Literature and Theology Advance Access published October 18, 2013

Literature & Theology, 2013, pp. 1–19

doi:10.1093/litthe/frt034

WHAT THE THUNDER SAID:

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
AS A TRANS-SECULAR EVENT

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Jack Dudley

Abstract
According to the dominant critical consensus, James Joyce’s writings are
secular, marking the absence or irrelevance of religion in modern life. This
article challenges that position by arguing that Joyce’s use of epiphany
reworked Catholic concepts of transcendence and immanence, amid the
contentious theological debates of the early 20th century, to craft a moder-
nist religious experience, one directed at achieving spiritual meaning. I then
show how the Joycean epiphany’s way of shaping being and time remarkably
anticipates Alain Badiou’s and Slavoj Žižek’s contemporary turn to religious
forms of fashioning meaning in the idea of the Event. This article thus not
only reframes Joyce’s relationship to art’s spiritual value, but also shows how
the persistent recourse to religion for literary and political ends further com-
plicates the idea of a secular modernity.

. . . was it anything but vanity which urged him to seek out the thorny crown of the heretic
while the entire theory, in accordance with which his entire artistic life was shaped, arose
most conveniently for his purpose out of the mass of Catholic theology?
-James Joyce, Stephen Hero

Richard Ellmann describes a thunderstruck moment for James Joyce, who had
a notorious fear of storms: ‘Once, when thunder crashed and Joyce quailed,
Thomas McGreevy admonished him, ‘‘Look at your children. They aren’t
frightened at all.’ ‘‘They have no religion,’’ Joyce said with contempt.’ This
strange reply seems at odds with Joyce’s famous hatred of Catholicism and the
equally celebrated non serviam (‘I will not serve’) of his central character
Stephen Dedalus. Ellmann concludes: ‘The marrow in his bones was at vari-
ance with his brain.’1 His metaphor has proven apt, as Joyce could no more
escape religion than he could the influence of ‘dear Dirty Dublin’.2
This article argues that when Joyce reworked traditional ideas of transcend-
ence, amid a Catholic controversy about nature and the supernatural, he

Department of English, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL 60660, USA.
Email: [email protected]
Literature & Theology # The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press 2013; all rights reserved.
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2 of 19 JACK DUDLEY
crafted a modernist religious experience in his conception of epiphany, one
that, in its temporality and ontology, strikingly anticipates the trans-secular
philosophical projects of leading theorists Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, both
atheists and materialists. Joyce’s characters, notably Stephen and Leopold
Bloom, are thought to be secular subjects like their author, what Charles
Taylor calls ‘buffered selves’.3 That is, they are immune to supernatural
forces they have no faith in. Yet, Joyce’s characters find their world punctu-

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ated and framed by epiphanies, which I argue are moments or events of
transcendence, foundational ones such as Stephen’s scene with the Bird-Girl
in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) or Bloom’s encounter with the
ghost of his dead son, Rudy, in Ulysses (1922). Such epiphanies reshape Joyce’s
characters in key ways: Stephen becomes an artist, Bloom seeks a son.
Joyce, Badiou, and Žižek all seek an escape from traditional religion: for
Joyce, the weight of the Roman Church’s hand in the ‘nightmare’ of Irish
history; for Badiou and Žižek, religion’s ‘fable’, the purportedly false super-
natural. As these irreligious projects proceed, each finally retains religion’s
power to invest events with meaning that transcends the ordinary passage of
time or strictly secular ontologies. All three ultimately craft a religious con-
ception of time and experience, distinct from traditional orthodoxies, but not
entirely atheist or a-religious, as they have been taken to be. These three
points of 20th-century religious persistence and transformation not only
signal the larger endurance and change in modes of religious meaning and
belief that mark what has been too hastily taken to be a secular century; they
also force us to question the real range of meaning-making structures that
remain if the religious is truly disavowed and divested from our conceptions
of time and experience.
In other words, when writers like Joyce and theorists like Badiou and Žižek
draw on religious structures and ontologies, they indicate the failure of atheist
materialism to construct a sense of meaning as robust and fulfilling as that
offered by religion. All three are affectively drawn to concepts like beauty,
truth, and goodness, but the resources offered by a secular, materialist universe
are, they imply by their recourse to a religious concept of the event, inad-
equate to produce a significant commitment to such ideals.4
By understanding the epiphany as a religious event in Joyce, I argue that his
fictions are ‘trans-secular’, neither comfortably classified as religious nor secu-
lar.5 By ‘trans-secular’, I mean Joyce’s works take place in a predominantly
secular, fictional world but are nonetheless transcended at key moments by
religiously significant events, which I locate in Joyce’s epiphanies. The trans-
secular moment is Joyce’s way of escaping the traditional nets of orthodox
religion while slyly retaining its meaning-making procedures for key moments
of character and plot structured around the epiphany as religious event. Before
turning to the specific theological controversies that shaped Joyce’s use of
 WHAT THE THUNDER SAID 3 of 19
epiphany, I examine how Joyce himself presented the idea and how critics
have since minimised its religious elements. I then demonstrate how a deeper
understanding of Joyce’s epiphany as a religious event shows the extent to
which his re-appropriation of the doctrine anticipates contemporary postmod-
ern theories of ‘the event’.
---
Joyce derived epiphany from the feast of the Magi, which, in the Christian

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traditions, is considered the first manifestation of Jesus’ divinity.6 Epiphanion,
in Greek, means ‘to manifest’ or ‘to show’, and referred to any manifestation
of divinity or divinities before its Christian use. The structure of the epiphany
disclosed the divine significance of an apparently insignificant object to a
perceiving subject. Assuming that structure as an aesthetic form, Joyce pre-
sented trivial and ordinary incidents as conduits for extraordinary meaning.
This form changed from early descriptions of dreams and incidents recorded
in Imagist terms to a more complex aesthetic fashioned by Stephen.7
In Stephen’s understanding, the subject’s perception is not applied over the
object, in the Kantian sense of perception; the object externally manifests
a reality that is correctly brought into focus for the perceiving subject
who undergoes that revelation or epiphany. The Stephen of Stephen Hero
(1901–03?) famously describes the concept:

By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the

vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He
believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme
care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of
moments.
...
-Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which
seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the
object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme
quality of beauty.8

