Julian of Eclanum, or The Road Not Taken

III. The objection that did not survive its rebuttal

The eunuch-Christ argument deserves its own paragraph, because of all of Julian's claims it is the one that most directly tested whether Augustine's theology could absorb its strongest opponent's strongest objection.

Augustine's mature doctrine, articulated in City of God book 14 and refined in the anti-Pelagian writings, is that sexual desire as humans now experience it — the motus libidinis, the involuntary movement of the genitals — is the trace of the Fall in the body. Adam and Eve in the Garden, before they ate the fruit, were sexually capable but volitionally complete: any sexual act they performed would have been performed at the will's command, with no involuntary stir, no pleasure that arrived ahead of the choosing of it. After the Fall, the body began to move on its own. The first involuntary erection was simultaneously the first sign of the Fall and the mechanism by which the Fall would propagate. Augustine knew this position was strange. He spent paragraphs of careful counterfactual prose imagining the Edenic act as a calm, willed, libidoless transmission of the seed.[^11]

Julian asked the obvious question. If the Fall's signature in the body is involuntary sexual desire, and if Christ was fully human and without sin, then either Christ had no sexual desire — in which case he was, in Julian's word, a eunuch, that is, less than fully human — or Christ did have sexual desire, in which case Augustine's diagnostic of the Fall is wrong. There is no third position. Augustine, in his answer, attempted a third position anyway: Christ's humanity was real but not in this respect identical to ours; the sinless humanity of Christ was the humanity Adam had before the Fall; therefore Christ had the calm Edenic capacity for desire-without-libido that Augustine had imagined as the unfallen condition. This is intellectually consistent. It also requires, as Julian saw, that Christ's body and our bodies differ at exactly the place where the doctrine of the Fall does its work. A Christ whose body did not feel what our bodies feel cannot save bodies that feel what ours do.[^12]

The Latin West did not pursue this question further. The Greek-speaking East never accepted Augustine's diagnosis in the first place and so never had to address the reductio. Julian's argument went into the Opus Imperfectum, where it has sat for sixteen hundred years, available to any reader patient enough to lift it out.

IV. The animal that does not rebel

The most philosophically interesting fragment of Julian — and the one Foucault reads most attentively — is the comparison with animals. Animals, Julian observed, plainly experience sexual desire. Augustine cannot deny this; everyone has seen it. The desire is involuntary, and it produces the same physical events in animals that it produces in humans. Either, then, animal sexual desire is also the punishment of a Fall, which is absurd because animals did not eat the fruit, or animal sexual desire is part of the good created order — in which case it is at least possible for involuntary sexual desire to be part of a good created order, and Augustine's identification of involuntariness as the diagnostic of the Fall fails.

Augustine's reply, in the Opus Imperfectum, is intricate and revealing. He concedes the empirical observation. He concedes that animals experience desire involuntarily. He insists, however, that the involuntariness in animals is innocent because it does not represent a rebellion — there is no will in the animal that the body is overruling. In humans, by contrast, the involuntariness of desire is a rebellion, because in humans the rational will exists and the body's sexual movements occur against it. The same physical phenomenon — the unbidden stir — has a different moral status depending on whether there is a divided self for it to occur within.[^13]

This is a subtle move, and Foucault is right that it shifts the location of the Fall's damage from the body to the structure of the subject. The Fall is no longer something that happens to the flesh; it is something that happens to the relation between the will and the flesh. The flesh is not the problem; the will-flesh split is the problem. The result is that Augustine's anthropology, far from being a simple body-is-bad doctrine, is a doctrine about the internal division of the human person — the will against the flesh, the spirit against the desires, the rational self against the involuntary self. This is the doctrine that gave the West its grammar of interior conflict.

But the move costs something. It requires that what differentiates the human person from the animal is the existence of a will that desire can rebel against — and it requires that this divided structure is itself the wound of the Fall, since in unfallen Eden Augustine has to insist (against the obvious) that there was no involuntary desire at all. Julian's animal example was not, after all, frivolous. He was asking whether the diagnostic Augustine had built — involuntariness equals fallenness — could survive the comparison with creatures whose involuntary desires Augustine himself acknowledged were good. The diagnostic survived, in Augustine, only by being relocated to a place inside the human subject where the empirical comparison could no longer reach it.

Foucault's reading is that Augustine here invents the modern subject — the subject as the site of an internal scission between will and desire, the subject who can be in rebellion against itself, the subject who must therefore be governed not only by external law but by the interior labor of consenting or refusing, moment by moment, to one's own urges.[^14] If that reading is right, the Western tradition of confessional self-examination, the moral grammar of consent, the sense that one is responsible not only for what one does but for what one wants — all of this is downstream of the move Augustine made under pressure from Julian. The diagnostic the West would inherit was the diagnostic Augustine produced when Julian's animals refused to fit the simpler one.

