Ulysses describes the thoughts and actions of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus on a single day in Dublin in 1904. One of the first things the uninitiated reader will learn in editorial forwards to the novel is that Mr Bloom’s movements map to the adventures of Homer’s Odysseus—as those of Stephen map to Telemachus and those of Molly, Bloom’s wife, to Penelope. On one widely repeated interpretation, the purpose of this symbolic device is to imply the universality, and the perenniality, of certain aspects of the human experience. Just as ontogeny was once believed to recapitulate phylogeny, so a day in the life of an early twentieth century Dubliner may contain in miniature all the joys and agonies common to mankind throughout the ages. On another interpretation, compatible with the first, Joyce’s aim is to disclose the drama, courage and heroism of the everyday. Because the Homeric parallels give the novel its name and determine the sequence of most of its action, they form a necessary part of any complete exegesis. But taken as an interpretive key they risk reducing Ulysses to an metaphor too local, too parochial in its scope, to do justice to Joyce’s plethoric text. Of more interest to me, at least, is what the novel can tell us about Joyce’s view on the nature of Ultimate Reality; not simply that man suffers universally and perennially but why; and in particular, what the novel reveals about Joyce’s view on the existence of God and the role and relevance of the Catholic Church which figures so prominently in the thoughts of its Irish Catholic characters. On a first pass it seems reasonable to suppose that Joyce was an atheistic firebrand. Stephen (the hero of Joyce’s semi-autobiographic novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) repudiates the Church with the Satanic cry of protest non serviam; refuses on reasons of principle to kneel and pray at his mother’s deathbed; and, throughout the novel, gives vent to bitter, drunken blasphemies. Corroborating this supposition is a well-known letter from Joyce to his wife Nora in which he declares, “My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity—home, the recognized virtues, classes of life and religious doctrines… I make open war upon it by what I write and say and do.” The first hint that this reading is too simplistic is given during the discussion of Shakespeare that takes place in the Dublin National Library. Stephen, in the company of a group of local litterateurs, hears the conventional critical opinion that Hamlet is a mouthpiece for the views of Shakespeare. Stephen does not dispute this but argues (on the basis of a formidably erudite analysis of biographical clues in the plays) that Shakespeare simultaneously identified with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, whom Shakespeare himself played on stage, and whose message is therefore directed, covertly, at Shakespeare’s own son and Hamlet’s near-namesake Hamnet: You are the dispossessed and disinherited son, betrayed by Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway. What matters here is not the plausibility of reading the plays for clues to Shakespeare’s life but Stephen’s invitation to understand literary characters, of which he himself is one example, as symbolically polyvalent. If Stephen is telling us that Shakespeare is both Hamlet and Hamlet’s father’s ghost then, credibly, Joyce is telling us that both Stephen and Bloom represent him at different stages of his intellectual and spiritual development. Seen through this lens, and taking note of differences of emphasis, the picture looks very different. Consider first the differences of emphasis. Stephen is the hero of A Portrait, the novel Joyce wrote in his twenties; but it is Bloom, not Stephen, who is the hero of Ulysses, the work of Joyce’s mature years. The letter quoted earlier, too, was written when Joyce was 22 and there are reports from those close to Joyce that his stance towards the Church softened in later life; indeed, that he regularly attended mass—ostensibly for “aesthetic reasons”—and on one occasion was seen to shed silent tears on hearing Christ’s words of dereliction on the cross—“Eli, Eli lama sabacthani!” Joyce’s portrait of Stephen in Ulysses, meanwhile, is highly unflattering. Note Stephen’s absurd aquaphobia, his intellectual exhibitionism and the false bravado motivating his blasphemy which is exposed when, interrupted by a tremendous clap of thunder, he turns pale and cringes with fear to the amusement of his drinking companions. The implied lack of faith in his own convictions on religious matters extends to other areas of his mental life: As a result of his hectoring intellectualism, Stephen is isolated, lonely and unhappy but asked whether he believes his own theories