What if Constantine never converted?

samcster94

Banned
Not only early Islam. It has only had an association with Islam since the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, and even now some Muslims disagree with its use (as the moon was originally in honor of the goddess Diana).
That would be paganism to many Muslims.
 
I think you're overstating the case here. Yes, Iamblichus had supported participating in the traditional cults, but there's no reason to think that he envisioned the kind of centralised religion established by Julian. And Julian's religion did actually incorporate a fair few features that were found in contemporary Christianity but not in paganism, even of the Iamblichan kind -- an episcopal organisation, for example, or religious catechisms, or a set of centrally-defined doctrines. Plus, most pagans' reactions to Julian's reforms ranged from indifference to derision, and the religion quickly withered away once Julian was dead. That would be unlikely if Julian really was just a run-of-the-mill Iamblichan.



Maybe I am just projecting my own intuitions here, although as I said above, with the exception of the Uyghurs (thanks for reminding me of them, BTW), Manichaeism never seems to have become numerically dominant, even in places where it was around for much longer than it was in the Roman Empire. Most of Manichaeism's influence in Rome came from the fact that it was disproportionately concentrated among the upper classes (hence why someone like Augustine was able to use his Manichaean connections to get a job), but that doesn't mean that it was popular with anything like as broad a section of society as Christianity was. I guess in a sense you could compare it to something like Freemasonry -- there used to be (and maybe still are, for all I know) lots of Freemasons in the British elite, but not many ordinary people were ever members, and the chances of any country becoming majority-Freemason are slim.
To be fair the poor Julian ruled for such a short time and his end kinda discredit the religion in a way.
 
To be fair the poor Julian ruled for such a short time and his end kinda discredit the religion in a way.
That would be interesting, to see if maybe his reforms would have stuck if he had a long and stable reign. Especially if he emerged totally victorious in Mesopotamia and other military campaigns. Military glory was an excellent way for the emperor to legitimize himself and his policies.
 
That would be interesting, to see if maybe his reforms would have stuck if he had a long and stable reign. Especially if he emerged totally victorious in Mesopotamia and other military campaigns. Military glory was an excellent way for the emperor to legitimize himself and his policies.
On the other side, I'd imagine Christian resistance at this point in time would be stronger than Pagan resistance was IOTL, which might create its own problems. Especially in the East.
 
I think you're overstating the case here. Yes, Iamblichus had supported participating in the traditional cults, but there's no reason to think that he envisioned the kind of centralised religion established by Julian. And Julian's religion did actually incorporate a fair few features that were found in contemporary Christianity but not in paganism, even of the Iamblichan kind -- an episcopal organisation, for example, or religious catechisms, or a set of centrally-defined doctrines. Plus, most pagans' reactions to Julian's reforms ranged from indifference to derision, and the religion quickly withered away once Julian was dead. That would be unlikely if Julian really was just a run-of-the-mill Iamblichan.



Maybe I am just projecting my own intuitions here, although as I said above, with the exception of the Uyghurs (thanks for reminding me of them, BTW), Manichaeism never seems to have become numerically dominant, even in places where it was around for much longer than it was in the Roman Empire. Most of Manichaeism's influence in Rome came from the fact that it was disproportionately concentrated among the upper classes (hence why someone like Augustine was able to use his Manichaean connections to get a job), but that doesn't mean that it was popular with anything like as broad a section of society as Christianity was. I guess in a sense you could compare it to something like Freemasonry -- there used to be (and maybe still are, for all I know) lots of Freemasons in the British elite, but not many ordinary people were ever members, and the chances of any country becoming majority-Freemason are slim.

I'm not sure why you're maintaining that "Julians religion" was a separate thing when we know he converted to Iamblichan Platonism. See Julians gods page 3:

The decision had important consequences. Julian quickly became familiar with a circle of pagan Neoplatonists headed by a former student of the 'godlike' Iamblichus, and underwent a theurgic initiation at the hands of one of them, Maximus of Ephesus. Though he kept the matter secret for a decade, he came to regard 351 as the year of his' conversion' to paganism and his awakening to Iamblichan Neoplatonism and theurgy: these commitments were never to waver, and from then on he revered Maximus as an intimate friend and mentor.

