14.1downes. Giordano Bruno

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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

Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 14, Summer 2003, pp. 37-73 (Article)

Published by Fordham University Press

DOI: 10.1353/joy.2004.0003

For additional information about this article

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Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 14, Summer 2003© 2003 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819

1 Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Vatican: Polyglottus, 1940), 66.2 James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist,” in The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the

Raw Materials for “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” ed. Robert Scholes and Richard M.Kain (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 63.

3 Jean-Michel Rabaté, Joyce Upon the Void: The Genesis of Doubt (New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1991), 10.

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

Bruno, Giordano. Opera omnia. Decr. S. Offi. 8. Febr. 1600.

Index Librorum Prohibitorum.1

Extravagance followed. The simple history of the Poverello was soon out

of mind and he established himself in the maddest of companies. Jo-

achim Abbas, Bruno the Nolan, Michael Sendivogius, all the hierarchs

of initiation cast their spells upon him.

James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist.”2

The textual moment in which, in the words of Jean-Michel Rabaté, Joyce first brought “Bruno’s covert authority to bear on a precisediagnosis of Irish paralysis”3 occurred in November 1901 with the

publication of his pamphlet, The Day of the Rabblement . The circum-stances surrounding the publication of The Day of the Rabblement and



38 the heretical auctoritas of giordano bruno

4 James Joyce, Letters, Vol. II, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 48.Hereafter all references will appear parenthetically within the text.

5 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury,

1997), 100.6 Joyce, James, The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ell-

mann (New York: Viking, 1964), 132. Hereafter all references will appear parentheticallywithin the text.

the exact identity of the cryptic “Nolan” have long been known.However, the historical and literary contexts in which Joyce encoun-tered Bruno are relatively unexplored, particularly with regard to the

circumstances of the nineteenth-century scholarly rehabilitation of Bruno’s writings; his contemporary lionisation by the anticlericalistsof the Italian Risorgimento; and the underground interest in Brunothat existed in English literary culture during the late 1880s and1890s. This article discusses Joyce’s acerbic pamphlet as the first of the belligerent sorties that he wrote in his “open war” 4 against theRoman Catholic Church, and the pervasive and paralysing influenceof the bourgeois Catholic morality that it helped to maintain in thecontemporary cultural and intellectual life of Dublin. It discusses

Joyce’s reading of Bruno’s Italian dialogues and how this encountersteeled him in his own struggle with Catholic orthodoxy, and ex-plores his covert employment of Bruno as an heretical auctoritas inThe Day of the Rabblement and Stephen Hero. It argues that an histori-cist examination of Joyce’s dialogue with Bruno provides an extremelyeffective means of realizing some of the urgency and offensiveness of his critical engagement with contemporary Catholicism during the1900s.

In an interview with James Knowlson in September 1989, Sam-uel Beckett revealed that the only remark Joyce ever made about“Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” was that, although he liked theessay (which was written at his own behest and instruction), hethought there “wasn’t enough about Bruno; he found Bruno ratherneglected.”5 His comments are, to a large extent, justified; and eventhough the essay was first published in 1929, Joyce’s estimation of “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” remains as a salutary and instructive

comment on the treatment of Joyce’s complex relationship with thewritings and legacy of the “heresiarch martyr of Nola” 6 in Joyc-ean criticism to date. Beckett’s discussion of Joyce’s encounter withBruno and his appraisal of the significance of the doctrine of thecoincidence of contraries in the Wake is relatively telegraphic, when



gareth joseph downes 39

7 Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” Our Exagmination Round His Facti-

fication for Incamination of Work in Progress, Samuel Beckett et al (London: Faber and Faber,1972), 3.8 Beckett’s summary of the coincidence of contraries appears to be in fact a concise pré-

cis of McIntyre’s text. Compare Beckett’s appraisal of the Brunonian doctrine in “Dante . . .Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” (Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in

Progress 6), with McIntyre’s summation of the geometrical illustrations and verifications thatBruno employs to explicate the doctrine of the coincidence of contraries in his 1903 study:

J. Lewis McIntyre, Giordano Bruno (London: Macmillan and Co., 1903), 176 –178.9 Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” Our Exagmination Round His Factification for

Incamination of Work in Progress, 17.10 Liberato Santoro-Brienza, “Joyce’s Dialogue with Aquinas, Dante, Bruno, Vico, Svevo

. . . ,” Talking of Joyce, Umberto Eco and Liberato Santoro-Brienza, ed. Santoro-Brienza(Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998), 49.

11 Theoharis Constantine Theoharis, Joyce’s “Ulysses”: An Anatomy of the Soul (Chapel Hilland London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 40– 41.

compared to his more expansive accounts of the importance of Dante’s “system of poetics” and the Viconian theory of the “inevi-tably of cyclical evolution,” 7 and, in fact, is cribbed largely from

J. Lewis McIntyre’s 1903 study of the Nolan, Giordano Bruno.

8

Thisobservation is not intended as a negative criticism. Beckett’s obser-vation that the first covert reference to Bruno by Joyce occurs in The Day of the Rabblement in 1901, where the cryptic allusion to the“Nolan” threw “the local philosophers [. . .] into a state of some be-wilderment,”9 and his precise elucidation of the axiomatic principleof Bruno’s immanentist philosophy, remains the general consensuson this subject. Indeed, Liberato Santo-Brienza in “Joyce’s Dialoguewith Aquinas, Dante, Bruno, Vico, Svevo . . . ,” published in 1998,

and the most recent article to broach the topic Joyce’s relationshipwith Bruno, says little that is not contained in Beckett’s essay of 1929, and merely recycles the accepted view that Joyce, whilst still anundergraduate, identified with “Bruno’s rebellious disposition to-wards any form of temporal authority and dogmatic power,”10 andlater employed the Brunonian doctrine of the coincidence of con-traries as a principle of formal technique in the Wake. As TheoharisConstantine Theoharis observed wryly in 1988, this consensus has

“become one of the clichés of Joyce criticism (especially criticism of Finnegans Wake). Like all clichés this one is true, but rarely understoodor spoken of with penetrating or precise intentions.” 11

Research on the nature of the Brunonian presence in Joyce’s writ-ings remains very much a coterie, if not a neglected, interest; andamidst the plethora of critical literature that exists on Joyce, there are




12 Michael Beasaung, “Authority Under Fire: Italian Heretics and Non-Conformists in Joyce’s Work,” Revue des Lettres Modernes: Histoire des Idees et des Litterateur , 1173–1182(1994): 77– 88; Sheldon Brivic, Joyce the Creator (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,1985); Elliot B. Gose, “The Coincidence of Contraries as Theme and Technique inUlysses,”

Joyce’s “Ulysses”: The Larger Perspective, ed. Robert D. Newman and Weldon Thornton (New-ark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), and The Transformation Process in James Joyce’s “Ulys-

ses” (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1980); Ronald J. Koch, “Giordano Bruno and

Finnegans Wake: A New Look at Shaun’s Objection to the ‘Nolanus Theory’”; Robert D.Newman, “Bloom and the Beast: Joyce’s Use of Bruno’s Astrological Allegory,” New Al-liances in Joyce Studies: “When it’s Aped to Foul a Delfian,” ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Newark:University of Delaware Press, 1988); Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Bruno No, Bruno Si: Notes on aContradiction in Joyce,” James Joyce Quarterly 27:1 (Fall 1989): 31–39; Klaus Reichert, “TheEuropean background to Joyce’s writing,” The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, ed. DerekAttridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); John S. Rickard, “Philotheologyin Mecklenburg Street,” James Joyce Quarterly 23:1 (Fall 1985): 80–82; Liberato Santoro-Brienzo, “Joyce’s Dialogue with Aquinas, Dante, Bruno, Vico, Svevo . . . ,” Talking of Joyce;Bonnie Kime Scott, “ Lyceum: An Early Resource for Joyce,” James Joyce Quarterly 22:1 (Fall1984): 77–81; Norman Silverstein, “Bruno’s Particles of Reminiscence,” James Joyce Quar-

terly 2 (1965): 271–280; Theoharis Constantine Theoharis, Joyce’s “Ulysses”: An Anatomy of the Soul (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Joseph C.Voelker, “Nature it is”: The Influence of Giordano Bruno on James Joyce’s Molly Bloom,”

James Joyce Quarterly 14 (1976): 39– 48.

no more than a dozen or so articles and books which attempt to ex-plore, at varying lengths and with varying degrees of success, thesignificance of the Brunonian trace in the Joycean text.12 Beyond Ra-

baté’s agile theoretical discussion of the Nolan and the development of a poetics of indeterminacy in the Wake in Joyce Upon the Void , the mostsignificant and seminal research on Joyce’s encounter with Bruno hasbeen undertaken by Sheldon Brivic, Elliot B. Gose, Robert D. New-man, and Theoharis: that is, scholars who are primarily concernedwith ascertaining the significant of Brunonian traces and allusions inUlysses, and not in the Wake. Nevertheless, while Rabaté and Gosedo provide cursory attention to the contexts in which Joyce encoun-tered Bruno, the formalistic precision of the majority of these stud-

ies is not complemented by any historicist scrutiny or refinement.The engagement with Bruno is not read in the context of Joyce’s tex-tual negotiations with contemporary Catholicism, and there has beenno systematic study of the significance of the Brunonian presence in Joyce’s writings as a whole. Joyce did not encounter Bruno in a vac-uum and, it can be argued, any study of the function or presence of philosophical, mystical, patristic or theosophical systems or elementsin the Joycean text should be read in the context of his determination

to effect a sundering with the Church.In Chapter of 5 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen




13 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1992), 267. Hereafter all references will appear parenthetically withinthe text.

