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Franz S. Klein
English 602
Professor Chris Buttram
25 October 2007

STEPHEN AS AN AESTHETIC THEORTICIAN:
Theoretical and Practical Considerations in A Portrait and the first part of Ulysses

Introduction

Examining Stephen as an aesthetic theoretician proves to provide an interesting journey through James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the first part of Ulysses. Always a character of contradictions, Stephen is no less so as a theoretician. Taking Thomas Aquinas as his philosophical base in A Portrait, Stephen tells his companion Lynch: “So far as this side of esthetic philosophy extends Aquinas will carry me all along the line” (477).

Whether Aquinas truly carries Stephen “all along the line” will be the central question addressed in this paper. The examination of the phrase pulchra sunt quae visa placent, and, later, the three requisites for beauty (integritas, consonantia and claritas) show Stephen’s actual knowledge of Aquinas was quite flawed. Since a careful consideration of Aquinas’ philosophy and Stephen’s theory demonstrates this deficiency, it will also be fruitful to examine Stephen’s theory in practice – in his own aesthetic experiences in A Portrait and, later, in Ulysses. Looking at these textual instances that contradict his own theory, it becomes possible to see Stephen as a flawed aesthetic theoretician, just as he is a flawed character in other ways. Examined lastly will be whether Joyce’s own break with the conventional moral order, the Jesuits, and the Church had anything to do with Stephen’s aesthetic shortcomings.

Pulchra sunt quae visa placent

Stephen is far from hesitant in expounding upon aesthetics. His conversation with Lynch follows their escape from a game of ball with Cranly and Davin. “Let us eke go, as Cranly has it” (470), Lynch says. Immediately and uninvited, Stephen begins boldly: “Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have. I say…” (Ibid.). Overcoming Lynch’s objections, Stephen persists in explaining his theory of kinetic versus static aesthetics:
"Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty" (473).
Here – now at an intrigued Lynch’s request – Stephen defines art as “a human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end” (474). Stephen is asserting that beauty does not excite the emotions, but awakens the intellect. As will become clearer as this paper proceeds, Stephen’s entire aesthetic theory stands upon this statement.

To anchor his theory, Stephen relies directly on Aquinas for the first time: “Aquinas, said Stephen, says that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases… Pulcra (sic) sunt quae visa placent” (474). Stephen’s “first principal” – actually put in Lynch’s mouth here – come from Thomas Aquinas’ major work, the Summa Theologiae. Within his discussion of goodness in general (De bono in communi), Aquinas writes: “Beauty, however, depends on the cognitive faculty: for things are called beautiful which are pleasing when seen” (26).[1] Aquinas addresses beauty and its visual apprehension while responding to an objection that, since goodness is praised as beauty and beauty is related to formal causality (an aspect of the thing), the goodness of a thing must also be related to formal causality, not to the more important final causality (why the thing is what it is). On the contrary, Aquinas argues that beauty and goodness are fundamentally identical and yet logically distinct (beauty is considered a formal cause while goodness is the final cause), since goodness relates to all a person’s desires, while beauty relates only to things that a person senses and processes cognitively.

According to Stephen, Aquinas’ use of the plural noun visa (seen things) covers:
"…[E]sthetic apprehensions of all kinds, whether through sight or hearing or through any other avenue of apprehension. This word, though it is vague, is clear enough to keep away good and evil which excite desire and loathing. It means certainly a stasis and not a kinesis" (474).
Here, immediately, Stephen stumbles in his understanding of Aquinas, for whom beauty and goodness, remember, are logically identical. As Aquinas puts it: “A beautiful thing and a good thing are the same in subject” (26).[2] For Aquinas, things perceived by the senses and apprehended as beautiful by the cognitive faculty are, like anything else, good to greater or lesser degree: “Every being which is not God is a creature of God. But ‘every creature of God is good,’ as it is said in the First Letter to Timothy 4:4: God truly is the maximal good. Therefore, every being is good” (25).[3] Thus, goodness for Aquinas is something that God has and that created beings share in and desire to grow in. As Brian Davies, O.P, puts it: “…[G]oodness is what is aimed at or sought… good things are things which are wanted or attractive… a good X is an X which has whatever features are desirable in that kind of thing” (85).