I haven't encountered this idea that Julian created a new religion in any scholarly work I've read. What's your source for that?

Establishing a hierarchy of priests doesn't mean that he created a separate religion. Julian appointed many of his Iamblichan Platonist friends as high priests. It's simply a sensible administrative arrangement in keeping with the general administrative centralization started by Diocletian. See The ‘Pagan Churches’ of Maximinus Daia and Julian the Apostate by Oliver Nicholson:

Historians have often stressed the similarities between the priests of Maximinus and those of Julian and the Christian clergy. Maximinus 'planned to create a pagan Church',18 and his reform 'must have served as a precedent for that of Julian'.19 These comparisons have centred on the organisation of the hierarchies. Maximinus 'imite, comme le fera plus tard Julien, l'organisation de l'eglise chretienne';20 Julian's 'ordered hierarchy... is clearly in imitation of that of the Christian Church'.21 Both emperors 'had noticed how the compact, hierarchic structure of the Church gave it combative superiority'.22 However, we have already suggested that in this respect Julian's hierarchy owed less to the Christian model than it did to the well-established network of provincial priesthoods inherited from Antiquity. It is likely, a fortiori, that Maximinus also built on existing institutions more than he copied those of the Christians; his priests were 'no doubt the presidents of the provincial diets'.23

Now, putting aside Maximinus Dias for a moment, Julians high priests were encouraged to imitate the Christians in the cultivation of personal piety and charity. I don't see why you can't be a Platonist and also be pious/charitable. Same for writing works explaining Platonism for the uninitiated (I assume by "catechism, you mean Concerning the Gods and the Universe). I'm not sure what you mean by a set of "centrally-defined doctrines".

We don't actually know how the general pagan population reacted to Julian's religious policies. We do know that Antioch was pissed and the pagans there didn't seem to care all that much but as Julians Gods says, we should be very wary of generalizing one city to the entire empire. There's also some criticism of Julian by some historians for being too eager with sacrificing but again, we should be careful with potentially baseless generalizations. We also know that there were multiple instances of pagan populations rioting on their own and murdering Christian bishops, with Julian chastising them but not really stopping it. Clearly at least some pagans didn't like the Christians. And of course, there are Julians Platonist friends who clearly supported him and payed for it when he died. We must also pay attention to the pagan inscriptions made in the Empire congratulating Julian:

But Bidez gave less weight than was due to the striking titles of Julian in some of the pagan inscriptions he adduced. 'To the Restorer of the Cults'; 'To the Lord Julian, Born for the Good of the State ... on Account of the Wiping Away of the Ills of the Former Time'; 'Restorer of Liberty and the Roman Religion'.133 A hundred years before, the persecutor Decius had been hailed as 'Restorer of the Cults'; now, Julian was 'Restorer of the Temples'.134 Titles of this sort respond to more than a mere declaration of religious toleration ensuring that paganism should no longer be hamstrung in competing for men's sympathies. They anticipate, or recognize, a concrete plan to weigh the balance decisively in its favour.

And here's another good quote:

'A devout and sincere attachment for the gods of Athens and Rome constituted the ruling passion of Julian.'!9 In my view, that judgement deserves to stand. As an Iamblichan Neoplatonist, Julian could subscribe to the doctrine of a transcendental First Principle as the sole true source of the real, 'known to the blessed theurgists' alone; but alongside his philosophic monism we find in his writings the traces of an irreducibly polytheist sensibility, with firm roots in ancestral patterns of pagan belief that were far from moribund.20 The key fact of Julian's devotional life is his assumption that a multiplicity of gods was constantly being manifested in the world of men, and that they must be honoured and rendered propitious by acts of cult performed in accordance with established custom. In his case, it is true, we must allow for a special factor! a pagan who had converted away from a Christian upbringing was no doubt likely to stay inclined to systematized expressions of belief. None the less, the assumptions Julian made about the gods and the forms of worship due to them were not the assumptions of one irreversibly permeated, despite his best endeavours, by a Christian education: rather, they mark the gulf which came to separate the mature Julian from the faith into which he had been born. Nor did they make for an innovatory attempt to transform the paganism of his subjects into a 'monotheistic universal faith'. Julian's promotion of paganism was first and foremost what the inscriptions declared: a restoration of the temples and cults of the ancestral gods whose worship his predecessors had sought to check by edict and law.2! And this in turn implies that the ascription to him of a totalitarian religious ideology is subject to a major proviso. His anti-Christian programme was indeed an attempt to consign Christianity to cultural oblivion: but he was not out to impose a uniform pattern on pagan thought and practice; 'He did not feast some [gods] and ignore others,' recalled Libanius, 'but made libation to all the gods whom the poets have passed down, ancestral parents and their offspring, gods and goddesses, ruling and ruled ... worshipping the different gods at different times'.22

