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Julian: on Rome and reactionary romanticism.
In a different review this week, which is as disparate as it's oddly relevant, I wrote that how tempting it is to imagine the fall of empires. There is great hope and sorrow contained within, the insidious appeal of fatalism and the cathartic beauty of destruction; presented with a car crash, we stop and watch; we are moths and our light is Story; our dwelling places are in the shadow of death; thus, we "never forget."
...And Gore Vidal as an author and critic was terminally obsessed with the decline of the American Empire; there is no surprise, then, that Julian is a novel about decline and the tragedy of ineluctable decay.
For more than a millennium, the West (whatever that is) has been enraptured by the decline and fall (and resurrection (preferably by whoever is talking)) of Rome. Romans themselves excelled at it.
Flavius Claudius Julianus (331-63 AD) was the last pagan Emperor and the last living of the dynasty of Constantine the Great. He was a Neoplatonist philosopher by choice and a Caesar by circumstance. (The circumstances being dead, often executed by means of circumstantial evidence, relatives.) His was a life mission full of the potential of doomed romanticism: no less than the reversal of Christian primacy and the restoration of Hellenism.
Julian is told as correspondence between Libanius and Priscus, another neoplatonists and dying old men facing their dying old world, trying to assemble an account of Julian's life twenty years after his death, out of the same's stolen memoir and diary, and their own memory. I found these two's framing gossip about their sexual lives boring and kind of gross and hard to get through, but what is left is a rather fascinating text that is gripping despite (or because of?) its distanced tone and dry affect.
That philosopher king's efforts are presented luminously, the acts of a fallen true hero, a man who would be a saint if he wasn't the Apostate. Julian says of his mission of restoration, as Vidal writes it:
And we all know what befell Icarus. We learned, too late, to grieve him on his way.
It's difficult to determine what the reader is supposed to make of prophecy. Prophets' manipulations and dishonesty, the behind-the-scenes politicking that ensures a prophecy's fulfilment, are certainly clearly laid out often enough. Yet persistently prophecy is proven textually vindicated: omens doggedly follow Julian's victories and failures through Persia, Julian dies of a Roman spear, raised in purpose and religious conspiracy, in the same manner a dead lion is found in one of several moments of dread omensthe Hierophant of Greece solemnly and certainly declares himself the last of his ancient line. Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath...
These are all the makings of classical tragedy. One is invited to lament that dying world, that old world and what never came to pass: the restored white-columned temples and the allaying of a Dark Age, and - should you be inclined to misread Nietzsche - the emancipation of humanity from a slave mentality.
So laments Libanius, the dying Hellene, to his student John Chrysostom, the rising bishop:
... We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Imagining what a world could have been is also a tempting exercise. It allows for all the rosiness of nostalgia, with none of the irksome counterpoints of historiography. A negative cannot be disproven. There is a reason why alternate history, though by no means exclusive to them, tends to attract fascists.
It has been argued that Julian with its multiple points of view, with its bared process of truth-sourcing and multiple narration, prefigures postmodernist literature. I can also see within Then again, Julian's theology following the Iamblichus' Syrian Neoplatonists is profoundly mystical in its praxis, extolling ritual and tradition. Julian's attempted Hellenist revival was no heroic resistance of rationality against the dark, fog-minded encroachment of Christianity in the half-assed mode of historio-political understanding of New Atheism. Between the lines, Julian is a mirror to political reaction— so Julian's Priscus writes that "[Julian] was disturbed by the fact that the barbarians increase in numbers while we decrease.". Not quite 14 words, a bit too verbose for that. Resentment was never an original thinker.
This is a poignant text, both for what it says about politics and philosophy and for how it's telling it.
In a different review this week, which is as disparate as it's oddly relevant, I wrote that how tempting it is to imagine the fall of empires. There is great hope and sorrow contained within, the insidious appeal of fatalism and the cathartic beauty of destruction; presented with a car crash, we stop and watch; we are moths and our light is Story; our dwelling places are in the shadow of death; thus, we "never forget."
