Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company

1. The Papal Bulls Enlist the Dumb Ox

1 The Papal Bulls Enlist the Dumb Ox We exhort you, venerable brethren, in all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the sciences. From Aeterni Patris, Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, August 4, 1879 —Papal infallibility, said Mr. Cunningham, that was the greatest scene in the whole history of the Church. James Joyce, “Grace” Allusions to the modernist crisis in Catholicism permeate Joyce’s oeuvre. From his earliest stories to his critical writings to Finnegans Wake Joyce responds to the initiatives taken during the pontificates of popes Pius IX (1846–78), Leo XIII (1878–1903), Pius X (1903–14), and Benedict XV (1914–22) to stem the tide of antiauthoritarianism challenging the church’s position as both religious and political institution. Furthermore, we might be justified in claiming Joyce helped spread “the golden wisdom of St. Thomas . . . far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith.” In his essay on “The Heretical Auctoritas of Giordano Bruno: The Significance of the Brunonian Presence in James Joyce’s ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ and Stephen Hero,” Gareth Joseph Downes covers a portion of the ground I will be exploring in this chapter. Downes observes that “during the period in which Joyce was born, educated and grew to maturity, the Church . . . cultivated an atmosphere of institutional and philosophical medievalism, and prosecuted any departure from a narrowly defined orthodoxy with force majeure” (Downes, 42). Whereas Downes focuses on “the subversive nature of [Joyce’s] critical negotiation with contemporary Catholicism,” especially as manifested in Joyce’s invocations of Giordano Bruno in “The Day of the Rabblement” and Stephen Hero, I am more interested in the way Joyce reproduces throughout his oeuvre The Papal Bulls Enlist the Dumb Ox 29 the very strategies, doctrines, and texts the church deployed in its antimodernist attacks. Furthermore, I hope to demonstrate that those strategies contribute to the Catholic nostalgia that pervades his works. I also find the antimodernist tactics the church employed often as seductive as coercive, especially in the devotional practices it continued to encourage up to the years of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, or Vatican II (1962–65). Nineteenth-century Catholic modernism, as viewed by twentieth-century commentators, was a many-faceted somewhat nebulous philosophy developing over the period of a century in response to challenges and promises offered by numerous “isms,” the most threatening of which was an all-inclusive Enlightenment -inspired rationalism (see McCool, intro.). In the view of Gabriel Daly, the Vatican created the myth of a modernizing movement which was allegedly threatening the very existence of the church. It has been suggested that the decision to attack Modernists stemmed from Rome’s general hostility to post-Enlightenment developments outside the Catholic Church. The sociologist, Lester R. Kurtz, argues that the Modernists were an asset to the Vatican in that they “served as the negative model for the church’s stance toward the modern world” [Kurtz, Politics, 179]. In short, Rome, which found itself powerless against the modern world could bring all its might to bear successfully on its own dissidents, thereby revitalizing the Catholic will to resist modernity and—far more significantly—to do so on Rome’s terms. (Daly, 99–100) Given his insistent representations and misrepresentations of the doctrines and devotions officially sanctioned by the papacy during the nineteenth century , Joyce qualifies as a dissident who entered the Catholic modernist debate “on Rome’s terms.” Joyce certainly rebelled against the overt, coercive, retributive measures the papacy employed to retain control over its constituents (excommunications , assigning dissenting works to the Index Liborum Prohibitorum [index of forbidden books], for example); nonetheless he retained and conveyed admiration and even affection for selected doctrines and practices imposed during the crisis in modernism which have, in turn, inspired a continuing discourse favorable to Roman Catholicism. In some respects, Joyce also revitalized the “Catholic will to resist modernity” (Daly, 100) by enlisting himself on the side of “philosophical medievalism” (Downes, 42).1 To combat the “modernizing movement,” as Kurtz calls it, in 1864 Pius IX (also known as “Pio Nono”) issued his Syllabus of Errors, a list of condemned 30 Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company propositions referring the reader to earlier papal documents explaining the church’s opposition...