Julian the Apostate (r. 360-363)

>he thinks "Roman Religion" was imposed across the Empire.

>All Julian adorers on Veeky Forums are all butthurt that they got their GTA or DnD taken away by mommy and daddy as a kid

I'm angry monotheists came between me and God. They're Bible - particularly Moses and the "prophets" - is now proven a fraud which means it was always a fraud and they're just a bunch of hell-bound losers pretending to be somebodies.

>Paganism is just too fractured a "religion" to succeed

China?
Japan?

Fuck your degenerate Empire. The roman civilization may only be examined within the context of the Republic.

He meant across a large empire. China and Japan were relatively homogenous. Also, calling either pagan in the same sense as IE paganism is disingenuous. Japan's sponge-like Animism virtually allowed anything to seep in and be accepted. China's Confucian state philosophy anticipated non-theism

Also, in both cases, Buddhism succeeded in supplanting paganism to a large degree.

>How autistic was his religion compared to the prevailing Christianity at the time?

Monotheism is a lie, it's always been a lie, it'll always be a lie, it's proven to be a lie. The gospels say it's a lie. How dare you people use the gospel documents to spread Moses' genocidal agenda?

"Jesus really means 'don't murder' unless Moses says it's ok to murder!"

youtube.com/watch?v=NCGk1WimO2I

I am really glad people have started ignoring the Imperial Cult poster. He really likes to shit up LARP threads. :)

I can't even tell what he's promoting. Is it some kind of retarded polytheistic Gnosticism?

I'll be honest I've only read one of his posts completely before and since then I've ignored him. If hes not a troll then English must be his second language or hes just insane. He seems to just bring up things no one was discussing for no apparent reason.

He's always posting links to his terrible YouTube channel. The videos are weird and poorly made.

His posts are textbook schizophrenia. Just ignore them

>I can't even tell what he's promoting. Is it some kind of retarded polytheistic Gnosticism?

No, I promote paganism. I'm a god.

youtube.com/watch?v=-BVx_INbbxQ

Monotheism is an ancient death cult - that's all it is - it's not worshiping God. The universe isn't going to stop spinning just because one little species on one little planet in one little solar system in one little galaxy decided to go lightyears off the rails into batshit crazy land.

"I knocked over the statue of Athena after I murdered her priests - therefore Athena is a false god!"

Retards...

youtube.com/watch?v=w8w2mv-AflU

His death killed the Romans long term and ended the greatest Med civ.

Classic case of being goaded into LARPing as a warrior by the ((((((Christians))))) still infiltrated within the Constantinian army.

>monotheism is an ancient death cult
>implying god can't micromanage everything
>implying paganism doesn't go farther off the rails into crazy land
You should read summa theologica.

In this moment I am euphoric, not because of any phony God's blessing, but because I am enlightened by Athena

*tips imperial diadem*

Why do people always associate the term paganism with the Abrahamic definition of them and nothing else?

Because paganism is an abrahamic term and lacks any meaning outside abrahamic faiths or even christianity.

He was the first LARPer.

He wrote retarded screeds against Christianity and posted them publicly. He wrote a butthurt letter to the people of Antioch for not liking him.

He also managed to annoy ACTUAL PAGANS because he had an autistic fixation on animal sacrifice, which had by that time fallen out of favor.

>Paganism is an Abrahamic term
Really?

It was a Latin term used by Christians which was equivalent to "gentiles".

just report him for spam

Schizophrenia must be so exhausting.

The greatest minds have trouble accepting that they're supposed to place faith in hebrew mythology above the truth.

Considering he BTFO the early church so hard they couldn't respond to his arguments and had to resort to burning them I'd say he was /ourguy/.

Who did it best?
Julian vs Akhenaten

I think what is fascinating about his "reformation" was that having been raised a Christian, the forms and traditions of the Church were what he knew. He had no direct experience of what Pagan Rome had been like.

So he tried to ref-form Paganism and revitalize it under a made-up hierarchical structure that mimicked the Church and was not part of historical Paganism at all.

Further, though he did not have enough time to see it thorough, he recognized some of the features of early Christianity that made it appealing when contrasted to Paganism. For example, the Christian emphasis on taking care of the less fortunate in their community, Christian or Pagan, won them a lot of positive reaction, so Julian tried to set up similar traditions among congregants of Pagan faiths.

