The Spiritual-Philosophy of Julian the Apostate
I asked Chat GPT what would have happened if Julian the Apostate had succeeded in his attempt to replace Christianity with a religion that he had invented, and described in his books, namely "against the Galilaens" (his main beef with christianity in the book is very interesting, he believed that all races, having been made by a single God, was insane, and that "the difference between Roman, Germanic, or Scythian with an Ethiopian or Nubian makes it impossible to conclude that these came from a single divine source" )
Julian was a Roman Emperor, born after the conversion of the Empire to Christianity, who tried to rebuild Paganism as the state religion, based on a sort of Monotheistic model, mixing the Roman Sol Invictus/Mithra cults with Platonism.
we will start with a biography from chat gpt, and a overview of his beliefs,. then we will post what chat gpt believes would be different about Europe.
SO LETS BEGIN
Julian the Apostate (Flavius Claudius Julianus, 331–363 AD) was a Roman Emperor, philosopher, and military leader best known for his attempt to restore Greco-Roman paganism and reverse the rise of Christianity. A nephew of Constantine the Great, Julian ruled as Caesar in Gaul (355–360) and then as Augustus (360–363) after the death of Constantius II.
🏛️ Brief Biography
Born: 331/332 in Constantinople
Family: Nephew of Constantine the Great; most of his family was killed in a purge after Constantine’s death.
Education: Privately educated in Athens, Julian was exposed to both Christian doctrine and classical philosophy, especially Neoplatonism.
Rise to Power: Proved a brilliant military commander in Gaul; declared emperor by his troops in 360.
Reign: As emperor, he rejected Christianity (which he had been baptized into) and sought to revive traditional Greco-Roman religion.
Death: Died in 363 on a Persian campaign. His last words were rumored to be: “You have won, Galilean!”
📜 Beliefs and Philosophical Influences
Julian was a devout Neoplatonist and deeply influenced by theurgy (ritual magic) and Hellenic philosophy. His religious worldview combined:
Neoplatonism (Plotinus, Iamblichus): Emphasis on the One, the divine hierarchy, and the soul’s ascent through virtue and contemplation.
Stoicism and Cynicism: Admiration for the self-sufficient, virtuous life.
Theurgy: Rituals to commune with the divine and align oneself with the cosmic order.
Solar Monotheism: He saw Helios (the Sun god) as a supreme divine principle, a cosmic unifier of all pagan traditions.
Julian sought to synthesize the many pagan cults into a single, unified, philosophical paganism, supported by an organized priesthood, ethics, and education system.
📖 Against the Galileans – His Critique of Christianity
In his polemic Against the Galileans, Julian launches a reasoned and rhetorical attack on Christianity, accusing it of the following:
Intellectual Incoherence:
He argued that Christianity borrowed heavily from Jewish scriptures yet distorted them.
Claimed the Gospels were inconsistent, mythologized, and historically weak.
Moral Hypocrisy:
He accused Christians of claiming virtue while practicing intolerance, schisms, and power-seeking.
Criticized their asceticism as anti-natural and anti-life.
Cultural Destruction:
He believed Christianity undermined classical learning, civic virtue, and Roman tradition.
Condemned it for destroying temples, libraries, and classical institutions.
Appeal to the Ignorant and Weak:
Christianity, he argued, appealed primarily to women, slaves, and the uneducated, and taught resentment against noble virtues and natural hierarchies.
Undermining the Gods:
He saw monotheism as absurd and arrogant, rejecting the rich, cosmological order of polytheism.
Julian sought to “expose the Galileans” by defending Hellenism not only religiously but philosophically, arguing that truth, beauty, and the divine were better served by paganism.
🛐 What Julian Embraced Religiously
Julian’s spiritual system can be summarized as:
Neoplatonic Monism: Belief in a divine hierarchy emanating from “The One.”
Helios Worship: The Sun as a supreme, unifying god—light, reason, and vitality.
Theurgical Practice: Use of sacred rites, symbols, and invocations to ascend spiritually.
Civic Paganism: State-supported priesthood, public ritual, and temple restoration.
Moral Virtue through Classical Philosophy: Living a noble life in harmony with the cosmos and the state.
