Joyce's Loss of Faith

Author(s): Jeffrey Hibbert

Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Winter 2011), pp. 196-203
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.34.2.196
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Joyce’s Loss of Faith

Jeffrey Hibbert
Yaşar University, Turkey

Geert Lernout. Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion. New York: Continuum,
2010. vi–239, 241 pp. $120.00 cloth; $34.95 paper.

Geert Lernout’s Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion argues that James Joyce
lost his faith in the Roman Catholic Church and its dogma and that the historical condi-
tions of Joyce’s loss of his faith provide an inescapable context for reading Joyce’s works.
Lernout explains the beliefs and practices of the Church of Rome that Joyce encountered
from the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. By attending to
the tradition of freethinking writers of the same period, he demonstrates that Joyce’s revolt
against Christianity was part of a larger network of anti-religious thinking in literature
and philosophy. Through anecdotal and epistolary evidence of Joyce’s religious crisis and
Joyce’s reading in freethinkers and heretics, Lernout provides illuminating readings of
A Portrait of the Artist, Dubliners and Ulysses.

Keywords: James Joyce / Catholicism / atheism / religion

W
hen—and to what degree—James Joyce lost his faith in the Roman
Catholic Church specifically, or Christian religion more broadly, remain
lingering questions for Joyce’s readers. Joyce’s biographers place the date
of his defection from the Church around the time he attended University College
Dublin. Yet whether Joyce fully abandoned or somehow aesthetically reshaped his
religious faith remain issues of contestation. In Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and
Religion, Geert Lernout engages the conversation with a compact and provocative
premise: Joyce lost his faith in the Church and its dogmas. This book argues that
the historical conditions of James Joyce’s loss of his faith, his anti-religious and
anticlerical views, and his reading of freethinking and anticlerical writers provide
inescapable contexts for Joyce’s fiction. Joyce’s detachment from Christianity,
his literary challenges to Catholic doctrine and his subsequent reading in anti-
Catholic writing cannot be seen as evidence of a man struggling to maintain his
faith, but as the signs of a man who consciously chose to abandon the faith of his
family and nation. Joyce’s lingering interest in or fascination with the Church’s
practices in his notebooks and novels is not sufficient for critics to reserve a pew for

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Joyce Losing His Religion 197

Joyce at a mass for Catholic writers. Yet ironically, Joyce, along with perhaps G.K.
Chesterton and Graham Greene, is one of the most prominent names among
writers of twentieth-century fiction to be associated with Catholicism. But while
Chesterton and Greene are known for their adherence to the Church, Joyce should
be best understood in terms of his adversarial relationship to it.
Lernout’s project is to explain precisely the beliefs and practices of the Church
of Rome as Joyce would have encountered them from the nineteenth century to
the beginning of the twentieth century. He shows how the Church in Ireland
existed for Joyce. He argues against readings that have tried to redeem Joyce for
Catholicism or at least redeem him as a non-traditional Christian still expressing
a transformed faith. He then turns to the tradition of freethinking writers of the
same period, many of which Joyce read, and how Joyce’s revolt against Christianity
is part of a larger network of anti-religious thinking in literature and philosophy.
Next, Lernout attends to the anecdotal and epistolary evidence of Joyce’s religious
crisis and Joyce’s reading in the history of the Church and its heretics. Finally,
Lernout provides newly illuminating readings of A Portrait of the Artist, Dublin-
ers, Ulysses and notebooks for Finnegans Wake through the lens of his previous
discussions on freethinkers, heretics and church history. In his conclusion, which
provides one of his most penetrating arguments, Lernout argues against the com-
monly held belief that a person raised in the Church is imprinted for life with its
methods of thinking. Joyce’s friend Mary Colum said that she had “never known
a mind so fundamentally Catholic in structure as Joyce’s own” (qtd. in Lernout
110). Lernout disagrees that a former Catholic like Joyce would retain a matrix of
thinking through which future experience would still be processed.
There is no record of when Joyce last attended a Catholic mass, when he last
received holy communion, or when he last attended confession. Still, these acts
gauge whether a person is a participant, not a believer. Lernout is unsure precisely
when Joyce left the Church, but he dates Joyce’s exodus around his university
years, as do Joyce’s biographers Richard Ellmann and Peter Costello (qtd. in
Lernout 4–5). In a letter to Nora in 1904, Joyce claimed to have left the Church
six years earlier, at which time he would have been about 14 years old. In the same
letter, Joyce writes that he made “secret war upon it when I was a student . . .”
but that now, at 22, he would “make open war upon it by what I write and say
and do” (qtd. in Lernout 6, 206). This is an exceptionally strident message, and
does not quite jibe with some of Joyce’s actions after it was written. Joyce’s letters
attest that he attended a Greek mass in Trieste in 1905 and a mass at St. Peter’s
in Rome in 1906. We can imagine Joyce, like Leopold Bloom in All Hallows
Church, as a voyeur or tourist, but probably not as a believer or a participant. Still,
it seems contradictory for Joyce to go into any church after declaring war upon it.
Joyce and Nora’s refusal to marry in a Catholic church and their disinclination to
baptize their children suggest a much more public and longer stride away from
their faith. Joyce did not receive last rites from a priest, and when Nora was asked
by a priest if she wanted a funeral mass for her husband, she replied pointedly, “I
couldn’t do that to him” (qtd. in Lernout 6, 94). Joyce’s lack of engagement with

