This substantial and impressive study marks a considerable achievement, and one in many respects long overdue: it is an attempt to read the œuvre of two apparently diametrically opposed fourth-century thinkers, one pagan, one Christian, as expressions of one interconnected elite discourse. Resisting the customary and comfortable ghettoisation of pagan vs Christian and philosophy vs theology (and behind these the disciplinary division between classics and church history), E. seeks to demonstrate the interdependence and multifaceted interplay in problems, intellectual resources and political agendas among many of Julian and Gregory's best known orations. The result is a provocative flattening and broadening of the fourth-century cultural–intellectual landscape such that Julian and Gregory can emerge as thinkers distinguished only by their (in effect) slightly different emphasis on the ultimate referent for the divine.
The explicit focus of the work is political ideology. Informed by the work of D. O'Meara and others who are attempting to rediscover the political dimensions of late Platonic philosophy, E. reads the works of Julian and Gregory as engaged fundamentally in a contest over which tradition, pagan or Christian, could claim to provide the correct theological foundation for Rome's continuing political security and universalism. In this reading Julian appears much less sophomoric and quixotic than is normally the case. Instead he emerges as a purveyor of a sophisticated and coherent theologico-political vision. Gregory's transformation is even more dramatic, shedding his traditional image of an eccentric and ineffective romantic thrown unwillingly into the fray of politics, and arising almost menacingly as an exceptionally canny political player, deeply involved in the partisan machinations of the day and highly adept at ‘writing himself’ into positions of power and influence. In both cases, however, E.'s central concern is not so much to revise our image of Julian or Gregory as to demonstrate that both figures, in staking out their respective claims, inhabit virtually identical intellectual worlds, addressing the same set of philosophical problems, aware of each other's positions and even engaged in direct, albeit understated, dialogue.
E. develops her unconventional thesis in a traditional manner: she proceeds exegetically text-by-text, carefully plotting her commentary and exegesis against a detailed event chronology. The length and density of her exegesis at times leaves the thread of her central thesis difficult to follow, but this shortcoming is more than made up for by the breadth and sophistication of her exposition of the late antique thought-world. E. manages to weave both thinkers into several broad and long trajectories of antique philosophical problematics, most notably long-standing debates over the proper balance between the ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ life and problems in the philosophy of language. Set into these contexts, the soteriological and christological formulations of Gregory (e.g. theosis, oikeiosis), and the mythological metaphysics of Julian, no longer appear as separate dogmatic developments, but as interconnected expressions of much broader and larger debates. For E., neither figure can be understood without the other.
E. is extremely sensitive to the rhetorical textures of late antique texts, and much of her argumentation is developed through teasing out allusions, subtleties and omissions in Julian and Gregory's orations. This acute command of the conventions of ancient rhetoric, and the awareness of the allusive and polyvalent nature of elite texts of this period, is one of the great strengths of this work. Nevertheless – as E. at times acknowledges – her readings can become so subtle as to evade clear demonstration or proof. In effect, much of her evidence is ‘circumstantial’. But E. is right to suggest (e.g. pp. 468–9) that her texts demand such subtle reading; certainly we can agree that arguing at the knife's edge of demonstrability is virtually an occupational hazard of good cultural historians of this period. In any case this reviewer suspects that E. has it right more often than she has it wrong, and at the very least she points the way to reading her texts in a much less crassly and anachronistically literal way than has hitherto been the case.
A greater problem may be her at times uni-directional model of cultural appropriation. Quietly dipping into the old debate about the ‘Hellenisation’ of Christianity, she frequently implies that Christian thinkers like Gregory were much more Greco-Roman in their outlook and motivations than generally acknowledged. She concludes, for example, that ‘the model of late Roman Christian leadership (the bishop) is rooted not so much in the prescriptions of the New Testament and their Jewish antecedents … but in the social reality of Greek and Roman elite men’ (p. 483). Here a little more nuance may have been advised. In particular, it would have been helpful if she had considered at greater length the degree to which the common Greco-Roman philosophical and ideological framework of Julian and Gregory may in fact already have been shaped by Christian (perhaps New Testament?) cultural currents. She instead tends to portray the Greco-Roman socio-cultural reality as a pure and uniformly pagan background into which Christians could only assimilate. For instance, she seems to view the Christian concern to promote the discourse of Roman imperial universalism as a clear example of the assimilation of Christian thinkers into prior pagan ideals. But might we not wonder with A. Lintott and others about the extent to which the discourse of Roman universalism was in part created by, or at least by the fourth century set front-and-centre by, Christians themselves (and Christian theology)? Likewise E. seems to assume that later Neoplatonic theories (especially in their theurgic aspects) existed as sealed systems impervious to Christian intellectual developments, but here too we might wonder about earlier cross-pollination. In short, E. never seems to consider the extent to which Christians may have already been in control of ‘the vision of Rome’ (of her title) by the mid-fourth century. As a result – very curiously – she never directly addresses a major aspect of the traditional (Christian) historiography of Julian, namely the extent to which his whole programme was a (second-rate) imitation of the by-then thoroughly Christian Greco-Roman religio-political synthesis. E. is surely right that we need to think of the boundary between elite pagan and Christian discourse in the fourth century as much more porous than we generally do; but a little more balance is required.
None of these issues, however, detract from what remains a remarkable achievement and a very stimulating read. Beautifully written and produced, this volume will become required reading for anyone interested in late antique cultural history or political philosophy – certainly for specialists of Gregory or Julian.
