Gibbon on Julian – 5

The History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire

Volume 2

Chapter XIX, Part 4

The Cæsar immediately sent his captives to the court of Constantius, who, accepting them as a valuable present, rejoiced in the opportunity of adding so many heroes to the choicest troops of his domestic guards. The obstinate resistance of this handful of Franks apprised Julian of the difficulties of the expedition which he meditated for the ensuing spring, against the whole body of the nation. His rapid diligence surprised and astonished the active Barbarians.

Ordering his soldiers to provide themselves with biscuit for twenty days, he suddenly pitched his camp near Tongres, while the enemy still supposed him in his winter quarters of Paris, expecting the slow arrival of his convoys from Aquitain. Without allowing the Franks to unite or deliberate, he skilfully spread his legions from Cologne to the ocean; and by the terror, as well as by the success, of his arms, soon reduced the suppliant tribes to implore the clemency, and to obey the commands, of their conqueror.

The Chamavians submissively retired to their former habitations beyond the Rhine; but the Salians were permitted to possess their new establishment of Toxandria, as the subjects and auxiliaries of the Roman empire. The treaty was ratified by solemn oaths; and perpetual inspectors were appointed to reside among the Franks, with the authority of enforcing the strict observance of the conditions. An incident is related, interesting enough in itself, and by no means repugnant to the character of Julian, who ingeniously contrived both the plot and the catastrophe of the tragedy.

When the Chamavians sued for peace, he required the son of their king, as the only hostage on whom he could rely. A mournful silence, interrupted by tears and groans, declared the sad perplexity of the Barbarians; and their aged chief lamented in pathetic language, that his private loss was now imbittered by a sense of public calamity.

While the Chamavians lay prostrate at the foot of his throne, the royal captive, whom they believed to have been slain, unexpectedly appeared before their eyes; and as soon as the tumult of joy was hushed into attention, the Cæsar addressed the assembly in the following terms: “Behold the son, the prince, whom you wept. You had lost him by your fault. God and the Romans have restored him to you. I shall still preserve and educate the youth, rather as a monument of my own virtue, than as a pledge of your sincerity. Should you presume to violate the faith which you have sworn, the arms of the republic will avenge the perfidy, not on the innocent, but on the guilty.” The Barbarians withdrew from his presence, impressed with the warmest sentiments of gratitude and admiration.

It was not enough for Julian to have delivered the provinces of Gaul from the Barbarians of Germany. He aspired to emulate the glory of the first and most illustrious of the emperors; after whose example, he composed his own commentaries of the Gallic war. Cæsar has related, with conscious pride, the manner in which he twice passed the Rhine. Julian could boast, that before he assumed the title of Augustus, he had carried the Roman eagles beyond that great river in three successful expeditions.

The consternation of the Germans, after the battle of Strasburgh, encouraged him to the first attempt; and the reluctance of the troops soon yielded to the persuasive eloquence of a leader, who shared the fatigues and dangers which he imposed on the meanest of the soldiers. The villages on either side of the Meyn, which were plentifully stored with corn and cattle, felt the ravages of an invading army. The principal houses, constructed with some imitation of Roman elegance, were consumed by the flames; and the Cæsar boldly advanced about ten miles, till his progress was stopped by a dark and impenetrable forest, undermined by subterraneous passages, which threatened with secret snares and ambush every step of the assailants. The ground was already covered with snow; and Julian, after repairing an ancient castle which had been erected by Trajan, granted a truce of ten months to the submissive Barbarians.

At the expiration of the truce, Julian undertook a second expedition beyond the Rhine, to humble the pride of Surmar and Hortaire, two of the kings of the Alemanni, who had been present at the battle of Strasburgh. They promised to restore all the Roman captives who yet remained alive; and as the Cæsar had procured an exact account from the cities and villages of Gaul, of the inhabitants whom they had lost, he detected every attempt to deceive him, with a degree of readiness and accuracy, which almost established the belief of his supernatural knowledge. His third expedition was still more splendid and important than the two former.

The Germans had collected their military powers, and moved along the opposite banks of the river, with a design of destroying the bridge, and of preventing the passage of the Romans. But this judicious plan of defence was disconcerted by a skilful diversion. Three hundred light-armed and active soldiers were detached in forty small boats, to fall down the stream in silence, and to land at some distance from the posts of the enemy.

They executed their orders with so much boldness and celerity, that they had almost surprised the Barbarian chiefs, who returned in the fearless confidence of intoxication from one of their nocturnal festivals. Without repeating the uniform and disgusting tale of slaughter and devastation, it is sufficient to observe, that Julian dictated his own conditions of peace to six of the haughtiest kings of the Alemanni, three of whom were permitted to view the severe discipline and martial pomp of a Roman camp. Followed by twenty thousand captives, whom he had rescued from the chains of the Barbarians, the Cæsar repassed the Rhine, after terminating a war, the success of which has been compared to the ancient glories of the Punic and Cimbric victories.

As soon as the valor and conduct of Julian had secured an interval of peace, he applied himself to a work more congenial to his humane and philosophic temper. The cities of Gaul, which had suffered from the inroads of the Barbarians, he diligently repaired; and seven important posts, between Mentz and the mouth of the Rhine, are particularly mentioned, as having been rebuilt and fortified by the order of Julian.

The vanquished Germans had submitted to the just but humiliating condition of preparing and conveying the necessary materials. The active zeal of Julian urged the prosecution of the work; and such was the spirit which he had diffused among the troops, that the auxiliaries themselves, waiving their exemption from any duties of fatigue, contended in the most servile labors with the diligence of the Roman soldiers. It was incumbent on the Cæsar to provide for the subsistence, as well as for the safety, of the inhabitants and of the garrisons.

The desertion of the former, and the mutiny of the latter, must have been the fatal and inevitable consequences of famine. The tillage of the provinces of Gaul had been interrupted by the calamities of war; but the scanty harvests of the continent were supplied, by his paternal care, from the plenty of the adjacent island. Six hundred large barks, framed in the forest of the Ardennes, made several voyages to the coast of Britain; and returning from thence, laden with corn, sailed up the Rhine, and distributed their cargoes to the several towns and fortresses along the banks of the river.

The arms of Julian had restored a free and secure navigation, which Constantius had offered to purchase at the expense of his dignity, and of a tributary present of two thousand pounds of silver. The emperor parsimoniously refused to his soldiers the sums which he granted with a lavish and trembling hand to the Barbarians. The dexterity, as well as the firmness, of Julian was put to a severe trial, when he took the field with a discontented army, which had already served two campaigns, without receiving any regular pay or any extraordinary donative.

A tender regard for the peace and happiness of his subjects was the ruling principle which directed, or seemed to direct, the administration of Julian. He devoted the leisure of his winter quarters to the offices of civil government; and affected to assume, with more pleasure, the character of a magistrate than that of a general. Before he took the field, he devolved on the provincial governors most of the public and private causes which had been referred to his tribunal; but, on his return, he carefully revised their proceedings, mitigated the rigor of the law, and pronounced a second judgment on the judges themselves.

Superior to the last temptation of virtuous minds, an indiscreet and intemperate zeal for justice, he restrained, with calmness and dignity, the warmth of an advocate, who prosecuted, for extortion, the president of the Narbonnese province. “Who will ever be found guilty,” exclaimed the vehement Delphidius, “if it be enough to deny?” “And who,” replied Julian, “will ever be innocent, if it be sufficient to affirm?” In the general administration of peace and war, the interest of the sovereignis commonly the same as that of his people; but Constantius would have thought himself deeply injured, if the virtues of Julian had defrauded him of any part of the tribute which he extorted from an oppressed and exhausted country.

The prince who was invested with the ensigns of royalty, might sometimes presume to correct the rapacious insolence of his inferior agents, to expose their corrupt arts, and to introduce an equal and easier mode of collection. But the management of the finances was more safely intrusted to Florentius, prætorian præfect of Gaul, an effeminate tyrant, incapable of pity or remorse: and the haughty minister complained of the most decent and gentle opposition, while Julian himself was rather inclined to censure the weakness of his own behavior. The Cæsar had rejected, with abhorrence, a mandate for the levy of an extraordinary tax; a new superindiction, which the præfect had offered for his signature; and the faithful picture of the public misery, by which he had been obliged to justify his refusal, offended the court of Constantius. We may enjoy the pleasure of reading the sentiments of Julian, as he expresses them with warmth and freedom in a letter to one of his most intimate friends.