V. How he lost

The condemnation of Julian was not a theological event. It was a political event with a theological pretext. Understanding how it happened matters, because the modern reader who hears that Julian's position was condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431 is liable to assume that the church, having heard the arguments on both sides, weighed them and chose. The historical record shows something less philosophical and more familiar.

The triggering act was the decree of Pope Zosimus in the spring of 418, banning Pelagius and his Italian supporters from Rome and putting their adherents on notice of legal jeopardy. The decree was the product of a sustained lobbying campaign by Augustine and his Carthaginian colleague Alypius, who had cultivated relationships at the Western imperial court at Ravenna and who used those relationships to convert a theological dispute between bishops into a matter of imperial law.[^15] By the time the decree was issued, Pelagius's case had already been tried in two Eastern synods (Jerusalem 415, Diospolis 415) and acquitted in both. The Western intervention overturned the Eastern result.

Julian responded to the Zosimus decree with public letters of protest — one to a Roman audience, another jointly with eighteen Italian bishops to the bishop of Thessalonica seeking his support. Augustine answered these in print. Julian wrote To Turbantius in four books answering Augustine. Augustine answered with a second book of On Marriage and Concupiscence, then with the six books of Against Julian. Julian, by then in exile, wrote To Florus in eight books. Augustine answered with the Opus Imperfectum, the unfinished work, the book on his desk at his death. The polemical exchange took twelve years and produced, by O'Donnell's estimate, more pages of theological prose than any other patristic controversy.[^16] At no point did Julian's theological positions receive a deliberative hearing in a council at which his side was permitted to present its argument. The condemnations were administrative.

In 419, Julian and the eighteen Italian bishops who had signed the Thessalonica letter refused to subscribe to the imperial confirmation of the Zosimus decree and were deposed from their sees. Julian sailed east. He spent ten years in Cilicia under the protection of Theodore of Mopsuestia. When Theodore died in 428 and Nestorius — Theodore's student — was elevated to the patriarchate of Constantinople in the same year, there was a brief window during which it looked as if Julian's case might be reopened in the East under sympathetic patronage. The window closed when Nestorius himself was condemned at Ephesus in 431, on a Christological question entirely separate from the Pelagian controversy, and the political alliance that might have rehabilitated Julian collapsed in the wreckage. Julian's name was added to the list of the condemned as part of the same sweeping act, less because anyone had decided his position was wrong than because the political coalition that might have defended it had been destroyed.[^17]

He spent the rest of his life teaching school in Sicily — by some accounts a grammar master in a small town — and died in obscurity around 454. The year is uncertain. The grave is unknown. None of his major works survives in their original form. What we have is what Augustine quoted to refute, plus a handful of biblical commentaries on the minor prophets that circulated under another name in the Middle Ages and were only re-attributed to Julian in the twentieth century by patient philological work.[^18]

VI. The shape of the loss

What Latin Christianity inherited from the defeat of Julian was not a settled doctrine. It was a problem that the inherited doctrine could not solve, and a vocabulary in which the problem could not be named.

Foucault's reading of the Augustinian outcome — and one does not have to be a Foucauldian to grant the structural point — is that Augustine's victory installed a particular grammar for thinking about sex within marriage. Julian's grammar was that desire is a good of which one can make either a good or a bad use; the proper exercise is marital, the improper exercise is excess; the moral question is the use, which is to say the form of the act. Augustine's grammar, by contrast, is that desire is an evil of which one can nevertheless make either a good or a bad use; the act is fine when the will redirects the evil toward the procreative good and bad when the will allows the evil to operate for its own pleasure; the moral question is the will, which is to say the intention behind the act.[^19]

The two grammars look symmetrical and they are not. In Julian's framework, what marriage is for is the legitimate exercise of a created appetite. Marital sex is good because the appetite is good and the marriage is the proper channel of its exercise. In Augustine's framework, what marriage is for is the redemption of an act whose constitutive component — desire — is fallen. Marital sex is venial because the procreative intention provides cover for an underlying evil that would otherwise stand exposed. The Latin West, having received Augustine's grammar as the grammar of sexual ethics, would spend the next millennium and a half elaborating procedures by which the constitutive evil could be either contained, redirected, or atoned for. It would not develop, until very recently and very partially, a vocabulary for the simpler position Julian had offered: that the appetite is itself a good of creation and that its exercise within marriage requires no redemption because it has nothing to be redeemed from.