Rather than cohere in a secular, modernist aesthetic, these elements codified

in a theological concept: epiphany. The theological-aesthetic theory outlined
here by Stephen will be refashioned, explicitly through Aquinas and Aristotle,
but the term epiphany dropped, for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
David Hayman argues for the persistence and transformation of the epiph-
any throughout Joyce’s corpus, but, by and large, epiphanies are taken to be
secular aesthetic guidelines for Portrait and Dubliners—despite never being
mentioned in that text. Epiphany is assumed to give way to the mature
Joyce of Leopold Bloom and HCE.9 There has been broad agreement
too that the term is secularised—‘drawn from the ecclesiastical tradition’
4 of 19 JACK DUDLEY
(David Weir), ‘defiantly secular’ (J.C.C. Mays)—so much so that Robert
Adams Day rather surprisingly proposes that we ‘throw out his [Joyce’s]
own word ‘‘spiritual’’’, in the definition, ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation’, a
word that Day takes to be ‘meaningless’.10 In 1964, Robert Scholes asserted
the opposite, while still hoping to do away with epiphany: ‘The heart of this
definition, in both its contexts, I take to be the notion that an epiphany is a
spiritual manifestation’.11

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While critics like Day reject ‘spiritual’ as ‘meaningless’, Joyce once
described his entire poetic project to his brother Stanislaus as directed to
those ends:

Don’t you think, said he reflectively, choosing his words without haste, there is a
certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do?
I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual
pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into
something that has a permanent artistic life of its own . . . for their mental, moral,
and spiritual uplift, he concluded glibly.12

The transubstantiation of the Catholic mass, where bread and wine is con-
verted into the body and blood of Christ, repeats the epiphany’s structure,
where the everyday is revealed to be extraordinary. This was its attraction for
Joyce. Stephen would deploy this same vision of the artist as the true artificer
of transcendence toward the end of Portrait: ‘a priest of eternal imagination,
transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving
life’.13 As Joyce himself suggests, his adaptation of Catholic structures was not
simply aesthetic, as in some isolated modernist artifact, but crafted toward
spiritual ends. By using the term ‘spiritual’ instead of ‘religious’, Joyce could
distance himself from the Irish Catholic tradition implied by the term ‘reli-
gion’, but maintain, by the use of ‘spiritual’, the transcendent meaning he
intended.14
The closest we have to a definition of ‘spiritual’ from Joyce comes in his
short review essay, ‘The Bruno Philosophy’ (1903), where he uses the term in
praise of one of his heroes, Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). Joyce commends
Bruno for ‘[c]asting away tradition with the courage of early humanism’ and
remaining ‘a consistent spiritual unity’.15 Joyce then contrasts Bruno’s view of
the physical world with that of traditional religion: whereas Joyce thought
Neoplantonists saw the world as ‘the kingdom of the soul’s malady’, and
Christians thought it ‘a place of probation’, he found that Bruno imagined
the world as ‘his opportunity for spiritual activity’, where one could move
‘from enthusiasm to enthusiasm to unite himself with God’.16 In each case,
‘spiritual’ contrasts with traditional forms of religion; yet, the creative individ-
ual, Bruno, maintains a sense of spirit, theism, and mysticism, often fashioned
 WHAT THE THUNDER SAID 5 of 19
against existing orthodoxy, but religious nonetheless. ‘Spiritual’, then, enables
Joyce to draw positive elements from terms like ‘religion’ or ‘religious’, while
separating himself from the many negatives he saw in a tradition like modern
Irish Catholicism. As with modernist aesthetics, the writer selects from trad-
ition those elements he thinks of value and resituates them to give new
meaning to the modern situation, one where religious value in the form of
the spiritual is shifted from large institutions and orthodoxies to the individual,

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the reader whom Joyce wishes to give ‘spiritual uplift’.17
---
The dominant theology of Joyce’s Dublin significantly shaped his concept
of epiphany by teaching rules for transcendence, the ways in which one im-
agines the world relating to God, or, in the terms of Joyce’s times, how the
natural world relates to the supernatural. While The Oxford English Dictionary
offers a commonplace definition of transcendence as independent of the universe
(1b) with immanence as its opposite, the relationship in religion and philoso-
phy is more complex, as 19th- and 20th-century Dublin displayed. Reality
existed as two orders or levels, in Latin duplex ordo.18 In the ‘purely natural
order’, life proceeded under physical laws and could operate free from divine
interference. This order is, in the metaphor commonly used to describe the
relationship, ‘below’. Four categories that described this understanding were
(a) God and the world, (b) grace and nature, (c) supernatural and natural, (d)
transcendence and immanence. Between these two layers a clear distinction
held. In the basic mechanics of this system, God’s grace proceeded downward
at his discretion, through the channels of the Roman Catholic Church.
This understanding came about largely because Thomas de Vio Cardinal
Cajetan (1469–1534) read two possible ends into Thomas Aquinas’ use of an
Aristotelian telos, so that God was not compelled to grace creation, nor did
human nature have a natural desire for God. By imposing Aristotle’s ontology
of substance onto Aquinas, Cajetan split nature and grace in two. Such the-
ology effectively divorced the transcendent from everyday life. As a result, a
very specific, vertical model of transcendence emerged for Catholicism in the
20th century and established a very specific imaginary, one that ruled the
Catholic vision of reality. The diction of papal documents describing super-
addition, condescension, the elevation of the human by God, and the
metaphors of distinction—above/below, ascent/descent, heaven/earth—
showcase the division between nature and grace, and the denigration of
nature or the human.
The dominance of this model came to the forefront in Joyce’s time during
the Catholic modernist crisis, when a number of Catholic theologians, notably
Alfred Loisy (1857–1940), Maurice Blondel (1861–1949), Baron Friedrich von
Hügel (1852–1925), and George Tyrrell (1861–1909) unsettled the division
between nature and grace. Their turn to pastoral and theological methods that
6 of 19 JACK DUDLEY
emphasised the experience of the individual and the organic reality of grace
in everyday life challenged the divide. In Les exigences philosophiques de chré-
tienité [The Philosophical Exigencies of Christianity], Blondel explicitly ex-
pressed the problem: ‘It is not enough to show their opposition to each
other [nature and grace]; we must bring them together, in eodem
dramate. . . . Between the two gifts a dynamic unity exists, and an intelligible
relationship.’19