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198 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 34, Number 2

the Church and refusal of its sacraments demonstrate, at the very least, a willing
noncompliance with its tenets and, at most, an outright rejection of them.
Considering the historical evidence pointing to Joyce’s renunciation of his
faith, it is somewhat surprising that some readers have tried to reconnect it to
Joyce’s writing. Lernout notes that some Catholic critical readings of Joyce’s work
have been written by Jesuits, others by postmodern theologians and some by
religiously unaffiliated aesthetic theorists who draw connections between Joyce’s
beliefs and the scholasticism of Stephen Dedalus. Kevin Sullivan’s Joyce among
the Jesuits (1958) Robert Boyle’s James Joyce’s Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition
(1978) and Gian Balsam’s Joyce’s Messianism: Dante, Negative Existence and the
Messianic Self (2004), among several others, demonstrate that Joyce’s texts signify
beyond their writer’s personal feelings toward the Church and its God. Lernout
is not critical of their expositions in themselves, but of their methodology, which
privileges textual possibilities at the expense of historically demonstrable extra-
textual evidence. As readers, we again encounter a formalist debate between
literature and history, between a writer’s beliefs and his works. Lernout has little
sympathy for readings that try to reclaim Joyce as an evolved believer with a more
complex and supple attitude toward the Christian God than the Catholic Church
would permit. The historical Joyce was a political and religious contrarian whose
letters demonstrate an active animosity toward the Church’s beliefs and practices.
If a compelling reading demonstrates that his works betray an unconscious affili-
ation with the Church or an ideological matrix imprinted by Jesuits, then they
must also be tempered by the historical figure of a clearly defiant Joyce who indeed
declared a personal war on the Church.
Roy Gottfried’s Joyce’s Misbelief (2007) presents a more nuanced appraisal of
Joyce’s relationship to his Catholic faith. Gottfried approaches Joyce’s attitude
toward religion through a letter to Lady Gregory where Joyce explains his attitude
as that of a “misbeliever,” a kind of heretic who understands the faith but appro-
priates and transforms it for his own ends (Gottfried 4–5). For Gottfried, Joyce’s
fascination with dissent and heresy extends to the practices of Protestants — still
viewed by arch-Catholics as ignorant of the salvation provided by the one holy
catholic and apostolic church. Joyce’s choice of the Protestant King James Bible as
his authority in matters of Christian faith and his interest in the Greek Orthodox
Church during his years in Trieste articulate Joyce’s attraction to Christian alter-
natives to Roman Catholicism. For Gottfried, unlike Lernout, Joyce’s misbelief
was another form of self-imposed exile leading to reflection and transformation,
not a declaration of war (4–5).
But how and why would Joyce have fallen from the Church? Was it for
reasons related solely to theological problems? Not likely. As Lernout reminds
readers, the Church to which Joyce belonged was indeed very different from the
Catholic Church after Vatican Council II of the 1960s. In the nineteenth cen-
tury, the Church was still fighting to maintain its temporal powers in the Italian
peninsula against the Risorgimento movement for a united Italy. Lernout argues
that the weakening of the Church’s temporal powers was met by tightening its

