| This concerns Father Purdon’s homily in the third part of James Joyce’s short story "Grace" from Dubliners. Its main purpose is to the bring out the textual problems and context of the Bible passage, and Father Purdon’s pretext in his application of the passage. |
"We’ll make a new man of him," promised Mr. Power to Mrs. Kernan.1 Along with his friends Cunning(ham), (Mc)Coy, and Fogart(y), Power brings Kernan to a retreat at the Gardiner Street Church. We never find out in the story of "Grace" whether Kernan does become a new man,2 because the story ends with Father Purdon’s homily on how to "settle accounts" with God. His lecture illustrates one of the recurring themes in Dubliners—compromise or accommodation. The "new man" is the same old man. Father Purdon is as paralyzed as Father Flynn, in "Sisters," not because of obscure theology or lack of relevance, but because he has compromised the message of Christ for the materialism of the world
As the third ("Paradiso") episode of "Grace" begins, Kernan settles down comfortably in the church. The perpetual flame, representing Christ, is a "distant speck" (172). Kernan sees a variety of business and political types in the congregation. They are the kind of people even Jimmy Doyle’s father ("After the Race") might have associated with. Among them is Mr. Harford, a moneylender, perhaps reminiscent of the moneychangers Christ chased out of the Temple (John 2:13-17). It is worth noting that the façade of the Gardiner Street Church in Dublin, with its high pillars and lack of steeple, looks more like a bank or post office building than anything.3
Photo: William Hederman, Irish Times
Father Purdon, the speaker for the evening, is "powerful-looking figure." His message is for "those whose lot it is to lead," men of the world. He tells them to be "straight and manly with God," "to be frank and say like a man" what needs to be said (173,174). He has attracted a good crowd since the five men cannot sit together; the priest is reminiscent of the heterodox Father Burke (165). The men form a "quincunx" when they sit. This is the shape assumed by the assembly in Dante’s Fifth Heaven–the people who had fought for the faith including folks like Joshua, Judas Maccabeus, and Roland. This compares ironically with the men of the world in the Gardiner Street Church who have not fought for anything other than their own well-being.
The powerful-looking Father Purdon appears to have been attracted to "Muscular Christianity." During the first two decades of the century there was a large Christian revival in the British Isles, particularly in Wales. One aspect of the revival which appealed to the press was dubbed "Muscular Christianity." Testimonies of athletes and other successful men were popular, and churches were expanding at least partly due to the witness and celebrity status of such men. One muscular Christian was Olympic record-breaker Eric Liddell–the "Flying Scotsman" of the Chariots of Fire film. In America the famous evangelist Billy Sunday was a former professional baseball player. Christianity seems to have achieved a certain comfortable popularity during that period, but it was not passed on very well. People like missionary Liddell notwithstanding, Christians in the British Isles as a whole were not very successful in making disciples for the next generation. Churches that were overflowing in the beginning of the century are empty today. One of the reasons may be what Joyce was illustrating in "Grace" –people saw no need for it. If the Church is just a social gathering and the preacher says that I’m O.K. anyhow, what do I need Church or Christ for?
Father Purdon is "massive." It could be more fat than muscle. This can represent both the kind of man Father Purdon attracts as well as illustrating the opposite of the Muscular Christianity–a flabby Christianity. While the anticipation is not unlike an evangelistic meeting or "revival service," the retreat at Gardiner Street offers only the vaguest kind of conversion experience, and for most of the audience it even denies a need for one.
It is an old saw that the preacher is supposed to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." With the possible, exception of "poor O’Carroll," this is a pretty comfortable crowd. Father Purdon simply comforts them.
He truly did pick a difficult text to preach from, but he seems to emphasize the clause "make unto yourselves friends out of mammon" and totally ignore the context in which the passage was given in the Gospel. He claims that the passage was "specially adapted" for businessmen. He would speak that night as "a man of the world speaking to his fellow-men" (173,174).
Father Purdon is deceptively correct. The message of Luke 16:8-9, the passage quoted in "Grace," actually was spoken to a group of wealthy and religious businessmen. But the purpose and the effect were quite different. The Gospel account tells us:
The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus. He said to them, "You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of men, but God knows your hearts. what is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight." (Luke 16:14-15 NIV)
Not exactly the same adaptation that Father Purdon makes! It will take some real adaptation to make this say what Father Purdon does…
While Father Purdon does call for a confession, or at least a re-direction, if necessary ("I will rectify this and this," 174), his basic message is that the men in the church are doing all right. You moneylender, you pawnbroker, you journalist, you politico, you’re all right. I’m a priest, that’s my line of work, I’m O.K., too. He says nothing to them about loving money or power too much. Even if they did not sneer, most would probably not come back. Orthodox Christianity says that man has to adapt to God and His Word, not the other way around.4 (Indeed, this is why priests take vows of poverty.) What is he committing the men in the "pit" to, but the commercial lives they already lead?