Julian's intolerance of Christianity stemmed from a sense of outrage at those who denied the existence of the many gods and did their best to obliterate the worship of them. His determination to strip the Christian movement of the power and influence it had gained in the wake of Constantine's conversion led him to discriminate actively, in some fields anyway, against those who professed the faith. The education edict evoked a protest even from an Ammianus, and we may suppose that many other pagans may have shared his reservations. Conceivably, Ammianus' complaint was emblematic of a deeper disquiet at the degree to which religion had impinged on Julian's public policy, a sense that the rift between pagan and Christian had been exacerbated unnecessarily.23 But if the complaint went deep, it bore upon an aspect of Julian's religious programme, not the whole of it. It need not imply any lack of sympathy with his basic wish to restore the cults to their places of honour, and it gives no cause to suppose that the attempted restoration was a freakish episode which 'perplexed rather than inspired the majority of surviving pagans'.24

Whether or not the attempt had any real chance of making a lasting political impact is quite another matter, and it is not the subject of this book. In the logic of counterfactuals and the state of the evidence, the question can yield no certain answer. We are presented with the brute facts that the early fourth century saw the coming to power of a Roman Emperor determined to promote the Christian and to harm the pagan cause, and that a century later the number of those who professed Christianity had grown remarkably - from five to thirty million, on a recent guess.25 On one celebrated view, 'Constantine's revolution was perhaps the most audacious act ever committed by an autocrat in disregard and defiance of the vast majority of his subjects.'26 There is a sense in which that statement is deeply misleading, but it can still serve to warn us against any easy assumption that 'paganism' was already doomed by the time Julian reigned. If we cannot quantify the relative importance of the factors that led to its demise, there is no ignoring the fact that thirty years after Julian's death, one of them consisted in the coercion of pagans by force, the smashing of temples and their altars and statues, and on occasion the torture and killing of those who held fast to them.27 It may be inferred, at least, from the content and tone of numerous inscriptions set up in Julian's honour - and from the outbursts of pagan violence in several cities in his reign - that his pagan activism struck a deep chord in the minds of some of his subjects. The times were not gentle.

It's simply not true that the religion "withered away" once he died. It became less prominent sure but that's to be expected when every single emperor afterwards was a committed Christian who engaged in active discrimination. As I mentioned in my previous post, the Platonists continued to survive, study, and intellectually develop their doctrines and they clearly considered Julian to be one of their own. Hell, they literally dated their years by his reign! It took Justinian closing the schools and suppressing all sources of funding for the religion to finally die out, and even then, the city of Harran managed to preserve its Platonist paganism until the Islamic period.

Christianity and Islam didn't become numerically dominant in various areas either. In order to gain a majority, you need people of a particular religion to rule for an extended period of time. There was never a Manichaean emperor and in other places, Christianity didn't succeed in getting into power either. Why didn't Christians become a majority in Iran, central asia, or China before the coming of Islam? Because the conditions for coming into power weren't there. On the other hand, I don't see why Constantine couldn't have been a Manichee instead of a Christian. I would also like to point out that Manichaeism, Buddhism, and Christianity were all popular amongst the Sogdian merchants and they were vehicles for those religions coming to China. We still need to answer the question of why the Uyghurs converted to Manichaeism and not the other religions if Manichaeism was particularly unattractive.

Where are you getting your information on Manichaeism being disproportionately upper-class compared to Christianity?
 
