“INDIFFERENT WEIB”: GIORDANO BRUNO AND THE HERETICAL MODE OF VISION IN “PENELOPE”

Abstract

Bruno, Giordano, Opera omnia. Decr. S. Offi. 8. Febr. 1600. Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Vatican: Polyglottus, 1940).In an interview with James Knowlson in 1989, Samuel Beckett told him that the only comment that Joyce ever made on 'Dante... Bruno.Vico... Joyce', was that, although he liked the essay, he thought there wasn't enough about Bruno; he found Bruno rather neglected.1 To a large extent Joyce's comments are justified and instructive. Beckett's appraisal of Bruno and the significance of the doctrine of the coincidence of contraries in the Wake is relatively telegraphic, when compared to his more expansive accounts of the importance of Dante's of poetics and the Viconian theory of the inevitably of cyclical evolution.2 Of the recent critical consensus about Joyce's appropriation of the coincidence of contraries, Theoharis Constantine Theoharis wryly observed in 1988: Scholars have noticed this conception so often and so casually that it has become of the cliches of Joyce criticism (especially criticism of Finnegans Wake). Like all cliches this is true, but rarely understood or spoken of with penetrating or precise intentions.3 Along with Jean-Michel Rabate's agile treatment of Joyce's dialogue with the Nolan in Joyce Upon the Void,4 the most significant and seminal research on Joyce's encounter with Bruno has been undertaken by Sheldon Brivic, Elliot B. Gose, Robert D. Newman, and Theoharis himself: that is, scholars who are primarily concerned with ascertaining the significant of Brunonian traces and allusions in Ulysses, and not the Wake5 However, the approach of these studies is not complemented by much extended historicist scrutiny or refinement. Joyce did not encounter Bruno in a vacuum and, it can be argued, any study of the function or presence of philosophical, mystical, patristic or theosophical systems or elements in the Joycean text should be read in the context of his determination to effect a sundering with the Roman Catholic Church of his upbringing and education. Although Joyce was an apostate who left the Church in his mid-teens, hating it most fervently (L II 48), he possessed a perversely intimate knowledge of its spiritual and intellectual traditions. Like Bruno, he was a deviant insider,6 who evinced anti-clericalist opposition to the political and social influence of the Church, and who was unable to give his rational assent to the scholastic system that was the theologico-philosophical basis of its apologetic. Bruno was and remains an anathema for orthodox Catholicism; he was one of the atheistic writers whom the papal secretary puts on the Index.7 (SH 46) It is relatively well known that he covertly employed the heretical auctoritas of the Nolan in his early writings, as he began to enunciate his open war (L II 48) against the Church, and that he began slowly to incorporate aspects of Bruno's philosophy, specifically the doctrine of the coincidence of contraries, into his own writings during the composition of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. However, the supersaturation of the Joycean text with the Catholicism in which he famously avowed his misbelief arguably obscures the subversive and heretical nature of his discursive engagement with Bruno's pantheistic philosophy, particularly for secular or non-Catholic critics, or, indeed, the critic of a Catholic upbringing and education born in the period after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Therefore, a sustained historicist appraisal of Joyce's reading of Bruno is, perhaps, the most efficacious means of effecting an examination of the apostate Irishman's complex dialogue with the Church.Pascendi dominici gregis and Roman Catholic Modernism.A fervid intellectual climate prevailed within Catholicism during the latenineteenth and early -twentieth centuries with the triumph of Ultramontanism, the neo-scholastic revival and the condemnation and suppression of Roman Catholic theological modernism, defined in 1907 as the synthesis of all heresies8 with the promulgation of the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis. …