🧠 Legacy
Julian's reign was short-lived, and Christianity quickly resumed dominance after his death. But he remains:
A symbol of classical resistance to Christian dominance,
A tragic figure admired by Nietzsche, Gibbon, and some modern pagans, and
A philosopher-king whose vision of a spiritual, hierarchical, and heroic world continues to inspire alternate histories and philosophical reconstructions.
Julian the Apostate explicitly rejected the Christian belief in a universal mankind created by a single God, and this was a key part of his critique in Against the Galileans. His worldview was hierarchical, polytheistic, and cosmically pluralistic, rooted in Neoplatonism, Hellenic tradition, and an aristocratic sense of order.🧬 Julian’s Rejection of Christian Universalism
Christianity teaches:
All humans were created by one God.
All people are equal in spiritual worth as descendants of Adam and Eve.
Salvation is available to everyone through Christ, regardless of race, class, or sex.
Julian thought this was:
Cosmologically naïve — collapsing the rich diversity of the cosmos into a single flat moral order.
Socially destructive — leveling natural hierarchies and encouraging the rule of the ignorant over the noble.
Religiously incoherent — dishonoring the gods and spirits of particular peoples and places.
📜 What Julian Argued Instead
Humanity is Not One Race:
Julian believed different peoples were shaped by different gods, fates, and traditions.
He upheld the classical Greco-Roman idea that nations and races are rooted in distinct divine lineages and destinies.
Polytheism is Natural, Monotheism is Arrogant:
The idea of one God for all humans struck him as not only unnatural but hubristic.
He argued that every city and race had its own patron gods, customs, and rites—in line with cosmic order (ta kata physin).
Against Christian Egalitarianism:
Julian opposed the Christian idea that slaves, women, and barbarians could be spiritually equal to noble, educated men.
He saw this as undermining the aristocratic virtues of courage, wisdom, and piety.
Ethnos and Cosmos:
Julian's worldview linked people, place, and divinity—each race or ethnos had its own divine protector and moral path.
The unity of the cosmos came not from sameness, but from a harmonious hierarchy of differentiated beings.
🔥 Key Excerpt (Paraphrased from Against the Galileans)
“Each people has been assigned its own portion of the Earth and its own guardian deity by the gods. The Galileans, in their arrogance, claim there is one god who rules over all—mocking the diversity ordained by nature and fate.”
🏛 Philosophical Roots
Julian drew this view from:
Neoplatonism (especially Iamblichus): The divine is multiple and hierarchical, not singular and flat.
Herodotus and Plato: Each people has their own divine lawgiver and customs (nomos).
Traditional Greco-Roman religion: Civic religion, local cults, and divine ancestry (e.g., the Romans from Aeneas and Venus).
🧠 Implication
Julian saw Christianity as a spiritual form of cosmopolitanism and moral anarchy, flattening distinctions, erasing the gods, and undermining the old, beautiful, ordered world.
In his eyes, a world governed by Christian ethics would be a world of sameness, weakness, and spiritual disorder.
next, comparing Julians racial religion with Christian Universalism :
⚔️ 1. Immediate Political and Religious Outcomes
Christianity Marginalized: Julian’s policies would have likely pushed Christianity into a semi-persecuted or tightly regulated position, much like Judaism or Manichaeism at the time.
State Paganism Restored: A hierarchical, Neoplatonic-pagan theocracy would replace the Christian ecclesiastical structure. Temples, priesthoods, and rites would be revived and funded by the state.
Unified Pagan Philosophy: Julian’s vision combined Neoplatonism, theurgy, Stoicism, and Mithraism into a kind of “philosophical paganism,” elevating philosophers and mystics as spiritual leaders, much like bishops.
🏛️ 2. Transformation of the Roman Empire
Slower Collapse of the Western Empire: Julian’s intellectual elite might have brought a brief cultural revitalization, possibly delaying the empire’s disintegration.
Stronger Eastern Identity: The Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire would take on a more explicitly pagan and Hellenistic character, with classical learning entrenched rather than preserved only by select Christians.
📜 3. Religious and Philosophical Worldview Shift
Neoplatonism Dominates: Neoplatonism, rather than Christian theology, becomes the dominant intellectual and metaphysical framework.
No Augustinian Christianity: Without St. Augustine’s synthesis of Christian theology and Roman authority, Western moral-political thought would lack his concepts of original sin, divine grace, and the “City of God.”