While Stephen clearly admits he will make a break with Aquinas, he means for this break to come later, in regard to the manifold apprehension of beauty by “…[t]he Greek, the Turk, the Chinese, the Copt, the Hottentot,” who “all admire a different type of female beauty” (475). Aquinas would attribute these differences to the reproductive drive; but, for Stephen, Aquinas’ attribution “leads to eugenics rather than to esthetic” (Ibid.). Since his differences with Aquinas are not with perception of art but its conception, it seems that Stephen understands his stark disjunction between beauty and goodness to be within the bounds of scholastic philosophy. But as William T. Noon, S.J., has noted: “Joyce was not a professional philosopher. He was a much dedicated, gifted, and hard-working artist who took what was at hand, as often as not in secondary sources, all that was in the air where he was, in his own and if it suited him even in his younger brother’s early notebooks, all that he wanted” (355).

For Stephen in The Portrait, the complete interchangeability of aesthetic beauty and aesthetic truth calls for a truce between him and the “crude grey light, mirrored in the sluggish water, and a smell of wet branches over their heads…” (473). Remember that Joyce describes these very elements as seeming to “war against the course of Stephen’s thought” (Ibid.). But now the very truth of the adjectives “crude,” “sluggish” and “wet” transforms the ordinariness of Stephen and Lynch’s surroundings into something good and a beautiful work of art. On the other hand, however, Lynch’s failure to understand how Stephen artistically transformed their environment is illustrated through their diverse reactions to a passing dray during their conversation. When the dray appears, “covering the end of Stephen’s speech with the harsh roar of jangled and rattling metal,” “Lynch closed his ears and gave out oath after oath till the dray had passed” (476). But for Joyce ad extra writing A Portrait, the dray was part of his artistic creation of a scene of true Dublin: Its very correspondence with the true engenders its goodness, its beauty. Thus Joyce ad intra as Stephen recognizes and accepts the dray, and simply “turned also and waited for a few moments till his companion’s illhumour had had its vent” (Ibid.).

The most ordinary things become extraordinary in Ulysses, too, where ugliness made “beautiful” abounds. Buck Mulligan, whose character is variously described as having a “shaking, gurgling face” and a “plump shadowed face and sullen jowl” (3), takes on a sacred role in his mockery of the Mass. The extraordinary beauty of the Catholic Mass is transferred to the ordinariness of the apartment Stephen shares with his companions. A bowl of lather becomes a sacred censer, and Mulligan its bearer. The whole first chapter, really, is a continuation of Mulligan’s mockery: Introibo ad altare Dei[4] (Ibid.) were the sung words that accompanied the priest up the aisle as Mass started. When Mulligan asks Stephen, “Did you bring the key?” (15), Stephen presents it just as an altarboy would present the key to the tabernacle on the altar containing the Sacred Hosts. Having the key, Mulligan “slung his towel stolewise round his neck,” and speaks of a “sacred pint” (Ibid.,) much as a priest would consume the Blood of Christ from the sacred chalice. And with the key, Mulligan and Stephen leave the mockery of the Mass “sanctified,” just as the hosts would be at a real Mass. Described in all their ordinariness and ugliness, these two young men leave their tabernacle[5] and enter into the dirtiness of Dublin.

Integritas, Consonantia and Claritas

In A Portrait, even as Stephen breaks – intentionally or unintentionally – with Aquinas in regard to the relationship between the transcendentals of truth, beauty and goodness, he continues to draw material from him to further define beauty. Continuing his conversation with Lynch, he lays out three “phases” for the apprehension of beauty: “Aquinas says: ad pulcritudinem [sic] tria requiruntur, integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?” (479). Looking to a butcher boy’s basket, Stephen illustrates integritas as “selfbounded and self-contained… You apprehend it as one thing… You apprehend its wholeness” (479-80). Consonantia, he continues, is the secondary apprehension of a thing “as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious” (480). Finally, claritas is related to “the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination” (480-81), he tells Lynch.

