The swan song of Mediterranean "paganism" and ancient sacred thought in the last attempt of the last emperor of Rome, who paid his personal resistance by being branded as "Apostate"
di Daniel Perra
Following the Neoplatonic doctrine of Plotinus (203-270 AD), there are three necessary prerequisites for reaching ecstatic union with the Divine: the study of philosophy, the exercise of virtue and the contemplation of beauty. The earthly life of the Emperor Flavius Claudius Julian (331-369), instructed in Neoplatonism and some mystery doctrines by Maximus of Ephesus, can rightly be considered as a constant effort towards philosophical-spiritual realization along these three directions. Philosopher, theologian, but above all a man with a deep religious sentiment, Julian spent his short life in the search for divine Truth and for the restoration of his spiritual sovereignty at the expense of doctrines that sought to usurp and offend the tradition of Rome.
Julian, convinced of the fact that the notion of God does not come to men from a teaching (or from a revelation) but from nature itself, composed his Hymn to the Sun contemplating the dawn on Mount Casio near Antioch. All his political and military work, also inseparable from his spiritual convictions, never dissociated himself from an idea of imitatio heroum which in some cases became real imitatio dei. In fact, a legend tells that on his death, which took place at the confluence of the Tigris and Gyndes rivers by the hand of a Christian, the bystanders saw two souls emerge from his body, first that of Julian then that of Alexander the Great. [1]:
«Similar to two torches, they became two balls of fire, then two streamers that merged with the innumerable stars of the firmament. "
The assimilation of the figure of Alexander to that of the Emperor Julian is not accidental. The latter's mother had in fact been predicted that a new Alexander would be born from his womb. And Julian himself believed the words of Maximus of Ephesus when he assured him that he was destined to unite East and West and to overcome the exploits of what in the Islamic world is known as Iskander Dhu'l-Qarnayn ("Alessandro il Bicorne"), "an epithet that is interpreted in reference to the two centuries, the two ages, the two cycles of Alexander" [2].
Like the Macedonian, who declared himself the son of Ammon, Julian officially declared himself the son of Helios, as well as according to Heracles-Mithra "destined by the gods to restore the religious and political order in the Roman world". In this sense, the Emperor becomes a sort of savior of the inhabited world and his mission against Persia, far from being an operation aimed at mere commercial profit, "appears to be assimilated, through the figure of Julian himself, to the mission of purifying all the land and the sea that God entrusted to Heracles and Dionysus " [3]. The advance towards the East of Julian, restorer of solar monotheism, is therefore to be interpreted as an advance meeting the Sun. As for Alexander, this advance must necessarily take place along the lines of breadth and exaltation.
Julian's rejection of Christianity is characterized in the first place as a rejection of the idea of Paradise lost which places the Subject not in the Center, in the celestial Pole, but outside of it. This Subject, conceived as Subject-exile, suffers from the guilt of original sin. Julian's imperial and political idea, on the other hand, affirms the divine character of the Subject which has its seat in the Center of the cosmos. This Subject is absolutely inseparable from God (exaltation) and through the horizontal extension of his power (breadth) purifies the space transforming it back into Paradise. On the contrary, the Jewish and Christian God, according to the words of Julian himself, would be malignant, jealous and envious (which is inconceivable for a divinity) of the fact that man, "participating in life, becomes immortal". And to avoid this it prevents the knowledge of good and evil [4].
Alexander went into the Land of Darkness in search of the Source of Life that would make him immortal. However, his mission was unsuccessful and only his companion Andreas (al-Khidr in the Islamic version of the legend) was able to drink from the Fountain achieving immortality. This "Source" can only be found in the Paradise Pole (the Earthly Paradise) which represents the very center of the world. "This Pole is still effectively a part of the cosmos, but whose position is in any case virtually supra-cosmic: this explains the fact that from here the fruit of the Tree of Life can be reached, which is equivalent to saying that the Being having reached the center of our world, it has already conquered immortality " [5]. And this is the Pole towards which Julian aimed to reunite man with his primordial spiritual essence lost due to the estrangement from the Center of good.