I'm not sure why you're maintaining that "Julians religion" was a separate thing when we know he converted to Iamblichan Platonism. See Julians gods page 3:



I haven't encountered this idea that Julian created a new religion in any scholarly work I've read. What's your source for that?

Establishing a hierarchy of priests doesn't mean that he created a separate religion. Julian appointed many of his Iamblichan Platonist friends as high priests. It's simply a sensible administrative arrangement in keeping with the general administrative centralization started by Diocletian. See The ‘Pagan Churches’ of Maximinus Daia and Julian the Apostate by Oliver Nicholson:



Now, putting aside Maximinus Dias for a moment, Julians high priests were encouraged to imitate the Christians in the cultivation of personal piety and charity. I don't see why you can't be a Platonist and also be pious/charitable. Same for writing works explaining Platonism for the uninitiated (I assume by "catechism, you mean Concerning the Gods and the Universe). I'm not sure what you mean by a set of "centrally-defined doctrines".

We don't actually know how the general pagan population reacted to Julian's religious policies. We do know that Antioch was pissed and the pagans there didn't seem to care all that much but as Julians Gods says, we should be very wary of generalizing one city to the entire empire. There's also some criticism of Julian by some historians for being too eager with sacrificing but again, we should be careful with potentially baseless generalizations. We also know that there were multiple instances of pagan populations rioting on their own and murdering Christian bishops, with Julian chastising them but not really stopping it. Clearly at least some pagans didn't like the Christians. And of course, there are Julians Platonist friends who clearly supported him and payed for it when he died. We must also pay attention to the pagan inscriptions made in the Empire congratulating Julian:



And here's another good quote:



It's simply not true that the religion "withered away" once he died. It became less prominent sure but that's to be expected when every single emperor afterwards was a committed Christian who engaged in active discrimination. As I mentioned in my previous post, the Platonists continued to survive, study, and intellectually develop their doctrines and they clearly considered Julian to be one of their own. Hell, they literally dated their years by his reign! It took Justinian closing the schools and suppressing all sources of funding for the religion to finally die out, and even then, the city of Harran managed to preserve its Platonist paganism until the Islamic period.

Christianity and Islam didn't become numerically dominant in various areas either. In order to gain a majority, you need people of a particular religion to rule for an extended period of time. There was never a Manichaean emperor and in other places, Christianity didn't succeed in getting into power either. Why didn't Christians become a majority in Iran, central asia, or China before the coming of Islam? Because the conditions for coming into power weren't there. On the other hand, I don't see why Constantine couldn't have been a Manichee instead of a Christian. I would also like to point out that Manichaeism, Buddhism, and Christianity were all popular amongst the Sogdian merchants and they were vehicles for those religions coming to China. We still need to answer the question of why the Uyghurs converted to Manichaeism and not the other religions if Manichaeism was particularly unattractive.

Where are you getting your information on Manichaeism being disproportionately upper-class compared to Christianity?
Do you think all religions have the same general appeal or capacity to convert? Well excluding the strictly ethnic ones.
 
On the other side, I'd imagine Christian resistance at this point in time would be stronger than Pagan resistance was IOTL, which might create its own problems. Especially in the East.
Oh absolutely. It wouldn't be insurmountable at this point but it would be a potentially epic struggle depending on how hard the Bishops decide to fight him. But Julian understood that really the best way to deal with the Christians was not outright persecution. He overstepped in many places but what he really did seem to understand was that the best way to restrain their power was to make the most attractive parts of the Christian message not unique to Christianity. With an extra twenty years or so and maybe a like minded successor to follow him, I think it could be done.
 
Do you think all religions have the same general appeal or capacity to convert? Well excluding the strictly ethnic ones.

But what is true is that most people will go with whatever faith is favored by the rulers over time. This is true because most people want to live and be left alone by the powers that be. Look how Elizabethan England going went from Catholic to Protestant. Look how slowly over the centuries places conquered by Islam went from majority Christian or Zoroastrian to Muslim because the rulers were Muslim.

The same thing happened in Constantine's Rome. The only special vunerablity that Classical Paganism had was that it had never be challenged by an exclusivist faith and didn't understand the implications perhaps until Julian's time.