14 James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (London: Paladin,1991), 57. Hereafter all references will appear parenthetically within the text.

15 Lester R. Kurtz, The Politics of Heresy: The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism (Berke-ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 2. This phrase is an extremelyuseful means of describing the ambiguous relationship that exists between those men andwomen who adopt a discursive position that is at odds with the broader religious commun-

ion of which they are apart, and helps qualify the tension between individual subversion andinstitutional containment.

16 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (London: Fontana Press,1993), 6.

Dedalus discusses with Cranly his reasons for leaving the Church,and for leaving Ireland. Cranly tries to temper the obstinacy of Ste-phen’s reasoning, and says:

[. . .] you need not look upon yourself as driven away if you do not wish

to go or as a heretic or an outlaw. There are many good believers who

think as you do. Would that surprise you? The church is not the stone

building nor even the clergy and their dogmas. It is the whole mass of

those born into it.13

However, for Joyce, as for Stephen, the Church in the social forma-tion of Victorian and Edwardian Dublin was a stone building of the

clergy and its dogmas. It was a material institution with considerablehegemonic influence that was not to be thought away. “The Roman,not the Sassenach, was [. . .] the tyrant of the islanders”; 14 and Joyceevinced both anticlericalist disdain for the political and cultural in-fluence of the Irish Church, and existential dissent towards the arid-ity and Ultramontane temper of its authority and the insubstantialform of its apologetic. He was a “deviant insider”15 whose discursivestruggle with the hegemony of the Church was informed by a per-

versely intimate knowledge of its spiritual and intellectual tradi-tions. However, the Catholicism of the 1900s belongs to a differentepistemic period to our own and, it can be argued that, for the secu-lar or non-Catholic critic, or, indeed, the critic of a Catholic up-bringing and education born after the reforms of the Second VaticanCouncil of the 1960s, the discursive shock of Joyce’s complex en-gagement with Catholicism can be effected only through sustainedhistoricisation or, indeed, through a degree of “thick description.”16

Without an appreciation of the conditions of constraint there can be




17 Ibid , 6.

no substantive understanding of the subversive nature of his criticalnegotiation with contemporary Catholicism. The thickness of someof the description in this article may appear overwrought. However,

if one of the tasks of the historicist critic is “construing social ex-pression on their surface enigmatical,” then it is only through at-tempting to excavate and retrieve the “webs of significance” of thehistorical moment in which that “social expression” occurs that anyform of valid interpretation can be ventured.17

In a letter that he wrote to Stanislaus in August 1906, Joyce states:“For my part I believe that to establish the church in full power againin Europe would mean a renewal of the Inquisition—though, of course, the Jesuits tell us that the Dominicans never broke men on

the wheel or tortured them on the rack” ( L II 148). The discursiveclimate that prevailed within the Church during the late-nineteenthand early-twentieth centuries was perfervid in the extreme. Althoughthe Church no longer handed over its “deviant insiders” to the secu-lar arm to suffer the ultimate censure, during the period in which Joyce was born, educated and grew to maturity, the Church, feel-ing itself increasingly under threat from the anticlericalist and ma-terialist cultural condition of modernity, cultivated an atmosphere of

institutional and philosophical medievalism, and prosecuted any de-parture from a narrowly defined orthodoxy with force majeure. The in-fallibility of the Pontiff on matters of faith and doctrine was declareda dogma of the Catholic Church during the First Vatican Council,with the promulgation of the encyclical Pastor aeternus in 1870, andthis gradual limitation of the power to define orthodoxy to the officeof the Pope, and the ecumenical council he convened, produced anintellectual climate that was increasingly absolutist and intolerant of

any discursive attempts to stray beyond the narrowly defined bound-aries. Joyce was not indifferent to the counter-revolution that wastaking placing in Catholic doctrine and theology at this time. Dur-ing his sojourn in Rome in 1906, he spent some time in the Biblio-teca Vittorio Emanuele. He undertook some research on the events of First Vatican Council, and paid particular attention to the circum-stances of the promulgation of Pasto aeternus. In a letter to Stanislauson 13 November 1906, Joyce wrote:

I was today in the Biblioteca Vittoria Emanuele, looking up the account of

the Vatican Council of 1870. Before the final proclamation many of the




18 Gabriel Daly, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 189.

19 Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–1985 (London: Fontana,1981), 30.

20 The new Index was re-established on 17 September 1900 by Leo XIII. See J. N. Kelly,The Oxford Dictionary of Popes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 312.

21 Kurtz, The Politics of Heresy, 7.22 This description of Tyrrell’s intemperate response to the condemnation of modern-

ism is attributed to his friend and fellow modernist scholar, the French Jesuit Henri Bre-mond. M. T. Perrin, ed., Labethonnière et ses amis (Paris, 1975),167; cited in Daly, Transcendence

and Immanence, 205.23 Ibid , 39.

clerics left Rome in protest. At the proclamation when the dogma was

readout the Pope said“Is thatall right,gents?” All the gents said“Placet”

but two said “Non placet.” But the Pope “You be dammed! Kissmearse!

I’m infallible.” ( L II 192)

Under the Ultramontane pontificates of Pius IX, and his succes-sors Leo XIII, and Pius X, there was “a skilfully organised retreatfrom the jungle of post-Enlightenment ideas into the hortus conclususof an artificially constructed theology.” 18 Integral to this retreat wasthe revival of scholasticism: the very theologico-philosophical sys-tem against which Bruno had rebelled so vigorously. Leo XIII madeThomisticneo-scholasticismmandatory fortheentireChurchin1879

with the issuing of the encyclical Aeterni patris. However, this “facilescholasticism”19 was Aquinas simpliciter and many modernist Cath-olic scholars and writers, both lay and clerical, believing such anapologetic incapable of making Catholicism a possibility for con-temporary culture, found themselves subject to ecclesiastical cen-sure and condemnation. The Vatican conducted its campaign againstthe Roman Catholic modernists with a relentless and ruthless ef-ficiency. Some scholars saw their writings placed on the recently

re-established Index Librorum Prohibitorum (The Index of Prohibited Books); 20 and with the promulgation of the encyclical Pascendi domi-nici gregis in September 1907, Pius X condemned modernist scholar-ship and philosophy as the “synthesis of all heresies.” 21 When theDublin-born Jesuit and modernist George Tyrrell could contain nolonger his “furia irlandais” 22 [sic] and attacked Pius X in an openletter to The Times, he was dismissed from the Society of Jesus andexcommunicated as an obstinate and unrepentant heretic. Such Ro-

man Catholic modernists as Tyrrell, Alfred Loisy, Lucien Laberthon-nière, and Maurice Blondel, were essentially pious and conservativereformers who, frustrated with the ineptitude of “Thomistic stasis,”23




24 Pius X, Pascendi dominici gregis, Roman Catholic Modernism, ed. Bernard M. G. Reardon(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), 237–38.

25 Pius IX, “The Syllabus of the Principle Errors of our Times,” H. Denzinger andA. Schönmetzer, eds. Enchiridion Symbolorum Definitiorum et Declarationem de Rebus Fidei et

Morum, 34th ed. (Freiburg, 1967), 2980; cited in Nicholas Sagovsky,“On God’s Side”: A Lifeof George Tyrrell (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1990), 59.

sought to reconcile Catholicism with contemporary philosophy andmodern historiography, and they were not wilful and deviant schis-matics. However, they were anathematised as “partisans of error”

whose thought was “thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doc-trines taught by the enemies of the Church.” 24

Joyce was belligerent in his apostasy and declared to Nora Bar-nacle in August 1904, a mere month before their elopement to Pola,and crucially, at a time when he was beginning to work on the novelthat eventually would be published in 1916 as Portrait :

Six years ago I left the Catholic Church, hating it most fervently. I

found it impossible for me to remain in it on account of the impulses of

my nature. I made secret war upon it when I was a student and declinedto accept the positions it offered me. By doing this I made myself a

beggar but retained my pride. Now I make open war upon it by what I

write and say and do. I cannot enter the social order except as a vaga-

bond. ( L II 48)

His conscious occupation of a discursive position that would bedeemed heretical by orthodox Catholicism was not an act of over-

weening hubris, and neither was his ardent belief in the necessity of exile on the European continent as a precondition of artistic freedom.In developing a modernist poetics that responded intimately to theliberalising forces of modernity and its popular culture, Joyce was toreject tacitly the necessary opposition of Catholicism to “progress,liberalism and modern civilization” 25 that was enshrined in Pius IX’s“Syllabus of Errors” of 1864. Moreover, as an apostate Catholic en-gaged in an anticlericalist “open war” with the Church in the colo-

nial social formation of Victorian and Edwardian Ireland, Joyce wasplacing himself beyond the pale for the emergent forces of Irish na-tionalism. As Gauri Viswanathan argues in Outside the Fold , in thosesocial formations in which there has long been a blurring of theboundaries between national and religious identity, any internalchallenge to the religious doctrines and practices of the nation is




26 Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1998).

27 “Introduction,” Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper , trans. Edward A. Gosselin

and Lawrence S. Lerner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in Association with the Re-naissance Society of America, 1995), 23. Hereafter all references will appear parentheticallyin the text.