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Condemning such sensibilities, Pius X’s anti-modernist encyclical, Pascendi
dominici gregis (1907), preserved the distinction between nature and grace,
rejecting any notion that humanity possessed a natural desire for grace. Pius
described the ‘Modernist’ understanding of nature and grace as ‘immanence’,
which, he argued, ‘would destroy the supernatural order’.20 With their doc-
trine of ‘immanence’, the ‘Modernists’, the pope claimed, asserted the ‘error’
that ‘there is in human nature a true and rigorous need for the supernatural
order’.21 He ultimately declared, ‘the Modernists, losing all sense of control,
go so far as to proclaim as true and legitimate whatever is explained by life’.22
Though the controversy has been little represented in literary studies of mod-
ernism, it was widely known and debated in Europe at the time, and Joyce
doubtlessly knew of it.
Joyce’s epiphany deployed just such an immanent model of transcendence,
rejecting orthodox Catholic theology but reimagining its categories and
values. His aesthetic form conveyed ‘spiritual’ transcendence, manifesting
divinity and grace in everyday life. Joyce’s epiphanies are just such ‘sudden
spiritual manifestations’, ‘the most delicate and evanescent of moments’,
which punctuate the mundane.23 As his stories in Dubliners demonstrate,
such moments may be non-redemptive or ironic. They do not necessarily
preserve the traditional Christian deity nor much of the traditional content of
Irish Roman Catholicism. They retain instead its form of fashioning meaning
and significance, of giving shape to human activity to produce what he calls
‘spiritual uplift’. Epiphany, then, presented a new conception of modernist
meaning drawn from and powered by religious sources, a concept of meaning
that remarkably anticipates the postmodern turn to ‘the event’.
---
Seeing Joyce’s epiphany as a transcendent event indeed aligns him with
today’s renewed interest in adapting structures of religious experience for
political ends. Badiou and Žižek have introduced a concept of the event
that extracts from the experience of the Christian evangelist St Paul a truth
procedure to militate against capitalism and neo-liberalism. For Badiou and
Žižek, the religiously structured ‘Event’ aligns in significant ways with Joyce’s
religiously structured epiphany. This alignment suggests affinities across the
20th century that show a continued recourse to religious resources for political
efficacy, aesthetic production, and the formation of meaning.
 WHAT THE THUNDER SAID 7 of 19
In Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme (1997), Badiou seeks ‘to refound
[re-fonder] a theory of the Subject’, where that Subject is founded by an
‘event’.24 As the structure for that event, he proposes Christian experience,
though Badiou has ‘never really connected [raccordé]’ St Paul ‘with religion’
and calls the founding event of Christianity (in Badiou’s opinion, the resur-
rection), a ‘fable’. He seeks instead a ‘pure secularity, here and now’, or a
‘materialism of grace’.25 ‘Everything hinges’, insists Badiou, ‘on knowing

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whether an ordinary existence, breaking with time’s cruel routine, encounters
the material chance of serving a truth, thereby becoming . . . an immortal’.26
The Event breaks the monotony of citizens in contemporary capitalism,
where time is experienced as an uninterrupted bland sequence. By rupturing
ordinary ontology, the Event establishes new truth for the subject who per-
ceives or undergoes it. As a result, the subject must ‘invent a new way of being
and acting’.27
Badiou’s truth procedure cores out the ‘fable’ from Christian experience,
but isolates the structure it inspires. Thus, a mechanism for making meaning is
affirmed independent of its source, so that the meaning produced maintains
for Badiou the full extent of its force. On the level of structure, most critics
noted the rather obvious problem of extolling a figure while divesting his
message of its content. After all, Badiou adopts the structure produced by an
event while disavowing the objective reality of the event itself. Paul himself
rather forcefully declares, ‘if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is
in vain and your faith is in vain’.28 Moreover, Badiou’s Event is not given
truth by the subject who experiences it, but the content of the Event itself
‘founds the singularity of the subject’ in a new real that is itself the Event,
beyond a ‘teaching’, ‘tradition’, or ‘bequest’.29 Subjectivity, then, is
‘constituted by evental grace’, in a ‘becoming rather than a state’.30 This
becoming is fidelity to the Event, with a grace that ‘is pure and simple
encounter [rencontre]’, one that comes ‘without being due’ to the subject.31
From this structure, Badiou extrapolates a ‘wholly secularized conception of
grace’.32
Thus, for Badiou, ‘all the parameters of the doctrine of the event are . . . laid
out in Christianity’, but must be secularised.33 While he claims to disavow
divine transcendence, Badiou’s ontology aligns directly with the Christian
incarnation and theological conceptions of time when he posits that the in-
finite enters into the finite to produce a type of transcendence, though one
unmoored from the supernatural. Joyce deploys this same conception of time
in the idea of epiphany, built from apparently contingent alignments in the
material of everyday life. The eye of a given character—Badiou would say
subject—correctly perceives their alignment in the span of a moment to
behold ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation’.34 Joyce’s reconception of religious
time through the epiphany is essentially Badiou’s idea of the event, avant
8 of 19 JACK DUDLEY
la lettre. Badiou is, in other words, renaming a long held religious temporality
and concept of self, while attempting to secularise it.
The three taken-to-be secular structures, those of Joyce, Badiou, and Žižek,
produce descriptions laden with religious language. Answering the question,
‘what is the Absolute?’ Žižek concludes that it is ‘in fleeting experiences’.35
‘[I]n such miraculous but extremely fragile moments, another dimension tran-
spires through our reality’.36 This experience is ‘easily corroded’ and evanes-

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cent, and ‘must be handled as carefully as a butterfly’.37 Žižek’s understanding
shares a delicate quality with Badiou’s Truth, which is ‘so precarious’.38 This
Truth must be cared for with ‘delicacy and subtle thought’.39 For the two,
Truth and the Absolute occur in momentary, fragile bursts, overwhelming the
subjectivity of the herald or perceiver. These descriptions unconsciously echo
Joyce’s conception nearly a century earlier, where sudden and momentary
epiphanies must be guarded ‘with extreme care, seeing that they themselves
are the most delicate and evanescent of moments’.40 The moment, for all
three, seems typically modernist in how it conceives the transformative instant.
Yet, that conception is deeply indebted to religious ideas of time and being.41
From Joyce to Badiou and Žižek, there has been a consistent attempt to
secularise meaning-making procedures based on religious structures of experi-
ence. In this framework, divinity or the supernatural interrupts the mundane
world, creating transformative events. Like Joyce, neither Badiou nor Žižek
cares for formal religion. Yet by adopting ways of making meaning powered
by religious experience, all three propose religion-by-other-means. The
epiphany and the Event are both religiously structured, explicitly drawn
from Christian mythology, the Magi for Joyce, the Pauline Conversion for
Badiou and Žižek. They use a religious notion of time where significant
moments radically redefine the subjects who experience them. They use re-
ligious ontology, where a transcendent Other interrupts the ordinary material
world. As a result, the power and pull, political or aesthetic, of their art and
theory produces religious experience, what we can technically and correctly
call the transcendent, set to modernity’s emphasis on the momentary and
ephemeral. But, Badiou and Žižek have not returned to a forgotten
Christian idea. They present a form of religious experience that has consist-
ently appeared across the century, from Joyce’s modernism to the present. The
structures that fashion the epiphany in Joyce’s fictional forms drew their lit-
erary force from religiously inflected ideas of time and events that resonate
today. It is to those forms that I now turn.
---
Most critics agree that the ‘Bird-Girl Epiphany’, the concluding scene of
chapter four of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, culminates the
novel, fulfilling Stephen’s nascent sense of artistic maturity. The scene is com-
monly read as a rejection of the priesthood, as the emergence instead of the
 WHAT THE THUNDER SAID 9 of 19
secular artist. But this celebrated encounter is still a type of religious experi-
ence, an Event in the Badiouian sense that redefines Stephen’s identity. Even
as he turns his back on orthodoxy, Stephen retains and refashions meaning-
making structures from Irish Catholicism. In this scene, the individual is not
the autonomous self of the modernist, but a vehicle for something larger than
himself. This larger spiritual experience is not timeless and controlled by the
Catholic church, but shifted to the scene of everyday life. So mundane is its