>He was raised by fundies and saw how retard it was.

I think you miss something here. Julian was raised seeing his immediate family killed one by one, for dynastic reasons. They were not killed over questions of faith -- many/all would have been Christian, as was Julian himself before his apostasy.

Julian's relatives were not being killed for being Christian, or Pagan, but the guys ordering the killings were the dynasty that defined itself above all else as Christian.

It is not surprising that this would turn him against the Church, and the only working option available was to embrace whatever he could reconstruct of what Paganism had been before it was suppressed.

His motives for apostasy were not based on what would be good for the State in the future, they wr3e personal -- "Christians killed muh fambly, bro."

>animal sacrifice

Animal sacrifice was not just "fallen out of favor." It was flat out banned by the time of Julian. Animal sacrifice was always a huge problem with Christianity -- the Ultimate Sacrifice having been made, participating in sacrifices was a huge taboo, and seen as an offence to God.

On the other hand, sacrificing animals' blood and spirit to the gods was key to most pagan cults, and suppressing it would be seen by the pagans as sapping the vitality and power of the gods, and their connections to their temples and worshippers.

With many pagan temples dismantled and many pagan priesthoods vacant, resuming animal sacrifice was the single most direct method Julian had for both striking a blow at the "Galileans" and restoring some credibility to his co-religionists.

Interestingly, the roots of "pagan" have to do with rustic-ness, ruralness and being a "bumpkin."

Since Christianity spread most quickly and easily into urban areas, as the new faith became dominant,the enclaves of the old Paganism were the rural areas.

"Pagan," as a term, means "rube" or "red neck" almost as much as it signifies an adherent of a then-vanishing set of religions.

Cyril of Alexandria would like a word with you.

Protip idiot: The Christian church's hierarchy was copy-pasted directly from paganism. Show me where in the Bible it talks about bishops and parishes and such.

so it was the old way of saying "urban and suburban retards"?

>Paganism is just too fractured a "religion" to succeed.

What the hell does that even mean? Nothing but word salad.

>le ebin fedora larp meme XD
>being applied to someone for whom the religion in question was *still extant and a large part of the population*
If that's LARPing, then Christians are the biggest LARPers of them all, gallivanting about as Jews and pretending to be Israelites.

Why are Christians allowed to shit up discourse on Veeky Forums?

>make drastic domestic changes to the State religion
>decide to fuck off and invade Persia where Romans have had a long history of getting btfo
>Christian auxiliary backstabs you by tossing a javelin in your heart to kill the Apostate

Agreed

You mean the guy that had to cherry pick and misrepresent arguments?

Christian hierarchy was not Biblical, it was added on. It mimicked, to a large extent, the hierarchy of the State Religion in Rome, spread over the entre Church in a way that the Roman hierarchy was never exerted over paganism as a whole. Each cult might have some ties between temples and sites, but generally The Priests at the Temple of Apollo, for example, had no responsibilities towards or ties to the one in the next town.

Unlike the Christian Church, and the specifically Roman State religion, Paganism as a whole was not a unti, not under a hierarchy, not tied together in the way Julian tried to make it.

>Was he retarded for trying to bring back paganism?
Not at all.
The combination of both long term systemic problems with the empire and the impact of Christianity had pretty much ensured the destruction of the empire (reminder that it only took ~150 years from Constantine to collapse).

By reforging imperial authority and overhauling the existing governmental bureaucracy.
I'm quite confident that he would have not only been able to hold the empire together, but set the ground work for a new golden age of culture, philosophy, wealth and expansion.

>Or was his cause righteous
I would consider reforming the traditional Hellenic faith, reforming the imperial government and attempting to get rid off a weird foreign death cult that had infiltrated and undermined the empire to be quite righteous.

>Paganism is just too fractured a "religion" to succeed
He knew this.
That is why he invited all of the exiled Christian 'heretics' back to Rome under the guise of 'religious freedom'.
He would let the Christians attack each other and divide themselves up over minor doctrinal differences, before introducing his new centralised, unified Hellenic church.
Basically he was going to make the Christians the divided ones and the pagans the unified ones.
He was a really smart guy.

>Raised in a city that still had a significant 'pagan' population
>Spend most of his childhood reading Hellenic philosophy
>Spend most of his teenage years sneaking off to attend lectures by Hellenic philosophers
>LARPer
Fucking Galileans are just embarrassing.

