At the same time that Augustine was finishing his monumental critique of paganism in The City of God, Cyril of Alexandria was writing his own response to the gods of Greece and Rome. Similarly vast in scope and length, Against Julian has remained untranslated and inaccessible due, in part, to the notorious prolixity of Cyril’s Greek. Robert Louis Wilken once wrote that in “any list of the most unread major works of early Christian literature, Cyril’s Contra Iulianum would stand close to the top, if not at the summit.” Matthew Crawford and Aaron Johnson have masterfully climbed the pinnacle and handed down this major achievement in late antique studies. This translation comes on the heels of the 2016–2017 publication of a two-volume critical edition in the GCS series, which has sparked renewed interest in the ten extant books of Against Julian. Crawford and Johnson’s translation is clear and authoritative, and the introduction and footnoting are especially designed not only to make the text accessible but also to open it up to further avenues of scholarship, of which one hopes there are many.
Cyril was both an obvious and inflammatory figure to make a robust defense of Christianity against paganism in the early fifth century. As the pope of Alexandria, he was embedded in the most volatile arena of pagan, Jewish, and Christian battle, both of ideas and of physical force. Against Julian is thus written in part as a practical apologetic for Christians tempted by the strength of pagan argumentation, and in part as a text with a social and political edge. Inadvertently, it also serves as a rich source of classical quotations (“stuffed… with a pretentious display of learning” as Robert Wickham put it), and serves as the main source for the work it critiques, the Emperor Julian’s Against the Galileans. While the quotations are of Cyril’s choosing, they are chunky enough to allow Julian’s own, unique voice to come through. Reading the text then gives the impression of listening in on a spirited debate between two of the greatest figures of the fourth and fifth centuries.
