Against Julian

St. Cyril of Alexandria’s Against Julian (Contra Julianum) is the great work of his apologetic, as distinct from his polemical, output: a sustained defence of Christianity against the most formidable pagan attack on it ever written by a Roman emperor. Its target is the lost Against the Galileans of Julian the Apostate, composed in 362–363; its dedicatee is the emperor Theodosius II; its architecture is twenty books in four pentads, of which books I–X survive complete in Greek and XI–XX only in fragments. This file sets out the work and its occasion, the contested question of its date, and its singular value as the chief surviving witness to Julian’s vanished treatise — the most extensive Christian reply to pagan polemic since Origen’s Contra Celsum — together with its argument about the relation of Hellenism, the Law, and the Gospel, and its place within Cyril’s wider apologetic.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Work and Its Occasion

Against Julian (Contra Julianum; full title Pro sancta Christianorum religione adversus libros athei Iuliani, “For the holy religion of the Christians against the books of the atheist Julian”) is Cyril’s principal apologetic treatise (PG 76:489–1064; CPG 5233). Unlike the Five Tomes against Nestorius or the Twelve Anathemas, which are weapons of intra-Christian controversy, Against Julian faces outward, against the pagan critique of the faith — and it answers an adversary who had been dead for some sixty years but whose book was still doing damage among the cultured pagans of the eastern empire (McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy, 14–15; Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, 191–192).

That adversary was the emperor Julian (r. 361–363), the nephew of Constantine remembered by Christian tradition as “the Apostate” because, raised a Christian, he renounced the faith and as emperor sought to restore the old gods and to disadvantage the Church. Among his weapons was a literary one: a treatise in three books, Against the Galileans (Contra Galilaeos), written in 362–363, in the last winter of his short reign, during his stay at Antioch before the Persian campaign on which he died. “Galileans” was Julian’s deliberately diminishing name for the Christians. The book mounted a learned, well-informed assault on the Scriptures and on the coherence of the Christian claim — the more dangerous because its author knew the faith from the inside.

The Dedication and the Structure

Cyril dedicated his reply to the emperor Theodosius II, the same emperor who would convene the Council of Ephesus, signalling the work’s status as an official defence of the established faith addressed to the Christian sovereign whose predecessor-apostate it answered. The treatise is built as twenty books arranged in four pentads — four groups of five — a deliberate and visible architecture. Of these, books I–X survive complete in Greek; books XI–XX are lost except in fragments, recoverable in part through later citation and excerpt (Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, 191–192). The surviving ten books are themselves a substantial work, ranging across the questions Julian had raised about the Mosaic account of creation, the relation of the biblical God to the gods of the nations, and the supposed inferiority of the Hebrew Scriptures to Greek philosophy and Greek religion.

The Disputed Date

The dating of Against Julian is genuinely contested, and the honest course is to flag the dispute rather than to resolve it. [Disputed: the traditional dating places the work late in Cyril’s career, in the late 430s or 440s, after the Nestorian controversy; but Markus Vinzent has argued for a substantially earlier completion, c. 423–428 — perhaps by Easter 424 — on the strength of parallels with Cyril’s Festal Letters. The dating is therefore best presented as unsettled.] What is secure, and not in dispute, is the twenty-book, four-pentad structure, the dedication to Theodosius II, and the survival of books I–X complete in Greek. The disagreement is over when, within a span of roughly two decades, the work was finished — and thus over whether Against Julian belongs with the early exegetical corpus or with the later controversial writings. Either way it stands somewhat apart from both, as Cyril’s one great turn outward against paganism.

The Chief Witness to a Lost Book

The most important single fact about Against Julian may be its function as a source. Julian’s Against the Galileans does not survive as an independent text: it was suppressed and lost, and what we know of it we know principally through Cyril’s refutation, which quotes the imperial treatise extensively in order to answer it. Against Julian is therefore the chief surviving witness to Julian’s lost work, preserving the great majority of the known fragments of the Contra Galilaeos; modern reconstructions of Julian’s argument are built largely on the passages Cyril chose to cite and rebut (Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, 191–192; McGuckin, 14–15). This gives the work a double life: it is at once Cyril’s reply and our best access to the thing replied to.

