Simple substance

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Bloom's effort to initiate intellectual exchange is embarrassingly incoherent:

     — You, as a good catholic, he observed, talking of body and soul, believe in the soul. Or do you mean the intelligence, the brainpower as such, as distinct from any outside object, the table, let us say, that cup. I believe in that myself because it has been explained by competent men as the convolutions of the grey matter. Otherwise we would never have such inventions as X rays, for instance. Do you?
     Thus cornered, Stephen had to make a superhuman effort of memory to try and concentrate and remember before he could say:
     –– They tell me on the best authority it is a simple substance and therefore incorruptible. It would be immortal, I understand, but for the possibility of its annihilation by its First Cause, Who, from all I can hear, is quite capable of adding that to the number of His other practical jokes, corruptio per se and corruptio per accidens both being excluded by court etiquette.
     Mr Bloom thoroughly acquiesced in the general gist of this though the mystical finesse involved was a bit out of his sublunary depth still he felt bound to enter a demurrer on the head of simple, promptly rejoining:
     — Simple? I shouldn't think that is the proper word. Of course, I grant you, to concede a point, you do knock across a simple soul once in a blue moon.

No one past the age of ten could feel "cornered" by Bloom's bumbling inquisition. If Stephen makes a superhuman effort to do anything other than keep his eyes open, it may be to consider whether he should waste any breath on the proposed topic. Having decided to be civil, he launches into an arch riff on the theological problem that occupied him at the beginning of Proteus: whether God, having created an immortal human soul, could destroy it. In that chapter his answer was No: "before the ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever." That view, no matter how well grounded in Aquinian logic, is heretical (God can do anything He goddamn well pleases), so now Stephen tries out the contrary position: the soul is said to be immortal, but God could make a practical joke of this verity by simply annihilating the troublesome thing.

Stephen returns to Aquinas for several pieces of terminology. Summa Theologica 1.75.6, which asks "Whether the Human Soul is Corruptible" (i.e., perishable), asserts that "a thing may be corrupted in two ways––in itself (per se) and accidentally (per accidens). Now it is impossible for any subsistent being to be generated or corrupted accidentally, that is, by the generation or corruption of something else." Nor is it possible, Aquinas maintains, for the soul to be corrupted per se, "For corruption is found only where there is contrariety," and the intellectual soul has no contrariety. It is in this sense that Stephen says that the soul "is a simple substance and therefore incorruptible": the soul is an unmaterial, undivided substance, and such entities do not decay.

Bloom hears the word in a rather less technical sense, and his hilariously off-topic reply suggests that he could not possibly have "thoroughly acquiesced in the general gist" of Stephen's remarks. He does seem to recognize, however, that he is "a bit out of his sublunary depth," and, to give him his due, most human beings would be hard pressed to follow Stephen's "mystical finesse."