This chapter looks at the ways in which Hellenisms are constructed, specifically with reference to the language of religion and divinity. It poses the question: how Christian is the determinedly nostalgic late-ancient Hellenism of the emperor known as Julian the Apostate (ruled 361-363)? If the emperor continued to be considered as a god, how did that inflect the understanding of Christ’s incarnation—and vice versa? The very language of the divine becomes fraught with ambiguity, and the distinctions imposed by interpreters between philology and theology seem increasingly tendentious. Ultimately it shows show how the dynamic interaction of theology and classical antiquity can produce an almost unthinkable collocation of ideas: that an ensouled statue of the emperor should provide some sort of model for comprehending the incarnation of Christ.

On 11 December 361 CE Flavius Claudius Julianus, aged twenty-nine, arrived in Constantinople as sole ruler of the Roman empire. A few months later an equally young man from a small city in Cappadocia apologized to his family and friends for a choice that few had anticipated: he wished henceforth to lead “the true philosophical life.” Two men, two signal events in their personal lives that stand paradigmatic for a phenomenon central to John Matthews's work: the later Roman empire, seen either as a “new age” described with “more or less traditional way[s]” or as a period, as once again argued, of decline and fall.

The fate of the late Roman empire has captured the imagination of historians for a very long time (as the introduction suggests, John Matthews's more or less explicit interlocutions with Gibbon merit a study in themselves), and much of that fascination found focus and drama in the person of Emperor Julian.

In thinking about the theme of this volume, it has been my principal interest to investigate how men who belonged to the Greek-speaking elites of the later Roman Empire, such as Gregory of Nazianzus, understood and expressed notions of “heavenly realms and earthly realities.” Specifically, how did Gregory of Nazianzus conceptualize instances in which the two realms met, and how did he perceive his role in bringing about such “meetings”? The answer to these questions points to a larger issue: How did Gregory and others like him understand salvation and the mechanisms by which it was achieved? For Gregory, a proper understanding of the manner in which the imagined realms of the (Neo-)Platonic cosmic spheres could intersect with the material realm below them was essential for attaining salvation. Each individual could actualize this process of salvation within himself or herself, but only by fully comprehending the mystery exemplified in the unprecedented merging of the two realms in the Incarnation.