The idea that Christianity came up from the bottom and just "naturally" took over would mean it is unique. This dovetails very well with what Christians seem to believe about themselves and seems to be the underlying beliefs of many of those arguing here.

So what is more likely, did Christianity win because it conquered from the bottom up or like in every other case I can think of, it was propagated from the top down after they essentially got lucky with Constantine? I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming from the latter perspective. The only evidence I've seen for the former perspective seems to be Christians explaining after the fact.
 
But what is true is that most people will go with whatever faith is favored by the rulers over time. This is true because most people want to live and be left alone by the powers that be. Look how Elizabethan England going went from Catholic to Protestant. Look how slowly over the centuries places conquered by Islam went from majority Christian or Zoroastrian to Muslim because the rulers were Muslim.

The same thing happened in Constantine's Rome. The only special vunerablity that Classical Paganism had was that it had never be challenged by an exclusivist faith and didn't understand the implications perhaps until Julian's time.

The idea that Christianity came up from the bottom and just "naturally" took over would mean it is unique. This dovetails very well with what Christians seem to believe about themselves and seems to be the underlying beliefs of many of those arguing here.

So what is more likely, did Christianity win because it conquered from the bottom up or like in every other case I can think of, it was propagated from the top down after they essentially got lucky with Constantine? I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming from the latter perspective. The only evidence I've seen for the former perspective seems to be Christians explaining after the fact.
Christianity converted Armenia, Ethiopia and Georgia during this time(300-340), I'd say that, even if one doesn't hold it as special in terms of doctrine or appeal, it's spread and position in the early 4th century was still peculiar, compared to other emerging cults during the time at least.
Oh absolutely. It wouldn't be insurmountable at this point but it would be a potentially epic struggle depending on how hard the Bishops decide to fight him. But Julian understood that really the best way to deal with the Christians was not outright persecution. He overstepped in many places but what he really did seem to understand was that the best way to restrain their power was to make the most attractive parts of the Christian message not unique to Christianity. With an extra twenty years or so and maybe a like minded successor to follow him, I think it could be done.
20 years and another generation seems to be quite optimistic, although I'm not sure what they are meant to achieve with this time.
 
20 years and another generation seems to be quite optimistic, although I'm not sure what they are meant to achieve with this time.

Especially at this time, yeah. But especially where Roman Emperors are concerned success often breeds success and a major reason Christianity became so dominant was the success of the Christian emperors. If Julian is successful in his likely many military campaigns while at the same time crediting his success to Sol Invictus the whole time, and his reforms within the pagan religion are given more time to bear fruit it would bring a great deal of credibility and confidence in his religious project. The time gives time again for these reforms to actually be implemented and actually start to see results, which would certainly further the cause so long as these projects are at least mostly successful and it gives anyone that buys into this new religion time to entrench themselves in the society and governmental apparatus, making it more difficult to uproot them later on.

The timeframe is certainly optimistic but it is what would have been needed really. It isn't impossible, especially since this is still before Emperors get assassinated left and right as they did the the last decades of the Western Empire. But if he does get the time, and if Julian can reign in some of his more... antagonistic policies with the wisdom hopefully provided by experience, it has a very real chance of succeeding.

Not that I think that Christianity would every really be wiped out by any means. They will likely remain a significant element in the Roman world for the rest of the Empire's existence and I think that Julian knew that. But they could be prevented from being the monolithic force that they became in OTL. Which I think would be quite interesting to read about personally. Plus, on the inevitability of Christianity, keep in mind that false conversions were still a major issue all the way up until Justinian's time, and at that same time Christianity was only really the majority in the cities and core of the Empire, while much of Rural Anatolia in particular was still quite pagan and required a great deal of effort by Justinian to force their conversion.
 
So what is more likely, did Christianity win because it conquered from the bottom up or like in every other case I can think of, it was propagated from the top down after they essentially got lucky with Constantine? I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming from the latter perspective. The only evidence I've seen for the former perspective seems to be Christians explaining after the fact.
But at the same time if the top-down imposition and encouragement of a particular faith is going to work, it seems to need enough organic appeal to have been spreading from the bottom up previously. When we see rulers come up with their own religion and try to spread it, it usually doesn't work well because there's no organic roots in their society. Think of Akbar and his Din-i-llahi, for instance, which never attracted much support from anyone outside of the court elite. If they play on some religion that's already moderately widespread, though, like Christianity in the Roman Empire or Buddhism under Ashoka, it tends to be much more successful (though obviously not always successful). After all, in that case they can play on creeds which have already found some successful methods of persuading people to convert, and they can work with existing religious structures and organizations instead of having to create them from whole cloth.

