The first words spoken (or chanted) in Ulysses, "Introibo
ad altare Dei," may make readers think––not
inappropriately––"In Troy." But they come from the
Latin Mass of the Catholic church, which Mulligan mocks from
the moment he makes his “stately” appearance carrying a bowl
on which a mirror and razor
lie “crossed.” In his ritual, the shaving bowl is the chalice
holding the wine which will become changed into the
blood of Christ. The unfamiliar Latin word that begins
the ritual, pronounced intro-ibo, means "I will go into." The
complete phrase of the old Latin Mass, sung by Catholic
priests as they approached the altar, means “I will go [in, or
up] to the altar of God.”
The words are taken from Psalm 43 (42 in the Vulgate), which
expresses a desire to find refuge in God. In the days of the
Latin Mass (pre-1964) it was chanted by the celebrant as he prepared to
ascend the steps of the altar. The first two of the following
three video clips show priests and their servers approaching the altar in
an Irish and a Polish church. The third video presents a
skilled Italian chanter singing the Introibo.
Gifford observes that the server assisting the celebrant of
the Mass responds to his Introibo by quoting from
the next line of the Psalm: Ad Deum qui
laetificat juventutem meam, “To God who
gladdens my youth.” When Father Malachi O'Flynn celebrates an
even more diabolic black
mass in Circe by singing "Introibo
ad altare diaboli," his server perverts the
responsory line too: "To the devil which hath made
glad my young days."
Stephen, who thinks of himself later in Telemachus
as a server (and thus a servant)
to Mulligan, does not speak the line responsorially to
Mulligan’s Introibo, but he too speaks it in a
twisted way in Circe, as he approaches the brothel
where he hopes to meet his favorite prostitute: “Georgina
Johnson, ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam.”
By making Georgina into a goddess (deam), Stephen
perverts the language of the Mass just as Mulligan does with
his "genuine Christine," and insinuates the serious thought
that, in this secular world, human
sexual love fulfills a need which medieval men and women
turned to God to satisfy.
The two men differ greatly in their attitudes toward religious mystery.
To Mulligan it is mere humbug. For Stephen, the rites of the
Catholic Church deserve respect and even veneration, as forms
of spiritual apprehension that literary art may learn from.
Like Joyce in his twenties, he recurs often to religious metaphors to express
what he wants to do in his art. One of these powerful
religious symbols is the transubstantiation
effected in the Mass. In the final section of A Portrait,
after renouncing his religious
vocation and choosing the life of an artist, he thinks
of himself as “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting
the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of eternal
life”—a function that surpasses the actions of a parish
priest, “one who was but schooled in the discharging of a
formal rite” (240). Later in Telemachus, it will
become apparent that Stephen despises
Mulligan’s mocking attitude toward religious faith, even
though Stephen himself is an apostate, bitterly determined to "kill
the priest and the king" and free himself from subjection.
The mock Mass may have yet another function in the opening of
Ulysses. Gifford plausibly suggests that, since
the Homeric epics begin with an invocation of the poetic Muse,
Mulligan’s “intoned” words do not only mock religion. They
also suggest that this will be a mock-epic. When the
book was first published, its title spurred debate about
whether its adventures should be seen only as a mockingly
debased version of great Greek antecedents, or as a more
serious instantiation of Homeric patterns. To some degree that
uncertainty still continues, as do questions about how
extensive and significant the book’s Homeric parallels may be.
Joyce’s parodic relation to his elevated epic source, and to
the religion of his youth, is deeply ambiguous—at once
respectful and irreverent, preservative and transformative.
