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7 A Health-Giving Star Shining on the East Julian in Antioch, July 362 to March 363 It is better for us to be persuaded to acknowledge the universal god . . . than to honor, in place of the creator of all things, a god to whom has been given the leadership of a very small part. —Julian, Against the Galileans, fragment 28.148c I left Julian, the beast threatening Gregory and his church from the outside, in early summer of 362 en route from Constantinople to Antioch. The emperor and his court, including Caesarius, passed Nazianzus shortly after Julian issued an imperial letter declaring those who denied the true gods’ inspiration of men such as Homer, Hesiod, Plato, and Aristotle unfit to teach and comment on their writings. This and other, similar imperial pronouncements propelled Gregory of Nazianzus and other members of the Greek Christian elites into action. Gregory claimed only his own (Christian) reading of these writings, inspired by the Logos, granted the true philosophical life—the life that alone would ensure oikeiōsis pros theon for all in the realm, because it was the life the only true God, the Trinity, mandated. Therefore , even though the beast stood ready, for Gregory the most important battle at hand was not that against Julian, crucial though it was, but the civil war among Christians threatening the Trinity, which had erupted during Julian’s reign and— though he does not say so explicitly—had been caused by that reign, which encouraged persons such as Eunomius and Photinus and other false Christian leaders . How Gregory used Julian to attack these enemies on the inside and, in so doing, to claim logoi for himself is the focus of the chapters that follow. This chapter considers what Julian said and did in late 362 and early 363, before his departure for Persia—because despite his protestations that he did not fear the enemy on the outside and that civil war was worse, Gregory was deeply afraid. That he continued to write of Julian long after his death as a divine scourge, warning and reminding all Christians to use their power wisely, attests to his fear. Even once Julian died, after a mercifully short reign, Gregory never allowed Julian and what he 269 stood for to slip from his mind or that of his audience: an emperor, the embodiment of evil, who considered himself close to the gods as a divinely chosen and divinely born philosopher and as a priest commanded to lead all to the old gods, and who could implement such innovation through the force of law. After all, Julian could justly claim not only the divine mandate and the personal purity of the true philosopher, but also the divine authorization manifest by centuries during which the power of the Romans (Rhōmaiōn archē), the imperium Romanum, embodied in his person, dominated the world (Gr. Naz. Or. 4.74). The oikoumenē, Julian’s subjects, recognized his mandate, and (many) considered him the epiphany of the gods, who had chosen him as theirs: above all, his father Zeus-Helios. As contemporary descriptions of Julian’s adventus into the cities of the West and especially the East make vivid, the people believed in Julian’s divine nature. In city after city “all ages and sexes poured forth as though they were going to see someone sent down from heaven [arisen] like some health-giving star for mankind.”1 Even during the early months of Julian’s rise, when his fate was far from certain, as Ammianus points out, citizens like those of Vienne poured out to greet him with candles and flowers as the embodiment of a good omen.2 Indeed, the momentum of Julian’s acclamation by city after city ratified his progress (despite his usurpation) as divinely authorized and preordained. Once he had become Augustus, Julian’s own pronouncements and writings conveyed an increasing confidence in the truth of his understanding of the divine will. The farther East Julian proceeded, the more the oikoumenē embraced him and his divine mandate to safeguard the entire politeia by merging once again the best of Greece and Rome according to the palaion ēthos, to reverse all ill effects of the recent misguided innovation, and to honor and revere the true gods through right paideia, philanthropy, euergetism , sacrifice, and the appropriate rituals. Yet each new adventus also raised the stakes, by bringing Julian closer to the ultimate test of his rule as truly divinely inspired : victory over...

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