The fact that Christianity had been slowly spreading among many Romans was certainly a crucial factor in both Constantine's conversion and the success of that conversion in spreading Christianity within the Empire, and I don't think it was merely the result of Christianity "getting lucky". That's not to say that it was preordained, of course, just to say that to a certain extent Christianity had constructed its own luck.
 
Christianity converted Armenia, Ethiopia and Georgia during this time(300-340), I'd say that, even if one doesn't hold it as special in terms of doctrine or appeal, it's spread and position in the early 4th century was still peculiar, compared to other emerging cults during the time at least.

20 years and another generation seems to be quite optimistic, although I'm not sure what they are meant to achieve with this time.

Constantine and his sons got fifty years before Julian so I'm not sure why it's optimistic. Furthermore...do you think Julian and other pagan emperor's are going to spend all their time masturbating in their rooms? Why not look at what happened during the reign of Constantine and his sons and take pointers from that? Lavish patronage for Christianity and favoritism towards Christians is replaced by lavish patronage for Julian's clerisy and favoritism towards pagans. Examples:

Nor is it clear that Julian's close concern with the running of the schools discloses a man whose political priorities had been rendered markedly eccentric by the company of theurgists: the historians of late antiquity who now study its 'rhetoric of Empire' as a pointer to a 'discourse' in a 'web of power' will take another view.152 Hand-outs to the needy notwithstanding, the principal aim of the philanthropic measures which Julian demanded was to ensure that the activities of the dominant classes of the cities should be intimately linked with the bedrock of pagan cult, and should be clearly seen to be so linked.

The education edict was exclusively concerned with the same classes and looked to the same end. It hardly touched the mass of Christians; it furthered Julian's plan to reverse the progress of Christianity as a social and cultural force in the upper levels of society.153 It was well directed to a sensitive point, and precisely for that reason it bulked large in the complaints of educated Christians.

To understand the full intention behind it, we need to dwell on the close of the rescript, where it is made clear that Christian students are free to attend the schools if they please: they are sick rather than wicked.154 Bidez regarded this as an empty gesture, assuming that compromise on the question would not be tolerated by the Christian community at large. On that reading, the aim of the edict was to cut off Christians from education tout court. But on one view,155 Julian may not have intended that. A man without the benefit of the enkyklios paideia would find himself virtually debarred from a public career in his city, and generally diminished in status in a milieu in which the claims of paideia clearly continued to count.156 Well-todo Christians faced a stark choice: to put their sons at a severe social disadvantage in their prospects, or to let them be taught by pagans. Julian's own experience, it may be guessed, will have given him no small faith in the transforming power of such an education. Whether he misjudged the numbers of Christian students who would be willing, or allowed, to attend the schools is another matter.

The most effective way for Julian to further his cause was to do all he could to ensure that the worship of the gods was firmly linked to the material prosperity of the Empire in the minds of his subjects. That, above all, was what Constantine had done for the Church. Behind the success of his reforms had stood the brute force of money.135 Vast sums were spent on the building of basilicas, and there were grand endowments of land to the Church. That land, moreover, was to be exempt from tax. Clerics were excused the burden of costly public offices, even personally subsidized. There were food allowances for Christian widows and nuns. To pay for it all, Constantine looked to a source of funds accumulated over centuries: the huge treasure house of precious metals lying to hand in the ancestral temples. Pagans, it has been nicely said, had financed their own destruction.136 Julian's most pressing task in this connection was to do the same in reverse, to restore the temples as the perceived focus of public beneficia at the expense of the Church.137