Helios, in Julian's imperial theology, is the intelligible hypostasis of good and the sunlight is the intellectual energy that illuminates the spirits. In many traditions the sun is represented as the fruit of the World Tree. It leaves its tree at the beginning of each cycle to settle there again at the end. In this perspective, the tree, in addition to its natural axial symbolism, takes on the meaning of "station of the sun". A symbolism that takes on even greater value if we consider that theAxis of the world it is always considered more or less explicitly as "luminous". It, as Plato affirmed - "the one to whom God spoke mouth to mouth" [6] - is "a luminous axis of diamond". And always according to Plato, like the Tree of Life which extends from top to bottom, "man is a celestial plant whose roots stretch towards the sky and the branches downwards" [7]. Consequently, its existence can in no way be separated from the metaphysical order. The tendency to monotheism and universalism of the Julian solar religiosity was based precisely on the fact that the uniqueness of the Divine necessarily had to be reflected in the unity of the Empire and its "angelized Head" capable of maintaining the direct relationship between the physical and metaphysical.
Now, as reported by Prof. Claudio Mutti in his collection of essays on the epiphanies of the imperial idea, Julian's attempt to refound pagan civilization has been compared to both Imam Khomeini's (successful) attempt to reorganize a state modern (albeit with an intrinsic imperial and traditional character), and to the attempt of Pope John Paul II to keep alive a religion (the Christian-Catholic one) now destined for decline [8]. However, a comparison that would seem better to fit with the hieratic figure of the Roman Emperor could be that with the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten: he who raised the solar disc Aten to the rank of sole and supreme divinity, cosmocrat and universal creator, universal source of life as well as epiphany. eternal of divinity. Through the so-called "Revolution of Amarna", Amenhotep IV assumed the name of Akh-en-Aton ("he who serves the Aten") and, freeing himself from the priestly dominion as regards religious questions, re-established a univocal and direct link between the Divine and royal power. His death and the end of the XVIII dynasty with his successor Tut-Ankh-Amon, who re-established relations with the priestly class, marked, according to the widespread opinion among scholars, the end of the creativity of the Egyptian genius. [9].
The writer Maximiani Portas (aka Savitri Devi Mukherji) in her work The Lighting and the Sun he identified in the figure of Pharaoh Akhenaten an example of "man over time": that is, a man who persists in his deep convictions regardless of the surrounding world, ignoring it, and almost in open contrast with it. Julian, like Akhenaten who established solar monotheism at a time when the Egyptian world was experiencing a phase of open decadence, can be considered a "man over time". Julian also lived in an era in which the Roman Empire was experiencing an irreversible phase of decline. A decline that Julian, deeply influenced by Neoplatonism, attributed to the spread of a religion, Christianity, perceived as extraneous to the founding bases and to the very essence of the Empire. And like Akhenaten, Julian's attempt, also due to his premature death, will be doomed to failure.
Julian's idea of Christianity was affected by the classic Neoplatonic setting according to which Christians were nothing more than an extremist sect that deliberately separated from the orthodoxy of the Mosaic Law. The Greek Neoplatonic philosopher (of Phoenician origin) Porphyry, a former disciple of Plotinus, believed that the Jews welcomed God better than Christians. But Porphyry himself regarded Jesus Christ as a deeply devoted man. St. Augustine in De civitate dei he reported part of Porphyry's speculations on Christianity with the precise aim of refuting them in a somewhat superficial way on the basis of the biblical verse "he who offers sacrifices to the gods in addition to the Lord alone will be doomed to extermination". Porphyry writes in his Speeches against Christians:
“The gods proclaimed that Christ was absolutely devoted and became immortal; however, they affirm that Christians have become tainted and entangled in error and are the object of numerous outrages […] The body is always exposed to the torments that weaken it, while the soul of devout men resides in the heavenly abode. However, that soul fatally let other souls to whom destiny did not allow to obtain divine gifts, nor to know the immortality of Zeus, became entangled in error […] God, as father of all, does not need anything; it is good for us, however, to adore him in a just, pure and completely virtuous way, making our life a prayer to be raised up to him. "
And, in fact, this did Julian: he made his life a prayer to be raised up to the heavenly abode. However, unlike Porphyry, Julian did not have a particular sympathy for the figure of Christ and did not see in him any specific spiritual and prophetic quality, also taking advantage of the Gospel verse "no prophet rises from Galilee" [10].