Father Purdon has not only adapted the context of the Bible passage to his audience, but he has adapted the text itself. Virtually all versions, of the text read something like a priest’s Douay-Rheims Bible would:
For the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. I say to you: make unto you friends of the mammon of iniquity that when you shall fail they may receive you into everlasting dwellings (Luke 16:8-9 Douay-Rheims, emphasis added).
Instead of "when you fail" or "when it fails" as most versions, Father Purdon says "when you die…" That is a fairly significant change in meaning–especially when followed by the above warning that what the world values is different from what God values!5 The Bible passage was meant to say that material wealth will fail, just as it did with poor O’Carroll. Then you can see what is really important. Luke 16:9, the second sentence of the text quoted in the story, begins Jesus’ explanation of his parable of the unjust servant. His very next words after the explanation are "No servant can serve two masters … Ye cannot serve God and mammon" (Luke 16:13 KJV). Father Purdon seems to be saying that you can work for the two masters. Work hard in this world serving mammon, and you can still be received into everlasting dwellings. Jesus’ address to the sneering rich men, on the other hand, ends with the story of the rich man and Lazarus. The self-assured rich man in Jesus’ story cannot take any of his wealth to Hades with him, while the leprous beggar Lazarus is comforted in Abraham’s bosom. Hardly the kind of story to make a rich man comfortable!
Adapt is a thematic word in the last part of "Grace" as compromise is a recurring theme throughout Dubliners. Mr. Doyle compromised his nationalism for money. Eveline compromised her love for Frank (which means "free"). The two gallants and Farrington compromise family life. Jimmy Doyle and Gallaher compromise their identities for Continental values and money. In "Grace" a spokesman for the Church compromises its message about what is really important in life for acceptance by the merchants. This adaptation of the Church, the accommodation or compromise with the world, has rendered its message useless. To go back to page one of Dubliners, it is a paralyzed gnomon.
Dubliners from the race and concert sponsors to Mrs. Mooney and Corley compromised for money, but the Church also has given in to materialism. The Church can be seen compromising with people from other places today. In Guatemala’s rural churches, for example, saints’ statues are next to Indian idols—like Mrs. Kernan who believes in the Banshee and the Holy Ghost (158). In more sophisticated Latin America heavily influenced by Marxism, there is liberation theology. In North America why fuss about the Freemasons (37) when you can join the Knights of Columbus or go to a Bingo game?
Over the years, the Catholic Church has adapted to a variety of popular movements or cultures besides the modern ones just mentioned. Unfortunately, the message of the Church—God’s grace—has often been lost or obscured as a result…Vergil the poet became Virgil the prophet as Rome became the power center of the Church and the Church adapted to the pagan culture. The practice which sparked the Protestant Reformation was the lucrative sale of indulgences. Simony—that other italicized word from the first page of Dubliners —was well-established by the turn of the millennium. Missionaries in the Middle Ages tried converting the nobility, figuring that the of the nation would follow their leaders. The Popes were often political candidates, notably from the German or Italian noble families—Joyce notes ironically that "not one of them ever preached ex cathedra a word of false doctrine." (168)6 Indeed, the discussion about the Popes in the, middle section of "Grace" hints at the Church’s history of accommodation. In Father Purdon’s homily, Joyce presents a contemporary manifestation in Ireland. And there is nothing about whether this retreat will help Kernan dry out. It is unlikely since Father Purdon is telling him he’s O.K.
What has happened to the Church’s message on Grace? Of the free, undeserved gift of God through faith in the risen Jesus? On the importance of the eternal over the temporal which we see in Luke 16? Instead of a call for repentance, there is a back-patting. What effect is the "accounting" before God? Is Kernan a new man? Are any of them truly "children of light?" It appears that the eternal flame is barely flickering and is in danger of going out. How can anything change at the Gardiner Street Church and Commercial Bank?
1. James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Penguin, 1976) 15. All subsequent quotations from Dubliners are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text.
2. The "plot" of Power and Mrs. Kernan is to make Kernan into a "good Catholic." They think that the retreat will help. It has little effect. Kernan appears briefly in Ulysses where he takes another "side-thrust at Catholicism" (Dubliners, 157) at Dignam’s burial. There he observes that the Protestant service is "simpler, more impressive." Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1958) 164. A text search of Ulysses showed that the name Kernan appears 37 times in the story. He is still a drinker and a burden to his wife.
3. See William York Tindall, The Joyce Country, Rev. ed. (New York: Schocken, 1972), 21. For more on the Church as it relates to Dante, see Ben L. Collins, "’Araby’ and the ‘Extended Simile,’" Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Dubliners, Ed. Peter K. Garrett, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 98,99.