After stating his own conduct, he proceeds in the following terms: “Was it possible for the disciple of Plato and Aristotle to act otherwise than I have done? Could I abandon the unhappy subjects intrusted to my care? Was I not called upon to defend them from the repeated injuries of these unfeeling robbers? A tribune who deserts his post is punished with death, and deprived of the honors of burial. With what justice could I pronounce his sentence, if, in the hour of danger, I myself neglected a duty far more sacred and far more important? God has placed me in this elevated post; his providence will guard and support me. Should I be condemned to suffer, I shall derive comfort from the testimony of a pure and upright conscience. Would to Heaven that I still possessed a counsellor like Sallust! If they think proper to send me a successor, I shall submit without reluctance; and had much rather improve the short opportunity of doing good, than enjoy a long and lasting impunity of evil.”

The precarious and dependent situation of Julian displayed his virtues and concealed his defects. The young hero who supported, in Gaul, the throne of Constantius, was not permitted to reform the vices of the government; but he had courage to alleviate or to pity the distress of the people. Unless he had been able to revive the martial spirit of the Romans, or to introduce the arts of industry and refinement among their savage enemies, he could not entertain any rational hopes of securing the public tranquility, either by the peace or conquest of Germany. Yet the victories of Julian suspended, for a short time, the inroads of the Barbarians, and delayed the ruin of the Western Empire.

His salutary influence restored the cities of Gaul, which had been so long exposed to the evils of civil discord, Barbarian war, and domestic tyranny; and the spirit of industry was revived with the hopes of enjoyment. Agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, again flourished under the protection of the laws; and the curi, or civil corporations, were again filled with useful and respectable members: the youth were no longer apprehensive of marriage; and married persons were no longer apprehensive of posterity: the public and private festivals were celebrated with customary pomp; and the frequent and secure intercourse of the provinces displayed the image of national prosperity.

A mind like that of Julian must have felt the general happiness of which he was the author; but he viewed, with particular satisfaction and complacency, the city of Paris; the seat of his winter residence, and the object even of his partial affection. That splendid capital, which now embraces an ample territory on either side of the Seine, was originally confined to the small island in the midst of the river, from whence the inhabitants derived a supply of pure and salubrious water. The river bathed the foot of the walls; and the town was accessible only by two wooden bridges. A forest overspread the northern side of the Seine, but on the south, the ground, which now bears the name of the University, was insensibly covered with houses, and adorned with a palace and amphitheatre, baths, an aqueduct, and a field of Mars for the exercise of the Roman troops.

The severity of the climate was tempered by the neighborhood of the ocean; and with some precautions, which experience had taught, the vine and fig-tree were successfully cultivated. But in remarkable winters, the Seine was deeply frozen; and the huge pieces of ice that floated down the stream, might be compared, by an Asiatic, to the blocks of white marble which were extracted from the quarries of Phrygia.

The licentiousness and corruption of Antioch recalled to the memory of Julian the severe and simple manners of his beloved Lutetia; where the amusements of the theatre were unknown or despised. He indignantly contrasted the effeminate Syrians with the brave and honest simplicity of the Gauls, and almost forgave the intemperance, which was the only stain of the Celtic character. If Julian could now revisit the capital of France, he might converse with men of science and genius, capable of understanding and of instructing a disciple of the Greeks; he might excuse the lively and graceful follies of a nation, whose martial spirit has never been enervated by the indulgence of luxury; and he must applaud the perfection of that inestimable art, which softens and refines and embellishes the intercourse of social life.

Gibbon on Julian – 4

The History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire

Volume 2

Chapter XIX, Part 4


Under these melancholy circumstances, an unexperienced youth was appointed to save and to govern the provinces of Gaul, or rather, as he expressed it himself, to exhibit the vain image of Imperial greatness. The retired scholastic education of Julian, in which he had been more conversant with books than with arms, with the dead than with the living, left him in profound ignorance of the practical arts of war and government; and when he awkwardly repeated some military exercise which it was necessary for him to learn, he exclaimed with a sigh, “O Plato, Plato, what a task for a philosopher!”

Yet even this speculative philosophy, which men of business are too apt to despise, had filled the mind of Julian with the noblest precepts and the most shining examples; had animated him with the love of virtue, the desire of fame, and the contempt of death. The habits of temperance recommended in the schools, are still more essential in the severe discipline of a camp. The simple wants of nature regulated the measure of his food and sleep. Rejecting with disdain the delicacies provided for his table, he satisfied his appetite with the coarse and common fare which was allotted to the meanest soldiers. During the rigor of a Gallic winter, he never suffered a fire in his bed-chamber; and after a short and interrupted slumber, he frequently rose in the middle of the night from a carpet spread on the floor, to despatch any urgent business, to visit his rounds, or to steal a few moments for the prosecution of his favorite studies.

The precepts of eloquence, which he had hitherto practised on fancied topics of declamation, were more usefully applied to excite or to assuage the passions of an armed multitude: and although Julian, from his early habits of conversation and literature, was more familiarly acquainted with the beauties of the Greek language, he had attained a competent knowledge of the Latin tongue. Since Julian was not originally designed for the character of a legislator, or a judge, it is probable that the civil jurisprudence of the Romans had not engaged any considerable share of his attention: but he derived from his philosophic studies an inflexible regard for justice, tempered by a disposition to clemency; the knowledge of the general principles of equity and evidence, and the faculty of patiently investigating the most intricate and tedious questions which could be proposed for his discussion.

The measures of policy, and the operations of war, must submit to the various accidents of circumstance and character, and the unpractised student will often be perplexed in the application of the most perfect theory. But in the acquisition of this important science, Julian was assisted by the active vigor of his own genius, as well as by the wisdom and experience of Sallust, and officer of rank, who soon conceived a sincere attachment for a prince so worthy of his friendship; and whose incorruptible integrity was adorned by the talent of insinuating the harshest truths without wounding the delicacy of a royal ear.

Immediately after Julian had received the purple at Milan, he was sent into Gaul with a feeble retinue of three hundred and sixty soldiers. At Vienna, where he passed a painful and anxious winter in the hands of those ministers to whom Constantius had intrusted the direction of his conduct, the Cæsar was informed of the siege and deliverance of Autun. That large and ancient city, protected only by a ruined wall and pusillanimous garrison, was saved by the generous resolution of a few veterans, who resumed their arms for the defence of their country.

In his march from Autun, through the heart of the Gallic provinces, Julian embraced with ardor the earliest opportunity of signalizing his courage. At the head of a small body of archers and heavy cavalry, he preferred the shorter but the more dangerous of two roads; and sometimes eluding, and sometimes resisting, the attacks of the Barbarians, who were masters of the field, he arrived with honor and safety at the camp near Rheims, where the Roman troops had been ordered to assemble. The aspect of their young prince revived the drooping spirits of the soldiers, and they marched from Rheims in search of the enemy, with a confidence which had almost proved fatal to them. The Alemanni, familiarized to the knowledge of the country, secretly collected their scattered forces, and seizing the opportunity of a dark and rainy day, poured with unexpected fury on the rear-guard of the Romans.

Before the inevitable disorder could be remedied, two legions were destroyed; and Julian was taught by experience that caution and vigilance are the most important lessons of the art of war. In a second and more successful action, he recovered and established his military fame; but as the agility of the Barbarians saved them from the pursuit, his victory was neither bloody nor decisive.

He advanced, however, to the banks of the Rhine, surveyed the ruins of Cologne, convinced himself of the difficulties of the war, and retreated on the approach of winter, discontented with the court, with his army, and with his own success. The power of the enemy was yet unbroken; and the Cæsar had no sooner separated his troops, and fixed his own quarters at Sens, in the centre of Gaul, than he was surrounded and besieged, by a numerous host of Germans. Reduced, in this extremity, to the resources of his own mind, he displayed a prudent intrepidity, which compensated for all the deficiencies of the place and garrison; and the Barbarians, at the end of thirty days, were obliged to retire with disappointed rage.

The conscious pride of Julian, who was indebted only to his sword for this signal deliverance, was imbittered by the reflection, that he was abandoned, betrayed, and perhaps devoted to destruction, by those who were bound to assist him, by every tie of honor and fidelity. Marcellus, master-general of the cavalry in Gaul, interpreting too strictly the jealous orders of the court, beheld with supine indifference the distress of Julian, and had restrained the troops under his command from marching to the relief of Sens.

If the Cæsar had dissembled in silence so dangerous an insult, his person and authority would have been exposed to the contempt of the world; and if an action so criminal had been suffered to pass with impunity, the emperor would have confirmed the suspicions, which received a very specious color from his past conduct towards the princes of the Flavian family. Marcellus was recalled, and gently dismissed from his office.