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Joyce Losing His Religion 199

political control over local churches and its ideological control over dogma (31–32).
Between the 1830s and the 1890s, the Church grew increasingly conservative
and intolerant of liberalism, democracy and modernity. During this period, it
denounced freedoms of conscience and the press, decried religious tolerance and
democracy, forbade its parishioners to vote, rejected rationalism and naturalism,
proclaimed the infallibility of the pope, legitimated the Immaculate Conception,
condemned progress and modern civilization, granted limited access to bibli-
cal scholarship while maintaining biblical inerrancy and discouraged historical
scholarship of the Church or research into the evolution of dogma and ritual.
This retreat into a highly conservative and unquestionable theological author-
ity occurs at the same time as the inerrancy of Church dogma and its claim to
apostolic legitimacy was threatened by Protestant biblical scholarship and the
rising popularity of socialist, anticlerical, freethinking literature. While liberal
voices and modernist biblical scholars within the Church protested the Church’s
inflated conservatism, they were subdued by the conservative Church hierarchy.
As Lernout shows persuasively, the Catholic Church of Joyce’s time was defiantly
traditionalist and unmoved by dissent, resorting to expulsion, anathema and
excommunication to defend its dogma from change.
In terms of dogma and practice, the specifically Irish face of the Catholic
Church was not much different from that of Rome; politically, however, it was
quite different. As Lernout explains, Irish Catholics in the nineteenth century
were fighting for civil liberties that were condemned by the Church (41). The
propaganda and pamphleteering between Catholics and Protestants extended
beyond the borders of Ireland, and a young Joyce was able to read extreme
anticlerical pamphlets by American evangelicals and continental Protestants as
easily as he could access screeds against West Britons and other texts that wove
Catholicism into the fabric of the nationalist movement. The Church in Ireland,
under Bishop John MacHale, Cardinal Cullen, Bishop Edward O’Dwyer and
Archbishop Walsh, was a farrago of religiously conservative, liberal, nationalistic
and unionist clergy whose involvement in Parnell’s Parliamentary Party ensured
their own control over Irish education so long as the party was given control
over the Home Rule question. The Church was not just a major source of public
opinion regarding Irish politics, but a power broker in those politics as well. The
house in which Joyce grew up was led by his anticlerical father whose opposition
to the clergy predated the fall of Parnell, but was terrifically fuelled by it. While
Joyce had come from a family that was anticlerical on his father’s side, a question
remains as to why he was educated in Catholic schools throughout his education.
Lernout does not address this, but we can assume that there were few alternatives
in late-nineteenth-century Dublin for a boy from Joyce’s background.
Lernout’s reading of nineteenth-century freethinkers is fascinating because it
locates Joyce’s rebellion against the Church in a wider context of dissent and oppo-
sition in Ireland and Europe. Joyce read and wrote in the context of freethinkers
like Ernst Haeckel, Robert Blatchford, Spinoza, Leo Taxil, Edouard Daanson
and Octave Mirbeau, as well as the anticlerical journals L’Asino and publications

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200 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 34, Number 2

by the Rationalist Press. In Italy, Joyce was drawn to the debates between Catholi-
cism and freethinkers at the same time he began reading works on anarchism.
Joyce was not, however, completely sympathetic to the freethought movement in
Ireland. On the one hand, he was reading George Moore’s anticlerical novels as
well as the issues of John Eglinton’s liberal journal Dana (which rejected Joyce’s
1904 essay “A Portrait of the Artist”). On the other hand, Joyce wrote in 1903
about the “damn editors and damn free-thinkers” as enemies of Dublin (qtd. in
Lernout 85). In this case, Joyce may have been temporarily upset with some free-
thinkers (though Joyce rarely seemed to be upset at anyone temporarily). But his
individual dislike for individual freethinkers does not preclude his overarching
sympathy with their anti-religious dissent.
Lernout gives only a brief exposition of Theosophy and other spiritualist and
occult groups that were popular in Dublin and elsewhere in Europe during the
first part of the twentieth century. He follows Stanislaus Joyce’s position that it
was a passing interest and, more bluntly, a waste of Joyce’s time (qtd. in Lernout
99). Lernout recognizes that Joyce’s interest in Theosophy is a subject that does
deserve more study but chooses to pass over it. But perhaps a discussion of Joyce’s
reading in Catholic and occult mysticism, Gnosticism or any of the other obscure
and esoteric religions that Joyce saw fit to reference in Ulysses or Finnegans Wake
would have added another dimension to Lernout’s reading of Joyce and religion.
Also, a question remains as to where Joyce would have gotten his material for the
black mass and apocalyptic scene in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses. Surely, the
Catholic Church noted and likely warned against the dangers of occultism, The-
osophy, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or Rosicrucianism, especially
as these movements were gaining currency among Anglo-Irish political leaders
and writers or other public Catholic believers.
The most striking and provocative chapters in Lernout’s book involve his
readings of “A Portrait of the Artist,” Stephen Hero, Dubliners (especially “The
Sisters” and “Grace”), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Lernout
argues that Joyce’s early essay “A Portrait of the Artist” announces his loss of faith
not as a result of sexual experiences but because of his feelings of superiority in
religious, political and aesthetic matters (113). The sections that remain of Stephen
Hero show Stephen Dedalus during his university years already isolated from his
classmates, enthralled by Ibsen’s adversarial drama, challenging the establishment
of the university, accused of apostasy by his friends and others and defiant in his
stance toward the Church and the Jesuits. The final published version of A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man dampens or at least complicates the explicitly anti-
religious aspects of Stephen Hero. Stephen’s adoption of the Luciferian non serviam
as his motto makes his apostasy a heroic act, according to Lernout. Accordingly,
Lernout argues that Stephen’s rebellion is part of a larger wish to sin against the
Holy Spirit — an irredeemable sin according to the Church. Stanislaus Joyce
explained that James Joyce had tried to commit a sin against the Holy Spirit (qtd.
in Lernout 98). As Lernout explains, for Augustine, final impenitence was a sin
against the Holy Spirit; for St. Thomas, it was blasphemy (98). Pope Pius X gave