In this it is the natural successor to Origen’s Contra Celsum, the third-century refutation of the pagan philosopher Celsus that similarly preserves its opponent’s lost True Doctrine by quotation. Against Julian is in fact the most extensive Christian reply to pagan polemic since the Contra Celsum, and the comparison was not lost on Cyril, who knew himself to be standing in Origen’s apologetic line and answering, in a Christian empire, the last serious imperial attempt to reverse the Christianization of Rome.

The Argument and the Method

The intellectual core of the controversy is the relation of Hellenism, the Law, and the Gospel. Julian’s strategy had been to drive a wedge: to praise Greek wisdom and Greek religion as the true inheritance of culture, to disparage the Hebrew Scriptures as crude and parochial, and to mock the Christians as men who had abandoned even their own Jewish patrimony for a novel superstition that was neither properly Hellenic nor properly Hebrew. Cyril’s reply, mounted with the resources of a man steeped in both the Bible and Greek paideia, is to dismantle the wedge: to show the dignity and antiquity of the Mosaic revelation against the Greek philosophers (whom, Cyril argues in the apologetic commonplace of the age, the best Greek thought had in part anticipated or even borrowed from), and to vindicate the Gospel as the fulfilment toward which both the Law and the highest pagan insight pointed. The Christian, on this account, is not the cultural barbarian of Julian’s caricature but the true heir of the whole human inheritance of wisdom, gathered up and completed in Christ.

The method is that of the cultured apologist meeting the cultured critic on his own ground: Cyril marshals philosophy, history, and Scripture, answering Julian point by point, citing his text and turning it. It is learned, combative, and conscious of its audience among educated readers who might still be tempted by the apostate’s brilliance. The same typological reading of the Old Testament that governs the commentaries — the Law as veiled prophecy of Christ — does real work here, for it is precisely the Christian claim to the Hebrew Scriptures, against both Julian’s Hellenism and his needling about the Jews, that Against Julian must defend.

Place Within Cyril’s Apologetic and Polemical Output

Against Julian occupies a distinct niche in Cyril’s corpus. His dogmatic works (the Thesaurus, the Dialogues on the Trinity) face the Arians; his controversial works (the Five Tomes against Nestorius, On the Unity of Christ, the Letters and Anathemas) face Nestorius and the Antiochenes; his exegetical works expound the Scriptures. Against Julian alone faces the external pagan world, and it is the fullest expression of Cyril as apologist rather than dogmatician or controversialist. It shows a side of him too easily eclipsed by the storms of 431: the bishop of a still-religiously-plural Alexandria, defending the faith not against a rival Christology but against the residual prestige of the old religion and the most articulate enemy it had ever produced.

A note on reception: despite its importance, Against Julian waited a very long time for a full English rendering. The first complete English translation appeared only recently — that of M. W. Crawford and others (Cambridge University Press, 2025) — so that for most of its history readers depended on the Greek text or the Patrologia Graeca. Its modern recovery as a major work, both of apologetics and as the indispensable quarry for Julian’s lost treatise, is largely a development of contemporary scholarship.

References

Cyril of Alexandria, Against Julian (Contra Julianum; Pro sancta Christianorum religione adversus libros athei Iuliani), 20 books in 4 pentads (books I–X complete in Greek; XI–XX in fragments), PG 76:489–1064; CPG 5233; first complete English translation, M. W. Crawford et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025).
Julian (the Apostate), Against the Galileans (Contra Galilaeos), 362–363, lost; surviving principally as fragments preserved in Cyril’s Against Julian.
Origen, Against Celsus (Contra Celsum) — the precedent for an extensive Christian reply to pagan polemic.
John A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2004).
Norman Russell, Cyril of Alexandria (London: Routledge, 2000).