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inspiration that Hugh Kenner notes cigarette packages came with such images
in Joyce’s day.42
The final few pages of chapter IV emphasise Stephen’s rejection of the
priesthood: ‘He had refused. Why?’43 The narrator does not give a clear
answer, but proceeds into the final aesthetic vision, the so-called ‘Bird-Girl’
or ‘Wading Girl’ on the beach. Stephen walks along a bridge. From the
opposing direction, a ‘squad of christian brothers’ is returning.44 The move-
ment stages his rejection of religious life for the symbol of bodily life on the
beach. The final sequence will be typically Joycean: a mixture of sources and
voices. Formally, Stephen’s Romantic lyrical imagery—‘—A day of dappled
seaborne clouds’—mixes with ironic comedic relief—the bantering bathing
boys. Thematically, the passage melds Catholic, Greek, Modernist and
Romantic.45 At the sight of the Bird-Girl above the strand, the narrative
voice wonders:

What did it mean? Was it a quant device opening a page of some medieval book
of prophecies and symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a
prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through
the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his
workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable
imperishable being?46

‘[M]edieval book of prophecies and symbols’ (Christian), ‘hawklike man’

(Greek), ‘forging artist’ (Modernist/Romantic), these three sources make up
the final vision’s raw material. But only the language of religious experience
transports Stephen in something like the Badiouian Event: ‘His heart
trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as
though he were soaring sunward.’47 The passage repeats this same language,
‘wild spirit’, ‘trembling heart’, ‘ecstasy of fear’, ‘soul in flight’, ‘beyond
the world’, ‘delivered of incertitude’, ‘made radiant’, ‘purified body’. Each
description typically characterises Catholic religious experience, from the
Revelation of John in Christian Scripture, to traditions of Christian mysticism.
For Joyce, in the epiphany, ‘The soul of the commonest object, the struc-
ture of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant’.48 In this scene, that instant
achieves a transformation in Stephen. Seeing the girl, he feels a ‘call to life to
10 of 19 JACK DUDLEY
his soul’, one that rejects the ‘dull gross voice of the world of duties and
despair’ as well as ‘the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service
of the altar’.49 Instead, ‘An instant of wild flight had delivered him’.50 The
artistic vision is then repeated in imagery of resurrection and a prevision of
Ulysses’s final affirmation: ‘His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood,
spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the
freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a

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living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.’51
Unable to contain this new drive, Stephen seeks a path, a place to wander
before nightfall, but ‘Where?’52 Indicating a source beyond himself, Stephen’s
gaze seems immediately directed, ‘northward towards Howth’.53 As the nar-
rator proceeds through paragraphs of Byronic and lyrical description, the
phrase ‘new life’, ‘wild life’ repeats. Puzzled at this, Kenner wonders, ‘What
‘‘life’’ connotes it skills not to ask; the word recurs and recurs’.54 In Joyce’s
religious context, these statements place the experience of life as the source of
Stephen’s ecstasy, described in religious language, channelled for aesthetic
effect. Recall that papal language at the time decried religious feeling drawn
solely from the personal experience of life. That is the life Stephen describes
here. He previously spoke of the contrasting religious life, ‘Another life! A life
of grace and virtue and happiness’, which is now rejected.55 While the phrase
‘life’ confirms modernity’s move to the individual and rejection of traditional
sources of authority, such as the monarchy or Church, for Joyce it maintains
a religiously inflected understanding that the material world can produce
spiritual transcendence.
Critics recognise the mixture of sacred and profane in the Bird-Girl scene,
but secularise it.56 Rather than a secular synthesis, the scene is best understood
as a type of religious or spiritual experience, seen through the theology of
Joyce’s Catholic context.57 The girl seems to Stephen ‘a darkplumaged dove’,
a complicated reference to a darkened Holy Spirit.58 She feels ‘the worship of
[Stephen’s] eyes’, and his soul famously declares ‘—Heavenly God!’ in ‘an
outburst of profane joy’.59 After this outburst, Stephen ‘suddenly’ turns away,
his ‘cheeks . . . aflame’, body . . . aglow’.60 The image of the girl ‘had passed
into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy’.61
This experience of a ‘wild angel’ turns to visions of ‘life’—repeated four times
in this passage alone. It moves his ‘soul . . . into some new world, fantastic,
dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings’.62 The
passage alludes to the Virgin Mary, Celtic goddesses, and secular language.
But the scene does more than juxtapose secular and religious.
Joyce instead enacts this synthesis to indicate that aesthetic experience is a
transcendent one, fashioned through religious structures, ones that transform
the subject as in the Badiouian Event. Transcendence is not controlled by the
Catholic Church, nor is it rejected for strict secular materialism. It is instead
 WHAT THE THUNDER SAID 11 of 19
experienced in the everyday of the physical world. As Joyce wrote in his essay
on Bruno, that world is ‘the opportunity for spiritual activity’.63 Hence
Stephen’s final lines of chapter V, ‘I go to encounter for the millionth time
the reality of experience’.64 ‘Experience’ is the source of a unified aesthetic
vision fashioned to achieve transcendence. The plane of that experience, the
material world, arranges to radiate significance, which can give forth spiritual
meaning to the one who sees it align in the epiphany.