28 Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 243.

necessarily regarded as heretical. This cultural phenomenon is morepronounced in those colonial situations in which the racial or ethnicand religious identity of the colonised subjects is different to that of

the colonial or imperial power. As such, any individual subject whosignifies his or her departure from the fold, either through an actof conversion or apostasy, or who expresses dissent from the ortho-dox religious doctrines or practices of the national community, isadjudged to have blasphemously violated the integrity and cohe-sion of the sacred narrative practices that constitute and endlessly re-produce the nation, and the individual subject is thus anathematisedaccordingly.26

*A statue of Bruno now stands in the center of the Campo dei Fiori inRome. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner have speculatedthat “thousands of Romans pass [this] statue every day without aglimmer of interest,”27 and Anthony Burgess has suggested that thishonoring of a “victim of papal obscurantism” is largely the result of the “anarchic” Roman sensibility.28 In February 1907 Joyce himself witnessed the annual procession in honor of the anniversary of the

death of Bruno. In a subsequent letter to Stanislaus he confessed thatthe spectacle had left him “quite cold. I understand that anti-clericalhistory probably contains a large percentage of lies but this is notenough to drive me back howling to my gods” ( L II 217). The erec-tion of the statue, executed by H. Ferrari in 1889, did, however,arouse some considerable consternation at the time. This memo-rial statue was financed by an international collection, and was dedi-cated with great pomp and ceremony. The statue dominates the small

piazza; and Bruno, figured in his monastic habit, staring sternly frombeneath his cowl, his arms crossed proudly, his hands clasping anopen book, is nothing but a figure of glowering defiance. Pointedly,his back is turned on the Vatican situated to the northeast across theTiber. The plinth upon which the statue rests displays three panelsdepicting Bruno teaching; his trial; and death at the stake; and bears




29 I am grateful to Fabio Caiani for this translation.30 Klaus Reichert, “The European Background of Joyce’s Writing,” The Cambridge

Companion to James Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1990), 58.

31 Bonnie Kime Scott has speculated that Joyce may have read an article on Bruno inback issues of Lyceum, a student magazine published in UCD from 1887 to 1894. Writtenin response to the dedication of the monument to Bruno in 1889, it provides a brief biog-raphy of Bruno and repeats the orthodox Catholic condemnation. See “ Lyceum: An Early Re-source for Joyce,” James Joyce Quarterly 22: 1 (Fall 1984): 77– 81.

32 McIntyre, Giordano Bruno, 97.33 See D. Dee’s entry for the Index in New Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. VII (New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1967), 435.34 Ibid , 435.

the inscription: “A BRUNO. IL SECOLO DA DIVINATO QUIOVE IL ROGO ARSE” (TO BRUNO. THE CENTURY WAS DI-VINED BY HIM HERE WHERE THE FIRE BURNED).29 Klaus

Reichert has observed that the erection of such a statue was “at oneand the same time a symbol of the liberation from the Church State[sic] and of the triumph of science.”30 Leo XIII condemned this act,and from within his “prison” in the Vatican he maintained the jus-tice of Bruno’s execution, and declared a day of fasting and prayer.31

The anticlericalist propagation of the Bruno legend was a verypopularised and public symptom of the gradual rehabilitation of thewritings and thought of Bruno during the nineteenth century. Amarginal figure during his lifetime, his obscurity became more pro-

nounced in the aftermath of his death and anathematisation. Hisbooks were burned publicly; and were placed on the Index, where“They were classed with other dangerous works on the black arts.” 32

Bruno was and remains an anathema for orthodox Catholicism. Thelast edition of the Index was published in 1948, and in 1966, as partof the liberalisation of the Church during the Second Vatican Coun-cil, it was declared that no further editions would be prepared.33 Al-though the Index remains only as an historical document, D. Dee has

noted dryly: “No matter from whom permission has been obtained,no one is exempted from the prohibition of the natural law that for-bids one to read books that place him in proximate spiritual danger.The Church still claims the authority to prohibit a book when it con-tributes a general danger to the faith or morals of Catholics.”34

As Paul Henri Michel has observed, during the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries Bruno’s life was subject to the moral impera-tives of those who wished to sanction the reactionary nature of the

Counter-Reformation. Regarded as the “most dangerous thinker




35 Paul Henri Michel, The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno, trans. R. E. W. Maddison (Lon-

don: Methuen, 1973), 9.36 Hilary Gatti, “Coleridge’s Reading of Giordano Bruno,” Wordsworth Circle 27:3

(Summer 1996): 143.37 Michel, The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno, 10.

[. . .] of deists, atheists or free-thinkers,” his life was presented as acautionary tale: a “pious fiction”; his fate that which awaits all over-reachers who would arrogate the right to challenge the doctrines of

Mother Church.

35

Hilary Gatti has noted that there is evidence of agenuinely philosophical interest in Bruno in the writings of Sam-uel Taylor Coleridge, and also among German Romantic poets andphilosophers; however, “notions of how he lived and died were stillvague and undocumented.”36

During the nineteenth century another myth was produced, and itquickly became the dominant reading of Bruno’s life. Michel notes:

It is remarkable that the new legend bases its authority on the same facts

as the first one, as well as on the same errors. As for the facts, (by whichwe mean those relating to biography), the new legend confines itself to

presenting them in a fresh light and giving them another meaning: that

which was only sound justice becomes martyrdom. Moreover, it claims

to restore truth to the facts; it strives to do so, and on occasion corrects

certain flagrant inaccuracies, which had been long accepted without ver-

ification. As for the errors (those relating to the interpretation of Bruno’s

thought and betraying inadequate knowledge, when it is not complete

ignorance of his writings), they are not corrected; on the contrary, theyhave been piously collected together in order to be used for other pur-

poses: the accusations of innate godlessness, atheism and materialism are

retained, but to the glory of the accused and not to his shame. In this

way the elements of a new portrait, lacking fidelity just as much as the

former, notwithstanding the good intentions of those who inspired it,

have been assembled. A character is established in conventional imagery,

and becomes familiar to a fresh public of devotees.37

The birth of the new Bruno legend coincided with the emergenceof the first biographical studies of Bruno. However, these studies areremarkable in that they are relatively impartial, are generally lack-ing in an anticlericalist accent, and do not merely reproduce theemergent Bruno myth. Brunonian studies can be regarded as hav-ing begun in the 1840s with the publication of Jordano Bruno by




38 Ibid , 11.39 Jordani Bruni Nolani Opera latine conscripta, ed. Francesco Fiorentino, 8 vols. (Neapoli:

Dom Morano, 1879–1891); Le Opere italiane di Giordano Bruno, ed. Paolo de Lagarde (Got-tingen: Lüder Horstman, 1888). Ibid , 12.

40 I. Frith, The Life of Giordano Bruno, the Nolan, ed. Moritz Carrière (London: Trübnerand Co., 1887); Giordano Bruno, The Heroic Enthusiast , trans. L. Williams (London: G. Red-way, 1887).

41 See W. Schrick, “On Giordano Bruno, Wilde and Yeats,” English Studies: A Journal of English Language Literature 45 (1964): 258.

Christian Bartholmèss in two volumes in Paris between 1846 and1847.38 However, the major advances in historical research on Brunowere undertaken in the following decades in Italy. Roberto Spaventa’s

Saggi di critica filosofica, politica e religiose was published in Naples in1867, and Domenico Berti’s documented biography, La vita di Gior-dano da Nola, was published in Turin in 1868. In 1880 Berti pub-lished his indispensable accompaniment to his biography of Bruno, Documenti. Berti’s scholarship provided the starting point for all fur-ther biographical study of Bruno, and McIntyre, in the preface to his1903 study of Bruno, acknowledges Berti as his prime source. TheLatin works of Bruno were also published over the years 1879 to1891 under the editorial direction of Francesco Fiorentino; and the

Italian works, compiled and published originally by Paolo de La-garde in 1888, “were reissued under the editorship of Giovanni Gen-tile, first in 1907, and again in 1925.” 39 The impact of this scholarlyrevival was felt in the English-speaking world in 1887 with the pub-lication in London of I. Frith’s The Life of Giordano Bruno, the Nolan,and the first volume of L. Williams’ translation of the 1585 text De gli heroici furori, The Heroic Enthusiasts.40 For the second volumeof Williams’ translation, which appeared in 1889, the publishing

rights were transferred to the more eminent publisher, Bernard Qua-trich. W. Schrick has suggested that this would seem to indicate theextent to which the reputation of Bruno had grown during this shorttime.41

In his letter to Nora in August 1904 Joyce states that his apostasydates from 1898, the year in which he entered University College,Dublin. The college was a microcosm of Irish Catholic society andthe cultural and political assumptions and aspirations of the major-

ity of its middle-class students were ultimately circumscribed by themoral dictates of contemporary Ultramontane Catholicism. Never-theless, as Richard Ellmann has observed, it was as an undergraduate




42 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,1982), 59. Hereafter all references will appear parenthetically within the text.

43 Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper , ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber,1957), 132. Hereafter all references will appear parenthetically within the text.

