Elizabeth Finch: A novel

by Julian Barnes

She was outside of her age in many ways. “Do not be taken in by time,” she once said, “and imagine that history—and especially intellectual history—is linear.” She was high-minded, self-sufficient, European. And as I write those words, I stop, because I hear in my head something she once taught us in class: “And remember, whenever you see a character in a novel, let alone a biography or history book, reduced and neatened into three adjectives, always distrust that description.” It is a rule of thumb I have tried to obey.

EF, as we now privately referred to her, stood before us, handbag on the lectern as usual, and said: “Be approximately satisfied with approximate happiness. The only thing in life which is clear and beyond doubt is unhappiness.” And then she waited. We were on our own. Who would dare to speak first? You will note that the quotation was unattributed. This was deliberate on her part, a useful trick to help us think for ourselves. If she had identified the source, we would start thinking about what we knew of the life and work of the person quoted, and about received opinion. We would bow in reverence accordingly, or the opposite. And so we had a lively discussion, pitching still-youthful hopefulness against mature scepticism—at least, as we saw it—until she chose to reveal her source. “Goethe, than whom few of us can hope to live a fuller or more interesting life, stated on his deathbed—he was eighty-two at the time—that he had only ever felt happiness in his life for one quarter of an hour.”

The survival of the fittest, by which, of course, Darwin didn’t mean the strongest or even the cleverest, merely those best equipped to adapt to changing circumstances. But it is not like this in actual human history. Those who survive, or excel, or overmaster are merely those who are better organised and wave bigger guns; those who are better at killing. Peaceable nations are rarely victorious—in ideas, to be sure, but ideas rarely prevail unless backed by the muzzle of a gun. It is lamentable, we would all agree, but it would be indolent not to recognise it. Because otherwise we merely have to sit on our hands—sit on our brains as well, and admit, To the victor the spoils, which also means, To the victor the truth. “Do we really think that, say, the Etruscans were inferior to the Romans? Would they not have been a better influence on the world? Can we not see that the Albigensian heresy was more enlightened and more just than the medieval Church of Rome which crushed it so ruthlessly? Do we imagine that all those white settlers who exterminated all those indigenous tribes across the world were morally superior to their victims? Consider also that what we used to call the Dark Ages are now recognised as being full of Light. Consider the cases of the two Julians—two conspicuous examples of what might have been. Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome, who attempted to turn back the disastrous flood tide of Christianity. And the lesser-known Julian of Eclanum, w...

“We might conceive that Julian’s words are meant to be read as a gracious concession of spiritual defeat. Julian the good loser. Not a bit of it. Swinburne, like many distinguished predecessors, is identifying this as the moment when European history and civilisation took a calamitous wrong turn. The old gods of Greece and Rome were gods of light and joy; men and women understood that there was no other life, so that light and joy had to be found here, before nothingness encloses us. Whereas these new Christians obeyed a God of darkness, of pain and servitude; one who declared that light and joy existed only after death in His confected heaven, progress towards which was filled with sorrow, guilt and fear. ‘We have fed on the fulness of Death,’ indeed. On such matters, both Julian and Swinburne agreed.

“Ernest Renan, the great nineteenth-century French historian and philosopher, once wrote the following: ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.’ Note, if you please, what he did not say. He did not say, ‘Getting its history wrong is part of becoming a nation.’ This would also be a true remark, but one considerably less provocative. We are familiar with the foundation myths on which countries rely, and which they furiously propagate. Myths of heroic struggle against an occupying power, against the tyranny of aristocracy and Church, struggles which produced martyrs whose spilt blood waters the delicate plant of liberty. But Renan is not talking about this. He says that getting its history wrong is part of being a nation. In other words, in order to believe in what we think our nation stands for, we must constantly, every day, in small acts or thoughts and large, deceive ourselves, as we constantly rehearse our comforting bedtime stories. Myths of racial and cultural superiority. Belief in benign monarchs, infallible popes, and honest government. Assumptions that the religion into which you are born, or have chosen to adopt, just happens to be the one sect which is true among hundreds of heathen creeds and apostasies out there. “And this disjunction between who we are and who we believe we are leads naturally to the question of national hypocrisy, of which the British are a famous example. Famous, that is, in the eyes of others who are inevitably blinded by thei...