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In his 1940 essay, ‘Inside the Whale’, George Orwell tendentiously remarks
of Joyce’s Ulysses, ‘Here is life without God’.65 By widespread consensus,
Ulysses is one of the central secular statements of modernism. Yet, the novel
continues on from Portrait to deploy a religiously informed sense of time and
meaning, one fashioned around a new mode of transcendence experienced in
the everyday of Dublin life. In ‘Nestor’, for example, Stephen, a ‘horrible
example of freethought’ (condemned by Pius X), ambivalently champions an
idea of God as present in the mundane. After completing his duties as a
substitute teacher, Stephen is summoned to the headmaster’s, Mr. Garrett
Deasy’s, office for payment, and a lecture. His interlocutor, an aged anti-
Semite, advocates a distant theology.66 Deasy presents a ‘mechanical heaven’,
like the ‘inhuman voice’ that called from the altar to the Stephen of Portrait.
For Deasy, God is above and outside creation: ‘The ways of the Creator are
not out ways, Mr Deasy said.’67 This theology reaches its height in his teleo-
logical view: ‘All human history moves toward one great goal, the manifest-
ation of God,’ what Richard Lehan calls ‘Christian Hegelianism’.68 In
response, Stephen offers a radical notion of God present in the mundane
and the everyday:

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

—That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
—What? Mr Deasy asked.
—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.69

Between the supernatural God and the natural human, Stephen gestures
toward to a new sense of transcendent presence in the everyday, with a
strong identity at the level of grammar: ‘That is God.’ In Trinitarian fashion,
three shouts stand for one God in the street. Instead of Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit: the Hooray! the Ay! and the Whrrwhee! The ‘inhuman voice’ from
Portrait becomes a human voice in Ulysses.70 This position, God present in the
everyday, violates Pius IX’s first condemned proposition in the famous
Syllabus Errorum, a catalog of modern ‘errors’: ‘In effect, God is produced in
man and the world and all things are God, and have the very substance of
God. God is, therefore, one and the same with the world.’71 That rejected
12 of 19 JACK DUDLEY
model of transcendence is staged in Dublin’s streets. Stuck in his idea of a
distant, impersonal God, Mr Deasy does not understand, and replies, ‘What?’
Michael Seidel observes that ‘Hooray! Ay! Whyrrwhee!’ has no 2/em marks
before it, which Joyce usually uses to indicate dialogue. Perhaps Stephen has
imagined these sounds, and is, it seems, thinking in Trinitarian threes.72
Street shouts are central to Ulysses, perhaps the quintessential example of the
modernist fascination with the city, and they return in Episode 14, ‘Oxen of

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the Sun’ with a new type of transcendence. ‘Oxen’ famously recapitulates the
development of the English language. But this recapitulation also refigures the
Logos, the Word made flesh. While critics examine the episode’s concern with
linguistics, gender, and nationality, scant attention has been paid to its religious
matters: ‘God is invoked’, Ellmann writes, ‘generally to be blasphemed, in
almost every paragraph’.73 God may be blasphemed, but the religious com-
plexity of the episode invites greater analysis.
The episode opens by referencing Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary a few
lines in, and Mrs Purefoy—Pure Foi or ‘pure faith’—delivering her child, ‘in
throes now full three days’.74 Like the general trinity of Ulysses, that between
Stephen, Bloom, and Molly, episodes like ‘Oxen of the Sun’ repeat threes.
Richard Begam observes a similar structure to Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).
He suggests that ‘the waste land allegory in ‘‘Oxen’’ is developed according to
a logic that is emphatically Catholic: from the episode’s use of Trinitarianism,
to the talking in tongues, the Pentecostal imagery, and finally the birth of the
Word’.75 Indeed, in answer to the debate about saving the life of the mother
in childbirth, Dixon agrees with Stephen—that the mother should be saved—
and significantly answers, ‘That is truth, pardy, said Dixon, and, or I err,
a pregnant word’.76 The chapter’s characteristics in the Gilbert schema
convey the dominant theme of motherhood and delivery: the ‘organ’ is
‘womb’, the symbol ‘mother’, and the technic ‘embryonic development’,
applied to the evolution of the English language as the embryo. But, in
typically Joycean punning, ‘pregnant word’ is more than linguistic maturation.
It is also ‘pregnant with the Word’, though the Virgin Mary will here be
usurped by the artist Stephen, who is pregnant with the Word of artistic
creation.
The debate is drawn out a few lines later when the narrative voice declares,
‘In woman’s womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh
that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away’.77 The artist makes all
material that passes before him into something eternal, aligning with the logic
of the incarnation or the ‘word made flesh’. As in Portrait, however, the
opposition throughout the episode is not simply secular artist claiming the
structure of religious orthodoxy, but a more complex presentation of tran-
scendence. The ‘Catholic logic’ Begam astutely identifies has been deployed,
but also transformed in a new understanding of nature and grace. Divine
 WHAT THE THUNDER SAID 13 of 19
transcendence is not eclipsed by secular artistry. That artistry requires
reworked transcendence to achieve artistic vision.
Suddenly, thunder sounds behind Stephen, a ‘black crack of noise in the
street’.78 Shocked, he ‘waxed wan’ with fear that ‘Thor’ or ‘the god self’ had
raged against his ‘hellprate and paganry’.79 Despite the atheist Bloom’s con-
solation, ‘it was no other thing but a hubbub noise’, the narrative voice states
that Stephen could not help but hear ‘the god Bringforth’, ‘unless he had

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plugged him up the tube of Understanding (which he had not done)’.80 More
than unnerve, the rumbling will unite Stephen with the Word, when
he declares what bar they will next despoil: ‘with the reverberation of the
thunder the cloudburst pours its torrent, so and not otherwise was the trans-
formation, violent and instantaneous, upon the utterance of the Word’.81 The
divine thunder that previously made Stephen quail now describes his Word,
and that Word is ‘Burke’s!’ Just as the voice of God or thunder rumbles when
Jesus speaks in the Gospel of John—where, like Bloom, bystanders claim that
the voice is only natural thunder—so too does Stephen’s word cut with the
‘reverberation of the thunder’.82 The ‘lord Stephen, giving the cry’, showcases
a kind of mundane transcendence, where the Divine Word is on the level of
the everyday, ordinary bar names, evening activities. As Ellmann observes,
Stephen ‘issues as a figure of speech for the work of art, a work of art
anthropomorphosed’, the ‘issuing word is at once God’s word (Christ) and
the artist’s word (a work of art)’.83 But this rightly observed identity partici-
pates in the larger religious framework I have identified as powering Joyce’s
aesthetic.
Stephen, the thundering Word, moves outside, as a mixture of divine and
human ‘shouts in the street’ culminate his earlier gesture toward God in
‘Nestor’. As the Word pushes all forth from the maternity ward, Joyce presents
the outside air in terms that set transcendence in the material scene: ‘The air
without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistening
on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum. God’s air, the Allfather’s air,
scintilliant circumambient cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee.’84 The epi-
sode’s concluding shouts are everywhere in ‘God’s air’, ‘buster, armstrong,
hollering down the street’, as the party bursts out of the maternity ward like
the baby born.85 One of the last shouts claims, ‘the Deity ain’t no nickel and
dime bumshow’.86 In the new transcendence, he really isn’t. ‘Bumshows’
intrigued people by claiming that they would show more skin than they
were finally willing to reveal, but God, as the Word in the street, reveals all
and is everywhere in a divine and human stream of street shouts.87
---
Joyce’s reworked transcendence in the aesthetic structure of the epiphany, a
precursor to the Badiouian Event, shows that he was much more interested in
religious experience and the human sense of transcendence than many critics
14 of 19 JACK DUDLEY
have allowed. From Stephen’s astonishment at the beauty of the wading girl,
to Bloom’s ‘wonderstruck’ moment with the ghost of his son Rudy in
Ulysses, Joyce reworked the deep structures of his religious inheritance to
explore what he called the ‘spiritual’ movements of the human condition.
To craft this spiritual dimension, Joyce took the meaning-making power of
the epiphany from Catholic tradition but conditioned it to modernism’s
characteristic turn away from centralised authority, shifting value to the

