not bishops, right? Who are also and even emperors who are Christian, you know a lot of them in this century are They realize that in order to have political stability you have to work With people who don't share your religion because especially for people like Constantine and Constantinus and Valentinian and even Theodosius, right? Even though they might you know pay lip service to kind of the extreme kind of Christianity is you know Should that should be everybody's religion. There's still many pagans, right are You know in the elite class and they need these people to run the empire together, right? There needs to be a consensus, right? It just brought up a thought like you know with Constantine himself He really exemplified that mode the majority of his reign and really I think a lot of people conflate what his sons later did like Constance and Constantinus the second like they were very much like we need to push this and this is what it needs to be You know Constance is like favor favoring Christian rhetorical teachers like Pro-Hyreces, right and a Constantine himself, you know like you were saying he's very pragmatic He's he's he's got played in his philosophers at his court. It's like he's got like the Christian bishops So so now let's talk about kind of what Julian comes up as now He Starts with you know traditional, you know elite Greco-Roman education, you know, he grows up grows up in the Greek East and basically after he gets his ABCs He's starting to read Homer, right and they start with Homer and kind of mythological literature poetry and then he moves on to studying other literature and also learning rhetoric a learning Compositional exercises, right how to write a good argument. Okay, how to learning the various forms of Literary genres and especially oratory for various occasions and of course at this time, you know, Epidetic or kind of Pan-Azyrical Enchomiastic oratory is is very much in vogue because they're under a monarchy and sort of that's how you have to kind of communicate with That way he masters these styles under various teachers and rhetoricians in In age of minor where he's where he's where he's growing up But eventually and he's also of course learning the Bible. He's learning Christian theology, you know Some of his tutors were Christian bishops and so he became very well-versed in that as well regardless of whether he Really was a devout Christian at any point. There's a lot of debate over Whether he was ever really Christian at all or he was just sort of nominally a Christian until he didn't have to be anymore Okay, that's a question that you know is We can't there isn't really a lot that we can say about it Because again, we don't his earliest writings are from, you know 355, you know when he's already You know in his in his mid-20s, we don't know but at some point as he is studying rhetoric He becomes more and more interested in philosophy True because especially the revolutions that he's hanging that he's learning from like libanus, you know, Plato Plato's dialogues are considered, you know, not just works of philosophy. They're also considered models of good prose literature Right and if you ever read Plato's dialogues, you can see that this isn't just a philosophical treatise This is a drop. This is a dramatized kind of Yeah, it really it really is a drama anything but and it's and it's in it's in there Just fun to read at least some of them are like the symposium, right? And so and I'm partial to the faders myself. Yeah. Oh, and so was Julian. Trust me So Plato's dialogues were taught, you know as literary models but Also, you know, they were also had various moral moral philosophy the moral philosophy of it was also, you know, very appealing and of course Platonic philosophy and Christianity certainly found ways to To reconcile them with each other He becomes more interested in platonic philosophy and he starts seeking out teachers of Platonism and at this point we call it if we the Platonism is neo-Platonism, right? But there's really kind of two branches of neo-Platonism that are of coexisting and sort of at this time and one is the kind of the original Platinian porphyry and kind of school where it emphasizes kind of individual rational contemplation on the ability and kind of one's inherent divinity and the ability of somebody through dialectical reasoning and contemplation and purification to Ascend and Reconnect with the the higher principles and eventually achieve kind of union with the highest principle of the one It's a philosophers these kind of seeing school, you know, they see Kind of traditional religion as as useful and good for its sort of instrumental Kind of functions its utilitarian functions if you will but they themselves kind of understand the world working kind of more in terms of You know, Platonist rationalist metaphysics, right while put the Platonian porphyry in school sort of has kind of a mysticism and sort of a spiritual kind of Bent to it much more than say traditional Platonism You know, they are not going so far as to Kind of unify philosophy and religion Until you get iamblicus of calcus coming along, okay, who is probably a student of porphyry who was a student of platinus and It's with the iamblican school that you see much more of a tendency towards a synthesis with traditional pagan religion and the reason for that is It has to do with this thing called this theory of the descent of the descended soul, right? So for somebody like platinus in that school who have a rational soul and you have an irrational soul Yeah, there's parts of the soul, okay? And platinus thought that while our lower irrational souls are kind of engaged with this Material world right our rational souls kind of the divine element within us is actually always up in the World of forms if you will up in them in the immaterial world Okay, and that we're sort of we're connected to it and kind of the idea is to identify with that higher Form of the soul more and more to the point where that's all we become and we unite with the first principle that explains why a platinian neoplatonists sees Themself as the at least theoretically capable of achieving personal salvation through the practice of you know theoretical philosophy Iamblicus comes along and says no the entire human soul descends they from the gods and You know our rational soul our irrational