A clear step in this direction came as early as 4 February 362. An edict decreed that temples of the gods that had been put to improper use should be rededicated, and that those which had been destroyed by the Christians should be rebuilt at the Church's expense.138 Owners of land which had formerly belonged to the temples were to give it back, and a special tax was levied on those who had used the fabric of sacred buildings in the construction of new ones. The importance Julian attached to the issue is clear from a further edict of 29 June: the rebuilding of temples was to take priority over all other building projects in the provinces.139 In parallel, in March, the clergy's tax exemptions were revoked, and their judicial power and exemption from service as decurions withdrawn.14o

Whole cities were penalized for their Christian affiliations. Palestinian Constantia was stripped of its civic status and merged with pagan Gaza.161 When the Caesareans destroyed the last functioning temple in their city, there was not only a fine, but civic demotion, with higher taxes to boot.162 A letter to the Edessenes gave a menacing slant to a cherished concept: in response to internal bickering between Christian sects, Julian confiscated the entire wealth of the community - it was easier for the poor, he said, to enter the kingdom of heaven - and warned them to desist from riot 'lest you provoke my philanthropia against yourselves and pay the price for upset of the common good by being sentenced to the sword and exile and fire' .163 More disturbing still, he seemed to condone violent pagan riots at Emesa and elsewhere.164 In the last months of his reign, there were apparently laws barring Christians from certain public and military posts, and a declaration that much more was to come on his return from Persia.165

Specific measures taken by Julian are not the whole story, however. The leading pagans in a number of cities were quick to sense the Emperor's hardening mood and took advantage of the situation. Gaza, for instance, apparently petitioned Julian to condemn the celebrated monk Hilarion as an outlaw.169 The initiative behind the pagan riots that occurred there - and likewise, the initiative behind such episodes of mob-violence as the murders of Bishop Mark at Arethusa and of the holy virgins at Heliopolisl7o - came from the local pagans, not from the imperial authorities.171 Against this background, Julian's status as a persecutor is reduced to a question of definition. If persecution is to entail the authorization of mob violence, then Julian will be found 'not guilty': he was a cultured man with a genuine regard for civic order, and he had no wish to shed the blood of Roman citizens. But that leaves a lot unsaid. Julian sought the obliteration of Christianity as a social and cultural force, not the physical destruction of Christians. If he eschewed violent measures of repression, it was partly because he thought that there were other means to hand, more likely to be effective in the longer run. That left room enough for vindictiveness; on the terms the Apostate set, the fight against the Church was a fight to the finish.
 
That would be interesting, to see if maybe his reforms would have stuck if he had a long and stable reign. Especially if he emerged totally victorious in Mesopotamia and other military campaigns. Military glory was an excellent way for the emperor to legitimize himself and his policies.

How often, by the 4C, did Rome emerge "totally victorious" anywhere? Iirc it was still beating off invasions, but rarely anything more than that.
 
Constantine and his sons got fifty years before Julian so I'm not sure why it's optimistic. Furthermore...do you think Julian and other pagan emperor's are going to spend all their time masturbating in their rooms? Why not look at what happened during the reign of Constantine and his sons and take pointers from that? Lavish patronage for Christianity and favoritism towards Christians is replaced by lavish patronage for Julian's clerisy and favoritism towards pagans. Examples:
Well putting it that way, Christianity was in a illegal status for 2 centuries or more, even if it was not really continuously persecuted over all this period.

Your theory has the same problem has what you say mine has, it assumes people sit on their laps waiting for Julian to enact his clever plans after 50 years of demographic and social growth they experienced thanks to Constantine and the others.
To me it seems doubtful that the Christians would react the same way to top-down pressure compared to most Pagans, first of all because of their organization and more unified identity, at least compared to the Pagan identity that was more constructed during this century as an opposition to Christianity and by Christian polemics, that's why I think half a century is too optimist to have Christianity be supplanted, after all Paganism survived up to the 6th century in relevant place and possibly even longer.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but we can't wash away what happened the half century before.

Although I must say this is a bit of a pointless debate considering we were meant to discuss about Constantine not converting to begin with.
 
Perhaps Mithraism will get another loook. Purely personally I’d like to see Zoroastrianism lighten up on no converts.
 

Philip

Donor
The prohibition on proselytization imposed by their new rulers certainly contributed. Societal isolation was also a factor.
 
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