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THE

AMERICAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW.

EDITED BY

REV. HENRY B. SMITH, D. D.,

Professor in the Union Theological Seminary, N. Y.

AIDED BY REV. PROF. ROSWELL D. HITCHCOCK, D.D., AND

A LARGE NUMBER OF ABLE CONTRIBUTORS.

Vol. III.

PUBLISHED QUARTERLY AT NEW-YORK, BOSTON, PHILADELPHIA.

New-York:

W. H. BIDWELL, No. 5 BEEKMAN STREET.

BOSTON: O. B. BIDWELL, CONGREGATIONAL LIBRARY BUILDINGS.

PHILADELPHIA: SMITH, ENGLISH & CO., 23 NORTH SIXTH ST.

LONDON: TRUBNER & CO., 60 PATERNOSTEL ROW.

EDINBURGH: OGLE & MURRAY, 49 SOUTH BRIDGE ST.

1861.

THE

AMERICAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW.

No. IX.

JANUARY, 1861.

ART. I.-JULIAN THE APOSTATE.

By PHILIP SCHAFF, D.D., Prof. in Theol. Seminary, Mercersburg, Pa.

THE reign of Julian the Apostate is a brief but most interesting and instructive episode in the history of the Roman Empire and of the ancient Church. It was a systematic and vigorous effort to dethrone Christianity and to restore Paganism to its former supremacy. But in its entire failure it furnished an irresistible proof that Christianity had accomplished a complete intellectual and moral victory over the religion of Greece and Rome.

Julian, a nephew of Constantine the Great, was born in 331, and educated in the Arian court-Christianity of his despotic and suspicious cousin Constantius. He was even intended for the priesthood against his secret wish and will, and ordained a reader of the Scriptures in public worship. But the despotic and mechanical force-work of a repulsively austere and violently polemic type of Christianity roused the vigorous and

independent spirit of the highly gifted youth to rebellion, and drove him over to Paganism which, although deprived of its former vitality and power, was by no means extinct, and by its literature continued to exert its influence upon the higher classes of society. The pseudo-Christianity of Constantius, the persecutor of the heathen and of the orthodox Christians, produced by way of natural reäction the anti-Christianity of Julian; and the latter was a well-deserved punishment of the former. A similar example history furnishes us at a more recent period, in the case of Frederick the Great, whose infidelity must be explained to a great extent from the forced character of his injudicious Christian training.

With enthusiasm and untiring diligence the young Roman prince secretly read Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the NeoPlatonists. The partial prohibition of such reading gave it double zest. He secretly obtained the lectures of the celebrated rhetorician, Libanius, afterwards his eulogist, whose productions, however, represent the degeneracy of the heathen literature in that day, covering emptiness with a pompous and tawdry style, attractive only to a vitiated taste. He became acquainted by degrees with the most eminent representatives of heathenism, particularly the Neo-Platonic philosophers, rhetoricians, and priests, like Libanius, Ædesius, Maximus, and Chrysanthius. These confirmed him in his superstitions by sophistries and sorceries of every kind. He gradually became the secret head of the heathen party. Through the favor and mediation of the empress Eusebia, he visited for some months the schools of Athens (A.D. 355), where he was initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries, and thus completed his transition to the Grecian idolatry.

This heathenism, however, was not a simple, spontaneous growth; it was all an artificial and morbid production. It was the heathenism of the Neo-Platonic, pantheistic eclecticism, a strange mixture of philosophy, poesy, and superstition, and, in Julian at least, in great part an imitation or caricature of Christianity. It sought to spiritualize and revive the old. mythology by uniting with it oriental theosophemes and a few Christian ideas; taught a higher, abstract unity above the mul

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