The prohibition on proselytizing Christians and the provision that prevented them from carrying out pedagogical activities (De Magistris) based on the idea that they could not teach a culture that they deeply despised, however, did not prevent the Emperor from showing relative tolerance towards them, so much so that he often worried that no violence would be done to them. At the same time Julian never appreciated the exclusivist and rigidly ethnic character of Jewish religiosity, but he could not help but appreciate the figures of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who in any case believed to be of Chaldean origin and therefore versed in the sacred sciences, in theurgy and in astrology.
Solar monotheism or enotheism, introduced by Julian, can rightly be considered as a "synthesis of all pagan religions and theologies" [11]. Helios is the only true God and the other Roman gods are nothing but hypostases of him. Julian did not invent a religion and did not insert elements extraneous to the Roman religious tradition. «Rome did not fail in its strictest traditions to welcome and adopt foreign cults and customs. On the contrary, after having been purified of its most spurious and equivocal features, the cult of Bedouin origin and established in Syria became a Roman state cult and the Sun God is confused with the most characteristic God of pure Roman tradition, Capitoline Jupiter. This fact, which René Guénon could have defined in terms of a providential intervention from the East in favor of Rome, could have occurred for the reason that the solar cult of late Roman antiquity represented the re-emergence of a common primordial inheritance " [12].
The Persians revered Helios under the name of Mithra. And Giuliano, who aimed at a form of universalization of Mithraism, in his Hymn to the Sun identified Mithra precisely with the Undefeated Sun, supreme Roman divinity starting from Aurelian's reform of 274 AD and celebrated on the day of the winter solstice, with Apollo and Prometheus. In fact, Mithra plays a complex role in the Iranian cosmogony. Celebrated in the Hymn Mihr Yasht and created by Ahura Mazda, Mithra is an omniscient and all-seeing solar god who provides for all creation, the fertility of fields and livestock and is at the same time a warrior god. [13]. Mithra, however, does not share the tragic fate of other mystery deities and the scenario of Mithraic initiation does not involve evidence evoking death and resurrection [cf. The religions of mystery: soteriology of the Mithraic cult and of Attis / Cybele].
Julian was initiated into these mysteries and theHymn to the Sun he is affected as much by his initiatory experience as by the Neoplatonic influences. All deities depend on the Light of Helios and are the emanation of his power. It is also connected to "everything on earth breathes and moves and participates in the rational being and soul of the intellect" [14]. In this sense, "Helios is the Sun not as a divinified physical star but as a symbol of metaphysical light and power in a transcendent sense [...] Helios is identified with Apollo, who, given his fundamental qualities of immutability, perfection, eternity , intellectual excellence, is the personification of divine unity expressing itself as pure and absolute intelligence " [15]. But for those who contemplate the visible god it is difficult to understand how great the invisible is. Giuliano writes [16]:
"This divine and beautiful cosmos, which from the top of the celestial vault to the extreme limit of the earth is held together by the indestructible providence of God, exists uncreated from eternity and is eternal for the remaining time, being preserved by nothing else if not directly from the fifth body - whose summit is the ray of the sun - then to a degree so to speak higher than the intelligible world; and, in a still higher sense, by the King of the universe, in whom all things have their center. This indeed, whether it is appropriate to call it that which is beyond intelligence, or the Idea of beings, or the One, or the Good, precisely this composite cause of all things, for all beings model of beauty and of perfection, unity and irresistible power, by virtue of the original creative essence permeating in her, she manifested by herself Helios, the greatest God, in all similar to himself, to make him a mediator between those mediating causes which are the intellectual and demiurgic. "
Therefore, according to Giuliano, between the supersensible world of the Divine and its angelic intelligences and the world of material and corporeal forms, there exists a third "intellectual" world in which Helios, son of the One and hypostasis of the Supreme Principle, " mediating, coordinating and unifying function in relation to intellectual and demiurgic causes, participating both in the unity of the transcendent Principle and in the contingent multiplicity of the phenomenal manifestation " [17].