he immediately disavows them. And all of this, together with his fear and guilt over his apostasy and over his mother’s death, brings him to a drunken crisis and a violent altercation at the end of which he lies flat on his back in the street. One is reminded of Thomas Reid who compared the course of modern philosophy from Descartes to Hume to a traveller who, upon finding himself in a coal pit, realises that he has taken a wrong turn. Stephen, I suggest, is an unreliable indicator of Joyce’s views on religion. What, then, of Bloom? In Ulysses, as in life, nothing is straightforward. On cursory inspection, Mr Bloom is a harmless homo domesticus but details soon emerge which call his moral credentials into question. He is pursuing an adulterous epistolary dalliance with a woman named Martha; he discreetly but publicly brings himself to climax when a teenage girl flashes her underwear at him on the beach; he keeps an irreligious pornographic postcard in a locked drawer of his bureau. Bloom, furthermore, is a secular Jew who rejects religious doctrine and mentions his belief that the miracles in the New Testament were pious fabrications inserted by monks. I do not wish to be misunderstood. Bloom, despite all this, is a good man—humane, sensitive, conscientious. But looked to for Joyce’s attitude towards religion he is a rather ambiguous Apostle. Mild perplexity therefore ensues when Joyce, as Harry Blamires proves in his study of Ulysses, subtly but repeatedly implies a symbolic association between Bloom and Christ. For example: At the end of the third chapter, Stephen, who has been wandering alone along Sandymount Strand, has an intuition that something is behind him. Turning, he sees a sailing ship entering the harbour—its three masts and crosstrees suggesting the three crosses of Golgotha. The moment and its symbolism prefigure Stephen’s first encounter with Bloom in chapter nine: Standing on the steps of the National Library with Buck Mulligan, the bawdy medical student who cadges money off Stephen while mercilessly mocking him, Stephen realises that the time has come for them to part company. “My will,” thinks Stephen, “his will that fronts me. Seas between.” Feeling someone behind him, Stephen steps aside. And at this moment Bloom, bowed in greeting, sails between them. The connection between the two moments is insinuated by Stephen's two intuitions that there is something behind him and reinforced as, Christlike, Bloom walks across the seas Stephen imagines lie between him and Mulligan—and reinforced again as Stephen watches Bloom's black back descend the stairs with “the step of a pard.” The choice of words, as Gifford points out in his encyclopaedic companion volume to Ulysses, is significant: In medieval bestiaries the pard, or leopard, sleeps for three days after eating and then awakes with a roar; for this reason, “it is allegorically Christ.” We have already found permission in the text for identifying one individual with multiple characters and one character with multiple individuals: Joyce is both Stephen and Bloom; Bloom is both Odysseus and Christ. The puzzle before us is not that Bloom symbolises Christ but why. With what possible justification does Bloom—epistolary adulterer, public masturbator and professed nonbeliever—serve as an emissary for the Spotless Lamb of God? The puzzle is solved by taking a hint from Jorge Luis Borges. In his essay, Immortality, he speculates that each time an ardent reader repeats a line by Shakespeare or declaims one of the apophthegms of Christ he is, in some way, that instant when Shakespeare wrote that line or Christ spoke those words; he is, in some way, Shakespeare and Christ. Elsewhere Borges invites us to imagine that the identification is literal (a hypothesis he thinks is borne out by Leibniz’s Identity of Indiscernibles and the Subjective Idealism of Berkeley) but we need not follow him that far. The relevant point is that the identification of one person with another need not be sustained; need not hold at all points. In John Bunyan’s Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress the character Goodwill is Jesus Christ—from the first page to the last his behaviour reflects or should reflect the nature of God Incarnate. But Ulysses is not an allegory and different rules apply: Bloom is Christ only in those moments when he follows the teaching or example of Christ; or (to express this slightly differently) Christ manifests Himself in Bloom every time Bloom follows His teaching and example. The first clear illustration of this occurs when Bloom meets an antisemitic Irish nationalist dubbed “The Citizen” in a local bar. Bloom’s arrival at the bar, significantly, is motivated by compassion: He is there to meet Martin Cunningham who is taking up a collection for