4. There are many admonitions to this effect in the Bible, two of the best-known in the New Testament are Matthew 5:18 and II Peter 1:20.
5. Father Purdon does have some grounds for his rendering of the Bible verse. Some Greek manuscripts of the New Testament read eklipute ("you die") rather than eklipu ("it fails" or "you fail"). Virtually all authorities prefer eklipu and consider the te to be a later addition. Most of the better ancient Greek texts have eklipu, the only widely-used Greek version with eklipute being the Textus Receptus. Even the King James Version, which relied heavily on the Textus Receptus, says "when ye fail." I checked a total seven different English versions including the Douay (quoted above) and three other Catholic versions of the New Testament; all rendered the verb as "it fail" or "you fail" with some tense changing to agree with the English conditional. The Vulgate, still the official Bible of the Catholic Church, says cum defeceritis ("when you have failed"). The least one can say is that Father Purdon chose the verb he preferred to emphasize the point he wanted to make. It is an adaptation. For manuscript and text analysis see Luke 16:9 in The Expositor’s Greek New Testament, Vol. I, Ed. W. Robertson Nicoll, (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1967).
6. This article is not singling out the Catholic Church for any other reason than it is the church of "Grace" and of Joyce’s Ireland. The "Muscular Christianity" mentioned earlier was predominantly Protestant. Father Purdon’s message reminds me of today’s Transactional Analysis: "I’m O.K.—You’re O.K." T.A. has had some success in the Presbyterian Church and some Catholic Dioceses. Joyce himself remained quite bitter towards the Catholic Church. In one letter he wrote, "I see nothing on every side of me but the image of the adulterous priest." Arnold Armin, James Joyce (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1969), 37,38. In another he would write about the Catholic Church, "Now I make open war on it by what I say and do." Richard Ellmann, “Joyce’s Religion and Politics.”
It is interesting to note that in Ulysses the Superior of the Gardiner Street Chapel is the Very Rev. John Conmee, S. J. ("’con’ me"). Even in this name Joyce suggests the Jesuits here are confidence men or the church is a confidence game.
While Joyce is most critical of Catholicism because that is the branch of Christianity prevalent in Dublin, it could be argued that many of the faults of Father Purdon’s homily are Protestant in nature. (One recurring theme of Dubliners is the corruption of Dubliners through compromise with the English. A Protestant-acting priest could represent this, too.) To see material wealth as a blessing from God is more typically Protestant (the so-called "work ethic"). Turn-of-the-century revivals and "Muscular Christianity" were predominantly Protestant movements. It was the Protestants like Wellhausen and others who first "liberalized" the interpretation of Scripture and made interpretation of the Bible relative. (In the Nineteenth Century Pope Leo XIII proscribed this method ["Providentissimus Deus"], though in the twentieth century it is taught by many Catholic seminaries in the West.) It seems clear from "The Dead," for example, that Protestantism represents the English oppressor, and Joyce does not consider that a viable option. It is an alien religion in Dublin.
Bibliography
Arnold, Armin. James Joyce. New York: Ungar, 1969. Print.
Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Henry F. Cary. New York: Collier, 1909. Print.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford U P, 1959. Print.
———. “Joyce’s Religion and Politics.” Irish Times, 2 Feb. 1982:9. Web. Sep. 1997. <http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/archive/1982/0202/Pg009.html>.
The Expositor’s Greek New Testament. Vol. I. Ed. W. Robertson Nicoll. Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1967. Print.
Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce’s Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1958. Print.
The Holy Bible. Douay Version. New York: Douay Bible House, 1938. Print.
Holy Bible. King James Version. New York: Thomas Nelson, 1975. Print. (Also called Authorized Version, abbreviated KJV in text.)
Holy Bible. New International Version. East Brunswick NJ: New York International Bible Society, 1978. Print. (Abbreviated NIV in text.)
Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Penguin, 1976. Print.
Kenner, Hugh. Dublin’s Joyce. Bloomington IN: Indiana U P, 1956. Print.
Luther, Martin. "To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation." Three Treatises. Philadelphia PA: Fortress P, 1970. Print.
Tierney, Brian. The Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964. Print.
Tindall, William York. The Joyce Country. Rev. Ed. New York: Schocken, 1972. Print.
Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Dubliners. Ed. Peter K. Garrett. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968. Print.
Notes to the reader:
For a scholarly study of the parable quoted by Father Purdon in historical context, see David Flusser, Judaism and the Origins of Christianity (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1988) 150-168.
For a fine overview on Joyce’s religious and political views, see Joyce Biographer Richard Ellmann’s “Joyce’s Religion and Politics” noted above.
The photograph is used with kind permission from the photographer.
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