“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
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