44 Gose, The Transformation Process in James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” 3.

student of Italian and modern languages at UCD that Joyce found an“unexpected master in Giordano Bruno.” 42

He studied Dante and D’Annunzio (whose novel Il Fuoco was then

on the Index) with the liberal Father Charles Ghezzi. Ghezzi appearsas the “little roundhead rogue’s eye” with whom Stephen has aninconclusive “wrangle” in Portrait : “He said Bruno was a terrible her-etic. I said he was terribly burned. He agreed to this with some sor-row. And then gave me recipe for what he calls risotto alla bergamasca”( P 271). In the original version of this episode in Stephen Hero, Ghezziappears as the “poor inquisitor” Father Artifoni ( SH 175). The exactsubject of this “wrangle” is revealed as the tutor’s admonishment of Stephen for an “admiring allusion to the author of The Triumphant

Beast ” ( SH 175). This is a clear reference to Bruno’s notorious Ital-ian dialogue of 1584, Lo Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsionof the Triumphant Beast ). Bruno’s writings were not part of the cur-riculum and, indeed, it would be inconceivable that the writingsof an anathematised heretic would be formally studied in this Jesuit-administered institution. However, Joyce’s reading as an undergrad-uate was both eclectic and idiosyncratic, and he was a frequent readerat the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street, which was near

to the University College buildings on Stephen’s Green.In My Brother’s Keeper Stanislaus confirms that Joyce was reading

Bruno’s “philosophical essays” at this time and observes that hisgrowing admiration for Bruno influenced his decision to choose Gor-don Brown as a stage name.43 In The Transformation Process in James Joyce’s “Ulysses” Gose makes no reference to the allusion to The Expul- sion of the Triumphant Beast in Stephen Hero, but he does argue that Joyce was indeed familiar with this text and with the other Italian di-

alogues written and published secretly in London in 1584 to 1585: La Cena de la ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper ), De gli eroici furori (TheHeroic Frenzies), Cabala del Cavallo Pegaseo (The Cabala of the Horse Peg- asus), De la causa, principio e uno (Cause, Principle and Unity), and Del’infinito universo e mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds).44 The cat-alogues of the National Library confirm that there was a considerablecollection of works by, and relating to, Bruno which would have been




45 Schrick, “On Giordano Bruno, Wilde and Yeats,” English Studies, 262–3.46 Ibid , 259.

available to Joyce at this time. The majority of these holdings arelisted as being catalogued from the 1890s onwards, and thus the col-lection reflects the contemporary growth in Brunonian studies in Eu-

rope. By 1900 the National Library possessed copies of the editionsof the Latin and Italian works and Williams’ 1887 translation of De gli eroici furori. Among the biographical and critical scholarship onBruno were Berti’s La vita di Giordano da Nola, and Frith’s The Life of Giordano Bruno, which Joyce refers to in his review of McIntyre’sGiordano Bruno in the Dublin Daily Express in October 1903 (CW 132). Although an awareness of the National Library’s holdings onBruno will not provide incontestable evidence of which of Bruno’swritings Joyce had read, it does suggest a point of departure for a dis-

cussion of Joyce’s youthful encounter with the Nolan. If Joyce did in-deed consult the work of Berti, alongside his reading of Frith and,later, McIntyre, it can be suggested that he was primarily consciousof Bruno as a neglected philosopher of the early modern period, andif he does invoke aspects of the Bruno legend from anticlericalist dis-course, it is as a deliberate affront to contemporary UltramontaneCatholicism.

The name of Bruno is largely omitted in the scholarly accounts

and indexes of English literary culture during the late 1880s and1890s. However, there was a significant underground interest in hiswritings and thought, most notably in the work of Algernon CharlesSwinburne, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats. AlthoughSchrick has noted a reference to Bruno in Wilde’s The Portrait of Do-rian Gray, first published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July1890,45 and observes that Yeats was reading Williams’ translationof De gli eroici furori in 1894,46 the most striking literary engage-

ments with Bruno occur in the work of Swinburne and Pater. In June1889 Swinburne wrote an ode commemorating the dedication of thestatue of Bruno at the Campo dei Fiori. “The Monument of GiordanoBruno” is of some interest as an example of the manner in whichthe Bruno legend of anticlericalist propaganda was reproduced inEnglish literary culture, and is unrelenting in its castigation ofthe Church’s legacy in the Italian peninsula. Swinburne imaginesBruno’s rehabilitation as a potent symbol of Rome’s liberation fromthe authoritarian Vatican States:




47 Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Monument of Giordano Bruno,” The Poems: A Midsummer Holiday, Astrophel, A Channel Passage and Other Poems Vol. VI (London: Chatto &Windus, 1904), 243–244.

48 Rabaté, Joyce Upon the Void , 13–14.49 Walter Pater,Gaston de Latour: An Unfinished Romance, ed. Charles L. Shadwell (London:

Macmillan and Co., 1902).50 Rabaté, Joyce Upon Void , 14.

Cover thine eyes and weep, O child of hell,

Grey spouse of Satan, Church of name abhorred.

Weep withered harlot, with thy weeping lord,

Now none will buy the heaven thou hast to sell

At price of prostituted souls, and swell

Thy loveless list of flowers. Fire and sword

No more are thine: the steel, the wheel, the cord,

The flames that rose round living limbs, and fell

In lifeless ash and ember, now no more

Approve thee godlike. Rome, redeemed at last

From all the red pollution of thy past,

Acclaims the grave bright face that smiled of yore

Even as the fire that caught it round and clombTo cast its ashes on the face of Rome.47

Rabaté has speculated that Joyce may have encountered Brunothrough the writings of one of his literary models, Pater. He arguesthat Joyce had “probably read Pater’s last book, Gaston de Latour , orat any rate the last chapter of this unfinished novel, which had beenpublished under the title of ‘Giordano Bruno’ in the issue of August

1889 of the well-regarded Fortnightly Review.”48

If Joyce had not readPater’s chapter on Bruno in The Fortnightly Review, it is conceivablethat he was aware of the 1902 edition of Gaston de Latour (the chap-ter concerning Gaston’s encounter with Bruno is entitled “The LowerPantheism”).49 In Pater’s unfinished Bildungsroman, Bruno is amongthree figures who define the three stages of Gaston’s progress as heventures to be an artist at the courts of Kings Charles IX and HenryIII of France. As Rabaté has noted, Pierre de Ronsard “stands for

youthful lyricism; Montaigne [. . .] introduces the hero to scepticism;and finally Bruno [. . .] reconciles all the contradictions between po-etry and ethics.” 50 Although an extensive appraisal of Pater’s “Gior-dano Bruno” is beyond the scope of this article, there are a numberof aspects of this work which are worthy of note. In Gaston de Latour Pater gives an extremely concise account of Bruno’s philosophy and




51 Pater, Gaston de Latour , 154.52 Ibid , 141.53 Ibid , 152.

cosmology. Pater describes how Bruno, the “knight-errant of in-tellectual light,”51 imagined an infinite universe of infinite worlds,created by God in a spirit of indifference, in which there is no differ-

entiation between matter and substance, and no hierarchy of spheresseparating a fallen world from its transcendent Creator. In this pan-theistic conception of the universe God is immanent in nature, andall contraries coincide: the “consciousness, the person, of God theSpirit, [. . .] was at every moment of infinite time, in every atom, atevery point of infinite space.” 52 For Bruno, the mind that is capableof beholding God and nature as One becomes part of the cyclical andinfinite process of creation.

Rabaté is keen to suggest that Pater’s elaboration of Bruno’s pan-

theism, and his conception of creation as a cyclical process (which heargues is redolent of Vico’s philosophy of cyclical return), may havecontributed to Joyce’s linguistic tour de force in Finnegans Wake. How-ever, his insistence on appraising Joyce’s youthful intellectual and lit-erary negotiations solely in terms of the textual innovations Joyceachieved in the 1920s and 1930s does overlook, or obscure, certainaspects of the production of Joyce’s texts during the 1900s. In hisconcern to relate Pater’s elaboration of Bruno’s pantheism to the lin-

guistic strategies of the Wake, he fails to register the parallels that canbe discerned between the characters of Gaston and Stephen, in Ste- phen Hero, and the similarity of the manner in which they respond to“the ‘prodigal son’ of Dominic.” 53

Both Gaston and Stephen search for an exemplary figure within theinterstices of ecclesiastical history, whose mysticism might provide amore sustaining model of spiritual expression than that proffered byorthodox Catholicism. In Gaston de Latour Gaston encounters Bruno

at the court of King Henry III, and is inspired by Bruno’s disclosurethat a pursuit of the contemplative life of a monastic need not signifya cloistered mind that is enervated by the narrow intellectualism anddogmatism of contemporary Catholicism:

Bruno himself tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it, that

the monastic life promotes the freedom of the intellect by its silence

and self-concentration. The prospect of such freedom sufficiently ex-

plains why a young man, however well-found in worldly and personal




54 Ibid , 139–140.

advantages, was above all conscious of great intellectual possessions, and

of fastidious spirit also, with a remarkable distaste for the vulgar, should

have espoused poverty, chastity, and obedience, in a Dominican cloister.

What liberty of mind can really come to, in such places, what daring new

departures it may suggest even to the strictly monastic temper, is exem-

plified by the dubious and dangerous mysticism of men like John of

Parma and Joachim of Flora, reputed author of a new “Everlasting Gos-

pel”; strange dreamers, in a world of sanctified rhetoric, of that later dis-

pensation of the Spirit, in which all law will have passed away; or again

by a recognised tendency, in the great rival Order of Saint Francis, in the

so-called “spiritual” Franciscans, to understand the dogmatic words of

faith, with a difference.54

In Stephen Hero, Stephen discovers the obscure Marsh Library duringhis wanderings in “the midst of those sluttish streets which are calledold Dublin” ( SH 181). He is introduced to the hidden recesses of thelibrary, to its “nooks and niches,” by the librarian and is interestedbriefly in the writers of the Trecento: “He appreciated not withoutpitiful feelings the legend of the mild heresiarch of Assisi” ( SH 181).Through a chance discovery of Yeats’ The Tablets of the Law, in a book-

shop on the Quays, Stephen becomes enchanted with the propheciesof “Joachim, Abbot of Flora” ( SH 182). Stephen’s interest in “hisFranciscan studies” ( SH 182) briefly allays his spiritual restlessness,and temporarily postpones his departure from the Church. His sub-sequent determination to follow the “life of an errant” who refuses toaccept “the tyranny of the mediocre,” signifies his determination topursue an heretical mode of existence.