I asked her, during one of our lunches, why she preferred teaching adults. “I am not excited by incuriosity,” she replied. “Paradoxically, the young are more certain of themselves, while their ambitions, if objectively nebulous to the outsider, seem clear and achievable to them. Whereas with adults ... it’s true that some enrol as a kind of self-indulgence but most come because they feel a lack in their lives, a sense that they might have missed something, and that they now have a chance—perhaps even a final chance—to put things right. And I find that profoundly affecting.”

You see how hard it was to have a straightforward conversation with her? No, that’s another insult, I realise. I mean: you see how hard it was for me, and those like me, ever to be in charge of a conversation with her, or even be on equal terms? Not because she manipulated it—she was the least manipulative woman I’ve ever met—but because she examined things more widely, with a different horizon and focus. You can see, I hope, why I adored her. And I adored the fact that she was much cleverer than me. When I put this—in so many words—to Anna, she called me an intellectual masochist. And I didn’t mind that label either.

By the Edict of Milan in 313, Constantine and his joint-emperor Licinius had decriminalised Christianity. The state thus became officially neutral in regard to religion, though Christian priests were granted free travel throughout the empire, and had no tax obligations. After Constantine’s death in 337, his sons Constantine II and Constantius II then ruled as Christians. So when, on becoming emperor, Julian announced himself a pagan, and never again set foot in a Christian church, he was not disestablishing Christianity because it had never been established. The Christians of course, did not see it like this; and some suspected that if Julian returned successful from his Persian war, he would have turned his attention to the persecution of their Church. What was to stop him outlawing their religion again, and becoming a second Diocletian? Julian had, in his personal life, many traits—austerity, modesty, chastity, scholarliness—which could equally be seen as Christian. In the “fleshpots of Syria,” as they were always known, he remained untemptable; he was efficient, incorruptible, hardworking and fair-minded; he improved the judicial system, the tax system, and made the empire safer from invaders. But ... but ... but he was, and ever more would be so, an apostate. He was born and baptised a Christian, and grew up in the Church’s observances, while still being permitted to philosophise Hellenistically. In his early twenties, he was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, th...

All religions (well, almost all) hate the apostate much more than the ignorant misguided, idol-worshipping peasant who can usually, with a little stern persuasion, be hauled blinking to the light. Gibbon writes that the Jews at this time killed those who apostasised. Perhaps it’s true of all large unitary organisations: Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City for abandoning the one true political faith. But as well as hating apostates, such systems also need them: as negative exemplars, as warnings. Abandon the religion, preach against it, attack it, and see what you get: a spear in the liver, an ice pick in the skull. Had Julian been some dim and rollicking emperor, lustful and corrupt, cruel and duplicitous, he would have been easier to dismiss. But as one commentator put it, Julian was “at heart ... a Christian mystic gone wrong.”

Julian deliberately refers to Christians as “Galileans” and Christ as “the Nazarene” to make their origins and beliefs sound more parochial. He sees the religion not as a development of Judaism but a perversion of it—so great a perversion that Judaism and Hellenism are closer to one another than either is to Christianity. Julian himself “reveres” the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—who were Chaldeans; further, Abraham, like the Hellenes, believed in animal sacrifices, divination from shooting stars, and auguries from the flight of birds. The foundation myth of the Galileans, the story of the Garden of Eden, is “wholly fabulous” according to Julian; also, entirely unfair to Adam and Eve, since God knew exactly what was going to happen—the divine thumb was on the scales. As for the Ten Commandments, they have “nothing unique about them,” except for the laws concerning monotheism and keeping the Sabbath. The idea of God being “jealous” is “a terrible libel upon God.” Why would any reasonable person revere a punitive, control-freak deity who despises us and visits the sins of the fathers upon their children? Julian regards all this as juvenile and half-formed: “But all these are partial conceptions, and unworthy of divinity ... the commandment Thou Shalt Not Worship Other Gods is calumniating divinity in a very high degree.” In defiance of their own Apostles, the Galileans have raised Jesus to the level of a god. They venerate the bones of martyrs, which is “peculiarly Christi...

