In the early 20th century Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses, modernity is fast displacing tradition. Where collective life used to be totally organized around the church, it’s quickly shifting to modern institutions (like newspapers, universities, and corporations) and urban social spaces (like pubs, beaches, and street corners). In turn, Joyce’s Dubliners increasingly choose the excitement, consumerism, and vice of modern urban life over the traditional Catholic values of their parents and grandparents. But when religion disappears as an explanation of people’s place in the world, something has to fill the gap. Therefore, it’s significant that Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s two protagonists, are both atheists. Stephen and Bloom represent two different alternatives to religion. Stephen believes in art, philosophy, and creativity, whereas Bloom believes in science, business, and rationality. Roughly speaking, then, Stephen is the mind and Bloom is the body—but both are incomplete, because religion explains the relationship between body and mind. Ultimately, by integrating Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom’s perspectives in the closing chapters of Ulysses, Joyce shows that it’s possible to unite body and mind by finding spiritual meaning in the physical world itself.
Ulysses depicts a fast-modernizing society where the church, especially the Catholic Church, is traditionally powerful but starting to quickly lose importance. That said, it’s still everywhere—the novel includes a dizzying number of priests (Coffey, Conmee, Conroy, Cowley, and O’Hanlon), even if they do travel around by electric tram (Conmee) or amass substantial debts and play the piano in rowdy hotel bars (Cowley). But under English rule, the Catholic Church has little formal power, and most of the Dubliners in Ulysses care far more about Parnell than the Pope. In fact, Stephen and his friends repeatedly compare the Church to the English—as they’re Ireland’s two foreign masters. In short, the Church traditions are still alive, but they are growing more and more irrelevant to modern life.
Meanwhile, Joyce’s protagonists are already one step ahead: they’re atheists who have already rejected the church’s authority. As an alternative to religion, Bloom chooses to explain the world through science, while Stephen Dedalus chooses to explain it through ideas. In other words, Bloom thinks that everything in the universe is actually physical and there is no such thing as a soul, while Stephen thinks that everything is just a product of the mind and physical objects aren’t necessarily real. Bloom grew up Jewish, but he has never believed in God. He even views religion through the lens of science: when he stumbles into mass, he notes how the congregants appear drugged, and at Dignam’s funeral, he thinks about how wasteful it is to spend money burying loved ones instead of on charity. He’s the typical modern man of the early 1900s: he believes in throwing religion out and replacing it with technology, progress, and technocratic social reforms.
Meanwhile, Stephen Dedalus abandons religion in the opposite way, and he represents a philosophical response to the fading power of the Church. When he realized that his Catholic upbringing could no longer provide meaning, guidance, and structure in his life, Stephen gave up believing in God but kept looking at the world like a Jesuit. In Ulysses, he tries to understand the universe by asking philosophical questions, analyzing art, and searching for the ultimate truth hidden behind the physical world (which he considers a set of mere illusions). In the process, he totally ignores the outside world: he throws away his money, antagonizes his friends, and stops bathing. In short, whereas Bloom is a scientific thinker who copes with the decline of religion by focusing his energy entirely on the physical world around him, Stephen is an artistic thinker who copes with the decline of religion by turning his energy inward and focusing entirely on the mind. But Bloom neglects the mind and Stephen neglects the body.
In order to find a viable alternative to religion, Joyce spends the last few chapters of the novel looking for a way to integrate Bloom and Stephen’s worldviews into a kind of atheism that captures both body and soul. He offers several hints, but three are worth noting. The first is that the “Ithaca” episode presents Bloom and Stephen’s views together through a catechism (a series of questions and answers ordinarily used to clarify religious doctrines). While Bloom and Stephen often speak past each other, it’s often possible for the reader to see where their views intersect. For instance, in one moment, they both see the other as the Messiah, and Stephen thinks about St. John of Damascus, who said that the Father and Son are co-substantial (or made of the same substance). Essentially, Stephen and Bloom symbolically merge into a Messiah-like figure who will bring humankind an alternative to religion.
