The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX The Emperor Julian, that adept of the spirit who was never understood, that initiate whose paganism was less idolatrous than the faith of certain Christians, the Emperor Julian, we say, understood better than Dupuis and Volney the symbolic worship of the sun. In his hymn to the king, Helios, he recognizes that the star of day is but the reflection and the material shadow of that sun of truth which illumines the world of intelligence, and which is itself only a light borrowed from the Absolute. It is a remarkable thing that Julian has ideas of the Supreme God, that the Christians thought they alone adored, much greater and more correct than those of some of the fathers of the Church, who were his contemporaries, and his adversaries. This is how he expresses himself in his defence of Hellenism : “It is not sufficient to write in a book that God spake, and things were made. It is necessary to examine whether the things that one attributes to God are not contrary to the very laws of Being. For, if it is so, God could not have made them, for He could not contradict Nature with- out denying Himself. ... God being eternal, it is of the nature of necessity that His orders should be immutable as He.” So spake that apostate, that man of impiety! Vet, later, a Christian doctor, become the oracle of the theological schools, taking his inspiration perhaps from these splendid words of the misbeliever, found himself obliged to bridle superstition by writing that beautiful and brave maxim which easily resumes the thought of the great Emperor : 188