In his room Severus was appointed general of the cavalry; an experienced soldier, of approved courage and fidelity, who could advise with respect, and execute with zeal; and who submitted, without reluctance to the supreme command which Julian, by the interest of his patroness Eusebia, at length obtained over the armies of Gaul.

A very judicious plan of operations was adopted for the approaching campaign. Julian himself, at the head of the remains of the veteran bands, and of some new levies which he had been permitted to form, boldly penetrated into the centre of the German cantonments, and carefully reestablished the fortifications of Saverne, in an advantageous post, which would either check the incursions, or intercept the retreat, of the enemy. At the same time, Barbatio, general of the infantry, advanced from Milan with an army of thirty thousand men, and passing the mountains, prepared to throw a bridge over the Rhine, in the neighborhood of Basil. It was reasonable to expect that the Alemanni, pressed on either side by the Roman arms, would soon be forced to evacuate the provinces of Gaul, and to hasten to the defence of their native country.

But the hopes of the campaign were defeated by the incapacity, or the envy, or the secret instructions, of Barbatio; who acted as if he had been the enemy of the Cæsar, and the secret ally of the Barbarians. The negligence with which he permitted a troop of pillagers freely to pass, and to return almost before the gates of his camp, may be imputed to his want of abilities; but the treasonable act of burning a number of boats, and a superfluous stock of provisions, which would have been of the most essential service to the army of Gaul, was an evidence of his hostile and criminal intentions. The Germans despised an enemy who appeared destitute either of power or of inclination to offend them; and the ignominious retreat of Barbatio deprived Julian of the expected support; and left him to extricate himself from a hazardous situation, where he could neither remain with safety, nor retire with honor.

As soon as they were delivered from the fears of invasion, the Alemanni prepared to chastise the Roman youth, who presumed to dispute the possession of that country, which they claimed as their own by the right of conquest and of treaties. They employed three days, and as many nights, in transporting over the Rhine their military powers. The fierce Chnodomar, shaking the ponderous javelin which he had victoriously wielded against the brother of Magnentius, led the van of the Barbarians, and moderated by his experience the martial ardor which his example inspired. He was followed by six other kings, by ten princes of regal extraction, by a long train of high-spirited nobles, and by thirty-five thousand of the bravest warriors of the tribes of Germany.

The confidence derived from the view of their own strength, was increased by the intelligence which they received from a deserter, that the Cæsar, with a feeble army of thirteen thousand men, occupied a post about one-and-twenty miles from their camp of Strasburgh. With this inadequate force, Julian resolved to seek and to encounter the Barbarian host; and the chance of a general action was preferred to the tedious and uncertain operation of separately engaging the dispersed parties of the Alemanni.

The Romans marched in close order, and in two columns; the cavalry on the right, the infantry on the left; and the day was so far spent when they appeared in sight of the enemy, that Julian was desirous of deferring the battle till the next morning, and of allowing his troops to recruit their exhausted strength by the necessary refreshments of sleep and food. Yielding, however, with some reluctance, to the clamors of the soldiers, and even to the opinion of his council, he exhorted them to justify by their valor the eager impatience, which, in case of a defeat, would be universally branded with the epithets of rashness and presumption.

The trumpets sounded, the military shout was heard through the field, and the two armies rushed with equal fury to the charge. The Cæsar, who conducted in person his right wing, depended on the dexterity of his archers, and the weight of his cuirassiers. But his ranks were instantly broken by an irregular mixture of light horse and of light infantry, and he had the mortification of beholding the flight of six hundred of his most renowned cuirassiers. The fugitives were stopped and rallied by the presence and authority of Julian, who, careless of his own safety, threw himself before them, and urging every motive of shame and honor, led them back against the victorious enemy.

The conflict between the two lines of infantry was obstinate and bloody. The Germans possessed the superiority of strength and stature, the Romans that of discipline and temper; and as the Barbarians, who served under the standard of the empire, united the respective advantages of both parties, their strenuous efforts, guided by a skilful leader, at length determined the event of the day. The Romans lost four tribunes, and two hundred and forty-three soldiers, in this memorable battle of Strasburgh, so glorious to the Cæsar, and so salutary to the afflicted provinces of Gaul.

Six thousand of the Alemanni were slain in the field, without including those who were drowned in the Rhine, or transfixed with darts while they attempted to swim across the river. Chnodomar himself was surrounded and taken prisoner, with three of his brave companions, who had devoted themselves to follow in life or death the fate of their chieftain. Julian received him with military pomp in the council of his officers; and expressing a generous pity for the fallen state, dissembled his inward contempt for the abject humiliation, of his captive. Instead of exhibiting the vanquished king of the Alemanni, as a grateful spectacle to the cities of Gaul, he respectfully laid at the feet of the emperor this splendid trophy of his victory. Chnodomar experienced an honorable treatment: but the impatient Barbarian could not long survive his defeat, his confinement, and his exile.

After Julian had repulsed the Alemanni from the provinces of the Upper Rhine, he turned his arms against the Franks, who were seated nearer to the ocean, on the confines of Gaul and Germany; and who, from their numbers, and still more from their intrepid valor, had ever been esteemed the most formidable of the Barbarians. Although they were strongly actuated by the allurements of rapine, they professed a disinterested love of war; which they considered as the supreme honor and felicity of human nature; and their minds and bodies were so completely hardened by perpetual action, that, according to the lively expression of an orator, the snows of winter were as pleasant to them as the flowers of spring. In the month of December, which followed the battle of Strasburgh, Julian attacked a body of six hundred Franks, who had thrown themselves into two castles on the Meuse.

In the midst of that severe season they sustained, with inflexible constancy, a siege of fifty-four days; till at length, exhausted by hunger, and satisfied that the vigilance of the enemy, in breaking the ice of the river, left them no hopes of escape, the Franks consented, for the first time, to dispense with the ancient law which commanded them to conquer or to die.

JVLIAN excerpts – III

“Why were you so ungrateful to our gods
as to desert them for the Jews?”

—Julian, addressing the Christians

Libanius to Priscus
Antioch, April 380

You cannot imagine the pleasure I experienced when your letter was brought to me this evening.

Since I wrote you, I have not been idle. Through the office of the praetorian prefect at Constantinople, I have proposed myself for an audience with the Emperor. Theodosius has met very few people of our set, coming as he does from Spain, a country not noted for culture.

How often in the past we have been horrified by princes reputed to be good who, when raised to the throne of the world, have turned monstrous before our eyes? The late Valens for example, or Julian’s own brother, Caesar Gallus, a charming youth who brought terror to the East. We must be on guard, as always.

The question that now faces us is this: how seriously will Theodosius enforce the edict? It is customary for emperors who listen to the bishops to hurl insults at the very civilization that created them. They are inconsistent, but then logic has never been a strong point of the Christian faith.

The extraordinary paradox is the collusion of our princes with the bishops. The emperors pride themselves on being first magistrates of the Roman imperium, through whose senate they exercise their power; and though in reality we have not been Roman for a century, nevertheless, the form persists, making it impossible, one would think, for any prince who calls himself August to be Christian, certainly not as long as the Altar of Victory remains in the senate house at Rome. But confusion of this sort are inconsequential to the Christian mind as clouds to a day in summer, and as a teacher I no longer try to refute them; since most of my students are Christian, I suppose I ought to be grateful that they have chosen to come to me to be taught the very philosophy their faith subverts. It is a comedy, Priscus! It is tragedy!

Meanwhile, we can only wait and see what happens. The Emperor grows stronger in health every day, and it is thought that later this spring he may take the field against the Goths, who as usual are threatening the marches of Macedonia. If he decides to go north, this means he will not return to Constantinople till late summer or autumn, in which case I will have to attend him at Thessalonica or, worse, in the field. If so, I am confident the journey will be my last. For my health, unlike yours, continues to deteriorate.

Over the years I have made a number of notes for a biography of Julian. I have them before me now. All that remains is the final organization of the material—and of course the memoir. Please send it to me as soon as the copy is ready. I shall work on it this summer, as I am no longer lecturing. I thought it wise to go into seclusion until we know which way the wind blows.

There have been no incidents so far. My Christian friends come to see me as usual (rather a large number of my old students are now bishops, a peculiar irony). Colleagues who are still lecturing tell me that their classes are much as usual. The next move is up to Theodosius, or, to be exact, up to the bishops. Luckily for us, they have been so busy for so long persecuting one another that we have been able to survive. But reading between the lines of the edict, I suspect a bloodbath. Theodosius has outlawed with particular venom the party of the late Presbyter Arius on the grounds that Galileans must now have a church with a single doctrine to be called universal… a catholic church, no less!

