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1 one Ethics as a Guide into Metaphysics James Joyce once quipped, ‘‘The difficulty about Aquinas is that what he says is so like what the man in the street says.’’ And in response to a friend’s derisive comment that Aquinas ‘‘has nothing to do with us,’’ he stated, ‘‘It has everything to do with us.’’1 Joyce was schooled in the works of old Aquinas. As William T. Noon demonstrated some years ago in his Joyce and Aquinas, Thomistic themes pervade Joyce’s corpus, particularly in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.2 In the midst of the cascade of recent studies of Joyce, there has been a quiet resurgence of interest in the affinities between Joyce and premodern philosophy.3 As we shall argue in some detail toward the end of this study, Joyce had a remarkably penetrating understanding of certain features of Aquinas ’s thought. The use and (deliberate?) misuse of Aquinas in Stephen Dedalus ’s discussions of beauty in Portrait of the Artist are well known. But Joyce also exhibits a sophisticated grasp of Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology and its metaphysical and ethical implications, as is clear from Ulysses.4 Conversely, in what he attacks, Joyce opens up the possibility of a recovery of certain strains of premodern thought: the criticisms of symbolist conceptions of art, the roman- Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion 2 tic celebration of the autonomous creativity of the artist, the modern supposition of the transparency of the self to itself, and the voluntarism he encountered both in modern philosophy and in strains of Jesuit theology. All of these issues in Joyce—what he rejects and what he at least implicitly affirms—are allied to his affirmation of the primacy of myth, an affirmation that is most apparent in the use of the Homeric tale of Odysseus in Ulysses. Now, Aquinas is no weaver of tales; indeed, some critics see him as a forerunner of modern rationalism. So, for example, Eric Voegelin objects to Aquinas’s metaphysics precisely on the ground that it ‘‘ossifies it into a propositional science of principles, universals, and substances.’’5 But this assessment, as we shall see in ample detail in the course of our study, involves a very selective reading of Aquinas’s metaphysics.6 It omits, for example, his notion of reason as participant in an order that encompasses it and exceeds its grasp; the prominent role of erotic and aesthetic discourse throughout his metaphysics; the intimate connection, in his theology, between the Trinity as exemplar of human action and the development of a social ontology of individuals-inrelation ; and the construal of ethics itself as a mimetic practice. A number of these themes can be brought to the fore by a careful reading of the way Aquinas functions in Joyce’s novels. None of this implies that Joyce embraces Aquinas’s conclusions or, where he does embrace some, that he deploys them for the same ends as Aquinas. Just how far that takes us in the direction of Aquinas is certainly open to debate, and nothing in the exposition of Aquinas that follows hangs on an interpretation of Joyce as interpreter of Aquinas. Indeed, I will argue that Joyce’s texts embody tensions, even debates, between rival conceptions of human agency, rationality, and narrative (dis)unity, only one of which can be traced to Aquinas. Whether Joyce can in any meaningful sense affirm the primacy of myth merely as a human construct, void of any metaphysical commitments, is itself a serious question. One thing is clear. Joyce aims to capture a nonreductionist account of the ordinary. His famed biographer Richard Ellmann puts it succinctly: ‘‘The initial and determining act of judgment in his work is the justification of the commonplace. . . . Joyce’s discovery . . . was that the ordinary is the extraordinary .’’7 Ellmann’s comments overlap nicely with Joyce’s own sympathies toward Aquinas as expressed in the opening quotations. Of course, the recovery of the ordinary has been at the heart of an influential movement in philosophy at least since Wittgenstein. The problem with aligning Aquinas with this movement is its antipathy toward metaphysics. Stanley Cavell, a noted proponent of the return to the ordinary, contrasts metaphysics, understood as a ‘‘demand for the absolute,’’ with the ‘‘ordinary or the everyday.’’8 Part of my thesis, following out the Joycean suggestion of Aquinas’s fidelity to the ‘‘man in the street...

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