The quotation Stephen borrows comes from Aquinas’ description of the essential relation between the Persons of the Holy Trinity (De personis ad essentiam relatis). Reflecting on how human beings can come to know a God who is totally transcendental, Aquinas is asking whether the early Church fathers appropriately described the Persons of the Holy Trinity. Responding affirmatively, Aquinas says: “It is fitting that one first considers God according to the mode which He assumed from creatures (193).[6] Since the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Son, took flesh and became a man (the “mode” apprehensible to the senses), Aquinas says the fathers related beauty (which is sensual) to Jesus Christ. In this context Aquinas provides the quotation used by Stephen: “For three things are required for beauty: First, integrity or perfection, since those things which are made lesser are ugly. Then there is due proportion or harmony. And lastly radiance: Whence those things which have a bright color are said to be beautiful” (Ibid.).[7]

In his foundational book Joyce and Aquinas, William T. Noon, S.J., asserts that Stephen here confuses the ontological and psychological aspects of beauty. Noon writes: “The integritas, consonantia, and claritas (of which Stephen speaks in Aquinas’ name) are conceived by Aquinas as qualities of things which the mind comes to know, not as ‘stages’ in the mind’s own act of knowing” (22). Noon points out that the description of beauty which Stephen borrows is found in an ontological context, regarding God’s being: God is beautiful – transcendentally speaking, He is beauty itself and the source of all beauty. On the other hand, Stephen is speaking of artistic beauty as understood psychologically by the viewer – as something sensibly apprehended and understood in stages. While he admits that these three qualities have a certain priority, Noon says that priority is ontological, not psychological – and therefore not sequential:
"Stephen interprets this ontological priority as though it were a question of temporal sequence. But ontological and temporal priority are not the same thing: one must have light before the act of vision can take place, but the light does not come first and then the act of vision. Granted that there is light, one sees both the light and the object which the light illuminates not in stages but simultaneously" (46).
As an ontological characteristic of a thing, beauty rests not in the “eye of the beholder,” but in the beholden object. Thus does Stephen’s placement of art and perception over beauty ring hollow, since a thing is beautiful even before its perception as such. As Noon puts it: “Stephen confuses, it would seem, the Scholastic analysis of the act of apprehension with this act itself” (45).

Given that Stephen misunderstands – intentionally or unintentionally – the qualities of integritas, consonantia, and claritas, Noon is not surprised to find that he misuses them as well. Unlike Stephen’s “wholeness,” Noon notes that Aquinas pairs integritas with perfectio, meaning “the completeness or perfection which a being possesses when it is all that it ought to be” (47). While Stephen’s consonantia is static (thus supporting his theory of static aesthetics), Aquinas “pays more attention to it as a dynamic principle of order operative throughout all reality” (48).[8] More difficult than integritas and consonantia, Noon believes Stephen – or Joyce – understood claritas to be identical with quidditas through the influence of the Jesuit philosopher Suarez: “Aquinas, to be sure, considers quidditas in the existential order when he talks about existent things, but even in this existential order the existent quidditas is conceived of as the nature of a thing, or the principle of operation which the thing possesses in virtue of its ‘substantial’ form” (50). In other words, quidditas does not make something different from other things, but underlies what a thing is. Claritas, on the other hand, can be had to a greater or lesser degree.

Textual Contradictions

A new vein of scholarship is asking whether Stephen’s failure as a theorist was intentional on Joyce’s part. Admitting Stephen’s theoretical shortcomings as pointed out by Noon and others, Cordell D.K. Yee writes: “His failings as a theorist are as great as, if not greater than, his failings as an artist” (68). According to Yee, Stephen’s first error was choosing Aquinas’ philosophy for his theoretical foundation, since he never wrote a tract on art. Yee argues that Joyce was aware of this and had Stephen deliberately misuse Aquinas. Not only did Stephen misuse Aquinas, Yee writes, his argument’s long-windedness and contrived nature in A Portrait additionally mar it. Thus Yee posits: “If Stephen’s theory is not actually a theory, then it must be something else” (69). While Yee analyzes Stephen’s theory through various theoretical lenses, it might be helpful here examine key textual inconsistencies in both A Portrait and Ulysses.

In A Portrait, the “bird girl” scene immediately precedes the fifth chapter and Stephen’s aesthetic theorizing. Here Stephen is described as “alone” (433), precisely in the condition Joyce expressed as being necessary for an artist. Alone and at the beach, Stephen beholds the bird girl:
"A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon her flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softer than ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down… But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face" (Ibid.)"
Stephen sees the bird girl as art in context: He beholds integritas in the wholeness of her body, consonantia in its fitted parts, and claritas in her girlish humanity. But his reaction is to cry “Heavenly God!” (434). Then “[h]is cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him” (Ibid.). Even if his reaction is not specifically sexual, his flaming cheeks, glowing body and trembling limbs connote a kinetic reaction. It seems that Stephen’s own actions contradict his ethereal vision of static art.

