Letters of Julian/Letter 55

by Julian

55. To Photinus^[1]

Moreover the Emperor Julian, faithless to Christ, in his attack on Diodorus^[2] writes as follows to Photinus the heresiarch:^[3] O Photinus, you at any rate seem to maintain what is probably true, and come nearest to being saved, and do well to believe that he whom one holds to be a god can by no means be brought into the womb. But Diodorus, a charlatan priest of the Nazarene, when he tries to give point to that nonsensical theory about the womb by artifices and juggler's tricks, is clearly a sharp-witted sophist of that creed of the country-folk. A little further on he says: But if only the gods and goddesses and all the Muses and Fortune will lend me their aid, I hope to show^[4] that he is feeble and a corrupter of laws and customs, of pagan^[5] Mysteries and Mysteries of the gods of the underworld, and that that new-fangled Galilaean god of his, whom he by a false myth styles eternal, has been stripped by his humiliating death and burial of the divinity falsely ascribed to him by Diodorus. Then, just as people who are convicted of error always begin to invent, being the slaves of artifice rather than of truth, he goes on to say: For the fellow sailed to Athens to the injury of the general welfare, then rashly took to philosophy and engaged in the study of literature, and by the devices of rhetoric armed his hateful tongue against the heavenly gods, and being utterly ignorant of the Mysteries of the pagans he so to speak imbibed most deplorably the whole mistaken folly of the base and ignorant creed-making fishermen. For this conduct he has long ago been punished by the gods themselves. For, for many years past, he has been in danger, having contracted a wasting disease of the chest, and he now suffers extreme torture. His whole body has wasted away. For his cheeks have fallen in and his body is deeply lined with wrinkles.^[6] But this is no sign of philosophic habits, as he wishes it to seem to those who are deceived by him, but most certainly a sign of justice done and of punishment from the gods which has stricken him down in suitable proportion to his crime, since he must live out to the very end his painful and bitter life, his appearance that of a man pale and wasted.

Footnotes

1. These fragments of a lost letter are preserved only in the Latin version of Facundus Hermianensis, who wrote at Constantinople about 546 A.D. For a partial reconstruction of the original see Neumann, Contra Christianos, Leipzig, 1880, p. 5. This letter may have been written at any time between Julian's arrival at Antioch in July 362 and his departure thence, in March 363. The Greek original is represented by curious and sometimes untranslatable Latin. Photinus, bishop of Sirmium, where Constantius resided in 351, was tried, deposed and banished by a synod convened there by Constantius. According to Sozomen 4. 6, he wrote many Greek and Latin works in support of his heretical views on the divinity of Christ, which were opposed by both Arians and Nicaeans. He is mentioned by Julian, Against the Galilaeans 262c.
2. Bishop of Tarsus, a celebrated teacher; he was at Antioch in 362.
3. The italicised passages are the words of Facundus.
4. This is a forecast of Julian's treatise Against the Galilaeans.
5. Twice in this letter Facundus translates Julian's "Hellenic" as "pagan."
6. Here and in the last sentence I give what seems to be the general meaning.