Julian the Apostate: Can Old Religions Be Revived? | Guest: Alex Petkas | 11⧸13⧸24
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 6 minutes
Words per Minute
166.07712
Summary
In this episode, host Alex Blumberg sits down with Oren McIntyre, host of the Cost of Glory podcast, to discuss the parallels between the Roman Empire and the modern world, and how we can learn from them.
Transcript
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All right, guys, I want to dive into the idea of a society in transition.
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A lot of people have looked at the United States.
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They see a lot of, you know, different comparisons to make to the Roman Empire.
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But a critical thing that happened, of course, in the Roman Empire was the movement from its classic pagan religion to Christianity.
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And one emperor that presided over that was Julian the Apostate,
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trying to push back against a tide of change in religion during kind of the end,
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I wanted to see what we could learn from that transition is where did he succeed?
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Is there anything that we can learn and take in the future?
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I want to dive also into some very interesting side events that people often talk about,
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like Julian attempting to disprove the Bible by building a third Jewish temple,
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So joining me to talk to you about that today is a classics professor.
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He has a Ph.D. from Princeton, but he stepped away from academia to host the Cost of Glory podcast.
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So before we dive into the history and the parallels and what we can learn from it,
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I wonder if you could give people a little bit of your background,
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how you started your podcast, why you moved away from academia,
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So I was a tenure track professor in California.
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I was sort of gradually getting fed up with the academic consensus.
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You know, I had great colleagues and there are a lot of good people left in the university system.
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But, you know, a lot of us saw the writing on the wall and there's just a general hatred of greatness.
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And especially among classics professors, a kind of growing ignorance,
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stuffing of one's ears to what our tradition and our discipline is really all about,
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in my opinion, which is like fortifying manly greatness and political excellence
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and kind of digging deep to the roots and knowing what our culture is really about
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and the strong foundations that it was built on.
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So I left in 2020 and decided to try to get the message out in a more efficient way.
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I saw the rise of new media, started my podcast, Cost of Glory,
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where I am basically retelling the biographies of Plutarch's heroes in kind of long, long form,
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trying to stay true to the spirit of Plutarch by not just like telling these stories
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and looking at these men, but drawing lessons from them.
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And also, you know, this idea that we should try to emulate them is completely inappropriate
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and not cool and don't say that in a classic department.
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But I think that the founding fathers had it right.
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You know, so many of the ancients had it right.
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This is how they looked at their own classical tradition, that it's, you know, monuments of greatness.
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This is how the Nietzsche looked at the classical tradition.
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And so I'm trying to kind of revive that spirit in a digestible way
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and, you know, bring back these biographies of some of the greatest men who ever lived.
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I'm somebody who enjoyed schooling and thought about going into this kind of thing.
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But the more I looked at it, I said, there's just no place for anyone who has a more classical understanding
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of history has, you know, the idea that perhaps a more right-wing view should be brought about in these.
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And you're one of so many guys like Michael Millerman and Athenian Stranger and others
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who have been in academia, have wanted to go down that track, you know, are well-spoken,
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gifted, thoughtful about these issues, but end up finding that actually real freedom
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is outside the academy at this point in many ways.
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And I think it's great that there's a movement of that.
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All the exciting intellectual life now seems to be happening on and around the internet.
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So I think that's just going to accelerate, which I'm thrilled about.
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Well, we're going to dive deeper into the question of Julian,
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the transition from paganism to Christianity, and what a civilization can do in these moments.
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All right, Alex, so I think a lot of people have touched, obviously,
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on the subject of the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire.
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We could write entire books about this, do entire series.
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So I'm going to short shrift you a little bit on this,
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We're feeding Christians to lions, burning them as torches,
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and then it becomes basically the religion of the empire.
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Can you give us kind of a short history before we get, say,
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to kind of that Constantinian period of history?
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Yeah, so a lot of things Christianity has going for it that help it to grow.
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it's probably, people estimate maybe 10% of people in the Roman Empire
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are Christians, so it's a growing, intransigent minority,
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But so, you know, the persecution of martyrs, very visible.
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They're, you know, put on display in the arena often,
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and, you know, it's a great way of getting the message out, actually.
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I think it's an important thing to keep in mind.
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And one of the things that Julian noticed is the way that the Christians
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would minister to the needy, to the orphans, the widows, the poor.
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They had a very efficient, effective philanthropy machine
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that helped them to get the word out to the masses.
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but, you know, middle and upper class people here and there,
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And it's probably because of this rise of interest in Christianity
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that the later Roman emperors before Constantine,
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that weren't really, they were kind of sporadic before then
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But in the late third century, they become empire-wide,
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You know, the army has got a lot of Christians in it,
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And so that's, it's kind of a shocking for the Christians
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like the worst that they've ever seen in history.
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But it just hasn't been effective at stomping out the new religion.
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If anything, it's sort of helped to promote it.
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So that's the situation that Constantine walks into in 312, 313 AD.
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Now, Christianity couldn't have been the first new religion
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or a foreign religion that gained some sway there.
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Had they ever had to push back against another religion in this way?
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in kind of finding its way into not just, you know,
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the lower echelon, but eventually the upper echelon?
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to be going to pagan sacrifices, pagan, you know,
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And so I think that kind of galvanizes a common identity.
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And also they have this doctrine of the body of Christ
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They have ways of policing who's in and who's out
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And I'm baptized as the fifth generation Christian,
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until I read Festel Kalange's The Ancient City.
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that was, you know, burned before some pagan idol.
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And, you know, it's much more significant event.
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this kind of decided stance against all of that.
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And so I think you also, that's an important factor.
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pointed to his focus on Sol Invictus previously.