To balance this, we must compose a true life of Julian. So let us together fashion one last wreath of Apollonian laurel to place upon the brow of philosophy, as a brave sign against the winter that threatens this stormy late season of the world. I want those who come after us to realize what hopes we had for life, and I want to see how close our Julian came to arresting the disease of Galilee.

Again, my best wishes to the admirable Hippia, and to you, my old friend and fellow soldier in the wars of philosophy.

Gibbon on Julian – 3

The History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire

Volume 2

Chapter XIX


Besides the reigning emperor, Julian alone survived, of all the numerous posterity of Constantius Chlorus. The misfortune of his royal birth involved him in the disgrace of Gallus. From his retirement in the happy country of Ionia, he was conveyed under a strong guard to the court of Milan; where he languished above seven months, in the continual apprehension of suffering the same ignominious death, which was daily inflicted almost before his eyes, on the friends and adherents of his persecuted family.

His looks, his gestures, his silence, were scrutinized with malignant curiosity, and he was perpetually assaulted by enemies whom he had never offended, and by arts to which he was a stranger. But in the school of adversity, Julian insensibly acquired the virtues of firmness and discretion. He defended his honor, as well as his life, against the insnaring subtleties of the eunuchs, who endeavored to extort some declaration of his sentiments; and whilst he cautiously suppressed his grief and resentment, he nobly disdained to flatter the tyrant, by any seeming approbation of his brother’s murder.

Julian most devoutly ascribes his miraculous deliverance to the protection of the gods, who had exempted his innocence from the sentence of destruction pronounced by their justice against the impious house of Constantine. As the most effectual instrument of their providence, he gratefully acknowledges the steady and generous friendship of the empress Eusebia, a woman of beauty and merit, who, by the ascendant which she had gained over the mind of her husband, counterbalanced, in some measure, the powerful conspiracy of the eunuchs.

By the intercession of his patroness, Julian was admitted into the Imperial presence: he pleaded his cause with a decent freedom, he was heard with favor; and, notwithstanding the efforts of his enemies, who urged the danger of sparing an avenger of the blood of Gallus, the milder sentiment of Eusebia prevailed in the council. But the effects of a second interview were dreaded by the eunuchs; and Julian was advised to withdraw for a while into the neighborhood of Milan, till the emperor thought proper to assign the city of Athens for the place of his honorable exile. As he had discovered, from his earliest youth, a propensity, or rather passion, for the language, the manners, the learning, and the religion of the Greeks, he obeyed with pleasure an order so agreeable to his wishes. Far from the tumult of arms, and the treachery of courts, he spent six months under the groves of the academy, in a free intercourse with the philosophers of the age, who studied to cultivate the genius, to encourage the vanity, and to inflame the devotion of their royal pupil.

Their labors were not unsuccessful; and Julian inviolably preserved for Athens that tender regard which seldom fails to arise in a liberal mind, from the recollection of the place where it has discovered and exercised its growing powers. The gentleness and affability of manners, which his temper suggested and his situation imposed, insensibly engaged the affections of the strangers, as well as citizens, with whom he conversed. Some of his fellow-students might perhaps examine his behavior with an eye of prejudice and aversion; but Julian established, in the schools of Athens, a general prepossession in favor of his virtues and talents, which was soon diffused over the Roman world.

Whilst his hours were passed in studious retirement, the empress, resolute to achieve the generous design which she had undertaken, was not unmindful of the care of his fortune. The death of the late Cæsar had left Constantius invested with the sole command, and oppressed by the accumulated weight, of a mighty empire. Before the wounds of civil discord could be healed, the provinces of Gaul were overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.

The Sarmatians no longer respected the barrier of the Danube. The impunity of rapine had increased the boldness and numbers of the wild Isaurians: those robbers descended from their craggy mountains to ravage the adjacent country, and had even presumed, though without success, to besiege the important city of Seleucia, which was defended by a garrison of three Roman legions. Above all, the Persian monarch, elated by victory, again threatened the peace of Asia, and the presence of the emperor was indispensably required, both in the West and in the East. For the first time, Constantius sincerely acknowledged, that his single strength was unequal to such an extent of care and of dominion. Insensible to the voice of flattery, which assured him that this all-powerful virtue, and celestial fortune, would still continue to triumph over every obstacle, he listened with complacency to the advice of Eusebia, which gratified his indolence, without offending his suspicious pride.

As she perceived that the remembrance of Gallus dwelt on the emperor’s mind, she artfully turned his attention to the opposite characters of the two brothers, which from their infancy had been compared to those of Domitian and of Titus. She accustomed her husband to consider Julian as a youth of a mild, unambitious disposition, whose allegiance and gratitude might be secured by the gift of the purple, and who was qualified to fill with honor a subordinate station, without aspiring to dispute the commands, or to shade the glories, of his sovereign and benefactor. After an obstinate, though secret struggle, the opposition of the favorite eunuchs submitted to the ascendency of the empress; and it was resolved that Julian, after celebrating his nuptials with Helena, sister of Constantius, should be appointed, with the title of Cæsar, to reign over the countries beyond the Alps.

Although the order which recalled him to court was probably accompanied by some intimation of his approaching greatness, he appeals to the people of Athens to witness his tears of undissembled sorrow, when he was reluctantly torn away from his beloved retirement. He trembled for his life, for his fame, and even for his virtue; and his sole confidence was derived from the persuasion, that Minerva inspired all his actions, and that he was protected by an invisible guard of angels, whom for that purpose she had borrowed from the Sun and Moon.

He approached, with horror, the palace of Milan; nor could the ingenuous youth conceal his indignation, when he found himself accosted with false and servile respect by the assassins of his family. Eusebia, rejoicing in the success of her benevolent schemes, embraced him with the tenderness of a sister; and endeavored, by the most soothing caresses, to dispel his terrors, and reconcile him to his fortune. But the ceremony of shaving his beard, and his awkward demeanor, when he first exchanged the cloak of a Greek philosopher for the military habit of a Roman prince, amused, during a few days, the levity of the Imperial court.

The emperors of the age of Constantine no longer deigned to consult with the senate in the choice of a colleague; but they were anxious that their nomination should be ratified by the consent of the army. On this solemn occasion, the guards, with the other troops whose stations were in the neighborhood of Milan, appeared under arms; and Constantius ascended his lofty tribunal, holding by the hand his cousin Julian, who entered the same day into the twenty-fifth year of his age.

In a studied speech, conceived and delivered with dignity, the emperor represented the various dangers which threatened the prosperity of the republic, the necessity of naming a Cæsar for the administration of the West, and his own intention, if it was agreeable to their wishes, of rewarding with the honors of the purple the promising virtues of the nephew of Constantine. The approbation of the soldiers was testified by a respectful murmur; they gazed on the manly countenance of Julian, and observed with pleasure, that the fire which sparkled in his eyes was tempered by a modest blush, on being thus exposed, for the first time, to the public view of mankind.

As soon as the ceremony of his investiture had been performed, Constantius addressed him with the tone of authority which his superior age and station permitted him to assume; and exhorting the new Cæsar to deserve, by heroic deeds, that sacred and immortal name, the emperor gave his colleague the strongest assurances of a friendship which should never be impaired by time, nor interrupted by their separation into the most distant climes. As soon as the speech was ended, the troops, as a token of applause, clashed their shields against their knees; while the officers who surrounded the tribunal expressed, with decent reserve, their sense of the merits of the representative of Constantius.

The two princes returned to the palace in the same chariot; and during the slow procession, Julian repeated to himself a verse of his favorite Homer, which he might equally apply to his fortune and to his fears. The four-and-twenty days which the Cæsar spent at Milan after his investiture, and the first months of his Gallic reign, were devoted to a splendid but severe captivity; nor could the acquisition of honor compensate for the loss of freedom.

His steps were watched, his correspondence was intercepted; and he was obliged, by prudence, to decline the visits of his most intimate friends. Of his former domestics, four only were permitted to attend him; two pages, his physician, and his librarian; the last of whom was employed in the care of a valuable collection of books, the gift of the empress, who studied the inclinations as well as the interest of her friend. In the room of these faithful servants, a household was formed, such indeed as became the dignity of a Cæsar; but it was filled with a crowd of slaves, destitute, and perhaps incapable, of any attachment for their new master, to whom, for the most part, they were either unknown or suspected.

His want of experience might require the assistance of a wise council; but the minute instructions which regulated the service of his table, and the distribution of his hours, were adapted to a youth still under the discipline of his preceptors, rather than to the situation of a prince intrusted with the conduct of an important war. If he aspired to deserve the esteem of his subjects, he was checked by the fear of displeasing his sovereign; and even the fruits of his marriage-bed were blasted by the jealous artifices of Eusebia herself, who, on this occasion alone, seems to have been unmindful of the tenderness of her sex, and the generosity of her character.