Publicly, Julian was opposed to violent measures. “I have resolved,” he wrote, “to employ gentleness and humanity towards the Galileans; I forbid any recourse to violence ... It is by reason that one must convince and instruct men, not by blows, insults and torture.” Further, “One should feel pity more than hatred for people so unfortunate as to be mistaken in matters so important.” This was principle, but also pragmatism. Miracles and martyrdom were the two great selling points of early Christianity. You died for your religion and gained eternal life: the notion still inspires some today. But Julian declined to persecute the Christians unto death. He obliged them to take the slow, winding, rocky path of terrestrial life. He made them sweat out the wearisome human span for a future chance of paradise instead of being propelled there directly in a turbocharged blast of their own blood. The tactic was cunning: deprive those eager to die of their martyrdoms and Galilean exceptionalism might not seem so exceptional: it might relapse into mere doctrinal dissent.

Even more provocative was Julian’s plan to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem. Jesus had told his disciples that the Temple would not be rebuilt until his second coming—which would signify the glorious end of the world. The Apostate’s cunning plan to give the lie to Christ’s prophecy did not work out during his short reign; but such an approach was far more dangerous to the religion than the mere opposition of military might. So Julian fell upon the Galileans with “gentleness,” with mildness, with clemency, with a refusal to butcher—Christian virtues, you might think, all of them. But not Christian virtues which appealed to the Christians of the time, or later. Gregory of Nazianzus (c.329–90) was an early Church Father who had known Julian when they were both studying in Athens. In his writings he tries to portray Julian as a monster, while explicitly and consistently complaining how tyrannical the emperor had been in denying Christians the crown of martyrdom. A little later, St. Jerome (c.347–420) rails against Julian’s blanda persecutio—persecution by methods of mildness.

Julian is often described—and not just by his militant opponents—as a fanatic; even if a tolerant or clement one. The charge refers first to his deep involvement in the mystical side of his religion. (Non-pagans tend to prefer paganism with a calmer, more philosophical face to it.) Secondly, Julian was thought to go too far—far too far—in the matter of prognostication. His world was crammed with pagan gods, all of whom had their different competences and specialisms, which had to be acknowledged and revered. There were oracles to be consulted, and many birds and animals to be slaughtered and dissected. As well as external signs and portents, there were also internal ones—from body and soul. Nor was this amateurish “There’s a tingling in me bones” stuff; a proper philosophical theory lay behind it. “Coming events,” writes Ammianus, “are also revealed by a burning sensation in men’s hearts, which result in prophetic words.” According to the natural philosophers, “Our minds are, as it were, sparks sent out by the sun, which is the mind of the universe, and that when they are kindled into flame they become aware of the future. Hence the Sibyls often say that their hearts burn within them and that a great flame is consuming them.”

You might have thought that with so many different prognosticatory tools at their disposal, augurers and emperors would come up with a surefire prediction, if only by a system of cross reference. But did the bird’s guts agree with your dream, your burning heart, and what the sibyl in the cave said while wreathing her truths in doublespeak? There was also a built-in catch to divination. As Cicero wrote: “The gods give us signs of future events. If we go wrong about them it is not the divinity but men’s interpretation that is at fault.” So we are continually reminded of their infallibility, and our own fumbling fallibility.