the widow of a man who died two days earlier and whose funeral Bloom attended in the morning. Cunningham is late. One of the patrons offers Bloom a drink and Bloom politely refuses. The conversation already underway concerns the politics of Irish revolutionary action. Reluctantly, Bloom is drawn in—offering a moderate, pacifist counterpoint to the jingoistic rhetoric of his interlocutors. Growing increasingly aggravated—and increasingly inebriated—the Citizen begins to pepper his speech with antisemitic goads. Bloom does not allow himself to be provoked. Instead, he attempts to establish a basis for mutual sympathy: He agrees that the Irish have suffered persecution under English colonial rule but notes that he, too, belongs to a race that has been persecuted, “Also now. This very moment. This very instant.” “Then stand up to it with force,” someone suggests. And then, with great moral courage, Bloom says: “Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. Everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.” “What?” someone asks. “Love,” Bloom replies. “I mean the opposite of hatred,” and then he excuses himself to go off in search of Martin. “A new apostle to the gentiles,” the Citizen remarks with scorn after Bloom has left. “Universal love.” “Well, isn’t that what we’re told?” one of the characters says doubtfully. “Love your neighbour.” The bulk of what precedes and follows this scene fleshes out the inner lives of Stephen and Bloom who have many sorrows in common—both are mocked by others; emotionally separated from loved ones; grieving; misunderstood; isolated and betrayed—until the second occasion on which Bloom exemplifies Christ and initiates the climax of Ulysses. After a day which for both Bloom and Stephen has been filled with trials and misadventures, they encounter each other at a maternity hospital where Stephen is carousing with a group of medical students. Bloom, once again, is on an errand of compassion: He is checking up on Mina Purefoy, a family friend who has been in labour for three days. Invited to join the drinking party, Bloom reluctantly agrees and observes, with misgiving, Stephen throwing back drinks and then quailing in fear when his blasphemy is interrupted by the thunderclap. “It is only a natural phenomenon,” Bloom quietly reassures him but Stephen is beyond the point of no return. Fortifying himself with alcohol, he staggers off to a bar where he squanders yet more money on yet more drinks. The bar closes. Outside, Stephen's companions give him the slip, with the exception of Lynch, with whom he trams to a brothel in a disreputable and dangerous part of town. And Bloom, out of concern for Stephen, follows them. It is at the brothel that the crisis earlier alluded to occurs. Someone puts a record on the gramophone. Stephen, in a frenzy, dances a dervish with the whores and then comes to a standstill in the middle of the room where—dizzy, overwrought, high on absinthe—he sees an apparition of his dead mother rise up through the floor. It wrings withered, blackened hands; it fixes him in its sunken, smouldering eyes; and then in a hoarse deathrattle, it cries, “Repent! O, the fire of hell!” The apparition—which combines Stephen's two greatest fears: his apostasy and his mother's death—has a violent and almost instantaneous effect upon him. With a cry of strangled rage, he smashes a lamp with his ashplant and rushes out into the street. Bloom, all aflutter with nerves, tarries a moment to placate the whoremistress who is threatening to call the police; and then, after fixing her up for the broken lamp, collects Stephen's money and ashplant and follows him out the door. And here, outside the brothel, Stephen’s prophetic intuition of an encounter with a Christ-figure is fulfilled—for what follows is a thinly disguised reenactment of the parable of the Good Samaritan: A British soldier on the street misunderstands Stephen’s drunken rambling and knocks him unconscious. Lynch flees. A crowd forms and looks idly on. Only Bloom (of a race as hated in the twentieth century as the Samaritans were in the first) comes to Stephen’s rescue—retrieving his hat, standing guard over him, appeasing two passing nightwatchmen who want to take Stephen to the station. In Jesus’ parable the Samaritan provides shelter to the man he rescues and Joyce does not forget this: When Stephen regains consciousness, Bloom helps him up, buys him something to eat and takes him home where he makes them both a mug of cocoa and offers Stephen shelter for the night. The second to last chapter concerns the conversation that takes place between them in Bloom's kitchen. If we remember Stephen's theory of identity, there need be no confusion when Stephen, too, is symbolically associated with Christ—having been “resurrected” from his