The memory of his father and of his brothers reminded Julian of his own danger, and his apprehensions were increased by the recent and unworthy fate of Sylvanus. In the summer which preceded his own elevation, that general had been chosen to deliver Gaul from the tyranny of the Barbarians; but Sylvanus soon discovered that he had left his most dangerous enemies in the Imperial court. A dexterous informer, countenanced by several of the principal ministers, procured from him some recommendatory letters; and erasing the whole of the contents, except the signature, filled up the vacant parchment with matters of high and treasonable import.

By the industry and courage of his friends, the fraud was however detected, and in a great council of the civil and military officers, held in the presence of the emperor himself, the innocence of Sylvanus was publicly acknowledged.

But the discovery came too late; the report of the calumny, and the hasty seizure of his estate, had already provoked the indignant chief to the rebellion of which he was so unjustly accused.

He assumed the purple at his head-quarters of Cologne, and his active powers appeared to menace Italy with an invasion, and Milan with a siege. In this emergency, Ursicinus, a general of equal rank, regained, by an act of treachery, the favor which he had lost by his eminent services in the East. Exasperated, as he might speciously allege, by the injuries of a similar nature, he hastened with a few followers to join the standard, and to betray the confidence, of his too credulous friend. After a reign of only twenty-eight days, Sylvanus was assassinated: the soldiers who, without any criminal intention, had blindly followed the example of their leader, immediately returned to their allegiance; and the flatterers of Constantius celebrated the wisdom and felicity of the monarch who had extinguished a civil war without the hazard of a battle.

The protection of the Rhætian frontier, and the persecution of the Catholic church, detained Constantius in Italy above eighteen months after the departure of Julian.

Gibbon on Julian – 2

The History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire

Volume 2

Chapter XIX


When the two nephews of Constantine, Gallus and Julian, were saved from the fury of the soldiers, the former was about twelve, and the latter about six, years of age; and, as the eldest was thought to be of a sickly constitution, they obtained with the less difficulty a precarious and dependent life, from the affected pity of Constantius, who was sensible that the execution of these helpless orphans would have been esteemed, by all mankind, an act of the most deliberate cruelty.

Different cities of Ionia and Bithynia were assigned for the places of their exile and education; but as soon as their growing years excited the jealousy of the emperor, he judged it more prudent to secure those unhappy youths in the strong castle of Macellum, near Cæsarea. The treatment which they experienced during a six years’ confinement, was partly such as they could hope from a careful guardian, and partly such as they might dread from a suspicious tyrant. Their prison was an ancient palace, the residence of the kings of Cappadocia; the situation was pleasant, the buildings of stately, the enclosure spacious. They pursued their studies, and practised their exercises, under the tuition of the most skilful masters; and the numerous household appointed to attend, or rather to guard, the nephews of Constantine, was not unworthy of the dignity of their birth. But they could not disguise to themselves that they were deprived of fortune, of freedom, and of safety; secluded from the society of all whom they could trust or esteem, and condemned to pass their melancholy hours in the company of slaves devoted to the commands of a tyrant who had already injured them beyond the hope of reconciliation.

At length, however, the emergencies of the state compelled the emperor, or rather his eunuchs, to invest Gallus, in the twenty-fifth year of his age, with the title of Cæsar, and to cement this political connection by his marriage with the princess Constantina. After a formal interview, in which the two princes mutually engaged their faith never to undertake any thing to the prejudice of each other, they repaired without delay to their respective stations. Constantius continued his march towards the West, and Gallus fixed his residence at Antioch; from whence, with a delegated authority, he administered the five great dioceses of the eastern præfecture. In this fortunate change, the new Cæsar was not unmindful of his brother Julian, who obtained the honors of his rank, the appearances of liberty, and the restitution o fan ample patrimony.

The writers the most indulgent to the memory of Gallus, and even Julian himself, though he wished to cast a veil over the frailties of his brother, are obliged to confess that the Cæsar was incapable of reigning. Transported from a prison to a throne, he possessed neither genius nor application, nor docility to compensate for the want of knowledge and experience. A temper naturally morose and violent, instead of being corrected, was soured by solitude and adversity; the remembrance of what he had endured disposed him to retaliation rather than to sympathy; and the ungoverned sallies of his rage were often fatal to those who approached his person, or were subject to his power. Constantina, his wife, is described, not as a woman, but as one of the infernal furies tormented with an insatiate thirst of human blood. Instead of employing her influence to insinuate the mild counsels of prudence and humanity, she exasperated the fierce passions of her husband; and as she retained the vanity, though she had renounced, the gentleness of her sex, a pearl necklace was esteemed an equivalent price for the murder of an innocent and virtuous nobleman.

The cruelty of Gallus was sometimes displayed in the undissembled violence of popular or military executions; and was sometimes disguised by the abuse of law, and the forms of judicial proceedings. The private houses of Antioch, and the places of public resort, were besieged by spies and informers; and the Cæsar himself, concealed in a plebeian habit, very frequently condescended to assume that odious character.

Every apartment of the palace was adorned with the instruments of death and torture, and a general consternation was diffused through the capital of Syria. The prince of the East, as if he had been conscious how much he had to fear, and how little he deserved to reign, selected for the objects of his resentment the provincials accused of some imaginary treason, and his own courtiers, whom with more reason he suspected of incensing, by their secret correspondence, the timid and suspicious mind of Constantius. But he forgot that he was depriving himself of his only support, the affection of the people; whilst he furnished the malice of his enemies with the arms of truth, and afforded the emperor the fairest pretence of exacting the forfeit of his purple, and of his life.

As long as the civil war suspended the fate of the Roman world, Constantius dissembled his knowledge of the weak and cruel administration to which his choice had subjected the East; and the discovery of some assassins, secretly despatched to Antioch by the tyrant of Gaul, was employed to convince the public, that the emperor and the Cæsar were united by the same interest, and pursued by the same enemies. But when the victory was decided in favor of Constantius, his dependent colleague became less useful and less formidable. Every circumstance of his conduct was severely and suspiciously examined, and it was privately resolved, either to deprive Gallus of the purple, or at least to remove him from the indolent luxury of Asia to the hardships and dangers of a German war.

The death of Theophilus, consular of the province of Syria, who in a time of scarcity had been massacred by the people of Antioch, with the connivance, and almost at the instigation, of Gallus, was justly resented, not only as an act of wanton cruelty, but as a dangerous insult on the supreme majesty of Constantius. Two ministers of illustrious rank, Domitian the Oriental præfect, and Montius, quæstor of the palace, were empowered by a special commission to visit and reform the state of the East. They were instructed to behave towards Gallus with moderation and respect, and, by the gentle starts of persuasion, to engage him to comply with the invitation of his brother and colleague. The rashness of the præfect disappointed these prudent measures, and hastened his own ruin, as well as that of his enemy.

On his arrival at Antioch, Domitian passed disdainfully before the gates of the palace, and alleging a slight pretence of indisposition, continued several days in sullen retirement, to prepare an inflammatory memorial, which he transmitted to the Imperial court. Yielding at length to the pressing solicitations of Gallus, the præfect condescended to take his seat in council; but his first step was to signify a concise and haughty mandate, importing that the Cæsar should immediately repair to Italy, and threatening that he himself would punish his delay or hesitation, by suspending the usual allowance of his household. The nephew and daughter of Constantine, who could ill brook the insolence of a subject, expressed their resentment by instantly delivering Domitian to the custody of a guard. The quarrel still admitted of some terms of accommodation. They were rendered impracticable by the imprudent behavior of Montius, a statesman whose arts and experience were frequently betrayed by the levity of his disposition.

The quæstor reproached Gallus in a haughty language, that a prince who was scarcely authorized to remove a municipal magistrate, should presume to imprison a Prætorian præfect; convoked a meeting of the civil and military officers; and required them, in the name of their sovereign, to defend the person and dignity of his representatives. By this rash declaration of war, the impatient temper of Gallus was provoked to embrace the most desperate counsels. He ordered his guards to stand to their arms, assembled the populace of Antioch, and recommended to their zeal the care of his safety and revenge. His commands were too fatally obeyed. They rudely seized the præfect and the quæstor, and tying their legs together with ropes, they dragged them through the streets of the city, inflicted a thousand insults and a thousand wounds on these unhappy victims, and at last precipitated their mangled and lifeless bodies into the stream of the Orontes.