The figure of Attis is also associated with the sun, Cybele's companion who inHymn to the Mother of the Gods by Giuliano embodies the Logos, demiurgic cause of the visible world [18]:
Attis took as the principle of his reign the functions of all the gods directed to the visible world. He had for himself the whole and pure region up to the Galaxy. "
Cybele, on the other hand [19]:
«[…] It is the source of the intellectual and demiurgic gods who govern the visible gods; she is the goddess who generated the great Zeus and cohabits with him, after coming into existence, she is great after him great, together with the great demiurge; she is the mistress of all life, the cause of all generation […] Motherless virgin and Zeus' companion of the throne, she is truly mother of all gods. "
Julian, as is well known, did not introduce anything new into traditional Roman religiosity. The myth of Cybele and Attis was introduced since the time of the Punic wars in order to propitiate the victory of Rome. Of Phrygian origin, the myth tells the story of Cybele, mother of the gods, who, found Attis asleep on the banks of the Sangarios river, falls in love with him and keeps him with her. However, he falls in love with a nymph, unleashing Cybele's anger which drives him mad. Thus, Attis, self-destructed, leaves the nymph and returns to live alongside Cybele. The festivities linked to the cult of Cybele and Attis took place in the days of the spring equinox between 15 and 24 March and to them, after a certain date, were intrinsically connected mystery rites that promised immortality to the initiate.
The Neoplatonic idea, at the basis of Julian religious and philosophical speculation, was also adopted by the Islamic theosophy of Shaikh al-Ishraq Sohrawardi (1155-1191) and Mahmud Qotboddin Shirazi (1237-1311). Indeed, Sohrawardi himself was convinced of the existence among the ancient Persians of a community led directly by God. Their sublime doctrine of light would have been testified by Plato and Hermes Trismegistus. It is based on the ecstatic vision of beings of light. And this light is none other than the "light of glory" of Zoroastrianism (xvarnah: term that indicates the primordial blaze which is the source of the auroral splendors, those hypostases of light which, generating each other from their own radiations, reach the innumerable) [20]. Light opposes pure darkness (barzakh): the western world (land of the occaso) where evil reigns due to the absence of God.
Over a thousand years after Julian, another philosopher who shared an era of imperial decadence, the Byzantine Giorgio Gemisto Pletone (1355-1452), spoke expressly of the search for Paradise as the inner path of the Spirit towards the center of the soul surrounded by light. Plethon, bearer of an ideal of reunification of religions on the basis of Platonism and their primordial unity that shocked the bystanders of the Unionist Council of Florence in 1439 [21], believed that through Platonic philosophy, heir to the Zoroastrian one, it would be possible to give life to a theocentric and theocratic society inspired by the solar cult. He also considered himself to be the continuer of a consistently Eurasian wisdom line that had its origins in antiquity and through Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Plato and even the brahmins had reached him. For this reason Plethon, like Julian, was accused of wanting to restore paganism. However, his was simply an attempt to reconcile man with primordial religious characters through Platonism and solar monotheism: the only way to overcome religious disputes, both between Christians and between Christians and Muslims, and found universal peace. .