soul all together it descends entirely. Okay, it's all You know begins, you know Kind of trapped in embodiment in this material world Hey, the result of that is Iamblicus thought that the human soul a human being by themselves is actually incapable of achieving salvation and ascending back to the gods By themselves by their own efforts philosophy at least traditional Rational philosophy is not enough You need religion. Hey, you need the gods to help you re-ascend to them a because the gods Exactly the gods are so transcendent of this realm a That they just do not come into contact with this realm By any by any stretch a and so and we are so Separated from the realm of the gods to the point where in order for the gods to have any influence on this realm Which of course they control this realm entirely but the but they don't contact it directly. There's actually there's a hierarchy of inferior divinities and Diamond yes, the the diamo nays the the heroes the pure souls the angels Right, there's this hierarchy of superior beings that are superior to human beings To human souls, but they are inferior to the gods and these is in this is sort of this chain of being right The gods influence. They're kind of their illumination their power is kind of Filtered down through them, but also this chain of superior bearings is also the ladder, right by which the human soul can ascend However, in order to achieve that ascent. Yes practicing philosophy purifying oneself morally is important and necessary however, that's only sort of a preparatory practice you actually need to Engage in various forms of ritual a That the gods had prescribed Okay by communicating through the ancients right the ancient oracles if you will the Caldean oracles are sort of a later Version of of that sort of divine communication, right through various prophets through various oracle sites Ancient oracles essentially prescribed Forms of ritual practice Okay, that someone who has purified themselves can engage in in order to achieve that salvation to lift their soul up to communion with the gods, okay and whereas the Plotinians would think of this kind of ascent and return to the gods as a Form of divinization, right? You actually literally fuse with the first principle and become God yourself Okay, and I am a human soul regardless of how much it ascends and purifies itself It always stays a human soul ontologically. It never actually becomes a god. It can't Ontologically doesn't get one or anything doesn't get fused, but it can come into communion with right? and Contemplate the higher higher being and that's that's about as good as you can get Okay, is how an iamblican would call divinization, right? To be a Phaeos on there is someone who is capable of through the practice of these ritual acts to ascend that far and so those ritual acts are Theergy, okay, and the thing about Theergy is you tend to think of Theergy is like oh the Caldean oracles prescribe this sort of Practices that are completely different than anything you've seen in religion And while yes, there's some special practices that like the higher Theurgists and the adepts kind of practice you can really think of any sort of Religious ritual that involves prayer sacrifice and anything that that requires contact with the gods, you know As a form of Theergy like maybe a lower form of Theergy, okay? Right, so not everybody not everybody is animating statues, but people can pray people can meditate do things like that exactly Exactly and the point of Theergy as you mentioned I think is it is Phaeos god Aragon work god activity. It's divine activity in other words by practicing Theergy You are assimilating yourself to the gods or imitating the gods in some way by participating in their activity You're becoming more godlike by doing the things that the gods do Hey and So this is how Iamblichus and his school and Julian after him are able to see have to provide a Neoplatonic as They see it rational framework in which all traditional religion makes sense theoretically Okay, because every traditional religion came into being through oracles that communicated from whatever particular god Was in charge was in charge in that particular place told them how to how to conduct worship, right? Julian is not trying to impose a single Religion or catechism or doctrine Okay, he simply subscribes to a philosophy philosophical school that sees all traditional religion as Essentially doing the same thing You know all of these gods that they worship are essentially emanations of the higher god You know that is you know the one Intellects one being you know descending from there. I guess in philosophical terms. It's almost like a perennialist kind of view of religion and theology and things like that. It's a They take the stoic kind of allegorical method that you have in Crenutus and then they kind of take it to their own and they apply that towards religions and and You know you find that a philo in the middle platonic stuff, but then yeah, it really gets going with Platinus and porphyry, so so like yeah, like you said there's two different Groups, and I don't think I'd ever see porphyry animate a statue, but you know, yeah Yamblich is certainly would and the people who follow in his footsteps. They certainly would and they're looking at that You mentioned that theos honor, you know, of course the paradigm for that divine holy man is of course Apollonius of Tiana Yep Julian seeing all this stuff and these are basically like the rock stars the rock stars of his day, right? He's like I I want to animate statues like Maximus or whatever. Yeah, so I love I love that You know, it's like what he's doing, you know with his social and religious forums I kind of Liking it to you like when he gets in charge He's almost like an oil tycoon and he goes and makes this like all-star basketball team of platonic Philosophers and things like that. He just like brings them all over and like he surrounds himself with his entourage I really love that. I think it like he's like a crunk rapper with all his like entourage of like really smart dudes who are like Animating statues and trying to fend off earthquakes and stuff. I just love it Dr. Swiss. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been an absolute pleasure We hope to have you again sometime. You have an amazing evening Thank you. Thank you