Elizabeth Finch: A novel

by Julian Barnes

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,...