We from what we do know of the reforms he wanted to make.
His new religion would have been a rather syncretic one.
Given the influence that Buddhism had over eastern Hellenic philosophy by this point in time.
I think it is quite likely that Julian's religion would have absorbed Buddhism in a manner similar to Shintoism (only it would have been Theravada, rather then Mahayana Buddhism).

We got no fucking clue who killed him, and which side the killer was on. Attempts to establish the identity of the hand that threw the spear were made by Rome right away, with no witnesses (or at least none that came forward) an on the other side, no "brave hero" ever claimed what would have been substantial glory and reward for the deed.

This led to a lot of mythologizing about it, within a few centuries it was generally accepted that St. Michael or an angel offed ol' Julian, sense no hman agency could be identified.

The guy who wrote a refutation, which was earlier in this thread claimed to not have been done.

Better minds than Julian wrote a number of anti-Christian screeds, a larger number f Christian thinkers wrote any number of refutations and arguments in favor of the faith.

Julian's attack survives, to the extent it does, mainly through passages cited in refutations; otherwise we'd have no idea what he had written.

I would disagree about the of Christianity -- providing a unifying faith gave the Empire a sense f unity it had lost as it expanded and became culturally (and religiously) heterogeneous.

Could Julian's "Paganism that looked like the Church" have fulfilled the same need? Possibly. But that would be imitating an advantage Christianity was bringing, rather than undoing any supposed harm the new Faith was bringing.

As for your assertions of a golden age that died aborning, it is easy to make up what might have happened "if" but not really historical. I could imagine the if Julian succeeded, he would have caused the destruction of the Empire for whatever reason , or that his war to the East would have lead to extending the Empire into India and China, or whatever fantasy seems appealing. But it's just creating a fantasy. What "would have" happened is not knowable.

>Le Edward "Christianity caused the destruction of Rome meme" Gibbon
Go back to 1789 you fucking brainlet

He's a stupid neopagan child just like the ones that plague this board.

>Given the influence that Buddhism had over eastern Hellenic philosophy by this point in time
Oh God, you mean none? The West barely knew who "Vouta" was, aside from being some deified holy man.

Gibbon was right about everything, friend.

>being this retarded
By the 4th century, there had been literally hundred of years of contact between Hellenic philosophers and Buddhist missionaries.
Scythianus for example had travelled to India around 50 CE and quite famously brought back a number of eastern concepts with him.
Buddhist ideas were well known in areas like Alexandria and Mesopotamia and played an important part in the final philosophic and religious positions/movements that formed at the very end of antiquity.

>Those idiots saying he was a neopagan larping fedora

Friendly reminder that roman paganism allowed for emperors to be deified and thus reinforcing their authority
In the long run paganism would have been better for Rome in order to survive

Its pretty obvious. The problems neo-pagans face today would face them. That is that pagans are not a united group of people, their only common trait is that they aren't Christian. Doctrinal differences exist from one group to another, sure Christians had similar problems but they weren't nearly as bad. Pagan Gods and how to worship them could be different from town to town, its harder to convince several towns with different Gods and beliefs to work together than it is to convince several Christian towns to work together.

Imagine trying to coordinate a thousand people to paint a wall whose only shared trait is that they all don't like the colour green to some degree, these people all have different colours of paint with. Now imagine trying to coordinate a thousand people that all agree green is the best colour. A person that likes purple is going to be mad when you tell them to paint the wall blue but the green lovers will all be happy when you tell them to paint it green.

>No user Pagans all agreed to be fwends because they had the same Gods but different names!
It never worked out that well, people started favouring different Gods and elevating them above others. Imagine one of those debates about which superhero is the strongest that kids have, now imagine grown men having the same debate and willing to prove it with a sword.

>a refutation

No. He cherry-picked a few of his arguments and then misrepresented them in an attempt to challenge them.

>Gibbon was right about everything
Nice meme

Rome should have never existed.

Julian was awesome, he had the stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius but without the retarded son.