It therefore appears evident, as previously stated, that Julian himself did not insert any foreign or particularly novel element into the whole of Roman religiosity. Indeed, his might be better understood as a return to primordial religiosity; to what the Danish, naturalized German scholar Herman Wirth called urmonotheismus [22]:
"The essential element of this primordial religiosity, which was expressed essentially on a monotheistic basis, would have been constituted by a sort of natural revelation in which the primary role was to be covered by the immediate experience of cosmic light, by the spiritual meanings covered by the the sun and from the different moments that rhythm his celestial path, the year-God represented as the breath / life of the sun […] From an original cosmic father a son would be born, the bearer of what Wirth defined as the light of the earth; the sun, the bodily vehicle of spiritual light. "
Julian's political and religious planning failed due to his untimely death during the expedition against Persia. Like Akhenaten's successors who destroyed his work, Julian's successors no longer put any brakes on the Christianization of the Empire which managed to survive in its eastern component thanks to the profound influence that the Empire exerted on it. Felix Asia.
Note:
[1] C. Mutti, Imperium. Epiphanies of the Idea of Empire, Effepi, Genoa 2005, p. 37.
[2] Ibidem.
[3] Ibidem, P. 35.
[4] Flavius Claudius Julian, Against the Galileans (94 A), in C. Mutti (edited by), Men and Gods; the works of the Emperor who defended the tradition of Rome, Edizioni Mediterranee, Rome 2004, p. 37.
[5] R. Guénon, Symbols of sacred science, Adelphi Editions, Milan 1973, p. 282.
[6] Against the Galileans (49B), in Men and Gods, therein cit., p. 38.
[7] Symbols of sacred science, therein cit., p. 279.
[8] Imperium. Epiphanies of the Idea of Empire, therein cit., p. 13.
[9] M. Eliade, History of religious ideas and beliefs (Vol. I), BUR, Milan 1996, p. 124.
[10] John 7, 52.
[11] Imperium Epiphanies of the idea of Empire, therein cit., p. 14.
[12] C. Mutti, Franz Altheim's Eurasian Perspective, on Eurasia.
[13] History of religious ideas and beliefs, therein cit., p. 323.
[14] Hymn to King Helios (130B), in Men and Gods, therein cit., p. 79.
[15] Imperium. Epiphanies of the Idea of Empire, therein cit., pp. 19-21.
[16] Hymn to King Helios (132D), in Men and Gods, therein cit., p. 81.
[17] Imperium. Epiphanies of the Idea of Empire, therein cit., p. 20.
[18] Hymn to the Mother of the Gods (171B), in Men and Gods, therein cit., p. 116.
[19] Ibidem (166B), p. 111.
[20] H. Corbin, History of Islamic philosophy, Adelphi Editions, Milan 1991, pp. 218-219.
[21] G. Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine Empire, Einaudi, Turin 1993, p. 502.
[22] A. Branwen, Ultima Thule. Julius Evola and Herman Wirth, Editions under the banner of Veltro, Parma 2007, p. 57.
Recommended bibliography:
- Arthur Branwen, Ultima Thule, Julius Evola and Herman Wirth, Editions under the banner of Veltro, Parma 2007.
- Henry Corbin, History of Islamic philosophy, Adelphi, Milan 1991.
- Savitri Devi, Lightning and the sun, Thule Italy, Rome 2015.
- Mircea Eliade, History of religious ideas and beliefs, BUR, Milan 1996.
- Flavius Claudius Julian, Epistles, Editions under the banner of Veltro, Parma 1991.
- Rene Guenon, Symbols of sacred science, Adelphi, Milan 1975.
- René Guénon., The King of the world, Adelphi, Milan 1977.
- Claudio Mutti, Imperium. Epiphanies of the idea of empire, Effepi, Genoa 2005.
- Claudio Mutti (edited by), Men and Gods, Mediterranean Editions, Rome 2004.
- George Gemistus Plethon, Treatise on Virtues, Bompiani, Milan 2010.
- Porphyry, Speeches against Christians, Editions of Ar, Padua 1982.
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