...And Gore Vidal as an author and critic was terminally obsessed with the decline of the American Empire; there is no surprise, then, that Julian is a novel about decline and the tragedy of ineluctable decay.
For more than a millennium, the West (whatever that is) has been enraptured by the decline and fall (and resurrection (preferably by whoever is talking)) of Rome. Romans themselves excelled at it.
n ... [T]he barbarians are at the gate. Yet when they breach the wall, they will find nothing of value to seize, only empty relics. The spirit of what we were had fled. So be it.n
Flavius Claudius Julianus (331-63 AD) was the last pagan Emperor and the last living of the dynasty of Constantine the Great. He was a Neoplatonist philosopher by choice and a Caesar by circumstance. (The circumstances being dead, often executed by means of circumstantial evidence, relatives.) His was a life mission full of the potential of doomed romanticism: no less than the reversal of Christian primacy and the restoration of Hellenism.
Julian is told as correspondence between Libanius and Priscus, another neoplatonists and dying old men facing their dying old world, trying to assemble an account of Julian's life twenty years after his death, out of the same's stolen memoir and diary, and their own memory. I found these two's framing gossip about their sexual lives boring and kind of gross and hard to get through, but what is left is a rather fascinating text that is gripping despite (or because of?) its distanced tone and dry affect.
That philosopher king's efforts are presented luminously, the acts of a fallen true hero, a man who would be a saint if he wasn't the Apostate. Julian says of his mission of restoration, as Vidal writes it:
n To stop the chariot as it careers into the sun, that is what I was born to do.n
And we all know what befell Icarus. We learned, too late, to grieve him on his way.
It's difficult to determine what the reader is supposed to make of prophecy. Prophets' manipulations and dishonesty, the behind-the-scenes politicking that ensures a prophecy's fulfilment, are certainly clearly laid out often enough. Yet persistently prophecy is proven textually vindicated: omens doggedly follow Julian's victories and failures through Persia, Julian dies of a Roman spear, raised in purpose and religious conspiracy, in the same manner a dead lion is found in one of several moments of dread omensthe Hierophant of Greece solemnly and certainly declares himself the last of his ancient line. Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath...
These are all the makings of classical tragedy. One is invited to lament that dying world, that old world and what never came to pass: the restored white-columned temples and the allaying of a Dark Age, and - should you be inclined to misread Nietzsche - the emancipation of humanity from a slave mentality.
So laments Libanius, the dying Hellene, to his student John Chrysostom, the rising bishop:
n [Resurrection] is a story to tell children. The truth is for thousand of years we looked to what was living. Now you look to what is dead, you worship a dead man and tell one another that this world is not for us, while the next is all that matters. [...] This is all we have. There is nothing else. Turn your back on this world, and you face the pit!n
... We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Imagining what a world could have been is also a tempting exercise. It allows for all the rosiness of nostalgia, with none of the irksome counterpoints of historiography. A negative cannot be disproven. There is a reason why alternate history, though by no means exclusive to them, tends to attract fascists.
It has been argued that Julian with its multiple points of view, with its bared process of truth-sourcing and multiple narration, prefigures postmodernist literature. I can also see within Then again, Julian's theology following the Iamblichus' Syrian Neoplatonists is profoundly mystical in its praxis, extolling ritual and tradition. Julian's attempted Hellenist revival was no heroic resistance of rationality against the dark, fog-minded encroachment of Christianity in the half-assed mode of historio-political understanding of New Atheism. Between the lines, Julian is a mirror to political reaction— so Julian's Priscus writes that "[Julian] was disturbed by the fact that the barbarians increase in numbers while we decrease.". Not quite 14 words, a bit too verbose for that. Resentment was never an original thinker.
This is a poignant text, both for what it says about politics and philosophy and for how it's telling it.
n n