>"Riches are the object of your desires; those riches are in the hands of the Persians; and the spoils of this fruitful country are proposed as the prize of your valor and discipline. Believe me, the Roman republic, which formerly possessed such immense treasures, is now reduced to want and wretchedness once our princes have been persuaded, by weak and interested ministers, to purchase with gold the tranquillity of the Barbarians. The revenue is exhausted; the cities are ruined; the provinces are dispeopled. For myself, the only inheritance that I have received from my royal ancestors is a soul incapable of fear; and as long as I am convinced that every real advantage is seated in the mind, I shall not blush to acknowledge an honorable poverty, which, in the days of ancient virtue, was considered as the glory of Fabricius. That glory, and that virtue, may be your own, if you will listen to the voice of Heaven and of your leader. But if you will rashly persist, if you are determined to renew the shameful and mischievous examples of old seditions, proceed. As it becomes an emperor who has filled the first rank among men, I am prepared to die, standing; and to despise a precarious life, which, every hour, may depend on an accidental fever. If I have been found unworthy of the command, there are now among you, (I speak it with pride and pleasure,) there are many chiefs whose merit and experience are equal to the conduct of the most important war. Such has been the temper of my reign, that I can retire, without regret, and without apprehension, to the obscurity of a private station."

Source?

Ammianus

What part?

Page 355 of Res Gestae you lazy bastard
gutenberg.org/files/28587/28587-h/28587-h.htm

Thanks : -)

>What was the deal with this guy?

Best damn Emperor Rome had after Aurelius.

>Was he retarded for trying to bring back paganism? Or was his cause righteous.

You could call him a traditionalist. Christianity did sow civil strife, it was a far more radical religion then than it is today, they were oft obsessed with martyrdom and would refuse to take up arms to defend the Empire. Attempt to bring a people back to their roots to correct a decline is fairly common historically albeit not usually successful.

>How autistic was his religion compared to the prevailing Christianity at the time?

Christians had by his time stripped all the Pagan temples of wealth and spent it all, his religious struggle was a huge financial burden more than anything else.

And let us remember, he made such devastating arguments against Christianity that his works were deliberately erased for all time.

The same "refutation" in which he admitted he dared not touch some of Julian's arguments and only chose to address the weakest of them?

Like most lost roman works, I hold out hope that someday we will find a complete copy of Julians anti-galilean work.
Whether we find as a forgotten work in an old library or in a hidden cashe ala nag hammadi, I would love to read his arguments that even the best galilean scholars could not refute.

>“The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in this unique relation to its maker? Christians are like a council of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung-hill croaking and squeaking for our sakes was the world created.”
How will Galileans ever recover?

he's right you know

What's funny about Julian is for all that he tried to revive polytheism, he was as I recall, still a monotheist. Just a Platonic one. His views on the gods very much mirror modern day neopagan ones.

We will be getting a shit-tonne of additional Classical texts soon. There's the text that have already been recovered at Herculaneum (pre-Julian, of course) and more are anticipated as excavations continued. When technology develops to a point where we can reliably read them... BAM an entire fucking library of books, literally no need to ever read a modern text ever again.

Furthermore, work continues at places like Saint Catherine's Monastery. Classicism is coming back, Greek and Chinese texts will constitute cutting edge political developments and wisdom, and before long we will be explore the galaxy in city-state colony spaceships

>literally no need to ever read a modern text ever again.

For some reason all I can imagine is "the virgin bibliophile and the chad classicist" with the chad having "never read a modern text."

Honestly moreso than his paganism stuff was his "I NEED A WAR TO PROVE MYSELF" garbage against the Sassanids. Utterly disastrous for the empire, probably one of the stupidest decision an emperor ever made.

What's funny about this? Are you one of those dopes who thinks pagans are all polytheists? Protip: monotheism was the dominant theology BEFORE Christianity.

I find it slightly amusing is all. He tends to be characterized as wanting to bring back pagan superstition, when his beliefs were more philosophically grounded than that. I don't disagree with his position I should note.

Neo-Platonism is not exactly monotheistic.
Plotinus goes on for quite some length in the Enneads about what the One is and is not.
He makes it rather clear that the One is not really a god as we would understand it, it is simply a non-sentient source for everything.
Think more a source of a great river and less Mars.

As such, it is quite safe to consider Julian a polytheist, or at-least a henotheist.

I do hope that is the case.
I may just commit myself to learning Latin and Koine Greek if we do indeed see a new bunch of Roman works become available.