Stephen’s contradiction of his own theory continues in Ulysses, once again as he is walking on a beach, in the third chapter. Unlike the feelings aroused by the bird woman, however, Stephen’s feelings here are of loneliness. He is observing the cocklepickers as they leave, and notices the wife of one of them:
"With woman steps she followed… Spoils slung at her back. Loose sand and shellgrit crusted her bare feet. About her windraw face hair trailed… When night hides her body’s flaws calling under her brown shawl from an archway where dogs have mired…Buss her, wap in rogues’ rum lingo, foro, O, my dimber wapping dell! A shefiend’s whiteness under her rancid rags" (39).
Certainly no bird girl, the cocklepicker’s wife’s femininity, and the fact the woman’s husband – and others – enjoy it while Stephen doesn’t, still causes his lonely sexual drive to war against his theory of “applied” Aquinas: “Morose delectation Aquinas tunbelly calls this, frate porcospino” (Ibid.), he thinks bitterly.[9] Excusing himself thus, on account of Aquinas’ alleged rotundity, Stephen engages the “[i]neluctable modality of the visible” (31). He looks through and past the woman’s imperfections and finds beauty in her, and in this beauty is her truth and goodness: “Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch me, touch me” (41). Thus moved – kinetically – Stephen creates his art in contradiction to his own theory: “Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words” (40).

Breaking from the Conventional Moral Order

Given his desire to show how the ordinariness, ugliness and even badness of Dublin could be aesthetically beautiful, it is highly likely that Joyce had reason for redefining the relationship between beauty and goodness. Returning to A Portrait, Stephen in conversation with Lynch notes that good and evil “…excite desire and loathing” (474), while “[b]eauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic…” (472). But Haskell M. Block also points out Joyce’s perceived need for complete artistic freedom: “The artistic temper, he felt, must be exercised in an atmosphere of complete freedom, and the artist as a creative agent is subject only to the laws of his art” (179-80). For Joyce as Stephen, the end result of this stark separation of beauty and goodness results in his autobiographical exodus and the famous non serviam of A Portrait:
"I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning" (519).
Thus, while Stephen’s non serviam seems innocuous when understood as separating beauty from goodness, it has real consequences when applied to church and state, normally the upholders of societal morals. Yet Stephen believes he is simply following Aquinas to his logical conclusion. Since both the Church and Stephen are relying on Aquinas, somebody has it wrong.

But according to Richard Ellmann in James Joyce, Joyce as an author and artist probably didn’t mean so much to separate beauty and goodness aesthetically speaking as morally speaking. Ellmann says Stephen’s argument isn’t intended to make art immoral or amoral; rather, it seeks to “…transcend conventional morality that it is better able to recognize the good as a by-product of the pursuit of the true and the beautiful” (190). Adding that this is “his only concession to the ethical aspect of art,” Ellmann restates Joyce’s reasoning: [S]ince the good is what is desirable, and since the true and the beautiful are most persistently desired, then the true and the beautiful must be good” (Ibid.). So, for Joyce-Stephen, no longer do truth and goodness engender beauty; rather, the artist’s own search for truth and beauty, in a sense, engenders goodness.

Stephen’s apprehension of goodness in Ulysses, therefore, has less to do with grace received from the Church and more to do with what humanity already has just as it is. Ineluctably pondering a previous conversation with Uncle Richie towards the beginning of chapter three, Stephen listens to the bars of Ferrando’s aria di sortita. With the music, Stephen’s mind wanders to the Mass: “A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar’s horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat” (33). Then his uncle torments him: “Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint…” (34). Failing to find goodness there and deciding against going to his uncle’s, Stephen turns to the beach, where he encounters the “bloated carcass of a dog” (37). In this dog, too, Stephen sees a beach “heavy with the past” (Ibid.), bloated like the priests from his previous musings. For Stephen, goodness does not come from the past, but from the “live dog, gr[owing] into sight running across the sand” (Ibid.). Following the live dog with his eyes, he apprehends a woman and a man: He “see[s] her skirties” (38), he desires, and he thus he finds his object of goodness.

