Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion (review)

Much as religion itself in the nineteenth century, the matter of Joyce and his belief, the dogma of which was instituted by Ellmann in the biography of 1959, is currently undergoing a series of revisions. The beginning of the twentieth century saw the culmination of centuries-long developments in the fields of historical criticism that would have powerful repercussions across society as a whole. The principles and methodologies of higher criticism, with its insistence on placing ancient texts back into the historical and intellectual contexts from which they emerged, increasingly came to be turned to the study of the Bible. Joyce’s response to Catholicism was formed within the context of the many and various challenges to doctrine and the authority of the Church that this burgeoning scholarship provided. Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion is similarly engaged in the kinds of contextualization and source examination that marked higher criticism and uses that work to mount an instrumental challenge to the widely-held assumptions about Joyce and the religion he is generally portrayed as having rejected.

One intent of Help My Unbelief is to establish Joyce as a confirmed and consistent freethinking unbeliever rather than merely a rebellious Catholic who might be readmitted to the church through the back door of aesthetics. But that is not its major achievement. The more challenging and ultimately more informative effect of this study is to demonstrate with great thoroughness and detail “the historical reality in which the writer lived,” (11) specifically the intellectual currents running against the authority of Rome (11).

Lernout firmly maintains that Joyce was a committed unbeliever and he cites as evidence “those only genuine contemporary witnesses” (95), early acquaintances such as Gogarty in letters to a third party, an Oxford friend. Stanislaus’s diary, although written with the encouragement of Joyce, is likewise evidence of a strong anti-Catholic sensibility and Joyce’s own letters are unequivocal. These sources from Joyce’s life are made to stand up against Ellmann’s view of Joyce’s religion as a series of metaphoric stances, an interpretation Ellmann derived largely from working backward from the fiction and not forward from that life. All of this evidence, Lernout maintains, shows “a degree of unanimity about his religious and ideological opinions, . . . an extreme enmity towards religion” (109).

From this biographical context Lernout moves outward, noting that Joyce could not have been “unaware of biblical criticism and of th[e] liberal critiques within the church: the modernist debate was raging while he was a student at University College and when he first resided in Pola and Trieste” (41). Lernout focuses most particularly on the crucial years of 1904–1914 in which Joyce was beginning to be active in composition, as the most “active anticlerical phase” (103). Joyce was reading Strauss’s Life of Jesus (that seminal work in the catalog of higher criticism), Renan, and Anatole France (for his politics) during this period.

Wishing to clarify and “not obscure the historical reality in which the writer lived” (9), Lernout’s highly informative and concise chapters form a masterful treatment of major currents in religion and thought, chapters that describe the particular state of the Roman Catholic Church that Joyce felt he had to leave and that describe the alternatives to Catholic faith. He details the Church of Rome, caught in a political challenge to its secular authority in states throughout Europe, which found itself increasingly reactionary, anti-revolution, and aligned with conservative post-Napoleon powers. Particularly in Italy, as its secular power waned, it sought to assert even more strongly its spiritual power over its flock. When the Vatican faced the contemporary challenges modernism (by which the Church meant those Protestant or secular thinkers who “accepted the usefulness of history in the realm of religion” [38]), it paradoxically asserted its unchanging tradition. This, in turn, led to its unflagging support for the Pope (in ultramontanism) and for the reactionary Index of Forbidden Books and Syllabus of Errors, each...