*No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he

abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd,

is very careful to isolate himself. This radical principle of artistic econ-

omy applies specially to a time of crisis, and today the highest form of

art has been preserved by desperate sacrifices, it is strange to see the art-

ist making terms with the rabblement. (CW 69)

Stanislaus has argued that in The Day of the Rabblement , and in

“Drama and Life” and “James Clarence Mangan” (the two papers that




55 Giordano Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast , trans. Arthur D. Imerti (Lin-coln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 235. Hereafter all references will ap-pear parenthetically within the text.

Joyce read before the Literary and Historical Society of UCD in Jan-uary 1900 and February 1902), his brother “was defining his positionto himself and against others— contra Gentiles” ( MBK 137–38). The

Day of the Rabblement is certainly the most explosive of Joyce’s discur-sive sorties during this period, and the text in which he most clearlysignifies his heretical opposition to the dominant literary, culturaland religious orthodoxies of Edwardian Ireland. The very title of theacerbic pamphlet conveys Joyce’s arrogant belief in the authoritativenature of his own utterance and it covertly alludes to the heretical auctoritas whom he has chosen to sanction his jeremiad against theIrish Literary Theatre and the prevailing intellectual and culturaltemper of Dublin. The manner in which Joyce’s employs aspects of

Bruno’s discursive strategies in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast and, more specifically, The Ash Wednesday Supper , will be discussed atgreater length in the course of this section. However, at this junctureit should be noted that in these ethical Italian dialogues Bruno isunrelenting in his caustic disparagement of the “cultivated” and the“uncultivated” (CW 70) multitude. He is consistently scornful ofasinine pedants and grammarians, and the Aristotelians of orthodoxtheology and philosophy, both Catholic and Protestant, who wilfully

blind themselves to the immanence of the divine in nature (“naturaest deus rebus”)55 and who stubbornly cling to the transcendentalismof the rationalist scholastic system. He also demonstrates little pa-tience for the superstitious and ignorant mass of men and womenwho accept the strictures of the moral and physical universe that ispresented to them. According to the OED, the word “rabblement” isa rare variant on rabble, and the contemptuous term for those of thelowest stratum of society, meaning a riotous or tumultuous mob.

Joyce’s employment of this word to describe the cultivated and theuncultivated mass of contemporary Irish society, rather than the Lati-nate “multitude,” certainly provides for a more dramatic title. Theprovenance of the archaic “rabblement” is the late sixteenth-centuryand is thus contemporaneous with Bruno’s composition of his Italiandialogues in Elizabethan England. Like Stephen in Portrait , Joycedemonstrates that “His mind, in the vesture of a doubting monk,stood often under the shadow of [. . .] [the Elizabethan] age” ( P 190),




56 Rabaté, Joyce Upon the Void , 10.

the historical moment in which Bruno waged his heretical struggle.In entitling his attack on the Irish Literary Theatre The Day of the Rabblement , Joyce, it can be argued, is attempting consciously to

evoke something of the excoriating tenor of Bruno’s textual utter-ances of the 1580s, and thus invites a parallel to be drawn betweenhis own heretical stance and that of his anathematised predecessor.

Stanislaus advised his brother to omit the reference to “the Nolan”in The Day of the Rabblement . However, Joyce ignored his objectionsand desired that his covert reference to “the Nolan” might stimulatesome interest in Bruno’s philosophy:

He intended that the reader of his article should have at first a false im-

pression that he was quoting some little-known Irish writer—the defi-nite article before some old family name being a courtesy title in Ireland

so that when they discovered their error, the name of Giordano Bruno

might perhaps awaken interest in his life and work. Laymen, he repeated,

should be encouraged to think. ( MBK 153)

The laymen of UCD initially thought that “the Nolan” was a guisefor Joyce himself, or referred to a porter named Nolan at Cecelia

Street medical school ( JJ 89), and not the discursive entity throughwhich Bruno articulates his heretical philosophical ideas in such di-alogues as The Ash Wednesday Supper . There can be little doubt that Joyce’s appeal to “one of the atheistic writers whom the papal secre-tary puts on the Index” ( SH 46) would not have found much sympa-thy among the “shivering society” ( SH 40) of middle-class Catholicsat the institution. However, as Rabaté argues, in employing the de-liberately obscure “Nolan” in The Day of Rabblement as an “Irish No

man” Joyce has created a textual site that is “an aesthetic and politi-cal ‘no man’s land.’” 56 It is an example of Joyce as the “deviant in-sider” at his most mischievous. In covertly employing the heretical auctoritas of Bruno in the guise of a “little-known Irish writer” Joyceinsinuates himself into a discursive position that is deceptively fa-miliar and orthodox and from which he can attack the manner inwhich the Irish Literary Theatre had begun to pander to the pietiesof the more popularist elements of the Gaelic literary and culturalrevival.

Stanislaus has stated that his brother’s description of the cultured




and uncultured Irish multitude as “the rabblement,” “la bestia Trion- fante” (CW 70), is borrowed from The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast ( MBK 151), and there is a passage in this dialogue concerning

“Truth” and the “multitude” from which Joyce’s Nolan quotationmay be derived. In the First Part of the Second Dialogue of The Ex- pulsion of the Triumphant Beast , Saulino, Bruno’s symbol of man insearch of wisdom, discusses why it is that Truth is the paragon of allvirtues and eminently worthy of her restoration to the highest arc of the heavens:

SAUL. [. . .] Truth is the most sincere, the most divine of all things [. . .]

Without a defender and protector, she defends herself; and yet she loves

the company of a few wise men. She hates the multitude, does not showherself before those who do not seek her for her own sake, and does not

wish to be declared to those who do not humbly expose themselves to

her, or to all those who fraudulently seek her; and therefore she dwells

most high, whither all gaze, and few see. (ETB 140–41)

Arthur D. Imerti has argued that “Bruno’s concept of truth is thesource of the most heretical premises contained in Lo Spaccio” (ETB

30). Equating “Truth” with the divine, Bruno believes that the searchfor “Truth” is not an infallible one, and is scornful of those philo-sophical systems, specifically the rationalist theologico-philosophicalsystem of scholasticism, that claim to have realised an infalliblemethod of apprehending “Truth.” Bruno heretically believed that“Truth” is not an objective transcendental reality that was extrin-sic to the material universe and which could only be apprehendedthrough Platonic contemplation. Rather, he affirmed that “Truth”

was immanent in the material universe (nature) and could be realisedthrough the senses. As Imerti observes:

[. . .] she [Truth] is relative to time, and reveals herself as the substance

of things in myriad and ever-changing forms. She is manifest in all liv-

ing things, operating through the eternal laws of an immanent God iden-

tified with a timeless universe, and although she may appear different in

each succeeding generation, she is immutable and immortal. (ETB 30)

Joyce’s scornful disparagement of the “multitude” as “la bestia trionfante” and his privileging of a conception of “Truth” that is not




merely the preserve of the powerful and the pre-eminent, wouldseem to suggest that Joyce did indeed derive sanction for his attackon the Irish Literary Theatre from The Expulsion of the Triumphant

Beast . Joyce’s allusions to the “covert authority” of Bruno’s astrologicalethical dialogue does suggest that he intended The Day of the Rabble-ment to impact in the cultural and intellectual discursive environ-ment of Edwardian Dublin with “a maximum of explosive force”( SH 53). The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast is, perhaps, the mostnotorious of all of Bruno’s philosophical writings. It was the only textto be singled out by the Roman Inquisition at the summation of Bruno’s trial. It was a searing indictment of the religious and social

insitutions of sixteenth-century Europe, but the Inquisition read itas a specific allegorical attack on the papacy and presumed it to be afurther textual instance of the anti-papist tracts of Calvinist propa-ganda. Although Bruno does subject contemporary Catholicism tosome considerable criticism, it is the reformed religions that are moststrongly attacked in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast . The Cal-vinists, in particular, are remorselessly savaged; they are frequentlyreferred to as “that idle set of pedants” (ETB 124); they are “worse

than maggots, sterile locusts,” and are considered to be the “stinkingfilth of the world” (ETB 126). Nevertheless, as Imerti has argued, theassumption that The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast was an exclu-sive attack on the papacy and contemporary Catholicism is unsurpris-ing: “for owing to its daring ethical and epistemological speculation,its philosophy of nature, of religion, and of history, the work becamethe embodiment of all that is most heretical in the philosopher’sthinking” (ETB 21). And, critically, the assumption that The Expul-

sion of the Triumphant Beast was principally an heretical attack on theCatholic Church was the reading that was upheld by both the forcesof Catholic orthodoxy and anticlericalism.

In The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast the “great Patriarch” (ETB119) Jove, who is subject to the fate of mutations like all of the en-souled entities of the infinite universe, is introduced as a remorsefulfigure who laments that “The great reputation of our [the gods’s]majesty, providence, and justice has been destroyed” (ETB 106). Thegods have long neglected their divine duties and the effect of thisignominious abnegation of responsibility has been made hideouslyresplendent in the heavens.