After such a deed, whatever might have been the designs of Gallus, it was only in a field of battle that he could assert his innocence with any hope of success. But the mind of that prince was formed of an equal mixture of violence and weakness. Instead of assuming the title of Augustus, instead of employing in his defence the troops and treasures of the East, he suffered himself to be deceived by the affected tranquillity of Constantius, who, leaving him the vain pageantry of a court, imperceptibly recalled the veteran legions from the provinces of Asia.

But as it still appeared dangerous to arrest Gallus in his capital, the slow and safer arts of dissimulation were practised with success. The frequent and pressing epistles of Constantius were filled with professions of confidence and friendship; exhorting the Cæsar to discharge the duties of his high station, to relieve his colleague from a part of the public cares, and to assist the West by his presence, his counsels, and his arms. After so many reciprocal injuries, Gallus had reason to fear and to distrust. But he had neglected the opportunities of flight and of resistance; he was seduced by the flattering assurances of the tribune Scudilo, who, under the semblance of a rough soldier, disguised the most artful insinuation; and he depended on the credit of his wife Constantina, till the unseasonable death of that princess completed the ruin in which he had been involved by her impetuous passions.

Quotable quote

“Why were you so ungrateful to our gods as to desert them for the Jews?”

—Julian, addressing the Christians

Derrida, the Jews and the battle for Europe

by Manu Rodríguez

(translated from Spanish)

Derrida is, without doubt, the greatest Jewish thinker of late. I speak of what constitutes the whole Jewish “intelligentsia” of the past century. The “letters,” the “humanities”: Kafka, Freud, Lukacs, Benjamin, Arendt, Adorno, Marcuse, Levinas (the list is not exhaustive, of course). Derrida learned from all of them the best way of dealing with the Gentiles—learned from the mistakes of the Frankfurt School, for example. You had to use a different tone.

In view of the results of the present state of things, we can say with confidence that much of the scholarly work of the contemporary Jewish “intelligentsia” has been, and is, the destruction (“deconstruction,” if you prefer) of our culture. From all angles. They have introduced displeasure, mistrust, suspicion, discomfort throughout our culture in our painting, our music, our literature, our philosophy, our law, our traditions, all of our history since Marx… They poison the sources of our knowledge as harpies defile, desecrate, bumble, dirty, pollute our spiritual food.

It’s an old war that we do not want to register in our minds. A cold war. For more than two thousand years the Jews have declared war on the goyim, the gentile Europeans. Their first major victory was the Christianization of Europe, which was also our first step of Judaization (that massive process of forced and violent acculturation and enculturation of European populations 1700 years ago, which is extended, albeit more weakly, to this day). In the last two hundred years it seemed outclassed, left behind. But with Marx a new phase in this long war opened, which reached Derrida. Derrida is one of the last heirs of that pathway, a pathway opened by Marx: the destruction of the old institutions—the family, the nation, the religion, the symbolic parameters of a people, the frame, the skeleton: all of what had us standing.

The current preaching is the same of the past. The same destruction of our institutions and concepts. The same criticism of the nation, the homeland, the feeling of belonging to a land and a people, to our home, to our being ancestral and indigenous. And the same rising to the stars and the “selling” of all things Jewish. Jewish writing, Jewish culture… Theirs—Jewish identity—is untouchable. The Jew simply cannot be “deconstructed,” dismantled, censured, denied. The Jew is always affectionately embraced, and seductively presented as desirable, even as tempting. They tempt us, seduce us, divert us from our path. With one hand he destroys our identity and with the other he offers his. Illusionists, magicians, masters of distraction that swindle what is ours and attach to us what is foreign.

All this I say is shown to us in the media. It is the triumph of the rhetoric of advertising, of propaganda (Bernays). These are the times. Certain words, certain brands, certain slogans. Short messages, provocative, shocking, striking, bold, simple, catchy, leave a “footprint.” And also the gift, justice, forgiveness, friendship, hospitality. It is a “business” with “cause.”

A new Messianism comes now from the hand of Benjamin, Levinas, and Derrida (among many others, they are legion—and the converts) beyond the tart procedure of the Frankfurt School (those Maccabees). More subtle now, more Pauline, more cryptic, more cunning, more Marrano.

Internationalism is preached to us; the lack of patriotism. It is a universal, political, transnational, cosmopolitan creed; it is a perspective of the stateless, the rootless. It promotes this narrative, this point of view, this being.

The humpback wants to make humpbacks of all of us. The stateless wants us all stateless. The wandering, the nomads. Not only landless, without culture as well. A thing is not without the other. One thing leads to another. We cannot be deprived of land without first being deprived of culture, of “sky”, of word, of light. First he rails against the super-symbolic structures, against that being symbolic in ours, against the traditions about ourselves, against the basis and foundations of our symbolic being, against our ancient identity, against our collective ancestral memory— we are nothing, indeed.

The Industrial Revolution will end the old ways Marx said; with the Ancient Regime, with the old institutions (European, Western). Why is that hope, that desire, and why the rush? The “world” in which we lived was declared old, sick, mad, guilty, bad, worthy of perishing. We are condemned to death.

We are declared sick (critical, destructive discourse) and they heal us (universalism, cosmopolitanism) alike. They bring both the disease and the remedy (in the manner of the old Jewish Messianism with its “original sin” and its restoring baptism).

But these “cures” or “remedies” are equally destructive. We are pushed toward the abyss (death and oblivion), ​​we are blemished, denied, we are not left any outlet other than the “Other.”

We are being eliminated while we are offered the “diversity,” the Other, hospitality, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, the most suicidal altruism—indeed, the cure they say. We choose the Other, we place his interest before our own interests—the denial of oneself in short (“deny thyself”). And this evil, evil idea we like to accept as the highest and sublime “ideal.” Oh Miserable! It is the poisoned apple. The spreading among us of such universal principles seeks our destruction; that we voluntarily ignore ourselves, that we leave behind ours. Besides, our morality is reprehensible, punishable, it is the “bad” to remove.

Thus part of the cure is to destroy the attachment to the land, to the blood, to what is ours, all that should be up-rooted from the European goyim. Drive them away from their land, their people, away from our ends, away from ourselves. That was, and is, the way of salvation that we preach, and continues to be the cure. Now as then.

These are renewed attacks, and brutal, of the last two hundred years. From Marx to Derrida. New weapons, new missiles, new “reasoning,” new sophistry. Against everything that can strengthen and affirm. This is the whole strategy, and this is the role of the European Jewish “intelligentsia” to the Gentiles, that is what they have to do. They know that only by deconstructing us will they entirely succeed someday. And they spend their energy and greed toward that end. They dream but with the humiliation of the white European peoples. They want to see us defeated, vanquished, isolated, needy, few, solos. Oh, old Shylock!

They were not the first in this “path of destruction,” they were preceded by the enlightened after the Renaissance. The writings of the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provided political, legal, economic, philosophical arguments of “progress.” But it is not the same fight to combat ideologically the Ancient Regime than trying to destroy the entire European culture.

Nietzsche also, unfortunately, provided plenty of material. And Heidegger. However, the same criticism that a European makes of his culture sounds different when performed by a Jew. Keep in mind who is the subject of an enunciation: who speaks here, who says that. While in a Jew’s mouth these reviews sound like the speech of an enemy, in a European mouth those words sound like those of a father or a mother, or a son, or a brother. Rebukes, corrects, encourages… The European seeks the good of his health; wants to make it better, stronger, more confident; wants to establish it on new foundations and purest symbolism. Nietzsche’s intention is that the European be exceeded, that he leaves behind all the ideological and spiritual, Platonic and Judeo-messianic period. A symbolic change, a change of “heaven,” a complete regeneration, a new dawn, a return perhaps. Marx (Jewish strategy) seeks the destruction of our worlds; Nietzsche seeks correction, transformation, renewal.

In any case, what is allowed to Nietzsche (one of us), is not to any stranger, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Chinese. Let them stick to their “stuff.”

Why do we allow these strangers interfere in our affairs? Our family affairs. They are ancient, archaic, reach our ancestors, our true first Parents, those Indo-Europeans: Hittite, Vedic Aryans, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Celts, Slavs, Balts… The relations between different peoples in Europe, our holy land, are sometimes difficult—between Germans and Celts for example (in Ireland and the British Isles), or between southern Roman and Germanics, Slavic and Germanics or between them and the Balts. Our millennial affairs. No outsider is invited to this reunion, it is only for our ancestral peoples. No outsider has here any word, any ear, voice or vote.