Secondly, Joyce repeatedly talks about metempsychosis (reincarnation), which explains how souls can continue to exist in the physical world, moving from body to body, without being created or destroyed. Third and finally, Molly Bloom’s worldview integrates the physicality of Bloom’s with the spirituality of Stephen’s. Joyce strongly associates Molly with the natural world. And at the end of her monologue, she expresses frustration with people who argue about the existence of God and the soul. She thinks that people should affirm the world itself, rather than trying to figure out where it came from. So whereas Christians say that the soul comes from God, Bloom would say that it’s just a product of “brainpower,” and Stephen would say that the world is a reflection of the mind, Molly says that the soul already exists within the natural world, in its beauty, force, and dynamism.
While Joyce doesn’t give any single answer to the question of what people should believe in a modern secular society, he affirms that it’s possible to give up on religion and still have a coherent view of the world. Accordingly, even though Stephen and Bloom don’t change each other’s minds, Joyce offers his readers the tools and ideas they need in order to confront a world without God.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Religion, Atheism, and Philosophy ThemeTracker
Religion, Atheism, and Philosophy Quotes in Ulysses
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:
—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!
In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, faint odour of wetted ashes.
Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.
Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!
No, mother! Let me be and let me live.
—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
—That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
—What? Mr Deasy asked.
—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.
The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.
Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin.
—Here, she said. What does that mean?
He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail.
—Metempsychosis?
—Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home?
—Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls.
—O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.
His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly, shadowing Trinity’s surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on same, day after day: squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. Those two loonies mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second.
[…]
Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand.
[…]
No-one is anything.
—As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.
Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
—I’m talking about injustice, says Bloom.
—Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men.
[…]
—But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.
—What? says Alf.
—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
And she saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees, up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher […] it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee […] O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!
Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.
Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.
Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!
Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind’s ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature’s incorrupted benefaction.
But was young Boasthard’s fear vanquished by Calmer’s words? No, for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away. […] Heard he then in that clap the voice of the god Bringforth or, what Calmer said, a hubbub of Phenomenon? Heard? Why, he could not but hear unless he had plugged him up the tube Understanding (which he had not done). For through that tube he saw that he was in the land of Phenomenon where he must for a certain one day die as he was like the rest too a passing show. And would he not accept to die like the rest and pass away? By no means would he though he must.
STEPHEN: Here’s another for you. (he frowns) The reason is because the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which …
THE CAP: Which? Finish. You can’t.
STEPHEN: (with an effort) Interval which. Is the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which.
THE CAP: Which?
(Outside the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City.)
STEPHEN: (abruptly) What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow’s noise in the street. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco!
BLOOM: (mumbles) Awaiting your further orders we remain, gentlemen,…
BELLO: (with a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice) Hound of dishonour!
BLOOM: (infatuated) Empress!
BELLO: (his heavy cheekchops sagging) Adorer of the adulterous rump!
BLOOM: (plaintively) Hugeness!
BELLO: Dungdevourer!
BLOOM: (with sinews semiflexed) Magmagnificence!
BELLO: Down! (he taps her on the shoulder with his fan) Incline feet forward! Slide left foot one pace back! You will fall. You are falling. On the hands down!
BLOOM: (her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing, yaps) Truffles!
(With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his feet: then lies, shamming dead, with eyes shut tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most excellent master.)
STEPHEN: Non serviam!
[…]
(He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)
(Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)
BLOOM: (wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!
RUDY: (gazes, unseeing, into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)
What was Stephen’s auditive sensation?
He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation of the past.
What was Bloom’s visual sensation?
He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a future.
What were Stephen’s and Bloom’s quasisimultaneous volitional quasisensations of concealed identities?
Visually, Stephen’s: The traditional figure of hypostasis, depicted by Johannes Damascenus, Lentulus Romanus and Epiphanius Monachus as leucodermic, sesquipedalian with winedark hair.
Auditively, Bloom’s: The traditional accent of the ecstasy of catastrophe.
His (Bloom’s) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing for possible error?
That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a heavenman. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to the unknown.
I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
