Religion in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Three are the elements that accompany Stephen as a child and teenager (“When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets” (220)); three “nets” indissolubly linked by religion (as the central element) with an almost permanent presence in the novel interacting and influencing continuously all the others issues addressed.
Religion shapes Stephen’s home life, his school life, his introduction into the Irish policy, his expectations, much of the books he reads, and even the language he uses.
Religion, then, is a key and recurring theme in James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, something that is logical in a novel that transits from the the Bildungsroman genre to the Künstlerroman, since religion thinking plays a fundamental role in the system of beliefs and values of people, specially in a society so sharply catholic as the Irish Society in the early 20th century.
Although when, at advanced age, Joyce was asked about when he left the Church he told that “That’s for the Church to say”; he pointed out in several times his position. As Joyce´s referral biographer Richard Ellman points out in his article Joyce’s religion and politics, Joyce wrote to Nora Barnacle on August 1904: “Six years ago (at sixteen) I left the Catholic Church, hating it most fervently. I found it impossible for me to remain in it on account of the impulses of my nature.” […] “Now I make open war upon it by what I write and say and do”. These positions, according to his brother Stanislaus, would include that of priest, referred by him as “barbarians armed with crucifixes”. Regardless Joyce’s rejection of the strict Irish Catholicism; it was compatible with a considerable interest in it and with a robust presence of it in his works.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Men precisely addresses that process, showing how Stephen sheds the Catholic Religion while he develops his own liberty and artistic consciousness throughout a process that will shape the different spheres of his life.
In Stephen’s early years, religion plays a central role. He represents a typical Irish boy brought up in a catholic middle class Irish family. During the the novel moments of spiritual elevation are followed by episodes of deflation; replacing the religion and authority, with a more personal concept that is moving further and further away from that.
At Belvedere, Stephen distinguishes himself a little from his fellows, he seems a “saint” and a “model youth” (80), isolated by his habit of introspection, standing out his predisposition for being a good catholic. However, Stephen’s emergent sexuality and his contact with works of subversive writers breed unrest and bitter thoughts in him, which compound his growing skepticism about the religious life. Stephen begins to
question the judgment of his Jesuit masters. He experiences the sensation that he is “slowly passing out of an accustomed world …” hearing its language for the last time” (169).
When the suggestion of a possible vocation to be a priest appears, Stephen rethinks his religious beliefs and realizes that the Catholic religion will never satisfy him completely, being sure that that “His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders”(175).
At the end of the novel, Stephen replaces his initial Catholicism (his native institutionalized religion) by a more personal and “evolutionary” religion, the religion of art that will make him a complete and eternal person, an “artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being” (183).
“I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use- silence, exile and cunning.” (268).