These authors I am referring to are Jewish before being French, German, Spanish, or Russian, and only their “nation” moves them—not Europe or its people or their nations. Like Christians or Muslims, they are foreigners in any country or region. They can only speak from the position of the stateless. They have no nation but the Jewish community, or Muslim (the umma). These are their unique perspectives. They have nothing, then, to say. They cannot speak but from outside, from their own language / experience / perspective. Moreover, we can always say, “Take care of your business”, of your “nation and leave us in peace.” “Put your whole exegesis on your ‘Peters’ and ‘Pauls,’ and leave alone Homer, Aristotle and Plato.” This is what Julian told the “Galileans.” Something similar we can tell these new apostles of our newly restored paganism: “Devote yourselves to censor and destroy your own traditions and customs, and leave alone our philosophers and our entire culture.”

Jewish intellectuals among us don’t introduce themselves as Jews but as Westerners and seek to pass as ordinary citizens in appearance, indistinguishable from others (it is important, for their strategy, that we see them as French, German, or American, not as Jews). Mimicry. No Judaic displays or public fanfare. Rather: atheists, agnostics, heterodox, or simply “progressive” or “leftists” (terms that define much of the West). Their work is aimed at Westerners in general. In any case, these intellectuals, I say, never stop being Jews.

In their eternal double game—like aliens who are in any land (except in Israel); their dual nationality, double talk, dual mentality, dual language, double intention; their diabolism, forked tongue, their poison, they can not help it. Before being French, Russians, Germans or Americans, they’re Jews. The Jewish perspective never leaves them. The country or the Jewish nation is the transnational Jewish community, as is the case with Muslims and their umma, and would also happen to Christians and their community (the “people” of the god of the Jews) if they were consistent with their “faith.”

We must return to speak of Jewish philosophy, or Jewish thought, make them out of the current European thinkers (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger) as we do with medieval philosophy, where we distinguish Jewish thought, European (mostly Christian) and Muslim. There is a contemporary “literature” or “writing” in the West we might call Jewish or Hebrew—for its content, references, fundamental concepts, for their “masters.” Topics, quotes, and Jewish authors (ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary) are common in these scriptures.

The current Jewish thinkers navigate with the masthead of the most notable European thinkers of the past two hundred years (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger mainly) all the while guided by Jewish thinkers—Marx, Freud, Levinas, Adorno… These are the thinkers who form their conscience, they say. And the consciousness of much of today’s Europeans, unfortunately for us.

Wrapped in gentle nibbles, with a bit of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger they make us swallow handfuls of Jewish issues, we are Judaized—again. Something “sweet” on the tip of the spoon to deceive, something different, something other than what they would have us swallow, something familiar for us not to distrust. As with children. Little by little, until they get used. After that they may withdraw the little sweet, other than Jewish. The art of Derrida. The floured paw hovering below the door. Jewish Scripture for Europeans or western Gentiles, for the European “cousins.” Like the old Judeo-Messianism.

The Jew always makes an appearance with an air of triumph to gentile “confusion”—as deus ex machina, as Socrates in the (rigged) Platonic dialogues. Go to the Derrida webpage, see and check. Texts on Marx, Freud, Benjamin and Levinas; Jewish characters and Jewish allusions, ancient and modern everywhere (article, interview, conference). Jewish writing—Jewish authors, Jewish issues, Jewish concerns, Jewish disquisitions, Jewish Byzantinism, Kabala, Talmud, Messianism. Self-centeredness in short. Megalomania: all about the Jews and their small world.

Do not forget they hold conferences and meetings of philosophy, of thought, strictly Jewish. Meetings in which a non-Jew, I presume, cannot participate except as a guest. Many of the topics and authors are, however, worldwide (Marxism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, Benjamin, Derrida…). Authors and philosophical topoi governing, today, much of European and western thought. They are the main current of thought, we might say. They have taken over. The list of Jewish authors whose narrative is relevant to our contemporary culture is excessive.

They do not use exclusively Jewish sources. As said, they are combined with certain doses of the aforementioned European authors. But we notice that these uses are rather to flag, to mark, to marginalize, to set them aside, to distinguish they from them. They fight ultimately against these texts (these authors): they strike them, delete them, make them void—seek their annulment, beat them, disconnect from them we might say, deprive of their strength, power, utility, functionality and present value; spoil them, block the outputs, cut the roads…

I think of the work done with Nietzsche—the pruning. The Nietzsche of Blanchot, Klossowski, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotardt, Derrida, Vattimo. The post-modern. Weak thought. Weakened off thought, exhausted, dying, end. Nihilism in his misery. This scenario is not noticed in the Jewish front: it has another perspective. They have made that European thinkers rush, throw themselves into the abyss. They contemplate self-extinction. Objective nearly fulfilled.

It is the white Europe, of course, the final destination of these maneuvers and attacks; it is this Europe what he wants weakened, canceled, extinguished… deleted, gone, disappeared (as Sumer and Egypt disappeared). To turn Europe into something spooky, a dim memory.

Say there is a war between European thought and Jewish thought: Darwin and Nietzsche on the one hand, and Marx and Freud on the other (for simplicity). We have sociologies and anthropologies opposing each other. Opposing worlds. It’s a war of words, cultural, symbolic, even of the media. It is a struggle for dominance. Consider if Derrida’s writing is not raised as a fight against certain traditions and European institutions to influence the future of these institutions and traditions. The goal is to take over, to dominate, to possess. Those are “positions” in a fight. It is a war.

Today it is the entire European thought (from the Greek, from Homer) the demonized, which is under suspicion, the defeated, we could say. It’s all ancient European culture which is in question and is in danger of disappearing.

The future of European thinking (and being) is settled these days, although many of the “professionals” are not aware of it, do not realize they are already involved in this fight either one side or the other. You have to ask, what is the dominant thought? Which authors dominate or lead? It is an ideological struggle, a struggle in the heavens. Is the battle for Europe.

The objective is to take the head atop the Citadel (the Acropolis), the government centers, to drive, to lead. Like some retroviruses penetrating the nucleus of cells manage to enter the DNA and from it, replicate using mobile devices. The “replication” of the narrative from the core. Replicants. Cybernetics and the machinery or the social body.

The Jews try to dominate the whole field of thought, to definitely Judaize European philosophical thought, economics, politics, ethics, psychologies, anthropologies. They have spread in all fields of knowledge and culture. We go around figures and pathways of Jewish reflection, created by Jews: this is the intention.

For the achievement of this purpose, it is essential that Europeans and Westerners do not suspect for a moment that they are reading Jewish press, Jewish literature and Jewish thought, or watching Jewish movies (or myths propagated by Jews as the new Zion in Matrix). There are a number of clearly Jewish “products” that pass for art and culture for the mass, purportedly Western. We consume kosher culture prepared especially for Gentiles without knowing it.

Like when the old Judeo-Messianic Judaism—an ad hoc Judaism for European gentiles (no circumcision, no food requirements, and everything else—the god, the Jewish god, the Jewish holy book, the Jewish holy land…).

It is the propaganda of literature and art what we always have with Jews. They propagate themselves. They take care of themselves. They sell themselves; they are offered, promoted, one to each other. Is their art, the Phoenician art, Semitic art.

What they have always tried is how to survive, and always master, the strange land and even influence the life and work of the goyim. Among Semites it is always the search, anywhere, the transformation of the culture of the host to make it more favorable to their own interests.

Presently they win the battle in the minds and hearts of Europeans and Westerners. Incomprehensibly, their self-destructive and harmful slogans are in the air; their deadly conceptual beads. There are many Conversos or supporters that do not know they are, or are not taken by such (Marxists, Freudians, Derridans, universalists internationalists, multiculturalists…), those who leave their gold and flaunt the blackest chump.

Oh, simple, naive, gullible, trusting Europeans! Young, new, latest, inexperienced, adolescent race! When will you attain some maturity?

The recent Jewish cultural or intellectual contribution? It’s a room, four walls and a built-in insidious roof, slowly and laboriously from Marx to Derrida, the “intellectual” legacy or Jewish gift for future generations of poisoned Europe: a receptacle, a cell, a hideout. The new canonical texts and authors, the new “Parents” of the new European community or ecclesia—architects of this new Zion, the new Matrix. Is this our fate, the fate of our heirs? Once again enclosed within four walls? To live in the shade, under the roof of this minimum precinct—denying us space and horizon and preventing us from seeing our skies? Will this blackened and dirty roof be our single “heaven”? Nausea. Repugnance. The “universe,” the “world” of Marx, Kafka, Freud, Lukacs, Trotsky, Benjamin, Arendt, Adorno, Levinas, Derrida… The shadowy Jewish world; its unbreathable atmosphere, impure.