I do firmly believe that somewhere in Egypt, in some forgotten cave is a whole bunch of Roman works just waiting to be found.
Maybe some works that were saved from the destruction of the Alexandrian Serapeum (and so may include some of Julians work in full) by some brave Hellenic scholars.

While I do admit that my memory is rather hazy on this topic.
I'm 90% sure that the war was something Julian inherited from his predecessor.

>Neo-Platonism is not exactly monotheistic.
>Plotinus goes on for quite some length in the Enneads about what the One is and is not.
>He makes it rather clear that the One is not really a god as we would understand it, it is simply a non-sentient source for everything.
>Think more a source of a great river and less Mars.
I wanted to point this out myself but you did a better job than I could have. I'm getting tired of the misinformation circulating in these threads that paganism was already dead before christianity became dominant

Julian however considered the gods allegorical for natural forces and expressions of a singular divinity.

>I'm 90% sure that the war was something Julian inherited from his predecessor.
Nope, in fact Constantius II made peace with the Sassanids because of the uprising of Julian's troops who were marching against him when Constantius died. Julian decided he needed to prove himself to Constantius' troops and give himself military glory and decided to go and capture Ctesiphon despite the fact the Sassanids weren't doing anything to Rome and were trying to get him to back off diplomatically.

He went in with absolutely no end goal in mind, decided to lay siege to Ctesiphon without adequate siege equipment and destroyed his fleet so the Persians couldn't capture it but left his army stranded across the Tigris as a result and of course led to his death and the chaos and destruction of the army meant Jovian having to pay for safe passage which just led to further chaos. It's one of the most retarded military ventures in Roman history.

I think much of the problem comes from people not knowing anything about Neoplatonism.
Most people with even some passing degree of interest in roman history, would be able to provide you with a very basic outline of Stoic ideas.
This is because Stoicism has texts that are made for/understandable by the layman - Enchiridion and Meditations.
However even for someone with a pretty good existing foundation knowledge in Platonism, it took me quite some time and two reading guides for me to really get my head around Plotinus.

I can only guess that for some people, they assume that if they cannot understand something then it must not have been very important to being with.
When applied to reading of late antiquity, they discount the complex and theologically compete state that Hellenic philosophy/religion was able to reach before the end.
It is really quite the tragedy in my opinion.

I have personally never come across any text that claimed that Julian considered the gods to be allegorical.
If that were the case, I do not understand why he would have been so insistent on performing a bull sacrifice in Antioch.

I think it is more likely that he was just a henotheist.
Or at the very least, approaching the gods with the sort of sceptic humility found in the likes of Halcyon.

This is all according to Wikipedia (sue me) he viewed the myths as allegories and the gods as aspects of a philosophical divinity. Sorry that's very different from what I said.

I'd still say it's basically monotheistic.

>Protip: monotheism was the dominant theology BEFORE Christianity.
Nice historical revisionism. I highly doubt that in the vast populations of the Roman empire, that the common trader and farmer subscribed to Platonic ideas on godhood.

Farmers don't have theology to speak of. Or do you think Christianity posits that God is a beaded man in the sky, because that's what a majority of uneducated Christian farmers think?

>gods as aspects of a philosophical divinity
Ok, I think I understand the problem now.
In Neoplatonism, the Hellenic gods (as with all things) are viewed as part of the emanations from the One.
I think the person that wrote that article may have simply misunderstood Neoplatonism.

As I said before.
The One is not really a 'god' and as such no Neoplatonists would have been making any sacrifices to it.

>Farmers don't have theology to speak of.
Paganism doesn't have one either. It is a faith brought about by the common people arising from the ground up via the combined superstitions of the masses, whereas Christianity is a faith which explicitly has its practices devolved from a priestly class.

> Or do you think Christianity posits that God is a beaded man in the sky, because that's what a majority of uneducated Christian farmers think?

That isn't even correct.

>Paganism doesn't have one either.
*tips crucifix*

There is no pagan "dogma" friend. There is no central pagan authority declaring what is and is not proper ritual for the pagan people. Different temples, had local traditions and observances, and individuals had different perspectives on the gods.

*tips crucifix*

why you do dis

Why do you imagine your posts deserve a serious reply? Read a book, dope.

OP here. Some really good posts here, thanks guys.

that happened in christianity as well. it may well be said that this is universal or human nature. competing states and city-states that were christiant throughout history elevated Saints to special status as protectors of their country or city or profession.