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individual and the mundane. In epiphany, he found a way to preserve
the transcendent absent the trappings of the Irish Catholicism he so vehe-
mently rejected.
By rhyming the here-and-now with the eternal in a new mode of tran-
scendence, Ulysses functions as a synthetic novel—one that attempts to
achieve atonement between Stephen and Bloom, between Son and
Father. There have long been two dominant readings of Ulysses, transcend-
ent, in Richard Ellmann’s view, and ironic, that of Hugh Kenner. As
Kenner argues, ‘That everything dovetails in Ulysses doesn’t constitute its
consonantia, nor confer its integritas; that everything dovetails is an ingredient
in its irony. Ulysses is an epiphany of the self-contained, explicable world of
mechanism; and it is a prison and an inferno.’88 Yet, as I have shown,
Joyce’s aesthetic cared for consonantia and integritas, for connection and
aligned radiance. The sources of the epiphany conditioned that aesthetic
to reject simple mechanism. In his essay on Bruno, Joyce also rejected
models of the world as ‘a prison’, be they the imprisonment he saw in
Neoplatonist or Christian views.89 Ulysses is, without question, ironic, but
that irony is finally absorbed by the impulse toward transcendence. The
latter indeed includes the former but finally sublates it to a greater coher-
ence, one marked by the union of Molly’s ‘Yes’ with Mary’s fiat to God. In
this sense, it is a truly trans-secular novel in the same sense that both Badiou
and Žižek are trans-secular. The materialist ground is intact, indeed, in a
democratising gesture is given pride of place; but it is precisely this ground
that ultimately leads to the infinite, the transcendent. As Joyce wrote ap-
provingly of Bruno, that material world is ‘the opportunity for spiritual
activity’.90 That spiritual activity need not be sententious, and Joyce fre-
quently cloaks it in comedy or conveys it through scandalous means
and images. Irony, comedy, and scandal need not suggest a rejection of
religious value. Instead, Joyce reclaims them as part of a complex material
and literary world capable of producing spiritual value. In doing so, Joyce’s
works offer all the opportunity, in literary form, to perceive in material
moments the eternal break into the everyday. Like the flash of lightning
and its roaring wake, the ordinary fabric of reality is burst asunder by the
extraordinary in the instant of epiphany. That is, in Joyce’s terms, what the
thunder said.
 WHAT THE THUNDER SAID 15 of 19
REFERENCES

1
R. Ellmann, ‘Prologue: Two Perspectives believer, with an openness to possibilities
on Joyce’ in Heyward Ehrlich (ed.) Light of redirection’. See R. Gottfried, Joyce’s
Rays: James Joyce and Modernism (New Misbelief (Gainesville: University of
York: New Horizon Publishing, 1984), Florida Press, 2008), p. 5. In his ground-
p. 2. For Stanislaus Joyce’s description breaking Religious Experience and the

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of his brother’s fear of storms, see S. Modernist Novel (2010), Lewis too has
Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s noted of Ulysses, ‘this eminently
Early Years, ed. Richard Ellmann (New modern novel, presumably the secular
York: Da Capo, 2003), pp. 18–9. project of a secular age, is peculiarly
2
Early Joyce criticism from L.A.G. God-haunted’. See P. Lewis, Religious
Strong—who called Ulysses ‘a great Experience and the Modernist Novel
Catholic novel’—through to Hugh (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Kenner, Kevin Sullivan, Robert Boyle, Press, 2010), p. 197. Examining the fig-
William T. Noon, and J. Mitchell ural and typological strategies Joyce em-
Morse examined the Catholic context ployed, Lewis shows that the novel and
at work in Joyce. See L. Strong, ‘James its writer indeed pursued ‘the discovery
Joyce and the New Fiction’, (1935) in of meaning’ by ‘not merely the rejection
Robert Deming (ed.) James Joyce: The of the old theological framework but its
Critical Heritage, vol. 2 (London: reincorporation into a new system’
Routledge, 1970), pp. 636–39. A later (p. 180). ‘In place of the mass’, Lewis
wave of Joyce criticism explored concludes, ‘Joyce followed a sacramental
Catholicism alongside Irish Nationalism, conception of art’ (p. 179). See also P.
medieval theology, messianism, psycho- Lewis, ‘Churchgoing in the Modern
analysis, and postcolonialism, seen in the Novel’, Modernism/modernity 11 (2004):
work of Sheldon Brivic, Frederick K. pp. 669–94.
3
Lang, Frank Moliterno, Frances L. C. Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge:
Restuccia, Theoharis Constantine Belknap Press of Harvard University
Theoharis, Gareth Jospeh Downes, Press, 2007), p. 38.
4
Mary Reynolds, Beryl Schlossmann, For attempts to construct meaning absent
Colleen Jaurretche, Gian Balsamo, religion, see W.E. Connolly, ‘Belief,
Louise Bentley, and Douglas Kanter. Spirituality, and Time’, in M. Warner,
Virginia Mosely and Ira Nadel have J. VanAntwerpen, and C. Calhoun (eds)
examined the role of Judaism in Joyce’s Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age
works. Several recent studies of Joyce, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
especially Downes, Kanter, Roy 2010), pp. 126–44 and H. Dreyfus and
Gottfried, Mary Lowe-Evans, Pericles S. D. Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading
Lewis, and Geert Lernout, have begun the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a
to investigate the cultural and historical Secular Age (New York: Simon and
conditions of religion, with a focus Schuster, 2011).
5
on Irish Catholicism specifically. As The secular imagines a world that in its
Gottfried insightfully observes, Joyce’s physical operation and day-to-day life is,
‘misbelief’ was ‘looking always at unitary in Max Weber’s famous term, ‘disen-
belief from afar and defining itself by that chanted’. See M. Weber, ‘Science as a
distance’ in ‘a sort of chosen exile’, to the Vocation’ in Hans Gerth and C. Wright
end of challenging ‘the ‘‘narrow’’ view of Mills (eds) From Max Weber: Essays in
religion, the only definition of the Sociology (New York: Routledge, 1991),
16 of 19 JACK DUDLEY
p. 155. This is a closed, immanent order Triangles’ in Navigations: Collected Irish
sufficient in itself for human fullness. Essays, 1976-2006 (Dublin: The Lilliput
Joyce scholarship has by and large Press, 2006), pp. 131–47.
10
assumed this model. Yet, in reconsidering D. Weir, ‘Epiphanoumenon’, James Joyce
religion in Joyce, I am not interested in Quarterly 31 (1994) 56; J.C.C. Mays,
arguing that he was a crypto-Catholic, Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics (New
nor that he was a believer, or an atheist, York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); R.A.
nor that his fictions are somehow essen- Day, ‘Dante, Ibsen, Joyce, Epiphanies,