For there are clearly seen the fruits, the relics, the reports, the rumors,

the writings, the histories, of our adulteries, incests, fornications, wraths,

disdains, rapines, and other iniquities and crimes; and to rewardourselves

for our transgressions, we have committed more transgressions, elevating

to heaven the triumphs of vice and the seats of wickedness, leavingvirtues

and Justice, banished, buried, and neglected in hell. (ETB 106–107)

The beast that is triumphant in the heavens is not the Pope. Thismultiform creature is the sum of all vices and its ascendancy in theconstellations of heaven has allowed the cultured and the unculturedmultitude to flourish on earth. As Bruno writes in his “ExplantoryEpistle” (dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney), “the number of the fools

and the perverse is incomparably larger than that of the wise” (ETB70). Therefore, Jove summons all those gods who are not false and de-crees that on the Feast of Gigantomachy a celestial “conclave” (ETB104) will convene to discuss overthrowing of the “triumphant beast”(ETB 80), and the ethical reform of the heavens. Through the pro-tracted discussions of the gods, Bruno affects a remorseless allegor-ical attack on contemporary social and religious institutions. And,as Imerti writes, he envisages a utopian “society in which the natu-

ral religion of the Egyptians, in its purest sense, and the speculativeintellect of the Greeks would coincide in a sociopolitical structurepatterned after that of the Roman Republic” (ETB 46).

Although Joyce does not make any reference to the political,philosophical or theological disputations of The Expulsion of the Tri-umphant Beast , his denunciation of the narrow Catholic morality of “la bestia Trionfante” that is contemporary Irish society, and the man-ner in which the Irish Literary Theatre has surrendered to the du-

bious aesthetic tastes of these “trolls” (CW 71), is redolent of theexcoriating attacks on the “bestial multitude” (ETB 196) that Brunomakes in his numerous digressions in the dialogue. The Irish Liter-ary Theatre had given “out that it was the champion of progress, andproclaimed war against [the] commercialism and vulgarity” (CW 70)of the modern stage. However, at the first encounter with the will of the “placid and intensely moral” multitude, during the productionof The Countess Cathleen, the directors, in Joyce’s view, demonstratedthemselves not to be among those “few wise men” who love “Truth”and abhor the multitude, and duly surrendered the artistic integrityof the theatre to “the rabblement of the most belated race in Europe”(CW 70). In its surrender to the “trolls” the Irish Literary Theatre




had “cut itself adrift from the line of advancement” (CW 71). Joycedeplores the shyness of the directors of the theatre in their refusal toescape the “contagion” (CW 71) of the “popular devil” (CW 70), and

castigates Yeats for his “treacherous” accommodation of the whims of the “half-gods” of the Gaelic cultural and literary revival (CW 71).Furthermore, it can be argued that in The Day of the Rabblement Joyceis insinuating that the ascendancy of the cultured and the uncul-tured multitude in Irish society is a result of the moribund anddecrepit moral and intellectual authority of the “gods” of that soci-ety, particularly the discursive influence of the anti-intellectual andUltramontane Irish Church.

The “radical principle of artistic economy” that Joyce privileges in

The Day of the Rabblement , and which Stephen cultivates in StephenHero and Portrait , is partly derived from his obvious enthusiasm for“the Nolan”: the subversive discursive entity that Bruno employs inhis ethical dialogues. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast is a dia-logue that is “Proposed by Jove, / Achieved by the Council, / Re-vealed by Mercury, / Narrated by Sophia, / Heard by Saulino, / [and]Recorded by the Nolan” (ETB 67). However, the “Nolan” does notactually appear as a discursive entity within the text, as he does in

The Ash Wednesday Supper and Cause, Principle and Unity. The quota-tion attributed to “the Nolan” at the beginning of The Day of the Rab-blement is possibly derived from The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast ,and Joyce’s castigation of the “rabblement” (“la bestia Trionfante”) inhis pamphlet can arguably be seen to strengthen this assumption.However, there is a more succinct passage in The Ash Wednesday Sup- per that is closer to “the Nolan” quotation that appears in the open-ing sentence of The Day of the Rabblement . At the end of the First

Dialogue of The Ash Wednesday Supper the philosopher Teofilo, whoclaims that the Nolan “is as close to me as I am to myself” ( AWS87), says:

TEO: Yes, but in the end it is safer to seek the true and the proper out-

side the mob, because it [the mob] never contributes anything valuable

and worthy. Things of perfection and worth are always found among the

few. ( ASW 99–100)

The disparagement of the “mob” (“multitude”) in The Ash Wednesday Supper is as trenchant as it is in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast .Indeed, in the Second Dialogue Teofilo describes the “bulk of the




57 “Introduction,” Giordano Bruno The Ash Wednesday Supper. La Cena de le ceneri, trans.Stanley L. Jaki (The Hague and Paris: Mouton and Co., 1975), 7.

58 Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge andKegan Paul, 1964), 236.

common people” of England as a “stinkhole” whose “evil reek” issuppressed by the “open-handed humanity” of the Elizabethan court( ASW 120). Bruno is scornful in his estimation of the intellectual ca-

pacity of his scholastic adversaries, and describes their methods as“like those of peasants” ( ASW 110). However, in The Ash Wednesday Supper Bruno does not articulate his discursive interrogation of thecontemporary scholasticism in the form of an allegorical dialogue,and the radical speculative intellect of Bruno is openly manifested inthe text by the discursive entity of “the Nolan.”

In The Ash Wednesday Supper the philosopher Teofilo relates to hisfellow interlocutors a discussion that took place during a banquetat the house of the Elizabethan intellectual, courtier and poet Sir

Fulke Greville. In this discussion Bruno, “the Nolan,” engages in adefence and exposition of the Copernican heliocentric theory (“a new,resolute and most certain doctrine” [ ASW 70]). The Ash Wednesday Supper dialogue was the first book-length defence of Copernicus’s rev-olutionary heliocentric theory.57 Although Bruno praises the “great-ness of this German [Copernicus]” who had “little regard for thestupid mob” ( ASW 86), his defence of Copernicus’s heliocentric the-ory and his disparagement of the Aristotelian geocentricism of scho-

lasticism is principally a prelude to his exposition of the true “Nolanphilosophy” ( ASW 69). Bruno goes beyond Copernicus’s revolution-ary cosmological doctrine in positing an infinite universe of infiniteworlds in which the divine is immanent in nature, and, as Frances A.Yates has argued, represents Copernicus as “a precursor of the dawnof truth and of its prophet, the Nolan.” 58 Moreover, “the Nolan” isdescribed by Teofilo as seeing “through neither the eyes of Coperni-cus nor those of Ptolemy, but through his own eyes” ( ASW 85). He

authorises a discursive position from which he can enunciate his “an-cient and true philosophy [. . .] [which has] for so many centuries[been] entombed in the dark caverns of blind, spiteful, arrogant, andenvious ignorance” ( ASW 87). As Gosselin and Lerner have sug-gested, “Bruno uses the Copernican system as a grand metaphor orhieroglyph for his insights into the fundamental nature of the uni-verse, into the relationship between Man the microcosm and the ex-ternal macrocosm, and [. . .] into the relationship between Man andGod” ( ASW 28).




59 Gose, The Transformation Process in James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” 10.

Although there are no overt allusions or references to The AshWednesday Supper in either The Day of the Rabblement or Stephen Hero,the manner in which Joyce introduces “the Nolan” into his attack on

the Irish Literary Theatre in The Day of the Rabblement and the pro-cess by which Stephen is constructed as an heretical outsider who isengaged in a discursive struggle with contemporary Catholicism,may be attributed to his reading of The Ash Wednesday Supper . Gosehas suggested that the one aspect of Bruno’s texts to which Joyce mayhave been drawn during his initial encounter with “the Nolan” is theoccasions “in the Italian dialogues [that] Bruno allows the voice of the Magus to speak.”59 For Bruno the “lover of the true of the good”is the Hermetic philosopher who is able to unveil the secrets of na-

ture and realise immanent divinity; he is the heroic enthusiast whoseeks to “unite himself with God” (CW 134). The voice of the Ma-gus is unmistakably present in The Ash Wednesday Supper . In the FirstDialogue Teofilo praises “the Nolan” and the manner in which he haschallenged the continued hegemony of the geocentricism of the “vul-gar philosophy” ( ASW 109) of scholasticism, and blasphemously at-tributes him with Christ-like virtues and accomplishments:

Now behold, the man [the Nolan] who has surmounted the air, pene-trated the sky, wandered among the stars, passed beyond the borders

of the world, [who has] effaced the imaginary walls of the first, eighth,

ninth, tenth spheres, and the many more you could add according to the

tartlings of empty mathematicians and the blind vision of vulgar phi-

losophers. Thus, by the light of his senses and reason, he opened those

cloisters of truth which it is possible for us to open with the most dili-

gent inquiry; he laid bare covered and veiled nature, gave eyes to the

moles and light to the blind, who could not fix their gaze and see theirimage reflected in the many mirrors which surround them on every side;

he loosed tongues of the dumb who could not and dared not express their

tangled opinions, [and] he strengthened the lame who could not make

that progress of the spirit which base and dissolute matter cannot make.

He makes them no less present [on them] than if they were actual in-

habits of the sun, of the moon, and of the other known stars; he shows

how similar or different, greater or lesser are those bodies which we see

far away, in relation to the earth which is so close to use and to which we

are joined; and he opens our eyes to see [truly] this deity, this our mother

[the earth] who feeds and nourishes us on her back after having conceived




60

Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 237.61 Rivka Feldhay and Adi Ophir, “Heresy and Hierarchy: The Authorization of GiordanoBruno,” Stanford Humanities Review 1:1 (Spring 1989): 126.