concussion with a bruised side and a wound in his hand. It is clear, however, that Stephen is Christ in a very different manner to Bloom: Where Bloom is the warmth of compassion, Stephen is the light of intelligence—an intelligence sharpened by formal training which has an illuminating effect on the nimble but untrained mind of Bloom; an effect analogised by the experimental prose style of the chapter—its catechistical structure, its machine-tooled exactitude of diction. The question with which I have been concerned is what Ulysses can tell us about Joyce’s religious beliefs. I suggest we can answer this question by asking another: What exactly is so significant about this meeting between Bloom and Stephen to which 700 pages of notoriously difficult prose have led us? Recall, first, that the Homeric structure of the novel foregrounds the perenniality of human suffering—with a particular emphasis on desires for love, rest and reconciliation frustrated by irrational and capricious forces. Consider, next, that for its two central characters these desires come poignantly to the point of realisation only when they instantiate for each other God Incarnate: Bloom the Agape, or unconditional love, and Stephen the Logos—the principle of divine reason and creative order. In drawing my conclusion, it is important for me to distinguish between the ecclesiastical and metaphysical dimensions of the Church. It is obvious that Joyce’s relationship with the former was unhappy and conflicted—and this is something with which I have some initial sympathy. As a young man, Joyce was fiercely determined to be an important writer and the Catholic Church in Ireland in the early twentieth century—its revelation still imperfectly resolved—no doubt was a dead hand on many legitimate forms of sexual and artistic expression. The heavenly treasure of God’s revelation, as is often pointed out, is contained in the earthen vessel of the Church. This is the reason Joyce, after a phase of adolescent piety, rejected a calling to the priesthood to become, as he put it, “a priest of the eternal imagination.” But it is equally obvious that Christian Theism remained central to Joyce’s thinking and is central to our understanding of Ulysses; and it is probable, therefore, that Joyce believed in the metaphysical content of the Church—in the existence of God and in the Incarnation. The conclusion is supported by the final chapter of Ulysses. After Stephen departs (he politely declines Bloom’s offer to stay the night) Bloom gets into bed and, in so doing, wakes his wife Molly but himself quickly falls asleep. The last word is consequently given to Molly in the form of a long, discursive soliloquy—her interior monologue as, unable to get back to sleep, she thinks first of her day, then of her past, and finally of her engagement to Bloom. It is important here to note that Bloom and Molly have not been intimate since the death of their infant son Rudy ten years ago; and that Molly, a singer, is having an affair with her concert organiser Blazes Boylan—including a tryst that very day in the bed in which Bloom and Molly now lie. Her thoughts range over these facts as well as her girlhood in Gibraltar and her first kiss until, on the last page of the novel, she recalls the day on Howth Hill when Bloom proposed to her. Her recollection of that beautiful day on the coastal promontory moves her to silently exclaim, “God of heaven there’s nothing like nature—as for them saying there’s no God I wouldn’t give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning.” Flowers and lakes; bursts of sunlight on the ocean; rivers and scudding cloud shadows—for Molly these things are an undeniable testament to the existence of God and her praise of them sets the tone for the book’s conclusion. The final breathless Yes of Ulysses has, in this context, a double significance. It demonstrates both Molly’s willingness to be reconciled to Bloom and a swooning abandonment to the beauty of God that recalls Mary’s unconditional acquiescence at the Annunciation. This, I suggest, is the strongest proof of Joyce’s religious belief: That the coda of his greatest novel is a benediction to God whose domain is correctly understood by Joyce to extend beyond dogma, piety and self-denial to include the beauty and joy discoverable in nature and in the beauty and sexuality of the human creature. “O and the sea, the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets,” Molly silently effuses, “and the rose gardens and jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a flower of the mountain yes.” And then, as her memory of the moment she accepted Bloom’s proposal is swept into her general ecstasy, she utters the last words of the novel: “And first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”