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tially Catholic, or fundamentally materi- and the Art of Memory’, James Joyce
alist. I do not intend to ‘claim’ Badiou or Quarterly 25 (1988) 357. Franco Moretti
Žižek either. I am, however, interested has also asserted that Joyce originally in-
in moving past the binary between tended epiphany to be revealed by the
such positions by arguing that in his ‘in-significant’ in Stephen Hero, that he
fictions Joyce explored spiritual experi- then modified it to the ‘ ‘‘deeply deep’’
ence open to the possibility of real epiphanies’ of Portrait, but returned to
transcendence. the idea of ‘meaningless’ in Ulysses. See
6
Harry Levin, who edited the manuscript F. Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-
for Stephen Hero, discovered the concept System from Goethe to Garcı́a Márquez
in that writing. See H. Levin, James Joyce: (New York: Verso, 1996), p. 163, n.
A Critical Introduction (New York: New 61. In an excellent study of epiphany
Directions, 1941). The best short guide and spirituality in the modern novel,
to the epiphanies is David Hayman’s art- Sharon Kim still repeats the secularized
icle, ‘The Purpose and Permanence of reading of Joyce’s concept of epiphany:
the Joycean Epiphany’, James Joyce she asserts that Stephen ‘rejects any
Quarterly 35–6 (1998) 633–55. supernatural dimension’ to the event (p.
7
These early ‘Epiphanies’ were recorded in 1), that the ‘Joycean epiphany is expressly
notebooks or on scraps of paper and range non-supernatural and post-Christian’
from snippets of dialogue that struck Joyce, (p. 3), and that ‘Joyce extracts Aquinas’s
to his reactions to French novels, to dreams theory of beauty from its theological ma-
and short descriptions. See J. Joyce, trix’ (p. 34). For Kim, the ‘spiritual’ in
‘Epiphanies’ in Robert Scholes and Stephen’s terms seems to mean ‘pro-
Richard M. Kain (eds) The Workshop of foundly true’ and formative of his iden-
Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials tity as an artist—and key to Joyce’s
for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young method of forming literary characters—
Man (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern rather than traced by religious meaning
University Press, 1965), pp. 11–51. (p. 3). She asserts that ‘because ‘‘spiritual’’
8
J. Joyce, Stephen Hero, eds. John has a mystical tag, critics have mistaken
J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (New Joyce’s concept as something mystical,
York: New Directions, 1963), p. 211. religious, or moral, when it expressly
9
Richard Kearney, however, makes an denies each of those vectors’ (p. 6). Yet
interesting middle-ground argument that Joyce does not ‘expressly deny’ these
while ‘Ulysses is the mature Joyce trans- vectors in connection with the term
lating his—and Stephens’s—youthful ‘spiritual’ and, as I will show, his idea
notion of epiphany into a post- of the ‘spiritual’ developed in close and
Romantic literary praxis’, Ulysses none- complex connection with mystical, reli-
theless functions as the ‘performance of gious, and moral meaning. See S. Kim,
epiphany in the text itself’, what Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850-1950:
he terms ‘epiphany 2’ (146). See Constellations of the Soul (New York:
R. Kearney, ‘Joyce III: Epiphanies and Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).
 WHAT THE THUNDER SAID 17 of 19
11
R. Scholes, ‘Joyce and the Epiphany: Pius X (Westminster: Newman Press,
The Key to the Labyrinth?’, The 1954), §19.
21
Sewanee Review 72 (1964) 69. Emphasis Ibid., §37.
22
in the original. Ibid., §36.
12 23
S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, pp. 103–4. J. Joyce, Stephen Hero, p. 211.
13 24
J. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a A. Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of
Young Man (New York: Penguin, Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier, Cultural
2000), p. 221. Memory in the Present (California:

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14
Drawing on deconstructive thought, Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 4–6.
25
Kearney has called Joyce’s epiphany Ibid., pp. 5, 66, 81.
26
‘anatheism’, a belief that ‘marks not clos- Ibid., p. 66.
27
ure but a new overture, not some tota- A. Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on
lizing synthesis but a sounding of new the Understanding of Evil, trans.
possibilities of incarnation, not some Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001),
grand finale of triumphalist dogma but p. 42.
28
a deeper attention to the call of the 1 Corinthians 15:14. Ironically, in Did
stranger in the ‘‘cries of the street’’ ’, Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (2001),
where Molly’s ‘yes’ is to ‘secular-sacred Žižek summarized this same problem
existence’ (p. 104). Kearney correctly nicely, and critiqued what he saw as its
identifies Stephen’s ambivalent stance be- diminishment of the radical paradox of
tween theism and atheism, but Stephen’s the ‘authentic Christian legacy’ (The
position, and the transcendent concerns Fragile Absolute 2000): ‘post-secular
of Ulysses, may be more accurately deconstruction gives us this [Christian]
described in the theological terms and matrix itself, deprived of the positive
context of Joyce’s work, which indeed figure of God that sustains it’ (153).
actually anticipates much postmodern Denials to the contrary, this procedure
theory on the subject. See R. Kearney, is repeated by Žižek and Badiou in
Anatheism: Returning to God after God their construction of the Event, which
(New York: Columbia University Press, removes the core of the Christian experi-
2011), pp. 103–4. ence, but retains its structures of
15
J. Joyce, ‘The Bruno Philosophy’ in meaning.
29
Kevin Barry (ed.) Occasional, Critical, and A. Badiou, Saint Paul, pp. 53, 60.
30
Political Writings, by James Joyce (Oxford: Ibid., p. 63.
31
Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. Ibid., pp. 66, 77.
32
93–94. Ibid., p. 66.
16 33
Ibid., 94. A. Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver
17
S. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, p. 104. Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2006),
18
‘Transcendence, n.’ OED Online, p. 108.
34
December 2011, Oxford University J. Joyce, Stephen Hero, p. 211.
35
Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry S. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is
/204607?redirectedFrom=transcendence the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
(accessed 25 January 2012). (London: Verso, 2001), p. 128.
19 36
Quoted in R.R. Reno, The Ordinary Ibid.
37
Transformed: Karl Rahner and the Ibid.
38
Christian Vision of Transcendence A. Badiou, St. Paul, p. 54.
39
(Michigan: Eerdmens, 1995), p. 104. Ibid.
20 40
Pius X, Pascendi dominici gregis in Vincent J. Joyce, Stephen Hero, p. 211.
41
A. Yzermans (ed.) All Things in Christ: Born well before modernism’s moment,
Encyclicals and Selected Documents of Saint this structure has long obtained in
18 of 19 JACK DUDLEY
49
theology and literature as kairos, or divine J. Joyce, Portrait, p. 169.
50
time, and chronos, ordinary or secular Ibid.
51
time. Paul uses the distinction in the Ibid., p. 170.
52
Letter to Titus 1:2-3: ‘God, who does Ibid.
53
not lie, promised before time [r0non Ibid.
54
chronōn] began, who indeed at the H. Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (New York:
7
proper time [kairo|& kairois] revealed Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 132.
55
his word in the proclamation.’ A J. Joyce, Portrait, p. 158.