Even with Ellmann’s distinction and evidence in Ulysses that Joyce intended for an artist’s search for beauty and truth to engender goodness, that Joyce intended to break with the conventional moral order is clear, even if he didn’t feel he was breaking with Aquinas’ aesthetics. The journey of Stephen’s eyes from the dead dog to the living dog to a woman’s “skirties” certainly breaks from the search for goodness as the Church understands it. Similarly, for Stephen in A Portrait, the conventional moral order expressed by the Church takes person in the Jesuit dean he encounters in the physics classroom. It is in the context of their conversation on art that Stephen first quotes Aquinas’ famous line: Pulcra [sic] sunt quae visa placent. Like Stephen, the dean is an artist and a creator: “There is an art in lighting a fire” (448), he tells Stephen.

But as Stephen observes the dean about his craft, he thinks how his “very soul had waxed old in that service without growing toward light and beauty” (Ibid.). His eyes are “loveless,” and while he was lame like Ignatius, “in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius’ enthusiasm” (449). Although the dean practices “a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled books of secret wisdom,” he did so “without joy in their handling” (450). As they conclude their conversation and the dean begins to greet the class,
"A desolating pity began to fall like dew upon his easily embittered heart for this faithful servingman of the knightly Loyola, for this halfbrother of the clergy, more venal than they in speech, more steadfast of soul than they, one whom he would never call his ghostly father: and he thought how this man and his companions had earned the name of worldlings at the hands not of the unworldly but of the worldly also for having pleaded, during all their history, at the bar of God’s justice for the souls of the lax and the lukewarm and the prudent" (454-55).
Here Stephen’s indictment is not of the dean’s craft; after all, in his thoughts he praises “Ignatius’ enthusiasm” (449). But doesn’t find the requisite enthusiasm in the dean. In him, Stephen sees a lack of enthusiasm; furthermore, he sees a lack of the artistic drive in all those serving “as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man’s hand, to be left in a corner, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in the stress of the weather, to lie with a lady’s nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace” (450). In pleading “at the bar of God’s justice,” they have in Stephen’s eyes lost their apostolic artistry and become servingmen. Thus does Stephen the artist soon-to-be-free pity the dean as he goes about his craft.

Stephen’s rift with the Church continues in the opening chapter of Ulysses, where “[s]tately, plump Buck Mulligan” (3) begins with a mockery of the Mass. Always an observer, Stephen exits with Mulligan after the latter’s “Mass” for the creek, where his companion prepares for a bath while Stephen hesitates, afraid of the water. Just as infant baptisms would normally follow Mass, so too does Mulligan’s plunge; Stephen’s hesitation has to do with that sacrament: “I’m going, Mulligan, he said” (19).[10] Furthermore, as Stephen walks away, he is reflecting on the Liliata rutilantium, which was sung at his mother’s deathbed where he had refused to kneel. Lastly, among the “baptized” bathers, Stephen recognizes a “priest’s grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly” (Ibid.). According to Richard Ellmann in Ulysses on the Liffey, this priest’s hiddeness “display[ed] sanctified prudery, the opposite of Christ’s wholehearted offer of his body in the chalice” (10). Just as the Jesuit dean had lost Ignatius’ spirit, so this priest fails to live up to Christ, Stephen seems to reason. He concludes regarding the Church: “I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go” (Ibid.).

In constructing their Joyce biographies, most scholars accept that he once considered joining the Society of Jesus, the religious order that sponsored the most influential portion of the young man’s education, and perhaps even received an invitation from them. But J. Mitchell Morse notes that Joyce’s break with his precept-laden Catholic faith had much to do with his growing disillusionment with the Jesuits. Commenting on the Portrait scene, Morse writes: “As Joyce matured he found it increasingly difficult to admire his teachers, who lived under such discipline, for it seemed to him that by mortifying their wills they degraded or destroyed their souls” (1020). Morse points to “moral passivity” and “disavowal of personal responsibility” as being especially abhorrent to Joyce as an artist:
"The Jesuits’ freedom from self, so deceptively similar to the artist’s ideal freedom from personal involvement with the ideas and other materials he uses, inevitably appealed to the unformed artist; but since it is not at all the same thing as that freedom, he inevitably came to the appalling realization that for him at least it would be disastrous. It appealed also because it presented an alternative of order to the disorder of the child’s home; for the artist, however, order must come from within, and is not to be confused with suppression of the will or abdication of the mind" (Ibid.).