When marching from the pacified Western Empire towards a confrontation with his uncle Constantius, Julian halted in Dacia and “busied himself with the inspection of the entrails of sacrifices and with the observation of the flights of birds.” The answers, not for the first time, were “ambiguous and obscure.” Then a Gallic rhetorician, whose speciality was divination from entrails, discovered a liver covered with a double layer of skin, which apparently promised a successful campaign. Quite how and quite why, Ammianus does not tell us. But in any case there was a complication: Julian feared that this might be a false augury, designed to flatter him. So he dawdled on in Dacia until he received a convincing sign himself. And one day, as he was mounting his horse, the soldier whose right hand was supporting the emperor’s foot slipped, and the man fell to the ground. You might fear for his skin; but Julian read this moment not as human incompetence, but an indication from the gods that “he who had raised Julian to high station” (i.e., Constantius) had himself fallen. Still, Julian havered, until envoys arrived to confirm that Constantius had indeed died at the moment the soldier had slipped, and on his deathbed had proclaimed Julian his successor. A miraculous coincidence, or just the normal reality with which the gods organised the world beneath them? Whichever, a sign for once had been correctly interpreted.

But what was a sign from the gods and what wasn’t? On the evening of 7 April 363, there was an approaching cloud, which turned into an enveloping whirl of dust, which gave way to a full-blown storm in the course of which a certain Jovian and the two horses he was leading back from watering were struck dead by a thunderbolt. Experts in climate divination concluded that this phenomenon fell into the wonderfully named category of “an advisory thunderbolt.” The campaign, by their interpretation, should not proceed. Once again, however, the philosophers rubbished this explanation, and declared that it was a perfectly normal weather event, and if it portended anything at all, it was just nature doing honour to the emperor. The campaign proceeded.

For his supporters down the centuries, Julian was that seductive thing: a Lost Leader. What if he had ruled for another thirty years, marginalising Christianity year by year, and gently, then forcibly, recementing the polytheism of Greece and Rome? And what if the policy was pursued by his successors down the centuries? What then? Perhaps no need for a Renaissance, since the old Graeco-Roman ways would be intact, and the great scholarly libraries undestroyed. Perhaps no need for an Enlightenment, because much of it would already have happened. The age-long moral and social distortions imposed by a vastly powerful state religion would have been avoided. By the time the Age of Reason came around, we would already have been living in it for fourteen centuries. And those surviving Christian priests with their peculiar, eccentric but harmless beliefs—or rather, beliefs made harmless—would rub shoulders on equal terms with pagans and druids and spoon-benders and tree-worshippers and Jews and Muslims and so on and so on, all under the benign and tolerant protection of whatever European Hellenism developed into. Imagine the last fifteen centuries without religious wars, perhaps without religious or even racial intolerance. Imagine science unhindered by religion. Delete all those missionaries forcing belief on indigenous people while accompanying soldiers stole their gold. Imagine the intellectual victory of what most Hellenists believed—that if there was any joy to be had in life,...

Instead, it was the Christians who came to write Julian’s story. Theodoret of Cyrus (c.393–c.460) had two main points to make. Julian, supposedly a brilliant general, was in fact a poor strategist who made elementary mistakes: burning his boats left his troops downhearted, as did marching them across a parched desert in forty-degree heat. The emperor had failed to order enough supplies in advance, and also failed to loot the country he passed through with any efficiency. Theodoret’s second and wider point was about the nature of the pagan gods. Be they crafted in a German forest or a Greek temple, the fact was that they were just not very good at being gods. It wasn’t that they didn’t exist, rather, the many pagan gods were simply not as strong as the single (or tripartite) Christian one, plus all the accumulated saints and martyrs. Pagan gods were fickle and flakey: “Ares,” wrote Theodoret, “who raises the din of war had never come to Julian as promised; Loxias had given lying divination; while the god who delights in throwing thunderbolts had failed to despatch one in the direction of the man who killed Julian.” It was a political as well as religious argument: not only is our religion truer, but our God is stronger and more reliable. You’re better off with us. Vote Galilean!