62 Ibid , 118.

us in her womb to which she always receives us again, and he [leads us]

not think that beyond her there is a material universe without souls, and

life and even excrement among its corporeal substances. ( ASW 90)

This passage has the force of an heretical creed. Yates has observedthat it was passages such as this in The Ash Wednesday Supper “whichused to throw the nineteenth-century liberals into ecstasies as the cryof the advanced scientific thinker breaking out of medieval shack-les.” 60 Although Joyce’s appropriation of Bruno is different to thosemade by Pater, Wilde, Yeats and Swinburne, Joyce was similarly at-tracted to this image of “the Nolan” in the Italian dialogues. The im-age of a man who “has freed the human mind and the knowledge

which were shut in the strait prison of the air” ( ASW 89) is nothingif not exemplary.

Joyce may have been primarily drawn to the exemplary image of the Magus that Bruno creates in his Italian dialogues. However, themanner in which Bruno employs “the Nolan” as a discursive entityin The Ash Wednesday Supper , which parodies, subverts and mastersthe discourses of contemporary religious and intellectual orthodoxy,is instructive and one that may have influenced the textual strategies

he was to employ in his own fiction in his own discursive strugglewith the forces of orthodoxy. Rivka Feldhay and Adi Ophir havesuggested that in The Ash Wednesday Supper , specifically in relation tothe manner in which he employs “the Nolan” as a “discursive entity[. . .] that founds and sustains authorship,”61 Bruno exhibits a mod-ern concept of authorship that is self-legitimating. They argue thatBruno constructs a mode of authorship that is not dependent on theintellectual and religious discourses of orthodoxy for its signification:

The bizarre composition of the Cena, its discursive layers, and textual

practices, may serve as clues to a specific discourse, irreducible either to

science or Hermeticism. What Bruno has to offer is a modern concept of

authorship, which constrains the way he observes and interprets nature,

reads and uses texts, the autonomy of his discourse and its potential

institutionalization within a political environment.62




63

Umberto Eco, “Towards a New Middle Ages,” On Signs, ed. M. Blonsky (Baltimore,1985), 499; op. cit . 120n.64 Ibid ., 127.65 Ibid ., 119–120.

In The Ash Wednesday Supper Bruno signifies a radical disjunctionwith the accepted practices of scholasticism. As Umberto Eco has ar-gued, “The medieval scholar is always pretending to have invented

nothing and constantly quotes some previous authority [. . .] onemust never put something new without making it seem to have beensaid by someone in the past.” 63 For those writers who operated withinthe discursive parameters of scholasticism the authority of this ob-jective reality was a sine qua non and was derived from the divinerevelations of Holy Scripture and the traditions of the Church. Assuch, the scholastic system was an inviolable monolithic theologico-philosophical system. It is a discursive auctoritas. The work of the me-dieval scholar became a function of that scholastic system, a “knot in

a web of commentaries.” 64 The authority of its utterance was depen-dent on the degree to which it reproduced the authority and tradi-tion of the scholastic system, and any such addition to that systemwas attributed to a previous patristic writer. Thus, any philosophi-cal discourse that defied the conventions of the scholastic system wasdeemed illegitimate, or defiantly heretical.

As Feldhay and Ophir argue, Bruno inverts the traditional sys-tem of authority and dares to construct an authoritative discursive

position that is extrinsic to scholasticism. He is not attempting to ef-fortlessly insinuate his discourse into a monolithic “web of commen-taries”; he is proclaiming a revolutionary rupture with that system.

Bruno seldom tries to gain the status of an authorized writer in a known

discourse, presenting himself rather as the rising sun of a new intel-

lectual era, with Copernicus as its dawn. Not only does he ridicule the

authority of tradition, but he declares his own authority ex nihilo, si-

multaneously undermining the tradition of authorship and striving toarticulate a new concept of authority and authorship.65

The authority that Bruno asserts is derived from Hermeticism, andnot from the scholastic system. In positing an infinite universe of infinite worlds in which the contraries of the microcosm and themacrocosm are reconciled, Bruno has dismantled the “mechanicalheaven” ( SH 91) of scholasticism and liberated human reason from




66 Ibid ., 120.

“the fetters of the eight, nine or ten imaginary mobiles or movers”( ASW 91). Thus, in The Ash Wednesday Supper Teofilo honors “theNolan” as the true Hermetic philosopher who has, “by the light of

his senses and reason,” unveiled the secrets of nature and revealedhow mankind is always on the cusp of the divine. Having disman-tled the hierarchy of spheres Bruno radically disrupts the discur-sive conventions of the scholastic system that has maintained this“mechanical heaven.”

As Feldhay and Ophir observe, Bruno effects a “scandalous pre-sentation of the writing self [that] goes against the accepted rolesof discourse in Neo-Platonic, Aristotelian, and even so-called ‘Her-metic’ traditions.”66 Bruno destabilises the authority of contempo-

rary scholasticism through the textual construction of a “writingself ” (“the Nolan”) which radiates its own authority. In the “Prefa-tory Epistle” Bruno proclaims that The Ash Wednesday Supper is a di-alogue in which there is a coincidence of contraries. He declares thatthe text is “so trifling and serious, so grave and waggish, so tragic andcomic that I surely believe there will be no few occasions for you tobecome heroic and humble; master and disciple” ( ASW 67). Througha carnivalesque fusion of bathetic reduction and philosophical dia-

logue and interrogation, the “Nolan philosophy” is proclaimed as thediscursive means by which a reconciliation of all contraries can berealised.

While there is no trace of any of the philosophical and cosmolog-ical disputations of The Ash Wednesday Supper in The Day of the Rabble-ment , this text, like The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast , does occupya significant vestigial presence in Joyce’s attack on the Irish LiteraryTheatre in The Day of the Rabblement . As Copernicus is presented as a

prophetic precursor of “the Nolan” in The Ash Wednesday Supper so, itcan be argued, Joyce arrogantly prophesies that Ibsen is his own pre-cursor; he, Joyce, is “the third minister [who] will not be foundwanting when his hour comes” (CW 72). Although the imagery that Joyce employs to denounce the ignobility of the “cultivated” and the“uncultivated” Irish multitude is gleaned from The Expulsion of theTriumphant Beast , the manner in which Joyce arrogates the right toauthorise a discursive position from which he can effect such a de-nunciation is partly derived from his reading of The Ash Wednesday Supper .




67 Marilyn French, The World as Book: James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (London: Abacus, 1982), 33.68 Stanislaus Joyce, The Dublin Diary, ed. George Harris Healey (London: Faber and

Faber, 1963), 25.

*In Stephen Hero Daedalus acknowledges that the “persistence of Cath-olic power in Ireland” intensifies “very greatly the loneliness of the

Irish Catholic who voluntarily outlaws himself”; and speculates thatthe force he “must generate to propel himself out of so strong and in-tricate a tyranny may often be sufficient to place him beyond theregion of re-attraction” ( SH 152). Lacking the “scrupulous meanness”( L II 134) of Dubliners, suffused with “egotism and effusion,” and“overly sentimental, romantic, and pretentious,” 67 Stephen Hero is aproblematic and unstable text. Possessing neither the episodic norepiphanic structure of Portrait , the existing manuscript of StephenHero is a fragment of a novel that apparently sprawled to some thou-

sand pages; and the extant episodes of this text concern the period inwhich Stephen is a wayward student at UCD. As the text in which Joyce’s hostility to the Church is at its most visceral and unambigu-ous, Stephen Hero is of significant interest for the historicist critic of Joyce’s engagement with Catholicism. According to Stanislaus, Joycehad begun to transform the unpublished “A Portrait of the Artist,”written in January 1904, into a novel by March of that year; 68 and bythe time he left Dublin with Nora during the autumn, he had already

written the first twelve chapters ( L II 67). Chapter XXIV of StephenHero was completed by June of the following year ( L II 91). Writ-ten rapidly and amidst the pressures of the precarious and peripateticnature of his domestic and financial circumstances, and remarkablefor the rawness of its expression, Stephen Hero communicates some-thing of the intense anger of Joyce’s apostasy. It is the text in which Joyce, having established an heretical discursive position, mostclearly signifies his attempt to effect a rupture with the hegemony of

contemporary Catholicism.The heretical intent of Stephen Hero can be discerned in the presenceof Brunonian traces and allusions. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast and The Ash Wednesday Supper both occupy a covert presence inthe text, supplying the structural paradigm upon which Stephen’sheretical struggle with the Irish “rabblement” is constructed. AndStephen is himself presented as a Nolan-like individual who pro-fesses “scorn for the rabblement and contempt for authority” ( SH




127), and for whom “Isolation is the first principle of artistic econ-omy” ( SH 37). He seeks to subvert and displace the hegemony of Catholicism; and, through the expression of his “nature freely and

fully for the benefit of [. . .] society” ( SH 51), he struggles to profferto his generation the “gift of certitude” ( SH 81). While Daedalus isdespairing of the “stupefied intensity of worship” ( SH 152) of the un-cultured “rabblement” of Ireland, his ire is reserved primarily for aspecific section of the cultured “rabblement” of Irish Catholic soci-ety: the middle-class students of UCD who, distrustful of his in-tellectual and artistic interests, particularly his celebration of Ibsen,fear him as an “infidel” ( SH 46). They are perceived as “sycophantsand hypocrites” who obediently “toe the line” ( SH 146); and Ste-

phen expresses nothing but contempt for those who “have leaguedthemselves together in a conspiracy of ignobility” ( SH 32). In Chap-ter XXIV Joyce describes the university as a “day-school full of ter-rorised boys, [who] toil and labour to insinuate themselves into thegood graces of the Jesuits. They adore Jesus, Mary and Joseph: theybelieve in the infallibility of the Pope and in all his obscene, stink-ing hells” ( SH 238). Nevertheless, it is within the conservative andoppressive institutional boundaries of UCD that Stephen occupies

the oppositional and subversive discursive site of the heretic, andenunciates his profane aesthetic.