The clearest signal that Latin Christianity received Augustine without quite digesting him is that the inherited doctrine never ceased to be contested from inside. Every century produced its theologians who softened, qualified, or rebelled against the harder edges of Augustinian concupiscence. Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, smuggled an Aristotelian appreciation of the goodness of natural appetite into the structure of the natural-law tradition without quite admitting that the smuggling required revising Augustine. Luther, in the sixteenth, restored marriage as a real good against the medieval celibate hierarchy without revisiting the Augustinian premise that the desire inside the marriage was fallen. The modern Catholic theology of the body, in the twentieth century, attempted to reconstruct a positive theology of marital sexuality without acknowledging that the reconstruction was responding to a problem the inherited doctrine had created. Each revision is, in a way, a partial recovery of what Julian had said, conducted by a theologian who could not credit Julian as a source because Julian was a heretic.[^20]

The cost is hard to measure because it is the cost of a vocabulary not developed. What does the Latin West not have because Julian lost? It does not have, as a settled doctrinal possibility, the position that involuntary sexual arousal is theologically uninteresting. It does not have, as a default Christological premise, the assumption that Christ's full humanity included desire. It does not have, as a foundation for marital ethics, the older Mediterranean philosophical tradition that treats appetite as a faculty to be exercised within a proper mode rather than a damaged faculty to be regulated by a redirecting will. It does not have, as a baseline for theological anthropology, a clean separation between the question of moral fault (which can attach to acts) and the question of the appetite (which is a feature of being a creature). The Greek-speaking East has all of these. The Latin West, including its modern secular descendants, mostly does not.

VII. Reading him now

Two things can be held at once. Julian was not a sympathetic figure in his own century. He was, by all accounts including the friendly ones, a difficult man — an aristocrat with too clear a view of his own clarity, a polemicist whose contempt for his African opponent leaks through every page of his preserved prose. The modern reader who hopes to find in Julian the warm humane theologian who would have spared the West its Augustinian inheritance will find someone narrower and chillier than that hope deserves. He had not himself struggled with what Augustine had struggled with. He had not been a Manichee for a decade. He had not lived for thirteen years with a woman he could not name. He had not been a man whose own erotic history disturbed him. He spoke of moral conduct from a position of inherited ease, and what he could not see — and what Augustine could see, and what is the part of Augustine that is permanently alive — is the experience of being a self at war with itself, the experience of wanting in one direction and choosing in another, the experience of finding that one's body has gone ahead of one's will.

The Augustine pillar called Augustine the most psychologically penetrating writer in the first millennium of Christian thought. That judgment stands. What Julian had that Augustine did not have is not psychological depth but theological proportion. He could see what Augustine, working from inside his own pain, could not see — that the doctrine Augustine was building generalized a particular man's wound into the metaphysical condition of the human race, and that the generalization carried costs the man building it could not measure because he had never been outside the wound to look at it.

This is what makes Julian a counter-pillar rather than a refutation. He is not an alternative theologian who, had he won, would have produced a warmer Christianity. He is the figure who saw, contemporaneously and in writing, the precise place where the load-bearing Augustinian move would distort what came after, and who said so. The cost of his defeat is not that the West got Augustine instead of Julian. The cost is that the West got Augustine without the running counter-argument that would have kept Augustine from being received as settled. Julian was the immune system that the Latin West had against an over-reading of Augustine, and the immune system was destroyed in the lifetime of the patient.

The road not taken is sometimes a fantasy of the historian — a counterfactual constructed from the historian's own dissatisfactions with how things turned out. Julian is not that. Julian was a real figure, with a real argument, in real time, contemporary with Augustine and answerable to Augustine and answered by Augustine. His position was preserved in the Latin canon — preserved negatively, as the position the canon had to argue against, but preserved. It is encoded in the grammar of Augustinian concupiscence as the rejected term. A careful reader can extract it. The extraction is possible. It has been done, in the modern scholarly literature, by patient researchers who understood that what Augustine quoted to refute is, after sixteen centuries, what we have left of a Latin Christianity that did not survive its own internal disagreements.

What that recovered argument means for the modern reader is the question this counter-pillar holds open. It is not that the modern reader should adopt Julian's theology. The modern reader is mostly not in a position to adopt or reject any fifth-century theology; the conditions of the question have changed too much. What the recovered argument can do is show what was once a live alternative inside the same tradition, what was foreclosed when the alternative lost, and what kinds of present discomfort with the inherited doctrine — the lingering Western suspicion that desire is shameful, that the body is a problem, that pleasure within marriage requires an alibi — are not modern aberrations from a stable tradition but unhealed places in a tradition that contained, from the beginning, the disagreement that would have addressed them.

The fragments are still there. Lift them out of Augustine and read them in order. There is more than the Augustine pillar admitted, sitting inside the polemic as the rejected voice. The voice is Julian's. The road is the one that Latin Christianity did not take. The taking-not of it is what shaped what Latin Christianity became.