A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

fight and marched south with his army. The fight proved to be unnecessary; Constantius died
before they clashed, and the bookworm Julian - like Claudius before him - became emperor of
Rome.
Understandably, Julian did not feel particularly friendly towards the Christians, recalling the role of
the Bishop of Nicomedia in the murder of his family. Being a philosopher rather than a statesman,
he saw that Constantine had made a mistake in raising Christianity to the position of official
religion of the empire. The proof was that the Christians were still denouncing one another as
heretics and assassinating one another when the opportunity arose. Power had proved as dangerous
to the Christians as it had to the Caesars. The gentle, neighbour-loving apostles of the man-god
were becoming rather worse than the Jewish zealots who had caused so much trouble to the
Caesars. During one squabble about rival popes in 366 A.D., their supporters fought in church and
left behind a hundred and thirty-seven corpses. The historian Ammianus remarks mildly that ‘wild
beasts are not such enemies to mankind as are most Christians in their deadly hatred to one
another’. So Julian decided to do what he could to restore the balance. It was not his intention to
persecute, or even suppress, the Christians. He only wanted to make them stop squabbling and
behave like Christians. So he summoned the various bishops who were denouncing one another and
asked them to desist. He restored the rights of ‘heretics’ who had been banished and allowed them
to return. He withdrew the special privileges enjoyed by Christians - such as tax concessions. He
opened pagan temples and tried to bolster the morale of pagan priests, who were in a state
resembling shellshock after half a century of Christian persecution. Julian was attempting to restore
some of the old religious tolerance that had existed before Constantine had given the Christians the
whip hand.
There was a yell of outraged indignation from the Christians, who immediately labelled him Julian
the Apostate. Christian writers poured out blistering denunciations. One of these was the emperor’s
old schoolfriend Gregory of Nazianz, to whom Julian had been helpful; in his epistles against
Julian, Gregory had to find discreditable reasons for Julian’s kindness; he even accuses him of
failing to persecute the Christians in order to deny them the glory of martyrdom.
It was unfortunate that, like Marcus Aurelius, this mild philosopher-emperor was unable to remain
at home and devote himself to his literary works. The barbarians were still knocking at the door; he
had only been emperor for two years when, on his way back from a successful campaign in Persia,
he died from an infected lance wound. The Christians breathed a sigh of relief and went back to
denouncing and killing one another, and to persecuting the pagans.
And, with the irony of history, Julian’s tolerance made the situation worse. In allowing ‘heretics’ to
return home, he restored the anti-Arians to power (Constantius had supported Arius), and the
Nicene view that Jesus was God the Creator eventually triumphed as a consequence. And so the
quarrels and schisms went on. Winwood Reade says, with superb sarcasm in his book The
Martyrdom of Man: ‘The bishops were all of them ignorant and superstitious men, but they could
not all of them think alike. And as if to ensure dissent they proceeded to define that which had
never existed, and which if it had existed could never be defined. They described the topography of
heaven. They dissected the godhead and expounded the miraculous conception, giving lectures on
celestial impregnations and miraculous obstetrics. They not only said that 3 was 1, and that 1 was
3; they professed to explain how that curious arithmetical combination had been brought about.’
But amidst all their own quarrels, they had no hesitation about persecuting pagans. The emperor
Theodosius, a Spaniard who came to the throne in 379 after a quick succession of ‘barrack
emperors’, issued an edict saying that all his subjects should be called Catholic Christians, and that