The Emperor Julian and Cyril of Alexandria on Human Nature, Ethnicity, and Moral Progress

In his anti-Christian treatise Against the Galileans, the emperor Julian objected to the Hebrew Bible’s claim that Israel was God’s special possession and, in response, elaborated a sophisticated philosophy of ethnicity that explained all aspects of diversity in the human species as resulting from a complex causal network in which patron deities operated in concert with natural forces to produce distinct 'natures' for each people group, which in turn influenced their laws, culture, and intellectual achievements. In Julian’s view, only if such divine causes can be identified for all aspects of one’s identity and nature could the universal Craftsman be said to have providentially cared for all nations of the earth. This pairing of the Hippocratic tradition of geographic determinism with Neoplatonic theology in Julian’s theory resulted in the most robustly deterministic account of ethnic hierarchy in antiquity. When he came to write his rebuttal of Julian’s treatise several decades later, Cyril of Alexandria formulated a moral critique of the emperor’s philosophical proposal, arguing that, if humans have different natures that constrain their behavior, this can only mean that some have been endowed with a natural defect. In place of Julian’s philosophy of ethnicity, Cyril therefore proposed a theology of human equality according to which all humanity had a common nature, deriving from a single Creator, and therefore an equivalent capacity for pursuing virtue. Contingent aspects of human identity such as one’s upbringing, as well as ethnic traits like skin color and language, thus had no bearing upon a person’s moral capabilities. The present article maps the contours of this debate between Julian and Cyril and traces its origins in the account of human diversity set forth in Origen’s Against Celsus.

© 2024, Matthew R. Crawford.

This Open Access article is distributed under the CC-BY-NC-ND License. Published by Peeters Publishers.