Consubstantiality

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One central mystery of Christian doctrine, Incarnation, reconciles the humanity and the divinity of Christ. Another, the Trinity, reconciles the divinity of Christ with the divinity of God. To early theologians Jesus of Nazareth was clearly different from the "father" in heaven whom he mentions or addresses often. But he was also divine, and in a monotheistic religion he must therefore be identical with the invisible God in heaven. This contradiction exercised the best minds of the early Christian church, and it doubtless troubles many believers still. (Nora Barnacle, who was more religious than her partner, nevertheless asked him in perplexity, “Jim, is Jesus and God the same?”) Ingenious theologians came up with a solution: Father and Son (and also Holy Spirit) are different "persons," but they are united in a single divine nature, or "substance."

The Trinitarian doctrine enshrined in the Nicene Creed was illustrated in the later Middle Ages in the image of a Scutum Fidei or Shield of Faith: a triangle showing that the Persons are distinct from one another but all the same God. Accompanying text often made clear that Father is not Son and Son is not Father, but both are God.

"Valentine," or Valentinus, lived in the 2nd century AD, when the early church was only beginning to differentiate its teachings from those of the Gnostics. Gnosticism regarded the material world as evil and taught that salvation meant escaping the realm of matter. Although Valentinus thought of himself as a Christian, he was also a Gnostic, and taught that the world had been created not by God but by a quasi-Platonic Demiurge—a malevolent one. Christ came to liberate mankind from materiality, but since he was God, and good, he could not be thought to participate in any way in that materiality. He was therefore conceived as purely spiritual, not incarnate. Stephen thinks in Telemachus of “Valentine, spurning Christ’s terrene body” and thus breaking the Christological link between physical humanity and spiritual essence expressed in the doctrine of Incarnation.

"Sabellius," an influential theologian of the 3rd century about whom little is known today, directly contested early Trinitarian thinking. He denied the threefold quality of the deity, arguing that the supposed persons were simply personae: masks, faces, external aspects. Human believers looked at the incarnate Son who was crucified and resurrected and saw something very different from the unapproachable Ancient of Days who had laid the foundations of heaven and earth. But in themselves these two Persons, and likewise the Holy Spirit, were simply one God who chose to manifest himself in different ways. By this logic, Tertullian objected, the Father could be said to have suffered on the cross just as the Son did, since they are essentially the same. Stephen criticizes Sabellius in Telemachus as "subtle," reasoning that he "held that the Father was Himself his own Son." (He repeats this characterization in Scylla and Charybdis.) The subtlety seems really to be Stephen's own, prompted by Mulligan's taunt that he “proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.” But Sabellius simply denied that the terms Father and Son named anything essential.

"Arius," who figures also in Proteus, lived in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries. He conceived the Persons of the Trinity in an essentially Plotinian manner, as hierarchically ranked processions. God the Father, “the only true God,” first created the Logos (the pre-incarnate Son) “out of things nonexistent.” The Logos similarly created the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit created the material world. Arian teaching thus subordinated the Son to the Father. It was espoused by several of the Germanic tribes and by many people within the Roman empire: ordinary believers, priests, bishops, nobles, even some emperors. Its contest with Trinitarian thinkers was decisively resolved at the first council of Nicaea (325), which condemned Arianism as a heresy and promulgated the view that, in the words of the Nicene Creed, the Son was “begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.” Originally written in Greek, this Creed used the word homoousion to indicate that Father and Son shared the same ousia or essential, immaterial being. The Greek term was translated into Latin as consubstantialem, meaning “of the same substance.” Stephen affirms this crucial element of the Nicene Creed when he thinks in Proteus of Arius “Warring his life long" upon the doctrine of consubstantiality.

If Stephen has been reading Dante as avidly as Joyce himself was at this time of his life (and it seems that he has), it may be that he includes Sabellius and Arius in his catalogue of "heresiarchs" in part because Thomas Aquinas does so in canto 13 of the Paradiso. Dante has Thomas comment on those who reason falsely about ultimate reality, including Parmenides and Melissus of ancient Greece: "Such were Sabellius and Arius and the fools / who misread Scripture" (127-28).

"Photius," or Photios, was a powerful Greek cleric of the 9th century. The Orthodox church regards him as a great father who defended traditional doctrine from a Roman heresy, while Catholics view him as an arch-heretic. In his time the two churches were pulling apart from one another, in a historical process stretching back to the division of the Roman empire and the collapse of the western half. As Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius opposed the Pope in Rome over questions of political authority and also over Rome’s effort to add a single word to the Nicene Creed, filioque (“and from the Son”). This word had been circulating for several centuries in the west, and the Romans wanted the creed amended to make clear that the Holy Spirit proceeds both “from the Father and from the Son.” The Greeks in Constantinople, relying on the creed as written, affirmed that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. From Stephen’s perspective, the Orthodox position is regrettable because it accords primacy to the Father, whereas Catholic doctrine affirms the potency of Father and Son equally.

Telemachus identifies Stephen symbolically with Telemachus and Hamlet, two unhappy sons devoted to absent fathers. Like them, Jesus was a young man in the familiar human world whose life had meaning in relationship to a ghostly, absent father. This relationship suggests how human life encompasses spiritual possibilities—a central concern of Stephen’s aesthetics.