Joyce’s break was not just with the Jesuits, as is seen symbolically in the Ulysses passage just analyzed, but also with the Catholic faith the Jesuits stood for. Even as a lay Catholic, Joyce would have been bound by an exterior authority, and by the prudishness that his character Stephen Dedalus observed in the dressing priest, which asserted the authority to judge a person’s moral goodness. Such a proposition was as unacceptable for Joyce the artist as it was for Stephen the artist.

Conclusion

With Stephen having been traced herein as an aesthetic theoretician through his own theory and his experiences in A Portrait and the first part of Ulysses, a number of observations can now be made. First of all, it seems Joyce fully intended for Stephen to separate out moral goodness from the goodness his own theory espoused. As Joyce understands it, Stephen’s and his own artistic journeys demanded a complete and unconditional freedom from the constraints of the conventional moral order. An examination of Aquinas’ own understanding of beauty, however, indicates that a break with true scholasticism came earlier than Stephen intended, with this very necessary redefinition of the relationship between goodness and beauty. Aquinas, unfortunately, does not carry Stephen “all along the line.” The idea that beauty engenders truth and goodness rather than being paired with truth and goodness as transcendentals is as incompatible with Aquinas as it is with the Church Stephen came to abhor.

Still, Stephen’s very human clinging to the kinetic elements of aesthetics despite his disavowal shows his movement to a “higher” aesthetic might not have been so complete as he intended. Textual contradictions from both A Portrait and Ulysses show a sexually tormented Stephen, who remains at war with himself over the creation of an interior stasis. To paraphrase one scholar cited herein, Stephen’s failure as an aesthetic theoretician is but one of many flaws of his character. Whether Joyce intended for Stephen’s aesthetic failure seems as fair a question now as whether he intended for Stephen to be a failure as a character.


Works Cited

Block, Haskell M. “The Critical Theory of James Joyce.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 8:3 (Mar., 1950). 172-184.

Davies, O.P., Brian. The Thought of Thomas Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

de Aquino, Thoma. Summa Theologiae. Ed. Innocentio Colosio, O.P., et al. Torino: San Paolo, 1988.

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In The Portable James Joyce. Ed. Harry Levin. New York: Penguin, 1976.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Eds. Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York: Random House, 1986.

Morse, J. Mitchell. “The Disobedient Artist: Joyce and Loyola.” PMLA. 72:5 (Dec., 1957). 1018-1035.

Noon, S.J., William T. “James Joyce: An Unfact. PMLA. 79:3 (Jun., 1964). 355.

Noon, S.J., William T. Joyce and Aquinas. New Haven: Archon, 1970.

Yee, Cordell D. K. “The Aesthetics of Stephen’s Aesthetics.” Critical Essays on James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Eds. Philip Brady and James F. Carens. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.

Endnotes

[1] “Pulchrum autem respicit vim cognoscitivam: pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent” (I, qu. 5 art. 4, ad 1). All translations are mine.
[2] “…[P]ulchrum et bonum in subiecto quidem sunt idem…“ (I, qu. 5 art. 4, ad 1).
[3] “…[O]mne ens quod non est Deus, est Dei creatura. Sed omnis creatura Dei est bona, ut dicitur I ad Tim. 4, [4]: Deus vero est maxime bonus. Ergo omne ens est bonum” (I, qu. 5 art. 3, sed contra).
[4] “I shall go up to the altar of the Lord.”
[5] The Latin word tabernaculum literally means “tent” or “dwelling.”
[6] “…[O]portet quod Deum consideret secundum modum quem ex creaturis assumit” (I, qu. 39 art. 8, respondeo).
[7] “Nam ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur. Primo quidem, integritas sive perfectio: quae enim diminuta sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt. Et debita proportio sive consonantia. Et iterum claritas: unde quae habent colorem nitidum, pulchra esse dicuntur” (Ibid.).
[8] In another place, Noon demonstrates that Aquinas views beauty as less static and more kinetic. Noting that the apprehension of beauty is an intellective act, he writes: “The most supremely intellective act of which Thomas can conceive is the Beatific Vision, which as he thinks of it is a highly kinetic and has an abundant resonance in the affective nature” (39).
[9] “Tunbelly” (potbelly) and “porcospino” (Italian for porcupine, thus round like a porcupine) are references to Aquinas’ reported rotundity. Stephen is arguing that it is fine for him to indulge his sexual appetite if Aquinas indulged his appetite for food.
[10] Baptism, of course, leads to entry into the Church and to allegiance to her tenets – something Stephen strenuously rejected with his non serviam.