The episode in the text in which the conflict between Stephen andthe cultured “rabblement” of UCD is dramatically manifested con-cerns his presentation of a paper entitled “Art and Life” to the Literaryand Historical Society. This essay is a “careful exposition of a care-fully mediated theory of esthetic” ( SH 85), in which Stephen intendsto “define his own position for himself” ( SH 81). Although he is in

“favour of all but the premisses of scholasticism,” and describes his aes-thetic theory as “applied Aquinas” ( SH 89), it is a profane discoursethat mischievously masquerades as an orthodox utterance:

He proclaimed at the outset that art was the human disposition of intel-

ligible or sensible matter for an esthetic end, and he announced further

that all such human dispositions must fall into the division of three dis-

tinct natural kinds, lyrical, epical and dramatic. Lyrical art, he said, is

the art whereby the artist sets forth his image in immediate relation to

himself; epical art is the art whereby the artist sets forth his image in

mediate relation to himself and to others; and dramatic art is the art




whereby the artist sets forth his image in immediate relation to others.

( SH 81–82)

He argues that the literary artefact is the highest form of art, andthen proceeds to attempt to “establish the relations which must sub-sist between the literary image, the work of art itself, and that energywhich had imagined and fashioned it, that centre of conscious, re-acting, particular life, the art” ( SH 82). The artist occupies a me-diating position between the “the world of his experience and theworld of his dreams,” and the secret of his “artistic success” lies inhis ability to equate the twin faculties of selection and reproduction( SH 82). The “supreme artist” is the individual who is able to “dis-

entangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining cir-cumstances most exactly and re-embody it in artistic circumstanceschosen as the most exact for its new office” ( SH 82). And poetry isthat art form in which there is a “perfect coincidence of the two ar-tistic faculties” ( SH 82). The world of experience from which thepoet disentangles the “subtle soul of the image” of his literary arte-fact is imagined as a “spacious realm” ( SH 82); and it encompasses allthe material and existential circumstances of the social formation in

which the artist is an individual subject. Thus, the true artist cannotforsake the “the world, the flesh and the devil” ( SH 78). In declaringthat the realm of the artist is “society,” that is, “the complex body inwhich certain laws are involved and overwrapped” ( SH 82–3), Ste-phen signifies that the proper locus of the literary artist is the con-temporary social formation. Such a locus is a cultural and economicsite in which the condition of modernity, with its attendant “wolvesof disbelief” ( SH 58), prevails. Stephen, in arguing that the infra-

structure and superstructure of a social formation is the proper realmfor the literary artist, disavows the condemnation of modernity thatis implicit in the narrow proscriptions of the “Syllabus of Errors.” Fororthodox Catholicism such an aesthetic is inherently erroneous, evenif the disentangling of the “subtle soul” of the artistic image neces-sarily involves a critical examination of spiritual, social and economiccorruption and paralysis in a given social formation.

The aspect of Stephen’s profane aesthetics that is guaranteed toelicit the condemnation of contemporary Catholicism is the mannerin which he appropriates the speculative philosophy of Aquinas, theparagon of the theologico-philosophical system that was the touch-




stone of orthodoxy for Ultramontane Catholicism, to legitimate hisconception of literary art as a mode of human expression that is in-compatible with spiritual or moral didacticism. Stephen argues that

the critic must approach the literary artefact in an “act of reverence,”like a communicant approaching the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist( SH 84). If the critic is to approach “the temper” which has forged theliterary artefact, and apprehend fully its “secret,” he must free himself from those “profanities” in which he may be “enmeshed” ( SH 84).

Chief among these profanities Stephen set the antique principle that the

endofart is to instruct, to elevate, and toamuse. “I amunable tofind even

a trace of this Puritanic conception of the esthetic purpose in the defini-

tion which Aquinas has given beauty,” he wrote “or in anything whichhas written concerning the beautiful. The qualifications he expects for

beauty are in fact so abstract and common a character that it is quite im-

possible for even the most violent partizan to use the Aquinatian theory

with the object of attacking any work of art that we possess from the

hand of any artist whatsoever.” ( SH 84)

Stephen appropriates a sentence from the Summa Theologica of Aqui-nas, “ Pulchra enim dicuntur quae visit placent ” ( SH 84), to legitimate a

literary art form that selects and reproduces elements from the ma-terial and existential circumstances of a given social formation. Theartist is presented as the sole arbiter of the beautiful; the conceptionof beautiful being that moment when the “unuttered” ( SH 83) mean-ing of “intelligible or sensible matter” is perceived by an intelligencethat has not forsaken the “world, the flesh and the devil.” The rightof the Church to legislate on questions of faith and morals is rejected.The artist should be free from all the “interdictions” of secular and

ecclesiastical authority, and should be allowed to possess the licenceto “outrage” the “limits of decency” of the “public mind” ( SH 84).He argues, “It is absurd, [. . .] for a criticism established upon hom-ilies to prohibit the elective courses of the artist in his revelation of thebeautiful” ( SH 84–85).

Stephen concludes his argument with an “eloquent and arrogantperoration” ( SH 85) and, in the coded manner in which he proclaimsthe unique abilities of the poet, he reveals his Brunonian affiliation:

In fine the truth is not that the artist acquires a document of licence from

householders entitling him to proceed in this or that fashion but that




every age must look for its sanction to its poets and philosophers. The

poet is the intense centre of the life of his age to which he stands in a re-

lation that which none can be more vital. He alone is capable of absorb-

ing in himself the life that surrounds him and of flinging it abroad amid

planetary music. When the poetic phenomenon is signalled in the heav-

ens, exclaimed the heaven-ascending essayist, it is time for the critics to

verify their calculations in accordance with it. It is time for them to

acknowledge that here the imagination has contemplated intensely the

truth of the being of the visible world and that beauty, the splendour

of truth, has been born. The age, though it bury itself fathoms deep

in formulas and machinery, has need of these realities which alone give

and sustain life and it must await from those chosen centres of vivifica-

tion the force to live, the security of life which can only come to it fromthem. ( SH 85)

The artist is constructed as a Nolan-like individual who, like thepoet or the philosopher, the “lover of the good or the true,” refuses tomake “terms with the rabblement” and forges his “revelation of thebeautiful” free from the philistine interdictions of contemporary so-ciety. In Bruno’s pantheistic conception of an infinite universe of in-

finite worlds the divine is immanent in nature (“natura est deus rebus”).In arguing that the poet stands at the “intense centre” of his existen-tial and material circumstances and alone is able to transmute, or tran-substantiate, the “life that surrounds him,” Stephen echoes Bruno’sassertion in The Ash Wednesday Supper that “the Nolan,” and thosewho tasted “the fruits of the Nolan philosophy” ( ASW 69), are able toapprehend the divine as immanent in nature, the material universe.Furthermore, it can be argued that Joyce, in describing Stephen as

the “heaven-ascending essayist” who is able to fling his literary art“abroad amid planetary music,” is making an allusion to the effusivepassage in the First Dialogue of The Ash Wednesday Supper . In this pas-sage “the Nolan” is celebrated as an individual who has “surmountedthe air, penetrated the sky, wandered among the stars, passed beyondthe borders of the world, [who has] effaced the imaginary walls of thefirst, eighth, ninth, tenth spheres, and the many more you could addto the tatlings of empty mathematicians and the blind vision of vul-gar philosophers.” I would suggest that the hubristic effusion of this“eloquent and arrogant peroration” is an aporetic moment in Ste-phen’s paper in which an attachment to the anathematised shade of




69 Beasaung, “Authority Under Fire,” Revue des Lettres Modernes, 77.

Bruno is disclosed, and the heretical intent of his profane aestheticsis covertly signified.

*In reading the letters that Joyce wrote to Stanislaus from Rome in1907 it is evident that he had become tired of the anticlericalist li-onisation of Bruno. It was during this period that he was engaged inthe re-writing of Stephen Hero as Portrait . Although the structural re-lationship that exists between Stephen Dedalus, the alienated apos-tate and intellectual, and the orthodox middle-class Catholic societyof Ireland is retained, he is not presented as a Nolan-like heretic, andthe allusions and overt references to Bruno and the “rabblement”

were removed. The anarchistic determination to enunciate a discur-sive intervention with a “maximum of explosive force” is replaced bya defensive strategy of “silence, exile, and cunning” ( P 269). Whilethe rhythmic and thematic drive of the narrative of Portrait , in itsmovement “from contraries, through contraries, into contraries, tocontraries” (ETB 91), is consonant with Bruno’s belief in the fate of mutations, and Stephen’s epiphany on Clontarf strand is redolent of an intimation of an immanentist ontology, the Brunonian presence

in the text has been largely expunged or, at the very least, subli-mated. Nevertheless, Joyce’s decision to excise the allusions and ref-erences to Bruno and his Italian dialogues neither detracts from nornegates the significance of his enthusiastic dialogue with the “he-resiarch martyr of Nola” during the 1900s, specifically in relation tothe manner in which he conceptualised and enunciated his discursivestruggle with contemporary Catholicism. In this article I have at-tempted to demonstrate that Joyce’s enthusiasm for one of the “fiery

badgers of heresy”69

was not merely a superficial act of youthful de-fiance, but a complex strategic alignment that enabled him to gen-erate sufficient force to affect a rupture with the hegemony of theChurch of his upbringing and education.

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14.1downes. Giordano Bruno

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