Just as the Judeo-Messianic “new testament,” the whole Jewish world came over us (from which we have not left), and with the discourse of Marx, Freud, Levinas, Benjamin, and Derrida we are returned back to that world. The one leads to the other. We are stopped, paralyzed, retained in their maze for centuries. We did not leave their tight and tedious world.

Jewish “intelligentsia” attempts to shape and direct our lives for millennia. The brand new testament; the new apostles of the Gentiles. A new Jewish Messianic millennium, a new supreme winter. This is the threat.

The “Holocaust” is now their Golgotha, their sign, their cross, their pale banner.

The sky is brick-worked, certainly. Our skies are paved with brick through the Jewish skies and Judeo-Messianic Jews. Now we have a new brickwork, and both the old and new are preserved. A double brickwork and double key. In both cases the keys are held by Jews.

These “heavens” are the ways of salvation made by European Jews to the Gentiles. Both destroy us, destroy our being. Both the old Judeo-Messianism as the new—the brand new testament.

Clairvoyance and courage I wish to my own to get out of this mess, to de-brickworking these skies outside, to shoot down these walls, to restore the light of our skies, our breathing of pure air. To win in the end.

We must be stronger than the disease, more vigorous than the evil that invades us. It is time to frustrate the plans of these charlatans, these tricksters, these cheaters, these imposters and usurpers.

Until next time,

Manu

Germanics and Romans

Celtic buffer and Tacitus

Five decisive things

Alaric and the Fall of Rome

Christianity Spreads

The toll of Judeo-Christianity

 

Germanic People and the Romans (4): Christianity Spreads

Excerpted from the 18th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:

During the turbulent and eventful fifth century the Germans largely completed their conquest of the West. In the early years of that century German tribesmen, who had been raiding the coast of Roman Britain for many years, began a permanent invasion of the southeastern portion of the island, a development which was eventually to lead to a Germanic Britain.

Oriental Infection

But the Germans did not make their conquest of the Roman world without becoming infected by some of the diseases which flourished so unwholesomely in Rome during her last days. Foremost among these was an infection which the Romans themselves had caught during the first century, a consequence of their own conquest of the Levant. It had begun as an offshoot of Judaism, had established itself in Jerusalem and a few other spots in the eastern Mediterranean area, and had traveled to Rome with Jewish merchants and speculators, who had long found that city an attractive center of operations.

It eventually became known to the world as Christianity, but for more than two centuries it festered in the sewers and catacombs of Rome, along with dozens of other alien religious sects from the Levant; its first adherents were Rome’s slaves, a cosmopolitan lot from all the lands conquered by the Romans. It was a religion designed to appeal to slaves: blessed are the poor, the meek, the wretched, the despised, it told them, for you shall inherit the earth from the strong, the brave, the proud, and the mighty; there will be pie in the sky for all believers, and the rest will suffer eternal torment. It appealed directly to a sense of envy and resentment of the weak against the strong.

The new religion spread from the slaves to the freedmen, that motley conglomeration of Syrians, Egyptians, Jews, Armenians, and members of a dozen other nations who made up Rome’s mercantile, petty entrepreneur, and free worker class. It even began to catch on in some of Rome’s legions.

Edict of Milan

By the end of the third century Christianity had become the most popular as well as the most militant of the Oriental sects flourishing among the largely non-Roman inhabitants of the decaying Roman Empire. Even as late as the first years of the fourth century, under Emperor Diocletian, the Roman government was still making efforts to keep the Christians under control, but in 313 a new emperor, Constantine, decided that, if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em, and he issued an imperial edict legitimizing Christianity.

Although one of Constantine’s successors, Julian, attempted to reverse the continuing Christianization of the Roman Empire a few years later, it was already too late: the Goths, who made up the bulk of Rome’s armies by this time, had caught the infection from one of their own slaves, a Christian captive whom they called Wulfila. Wulfila was a tireless and effective missionary, and the Goths were an uprooted and unsettled people, among whom the new religion took hold easily. Wulfila’s translation of the Bible into Gothic greatly speeded up the process.

Conversion of the Franks

Before the end of the fourth century Christianity had also spread to the Vandals, Burgundians, Lombards, Gepids, and several other German tribes. A little over a century later the powerful nation of the Franks was converted. By the beginning of the second quarter of the sixth century, the only non-Christian Whites left were the Bavarians, Thuringians, Saxons, Frisians, Danes, Swedes, and Norse among the Germans—and virtually all the Balts and Slavs.

Athanaric the Goth

The Christians had many individual opponents, of course: among the Romans several of the more responsible and civic-minded emperors, such as Diocletian, as well as what was left of the tradition-minded aristocracy; and among the Germans many farsighted leaders who resisted the imposition of an alien creed on their people and the abandonment of their ancient traditions. Athanaric, the great Gothic chieftain who led his people across the Danube in 376 to save them from the invading Huns, was notable in this regard.

Athanaric and the other traditionalists failed to halt the spread of Christianity, because they were only individuals. Although there were pagan priests, the traditional German religion never really had a church associated with it. It consisted in a body of beliefs, tales, and practices passed from generation to generation, but it had no centralized organization like Christianity.

Early Christianity, in contrast to German religion, was as utterly intolerant as the Judaism from which it sprang. Even Roman religion, which, as an official state religion, equated religious observance with patriotism, tolerated the existence of other sects, so long as they did not threaten the state. But the early Christians were inspired by a fanatical hatred of all opposing creeds.

Also in contrast to German and Roman religion, Christianity, despite its specifically Jewish roots, claimed to be a universal (i.e., “catholic”) creed, equally applicable to Germans, Romans, Jews, Huns, and Negroes.

As for the brotherhood of man and equality in the eyes of the Lord, the Germans had no time for such nonsense; when confronted with non-Whites, they instinctively reached for the nearest lethal weapon. They made mincemeat out of the Avars, who were cousins to the Huns, in the seventh century, and the Christianized Franks or Goths of that era would know exactly what to do with a few hundred thousand rioting American Blacks; they would, in fact, positively relish the opportunity to do what needed doing.

It could not have been expected to be otherwise. In the first place, a totally alien religion cannot be imposed on a spiritually healthy people—and the Germans were still essentially healthy, despite the dislocations caused by the Voelkerwanderung.

(In the accounts of the incident at Thor’s Oak,
we read that Boniface took off his shirt
and axed the tree himself)

The Christian problem encompasses the Jewish problem

I update this entry regularly

No subject is so dangerous to address among White nationalists as the Christian religion.

Many Whites make a fundamental mistake when they portray new civil religions as part of an organized conspiracy of a small number of wicked people. In essence, civil religions are just secular transpositions of the Judeo-Christian monotheist mindset.

Christianity became thus a Universalist religion with a special mission to transform the Other into the Same. The seeds of egalitarianism—albeit on the religious, not yet on the secular level—were sown.

—Tom Sunic

All of this quoting from dust-covered books of my small library that I had read long ago has to do with our hypothesis that the Jewish Problem can only be understood as the deranged altruism resulting from the secular fulfillment of universal Christian values, a point that most nationalists, especially the monocausalists,* find it too hard to digest:

Basic:

Kemp on Christianity

The Red Giant

Tomislav Sunić

Pierce & Klassen:

On Christianity

Jesus was a Jewish liberal

Pierce on Christianity

Classic:

Porphyry on Christianity

Persecution of Christians

The Fall of Rome

Julian the Apostate:

Julian on Christianity

On Gore Vidal’s Julian

Briefest review

Overmen:

Hitler on Christianity

Nietzsche on Christianity

Nietzsche on the Aryan race

Contemporary:

Franklin Ryckaert on Christianity

White nationalists on Christianity

Greg Johnson on Christianity

Alex Linder on Christianity

Capitalism & the Church

A VNN exchange

My 2 cents:

Bicausalism

Isildur’s mess

On Erasmus

_________________

* Monocausalism is the orthodox view in many white nationalist circles that Jewish influence in our civilization is the sole cause of the decline of whites. Monocausalists do not believe that there is a Christian problem or that whites, including atheists, agnostics or new agers, are inherently wired the wrong way as a result of the programming of Christian meta-ethics through the last millennia.

The Christian problem does not only refer to Christian values, but also to the moral grammar of what we are calling “secular Christians,” a group that could even include the anticlerical Jacobins. See the second entry linked above to clarify this apparently paradoxical issue.

From our viewpoint, allowing the Jews to take over our societies, a process that started right after the French revolutionaries emancipated them, is the primary infection —the “Christian / Secular Christian problem”— and Jewish depredations in our society, a secondary infection. (From this point of view the Islamization of Europe would be a tertiary infection.)