And it is an expense to have merely one God, because He has all the answers, gives all the advice, requires all the worship. He does not subcontract, the Christian God; He is a jealous multitasker. Whereas the pagan and Hellenistic gods are multiple and multifarious. You have your favourite gods, each of whom is in charge of separate activities, and they have their favoured human beings. Of course they frequently quarrel among themselves, and humans are often collateral damage. They may abandon you on a whim: that is why you always need to curry favour with them. Splash out on another white bull! They keep you on your toes, these multiple gods. More than the Christian God? It’s a tight call.

In its early days, of course, the Church was more persecuted than persecuting; and here Milton cites Julian the Apostate as “the subtlest enemy of our faith.” You might think Julian a paradoxical choice in this context: after all, the massive destruction of manuscripts and libraries and the consequent loss of learning was inflicted by the early Christians on the heathens, not the other way round. Julian, as far as we know, did not order the destruction of a single Galilean text. But this is why he was so subtle: he may not have censored or destroyed books, but he did censor readers. The emperor’s most dangerous tactic was “forbidding Christians the study of heathen learning.” This might at first seem a small loss—indeed, you might think exclusion from pagan books a welcome thing for a Christian. But the by-product of banning access to Hellenic philosophy and science, leaving the Galileans to teach only their own sacred books in their own churches, was to marginalise them and exclude them from civic rights and duties. Christians immediately saw the danger. As Milton put it: “So great an injury they then held it to be deprived of Hellenic learning, and thought it a persecution more undermining, and secretly decaying the Church, than the open cruelty of Decius and Diocletian.” Happily, the Christian God spotted the danger represented by the Apostate, and acted through St. Basil and St. Mercurius. For Milton, “the providence of God [intervened] ... by taking away the illiterat...

Julian’s own religious practices were intense, constant, and conducted at the highest level. According to the orator Libanius, the emperor believed that: He lived in a perpetual intercourse with the gods and goddesses; that they descended upon earth, to enjoy the conversation of their favourite hero; that they gently interrupted his slumbers, by touching his hand or his hair; and that he had acquired such an intimate knowledge that they warned him of every impending danger, and conducted him, by their infallible wisdom, in every action of his life; and that he had acquired such an intimate knowledge of his heavenly guests, as readily to distinguish the voice of Jupiter from that of Minerva, and the form of Apollo from the figure of Hercules. Gibbon comments that such visions were just “the ordinary effects of abstinence and fanaticism” which “would almost degrade the emperor to the level of an Egyptian monk.” Almost: being an Egyptian monk was a comparatively cheap business, whereas being on hair-ruffling terms with the top gods was ferociously expensive. Julian sacrificed every morning and night, and left nothing to chance, or to others: It was the business of the emperor to bring the wood, to blow the fire, to handle the knife, to slaughter the victim, and, thrusting his hand into the bowels of the expiring animals, to draw forth the heart or liver, and to read, with the consummate skill of a haruspex, the imaginary signs of future events. Top gods naturally deserved and...

In Julian’s time, the Western Empire was ruled from Milan, the Eastern from Constantinople. His favourite city was far from being a metropolis: Lutetia (now Paris) was just an island in the Seine, plus a few developments on the rive gauche—houses, a palace, an amphitheatre, baths, an aqueduct, and a Champ de Mars on which the Roman troops exercised. There was even the cautious cultivation of vines and fig trees. What Julian loved best were the severe and simple manners of the inhabitants. There was no falsity: in Lutetia, the theatre was either unknown or despised.

