James Joyce and the Eastern Orthodox Church

James Joyce's appreciation of the music and ritual of Holy Week embraced services at Eastern Orthodox churches. In Zürich during the First World War he learned the rudiments of Modern Greek from two comrades, both of them exiles from the Hellenic diaspora. His basic language skills joined forces with his far-ranging imagination and cosmic cultural curiosity--abetted by the Encyclopaedia Britannica--to include occasional and invariably irreverent Orthodox allusions in his fiction, especially Finnegans Wake. There the Great Schism and parodies of credal formulas contribute to the rivalry between the Mookse and the Gripes; Greek and Slavic saints are turned topsy-turvy; hallowed theological terms reappear in comic situations. All of these effects demonstrate that Joyce's last liturgy of the words has a minor but distinct "arthouducks" dimension.