Or rather, he wrote to their high priest. Julian, in his struggle to explain why the worship of Cybele had fallen into such desuetude, did not content himself with blaming the ignorant and weak-minded. The true blame, he charged, lay with the priests themselves. Far from devoting themselves to the poor, they lived lives of wild abandon. This had to end. In a world rife with suffering, why were priests getting drunk in taverns? Their time would be better spent, so Julian sternly informed them, in providing succour for the needy. To that end, subsidies of food and drink would be provided out of his own funds, and sent annually to Galatia. ‘My orders are that a fifth be given to the poor who serve the priests, and that the remainder be distributed to travellers and to beggars.’2 Julian, in committing himself to this programme of welfare, took for granted that Cybele would approve. Caring for the weak and unfortunate, so the emperor insisted, had always been a prime concern of the gods. If only the Galatians could be brought to appreciate this, then they might be brought as well to renew their ancient habits of worship. ‘Teach them that doing good works was our practice of old.’3
An assertion that would no doubt have come as news to the celebrants of Cybele themselves. Behind the selfless ascetics of Julian’s fantasies there lurked an altogether less sober reality: priests whose enthusiasms had run not to charity, but to dancing, and cross-dressing, and self-castration. The gods cared nothing for the poor. To think otherwise was ‘airhead talk’.4 When Julian, writing to the high priest of Galatia, quoted Homer on the laws of hospitality, and how even beggars might appeal to them, he was merely drawing attention to the scale of his delusion. The heroes of the Iliad, favourites of the gods, golden and predatory, had scorned the weak and downtrodden. So too, for all the honour that Julian paid them, had philosophers. The starving deserved no sympathy. Beggars were best rounded up and deported. Pity risked undermining a wise man’s self-control. Only fellow citizens of good character who, through no fault of their own, had fallen on evil days might conceivably merit assistance. Certainly, there was little in the character of the gods whom Julian so adored, or in the teachings of the philosophers whom he so admired, to justify any assumption that the poor, just by virtue of their poverty, had a right to aid. The young emperor, sincere though he was in his hatred of ‘Galilean’ teachings, and in regretting their impact upon all that he held most dear, was blind to the irony of his plan for combating them: that it was itself irredeemably Christian.
‘How apparent to everyone it is, and how shameful, that our own people lack support from us, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans support not only their own poor, but ours as well.’5 Julian could not but be painfully aware of this. The roots of Christian charity ran deep. The apostles, obedient to Jewish tradition as well as to the teachings of their master, had laid it as a solemn charge upon new churches always ‘to remember the poor’.6 Generation after generation, Christians had held true to this injunction. Every week, in churches across the Roman world, collections for orphans and widows, for the imprisoned, and the shipwrecked, and the sick had been raised. Over time, as congregations swelled, and ever more of the wealthy were brought to baptism, the funds available for poor relief had grown as well. Entire systems of social security had begun to emerge. Elaborate and well-organised, these had progressively embedded themselves within the great cities of the Mediterranean. Constantine, by recruiting bishops to his purposes, had also recruited the networks of charity of which they served as the principal patrons. Julian, clear-sighted in his loathing of the Galileans, understood this very well. Trains of clients, in the Roman world, had always been an index of power – and bishops, by that measure, were grown very powerful indeed. The wealthy, men who in previous generations might have boosted their status by endowing their cities with theatres, or temples, or bath-houses, had begun to find in the Church a new vent for their ambitions. This was why Julian, in a quixotic attempt to endow the worship of the ancient gods with a similar appeal, had installed a high priest over Galatia, and urged his subordinates to practise poor relief. Christians did not merely inspire in Julian a profound contempt; they filled him with envy as well.
His adversaries named him the Apostate, a turncoat from his faith; but Julian likewise felt betrayed. Leaving Galatia, he continued eastwards into Cappadocia, a rugged landscape famed for the quality of its horses and its lettuces, and which the emperor knew well. As a boy, he had been kept there under effective detention by a suspicious Constantius, and so was perfectly familiar with the character of the local notables. One, in particular, might almost have been a mirror image of himself. Basil, like Julian, was a man deeply versed in Greek literature and philosophy, a one-time student in Athens, and renowned for his powers of oratory. He was, in short, precisely the kind of man the emperor hoped to recruit to his side – except that Basil had embarked on the opposite path to Julian. Far from repudiating his upbringing as a Christian, it was instead his initial career as a lawyer that he had abandoned. Committing both his energies and his fortune to Christ, he and his younger brother, a brilliantly original theologian named Gregory, had fast developed international reputations. Even though Basil did not meet with Julian during the emperor’s progress through Cappadocia, such was his celebrity that many, feeling that the two most famous men of the age really should have confronted one another, took the matter into their own hands.* When, a year after leaving Asia Minor, Julian perished in Mesopotamia, fighting the Persians, a soldier in his train wrote an account of how Basil had, in a vision, seen Christ personally send a saint to dispatch him with a spear. While there was no one, in the wake of the emperor’s death, to continue his counter-revolution, both Basil and Gregory went from strength to strength. In 370, the elder brother was elected bishop of Caesarea, the capital of Cappadocia; two years later, the younger was appointed to a new bishopric on the main road to Galatia, at Nyssa. Both were renowned for their labours on behalf of the poor; both, as a consequence, came to wield an influence that extended far beyond the borders of their native land. Julian’s insight was confirmed: charity might indeed breed power.
Yet that did not mean that his own strategy had been any the less doomed. A concern for the downtrodden could not merely be summoned into existence out of nothing. The logic that inspired two wealthy and educated men such as Basil and Gregory to devote their lives to the poor derived from the very fundamentals of their faith. ‘Do not despise these people in their abjection; do not think they merit no respect.’ So Gregory urged. ‘Reflect on who they are, and you will understand their dignity; they have taken upon them the person of our Saviour. For he, the compassionate, has given them his own person.’7 Gregory, more clearly than anyone before him, traced the implications of Christ’s choice to live and die as one of the poor to its logical conclusion. Dignity, which no philosopher had ever taught might be possessed by the stinking, toiling masses, was for all. There was no human existence so wretched, none so despised or vulnerable, that it did not bear witness to the image of God. Divine love for the outcast and derelict demanded that mortals love them too.
This was the conviction that in 369, on the outskirts of a Caesarea ravaged by famine, prompted Basil to embark on a radical new building project. Other Christian leaders before him had built ptocheia, or ‘poor houses’ – but none on such an ambitious scale. The Basileias, as it came to be known, was described by one awe-struck admirer as a veritable city, and incorporated, as well as shelter for the poor, what was in effect the first hospital. Basil, who had studied medicine while in Athens, did not himself scorn to tend the sick. Even lepers, whose deformities and suppurations rendered them objects of particular revulsion, might be welcomed by the bishop with a kiss, and given both refuge and care. The more broken men and women were, the readier was Basil to glimpse Christ in them. The spectacle in a slave-market of a boy sold by his starving parents, the one child sacrificed that his siblings might have some few scraps of food, provoked the bishop to a particularly scorching excoriation of the rich. ‘The bread in your board belongs to the hungry; the cloak in your wardrobe to the naked; the shoes you let rot to the barefoot; the money in your vaults to the destitute.’8 The days when a wealthy man had only to sponsor a self-aggrandising piece of architecture to be hailed a public benefactor were well and truly gone.