Moral Universe Without a Universal God: Ethics might have remained more virtue-based, hierarchical, and cosmically ordered (akin to Stoicism or Platonism), rather than universal, personal, and redemptive.
🎨 4. Cultural and Artistic Implications
Classical Revival Happens Early: Instead of waiting for the Renaissance, the classical revival begins in the 4th century. Art, architecture, and literature retain mythological and imperial themes.
No Christian Monasticism: Without Christian monasteries, the preservation of classical texts would fall to pagan philosophical schools or temples—less focused on textual copying, potentially leading to greater loss or fragmentation of ancient works.
Heroic-Pagan Morality: Literature and education focus on heroic virtue, cosmic order, and civic duty—not martyrdom, sin, or salvation.
🧭 5. Long-Term Historical Consequences
No Medieval Christendom: Without the unifying structure of the Church, Western Europe may develop into a more diverse but less centralized patchwork of pagan kingdoms and cults.
No Islam (or a Very Different One): Christianity’s suppression might delay or alter Muhammad’s teachings, which were in part a reaction to Christian doctrine. Islam might emerge later or with different theological underpinnings.
Science Develops Differently: The Christian assumption of a rational, orderly, law-giving God who created the universe “in number, weight, and measure” was foundational for early science. Pagan cosmology, which views the cosmos as a living organism or hierarchy, might delay or reroute the Scientific Revolution.
👑 6. Modern Implications
No Western Liberalism or Socialism: These ideologies grew from Christian moral roots (e.g., equality of souls, concern for the poor). A Julianic world may retain aristocratic, hierarchic social structures with little concern for mass enfranchisement or material equality.
Nietzsche’s Dream Realized Early: In a sense, Julian’s world would resemble Nietzsche’s ideal of a “noble” pagan culture—affirming life, hierarchy, beauty, and strength over guilt and asceticism.
Europe becomes a hierarchic, mystical-pagan civilization, grounded in Neoplatonic cosmology, led by philosopher-priests instead of bishops. Christianity becomes a dissident cult. The Roman Empire might survive much longer, he greatly admired the Germanics and advocated for allowing their inclusion into the Roman nobility as a warrior caste at scale, So the gothic and germanic migrations may and the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment as we know them never happen. Instead, we get an imperial, religiously pluralistic but caste-like world—a Rome Eternal built on stars and stone rather than sin and salvation.
🏛 Fictional Reconstruction: The Julianic Order (circa 1000 A.J. – “After Julian”)
In a world where Julian’s religious revolution succeeded...
📍 Politics and Society
The Roman Empire endures as a sacral-political order under the Pontifex Maximus Imperator, a fusion of emperor and high priest.
Cities are organized around ancestral cults: Athens venerates Athena, Alexandria honors Serapis, Rome reveres Jupiter Optimus Maximus.
The Senate and temples form a dual order of governance and ritual.
🧠 Education and Thought
Philosophy is religion: Children are trained in Homer, Plato, and theurgy.
Schools follow the Neoplatonic curriculum: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, and the mystical ascent of the soul.
Christian writings are banned, though small Christian sects survive underground.
🛐 Religion
Public rituals honor Helios, the Sun-God, as the visible symbol of divine order.
The calendar revolves around solar festivals, civic rites, and initiations.
Sacred mysteries (e.g. Eleusis, Mithras, Dionysus) are state-endorsed initiatory paths.
🏹 Hierarchy and Race
Ethnic groups maintain distinct rituals, laws, and gods. Jews honor Yahweh in Jerusalem; Egyptians keep Isis and Osiris; Romans revere the Capitoline triad.
Interethnic unity is discouraged; universalism is seen as cosmically unnatural.
The empire’s peace (Pax Deorum) depends on every people honoring its own gods faithfully.
⚖️ Moral Code
Nobility is earned through heroic action, civic virtue, and contemplative excellence.
Slaves, women, and foreigners can rise—but only if initiated into higher virtue via the mysteries.
Pity is not a virtue—order, beauty, strength, and truth are.
Thanks for a great article. I hadn’t given any real thought to Julian before reading this.
The speculative section, dealing with what the world might be like had Julian’s philosophy reigned, made me envious of a past that never was.