Creed

Creed

In Brief

Ithaca names "four separating forces" between Bloom and Stephen: "Name, age, race, creed." Although the word is used loosely there as a mere synonym for religion, in a narrower and stricter sense a creed is a formal statement of religious doctrines. Stephen thinks respectfully of two ancient Christian creeds in Telemachus, but he is no longer a believer and in Scylla and Charybdis he subjects one of them, the Apostles' Creed, to mockery. Someone in the crowd of young men at the end of Oxen of the Sun wittily captures the contradiction: "Parson Steve, apostates' creed!"

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Haines's questioning prompts Stephen to identify one of his two overbearing "masters" as “the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.“ Except for the word Roman, these "proud potent titles" come from the most widely accepted Christian creed, the 4th century Nicene Creed, as Stephen thinks a moment later: “et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam.” Immediately after, he thinks of the "Symbol of the apostles." The Symbolum Apostolicum or Symbolum Apostolorum, also known as the Apostles' Creed, is the earliest known Christian creed, formulated in the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries. The Nicene Creed followed its general outlines, repeating many of its phrases while significantly expanding it.

Creeds begin with the Latin word Credo, "I believe." The Greek term symbolon, which referred to a physical object signifying agreement between individuals, was sometimes used as a synonym. These formulations of belief were designed to define correct belief (orthodoxy) and distinguish it from false teachings (heresy). As Stephen acknowledges when he thinks of "the slow growth and change of rite and dogma," orthodox Christian doctrine developed gradually over the course of time as church authorities chose among competing accounts of the revealed truth, meeting in committees over the course of decades to hammer out perfectly correct language. One particular kind of wordsmithing lay behind the Nicene Creed; it was formulated to counter the teachings of Arius, by articulating a particular conception of the relation between Father and Son. This creed's "proud potent titles" soon send Stephen’s thoughts into a triumphal fantasy of the archangel Michael casting out a flock of heretics, Arius among them.

Stephen associates the evolution of orthodox belief with the evolution of "his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars," and the analogy is not fortuitous. Having renounced his allegiance to the Catholic church but not his affection for the church's intricate intellectual structures, he is engaged in appropriating Christian symbols and doctrines for use in his fiction. Richard Ellmann says of Joyce in his young adult years, "Christianity had subtly evolved in his mind from a religion into a system of metaphors, which as metaphors could claim his fierce allegiance. His brother Stanislaus's outward rebellion, which took the form of rudeness to his masters at Belvedere and defiance at home—his atheism worn like a crusader's cross—did not enlist James's sympathy. He preferred disdain to combat. He was no longer a Christian himself; but he converted the temple to new uses instead of trying to knock it down, regarding it as a superior kind of human folly" (66).

In Telemachus Stephen thinks of heretical offenses against the doctrine of consubstantiality enshrined in the Nicene Creed, in the process labelling Mulligan a heretic, because he is working out an understanding of artistic creation inspired by the relationship between father and son in Shakespeare's Hamlet––a theory which Mulligan likes to mock. Scylla and Charybdis shows Stephen lecturing on his vision of artistic consubstantiality, but it also suggests his disbelief in the Christian version. When Mulligan enters the library office, Stephen thinks of "Johann Most," a German-American anarchist who parodied the Apostles' Creed in a 1902 pamphlet titled Deistic Pestilence:

A Godly Charlatan who created himself through the Holy Ghost, and then sent himself a mediator between himself and others, and who, held in contempt and derided by his enemies, was nailed to a cross, like a bat to a barndoor; who was buried, arose from the dead, descended to Hell, ascended to Heaven, and since then for eighteen hundred years has been sitting at his own right hand to judge the living and the dead when the living have ceased to exist.
Stephen recalls Most's parody precisely, thoroughly, and with warmly inventive touches of his own:
He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself, Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead when all the quick shall be dead already.

The flood of mocking absurdities is triggered by thoughts like those that Stephen indulged in Telemachus, when he associated Mulligan with theologians who questioned the doctrine of consubstantiality: "Brood of mockers: Photius, pseudomalachi, Johann Most." And like those heretical theologians (Arius, Valentinus, Photius, and especially Sabellius), Most's blasphemous conceit takes aim at the notion that Father and Son are distinct, equal entities. But Stephen's recollection of Most's sentence shows him mocking Christian doctrine, just like Mulligan. Artistic consubstantiality is one thing, it seems, and theology quite another. After the long hour in Oxen of the Sun in which he heaps far more mockery on Christian teachings, the medical students hail Stephen's subversion of church language: "Parson Steve, apostates' creed!"

John Hunt 2024

Orthodox icon depicting the first Council of Nicaea holding the document they have composed. Source: Wikimedia Commons.


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