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Joyce Losing His Religion 201

a more exhaustive list of sins against the Holy Spirit, but one imagines that Joyce
trusted Augustine and Thomas. Joyce’s attitudes toward sin and sinning were
certainly complex and contradictory. Ellmann recounts a moment in 1924 when
Joyce refused to join in a toast to sin (565). Lernout doesn’t address this anecdote
or the conflicts it opens. Nevertheless, though Joyce may not have taken a drink
in the name of sin, his inclination toward blasphemy and his final impenitence
(as far as historical evidence shows) confirm an active personal combat against
the doctrine of the Church.
Reading Dubliners, Lernout addresses the religious aspects of nearly all the
stories, but focuses mainly on “The Sisters,” “Eveline” and “Grace.” He assesses
the devotion of the sacred heart in “Eveline” and the errors made by Tom Ker-
nan’s friends in “Grace.” Lernout makes an interesting comparison between
“Two Sisters” and the short stories in George Moore’s 1903 The Untilled Field,
explaining that a reader approaching the story remains distanced from under-
standing the relationship between the boy and the priest, just as Moore could
not understand the Church from the inside “perspective of an ordinary believer”
(Lernout 120). As a youthful believer, Joyce could bring a perspective on the
effects of Catholicism in his stories that would give the impression of a faithful
representation of religion in Ireland. In contrast, the characters of “Grace” make
numerous errors in their discussion of papal infallibility and the first Vatican
Council of the 1860s. Their understanding of Catholicism is purposefully per-
verted by Joyce to expose the limited knowledge of theology among the faithful.
The limited understanding of faith by the ostensibly faithful finds a sarcastic
correspondent in Stephen Dedalus who tells his mother in Stephen Hero that she
should burn him as an apostate. Throughout his reading of Dubliners, Lernout
shows that Joyce was highly attentive in alternating the accuracy and inaccuracy
of his characters’ knowledge of their faith, and that this demonstrates Joyce’s
position that Catholicism in Ireland created docility and compliance in the lower
class and lower-middle class.
Most impressive in the book is Lernout’s reading of Ulysses, in which he has
located sources used by Joyce for several curious and opaque textual moments. For
example, Mulligan’s pronouncement of the “genuine christine” during his mock
mass at the Martello Tower may allude to the followers of American preacher Levi
Dowling, whose alternative gospel addresses the followers of Christ as “christines”
(141). When Haines asks Stephen if he is a believer “in the narrow sense of the
word,” Lernout affirms that Haines has given a good description of a general
and orthodox form of Christian belief: “Creation from nothing and miracles
and a personal God” (U 1.611–13). Stephen’s response to Haines, though, gives a
response that appears at odds with his (and more specifically Joyce’s) wider project
of broadening the dimensions of the word: “There’s only one sense of the word,
it seems to me” (U 1.614). Stephen’s response seems incongruously monologic,
though it is consistent with the anti-religious animus of Mulligan’s mass; at the
same time, Stephen is irritated by Mulligan’s mockery. Presumably, Mulligan and
Stephen take two different paths toward their own anti-religious goals.

