Elizabeth Finch: A novel

by Julian Barnes

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...