And here she is working her way towards a lecture: —Had churches been less monotheistic and oppressive, had the expulsions of those Not Like Us not taken place, Britons would have mixed more freely, miscegenation would have become normal, and whiteness no indicator of superiority. So a society with fewer evident markers of status and money and power. British history might therefore have become the story of a country learning from otherness rather than ignoring and repressing it. In place of a country of conquest, viewed from the outside with anything from wary respect to intense loathing, a country which led the world (or part of the world) differently—as an example of those virtues, often present in the society if frequently overshadowed, of tolerance, liberalism, and a good-humoured openness to others. Harder to achieve from our present position. So much self-propaganda to be unlearnt, so much getting our history wrong. Of course all this, if stated publicly, would attract the usual anathematising: defeatist, self-loathing, pinko, a watering-down of true English and British blood, enemies of the state, etc., etc. But DNA tests invariably surprise “white” people by showing a multiplicity of “origins.” The folly of racial purity. In its place, an exaltation of what conservative fantasists would call “the mongrel state”: yet this is not an ambition, rather an acknowledgement of what is there anyway and everywhere.

I sometimes wonder how biographers do it: make a life, a living life, a glowing life, a coherent life out of all that circumstantial, contradictory and missing evidence. They must feel like Julian on campaign with his retinue of diviners. The Etruscans tell him this; the philosophers tell him that; the gods speak, the oracles are silent or obscure; the dreams alarm him this way, his visions propel him that way, the animals’ viscera are ambivalent; the sky says this, the dust storm and the advisory thunderbolt insist otherwise. Where is the truth, where is the way forward? Or maybe consistent narrative is a delusion, as is trying to reconcile conflicting judgements. Maybe you could equally account for someone by a mere list of snagging, indicative facts.

“I imagine that you despise politicians?” “Whyever would you imagine that?” “Because they’re corrupt and self-seeking and vain and incompetent.” “I don’t agree. I think most of them are well-meaning, or believe themselves to be. Which makes their moral tragedy all the more to be pitied.” Do you see what I mean? The shimmer of her phrasing, the lustre of her brain.

And here we reach an important point. I suppose I’ve always instinctively (or idly) believed that those brilliant myths and martyrdoms, with their thumping messages of salvation, while doubtless being “improved” as they were told and retold, were rooted in some rougher original reality. When you look at a great painting of a violent martyrdom, it compels and convinces you as the representation of something that had once happened. But all those holy compilations, like The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, and their subsequent illustration, are mere edifying fictions rather than True Lives. Current opinion among scholars is not just that few of those famous martyrs ever existed, but the actual number of them was tiny. Of course, there were many Christians killed “simply” for being Christians (and refusing to deny their faith in a court of law); but again, far fewer than previously assumed. A “sober computation” concludes that in the first three centuries of the Christian era, “at least two and at most ten thousand Christians were executed by the temporal power of the Roman Empire.” (So much for St. Ursula’s eleven thousand!) As for the number of those who willingly sought their own deaths, in the sure and certain belief of being fast-tracked to heaven: “Even the Church Fathers can’t produce more than one or two cases of voluntary martyrdom.” Further: we think (or I thought) that pagans killed Christians, and Christians pagans, on and on, back and forth, in tit-for-tat slaughter...

A recent biographer of Julian concluded that all his grand projects had failed, and that even his apparent victories—military, administrative, theological—were brief, even illusory. “Indeed, the ‘mighty warrior’s’ only real victory was in cleaning up the tax system.” Which made me remember EF proposing that failure can be more interesting than success, and losers tell us more than winners. Also, how we cannot tell, even on our deathbed—perhaps especially on our deathbed—how we will be judged, or, if at all, remembered.

I thought of Julian, and how the centuries had interpreted and reinterpreted him, like a man walking across a stage pursued by different-coloured spotlights. Oh, he was red, no, more like orange, no, he was indigo verging on black, no, he was all black. It seems to me, if in a less dramatic and extreme way, that this is what happens when we look at anyone’s life: how they are seen by their parents, friends, lovers, enemies, children; by passing strangers who suddenly notice a truth about them, or by long-term friends who hardly understand them at all. And then they look at us, in a manner different from how we look at ourselves. Well, getting our history wrong is part of being a person.