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56
famous biblical instance, Mark 1:15, Lernout most recently suggests that
mentions ‘the fullness of time’. The ‘when [Stephen] sees the bird-girl . . . he
term has been deployed in theology discovers a new kind of secular ecstasy’.
since, from Origen (184/5–253/4) in See G. Lernout, Unbelief, p. 135.
57
Contra Celsus through to Paul Tillich. Ellmann notes that the Virgin Mary is
For each, the eternal’s movement into mixed with the ‘more tangible reality’
the present moment gives shape and of the wading girl (298). See R.
meaning to history. Frank Kermode Ellmann, James Joyce, 2nd edn. (Oxford:
notes the significance of this conception Oxford University Press, 1982). For the
of time for theology and literature, but ‘synthesis view’, see also William York
perhaps missed its real role in Joyce’s Tindall, The Literary Symbol (New
work. Kermode proposes kairos, a ‘sig- York: Columbia University Press,
nificant season’, as the meaningful time 1955), p. 80 and Erwin R. Steinberg,
between beginning and end, the ‘tick- ‘The Bird-Girl in A Portrait as
tock’ time of ‘simple chronicity’ (p. 46). Synthesis: The Sacred Assimilated to
See F. Kermode, The Sense of An Ending the Profane’, James Joyce Quarterly 17
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). (1980) 149–63.
58
Kearney more accurately reads this idea J. Joyce, Portrait, p. 171.
59
of time in Joyce when what he sees as Ibid. Jeri Johnson objects that Stephen’s
Molly’s messianic epiphany marks ‘a ‘poetic creation’ ‘insistently overwrites’
transfiguring of an ordinary moment an ‘actual woman’ with ‘aesthetic fantasy’
of secular profane time (chronos) into (209). Yet, this position misunderstands
sacred or eschatological time (kairos)’ the dynamics of the epiphany, which is
(p. 192). See R. Kearney, ‘Sacramental not a subjective imposition on an object,
Imagination: Eucharists of the Ordinary but the object showing forth its radiant
Universe in the Works of Joyce, Proust, form. This is not to ignore the gender
and Woolf’ in Holly Faith Nelson et al. politics of the scene, but simply to
(eds) Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the point out that they miss Joyce’s point.
Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Throughout the scene, Stephen’s visceral
Theory (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier experiences move from without, rather
University Press, 2010), pp. 183–222. than simply emerge egotistically from
42
H. Kenner, introduction to A Portrait of his consciousness. See J. Johnson, ‘Joyce
the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce and Feminism’ in Derek Attridge (ed.)
(New York: Signet, 1991), p. 16. The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce
43
J. Joyce, Portrait, p. 165. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
44
Ibid., p. 165. Press, 2004), pp. 196–212.
45 60
Ibid., p. 166. J. Joyce, Portrait, p. 172.
46 61
Ibid., p. 169. Ibid.
47 62
Ibid. Ibid.
48 63
J. Joyce, Stephen Hero, p. 213. Emphasis J. Joyce, ‘The Bruno Philosophy’, p. 94.
64
mine. J. Joyce, Portrait, p. 253.
 WHAT THE THUNDER SAID 19 of 19
65 72
G. Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, in A M. Seidel, James Joyce: A Short Introduction
Collection of Essays (Florida: Houghton (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), p. 93.
73
Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 1981), p. 228. R. Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (Oxford:
66
J. Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 108.
74
et al. (New York: Random House, J. Joyce, Ulysses, 14.114.
75
1986), 1.625–626. All references to R. Begam, ‘Joyce’s Trojan Horse: Ulysses
Ulysses are by episode and line number. and the Aesthetics of Decolonization’ in
67
Ibid., 2.380. Richard Begam and Michael Valdez

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68
Ibid., 2.380–381. R. Lehan, The City in Moses (eds) Modernism and Colonialism
Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007),
History (Berkeley: University of p. 201.
76
California Press, 1998), p. 115. J. Joyce, Ulysses, 14.259.
69 77
J. Joyce, Ulysses, 2.382–386. Reading Ibid., 14.292–4.
78
these shouts, Kearney writes that he ‘sus- Ibid., 14.408. Emphasis mine.
79
pects’ Stephen’s reply points to ‘a radic- Ibid., 14.408–426.
80
ally in-carnational view’ (p. 132), to Ibid., 14.435–438.
81
‘apprehending divinity is a ‘‘street cry’’’ Ibid., 14.1390.
82
(p. 146). Kearney’s suspicion is correct, John 12:28. J. Joyce, Ulysses, 14.1390.
83
but Stephen’s reply is not simply ‘in- R. Ellmann, Ulysses, p. 136–7.
84
carnational’ nor merely a general idea J. Joyce, Ulysses, 14.1407–1410.
85
of ‘divinity’; it directly engages the Ibid., 14.1440.
86
Catholic mechanics of nature and grace Ibid., 14.1585.
87
that conditioned Joyce’s aesthetic and Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman,
imagines a specific model of immanent Ulysses Annotated: Notes for Ulysses, 2nd
transcendence. See R. Kearney, ‘Joyce rev. exp. edn. (Berkeley: University of
III: Epiphanies and Triangles’. California Press, 1989), p. 449.
70 88
J. Joyce, Portrait, p. 184. H. Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, p. 155.
71 89
Pius IX, Qunta Cura & The Syllabus of Errors Ibid.
90
(Kansas City: Angelus Press, 1998), §1. J. Joyce, ‘Bruno’, p. 94.