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202 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 34, Number 2

In his reading of “Scylla and Charybdis,” Lernout stresses the fact that Ste-
phen’s monologue in the National Library quotes a pamphlet written by German-
American anarchist Johann Most (U 9.493–99). This passage is attributed to
Most in Donald Gifford and Robert J. Seidman’s Ulysses Annotated (224), but in a
close reading of the sentence structure in this passage, Lernout argues that Joyce
worked with the German language edition of Most’s text and wanted to maintain
the German “ring” to the language, and presumably its associations with conti-
nental free-thinking (161). If Lernout’s reading of the “Scylla and Charybdis”
episode is illuminating and interesting, so are his readings of Father Conmee’s
liberal opinions on the salvation of Protestants (not consistent with the Catholic
Church’s position), the Adversary as the “other chap” (U 9.1080) who assists the
unbelief of Catholics and Stephen’s consideration of the Virgin birth at the Mater-
nity Hospital, among many others. Lernout’s reading of the religious aspects of
some of the Finnegans Wake notebooks is not as strong as his reading of Ulysses.
At this point, I would like to highlight four of the most curious, comic or
otherwise intriguing arguments about Joyce and his work that Lernout makes in
this book. First, Stephen Dedalus usually thinks of blasphemy in the French lan-
guage (176). Second, the “Divine Prepuce” was defended as a relic by Jesuits and
one line of thinking believed it would become one of the heavenly bodies — pos-
sibly the constellation observed by Stephen and Bloom during their micturation
(183–85). Third, that Alexander Dowie began a theocratic commune north of
Chicago, claimed that he was Elijah and began to dress as him (155–56). Fourth,
that the four Gospellers disagree over the letters inscribed over the cross and, as
a result, Bloom could not be blamed for not knowing what I.N.R.I. means (152).
Joyce must have reveled in the most ludicrous aspects of the Catholic Church as
much as he was fascinated by the drama that was created over issues of orthodoxy.
While a reading of Joyce’s portrayal of religion in his work often betrays a good
deal of anger and resentment, it is also exploited for comic effects.
Lernout’s conclusion makes one of the most pointed arguments against read-
ing Joyce as a Catholic writer. From Mary Colum’s reflection on Joyce’s “funda-
mentally Catholic” manner of thinking (qtd. in Lernout 110), Lernout begins a
sustained deliberation of what such a structure would be like in the early twentieth
century. It is common for Catholics who have renounced their faith to hear from
other believers, family or friends that they will always be Catholic, regardless
of their conscious affiliations. Built into this argument is the position that the
Church creates a permanent imprint on a child’s mind, that it gives the struc-
tural matrix for all future thinking and experience. For Lernout, a specifically
Catholic frame of mind must be historicized and explained, differentiated from
non-religious or Protestant frames of mind. As he explains, the major differences
between the Catholic Church and the high church forms of Anglicanism were
limited to the celibacy of the priesthood, belief in the Immaculate Conception
and the infallibility of the pope (213). A distinctively Catholic mind at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century would have had few key differences between itself
and an Anglican mind. To argue that a birth Catholic will always be a Catholic

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Joyce Losing His Religion 203

would be similar to arguing that no one could really convert to Catholicism from
another faith, since his or her original faith would predominate over his or her
entire system of thinking. This second position is not a view shared by the Catholic
Church, so it would likewise be unreasonable to argue that a person born in the
Church could never freely and consciously leave it.
Joyce did leave the Church as a young adult and did not return to it. Lernout’s
close reading of Joyce’s texts, his summary of Catholic history in the nineteenth
century, his overview of nineteenth-century anti-religious writing and his survey
of contemporary Catholic responses to Joyce’s work demonstrate that Joyce clearly
and consciously left the faith of his family, even if he retained an interest in its
ceremonies and practices. Joyce maintained a complex relationship to the Church,
but to argue that he was a member of it or allied with its beliefs or politics would
be to make an ahistorical and critical error. Lernout’s book is an indispensible
starting point for an extended examination of religion in Joyce’s works and his
always intricate perspectives.

Works Cited
Balsamo, Gian. Joyce’s Messianism: Dante, Negative Existence, and the Messianic Self. Columbia: U of
South Carolina P, 2004. Print.
Boyle, Robert. Joyce’s Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978. Print.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford UP, 1982. Print.
Gifford, Don and Ronald J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. Print.
Gottfried, Roy. Joyce’s Misbelief. Gainsville: UP of Florida, 2007. Print.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, et al. New York: Viking, 1984. Print.
Sullivan, Kevin. Joyce among the Jesuits. New York: Columbia UP, 1958. Print.

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