Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion
Geert Lernout
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1441194746
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the very beginning James Joyce's readers have considered him as a Catholic or an anti-Catholic writer, and in recent years the tendency has been to recuperate him for an alternative and decidedly liberal form of Catholicism. However, a careful study of Joyce's published and unpublished writings reveals that throughout his career as a writer he rejected the church in which he had grown up. As a result, Geert Lernout argues that it is misleading to divorce his work from that particular context, which was so important to his decision to become a writer in the first place. Arguing that Joyce's unbelief is critical for a fuller understanding of his work, Lernout takes his title from Ulysses, "I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help me to unbelieve?", itself a quote from Mark 9: 24. This incisive study will be of interest to all readers of Joyce and to anyone interested in the relationship between religion and literature.
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the European continent. This was by no means a vain threat. The conservative bishop of Limerick Edward Thomas O’Dwyer told his clergy not to attend a Nationalist meeting where the Plan of Campaign was going to be discussed and as a result the bishop was attacked in the most vicious terms by John Dillon and William O’Brien. It took all Walsh’s diplomacy to defuse this new problem for the alliance, but it had become clear that Irish loyalty to Rome was an asset that if necessary, the bishops could
receive the Papal Benediction which I shall be pleased to give you. Yours in the Agonising Jew, Vicenzo Vannutelli (Cardinal Deacon)’ (Letters II 45–6).6 It is clear from this reference that Nora was aware of her new friend’s opinions about the church, but at the end of August there must have been some sort of crisis, because on the 29th Joyce writes to explain to her that his mind ‘rejects the whole present social order and Christianity – home, the recognized virtues, classes of life, and
they’re brittle’ (102). A few months later Joyce writes to his brother about his unbaptized son, in characteristically strong language: ‘Thanks be to Jaysus no gospeller has put his dirty face within the bawl of an ass of him yet’ (124). His anticlerical reading continues: in January 1905 he orders the English translation of Strauss’s life of Life of Jesus and the Jesus 104 Help My Unbelief biography by Renan, which he has read by the end of the next month and liked very much (‘the temper is
presence of the Colums. Mary Colum had many contacts with catholics in Paris, among them the philosopher Jacques Maritain whose verdict on Baudelaire’s 110 Help My Unbelief catholicism (‘The intellectual structure of his mind was Catholic’) she passed on to Joyce. Although Joyce made fun of Maritain and of the very idea of someone having a mind with a catholic structure, in the memoir she wrote with her husband Mary Colum claims: ‘I have never known a mind so fundamentally Catholic in
Father Conmee will talk about saint Peter Claver and the African Mission and this leads Bloom into an extended train of thought. First he is reminded of the catholic prayers for the conversion of the protestant prime-minister Gladstone, then of the Mission to China and the difficulties of explaining christianity to ‘the heathen Chinee.’ In the spirit of the chapter, the Buddha’s passive attitude is compared with the bloody image of the ‘Ecce Homo’ and Bloom describes one of Conmee’s Jesuit
