Forestalling any performance of Stephen's Shakespeare theory
until later, Mulligan declares in Telemachus, "I'm
not equal to Thomas Aquinas and
the fiftyfive reasons he has made to prop it up. Wait till I
have a few pints in me first." Stephen thinks of the
philosopher in Proteus: "Morose delectation Aquinas
tunbelly calls this." When he finally expounds his theory in Scylla
and Charybdis, he does not use Aquinian ideas nearly as
much as he did in articulating his aesthetic theorizings in A
Portrait; but he does refer affectionately to Aquinas
as a philosopher “whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in
the original.”
The “original” of the huge ("gorbellied") Summa
Theologica and Summa contra Gentiles is
Latin, the language of the medieval Catholic church. Thomas
Aquinas (1225-1274) was a Dominican friar and theologian; the
Dominicans were as famous for intellectual rigor as the
Franciscans were for emotional fervor. The intricately logical
Scholastic method of Aquinas’ two big Summae sought
to reconcile Aristotelian
philosophy with Christian faith. Extremely controversial
in his own time, largely because of this synthesis of theistic
belief with pagan philosophy, by the end of the 19th century
Thomas had become absolutely canonical, recognized as the
greatest and most orthodox of all Catholic philosophers.
Stephen’s devotion to him has survived the lapse of his faith. In Scylla
and Charybdis, Buck Mulligan announces (with “malice”)
that “I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in
upper Mecklenburgh street [a street in the red-light district]
and found him deep in study of the Summa contra
Gentiles in the company of two gonorrheal
ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie, the coalquay whore.”
It is not only Aquinas' works that are gorbellied. According
to popular tradition the philosopher himself was immensely
fat, and anecdotes perpetuate the tradition: of holes cut in
tables to make room for his belly, of monks unable to carry
his dead body down the stairs from his sickroom, and so forth.
In Proteus Stephen thinks of him as "Aquinas
tunbelly." "Morose delectation" is
a translation of Delectatio morosa, which Thornton
identifies as one of three internal sins, consisting
(according to the Catholic Encyclopedia) of "the
pleasure taken in a sinful thought of imagination even without
desiring it." He directs readers to three passages in the Summa
Theologica.
“Fiftyfive reasons” certainly does suggest Aquinas’ method of
breaking large topics down into sub-topics, sub-sub-topics,
and sub-sub-sub-topics, then (at the level of the specific
question) proposing a statement of his belief, then
anticipating the most powerful objection that might be
advanced against that belief, then answering it with an “On
the contrary,” and finally detailing numerous precise reasons
for preferring his position. But it is also possible, Gifford
notes, that the number 55 may have been suggested by a detail
in Aristotle’s Metaphysics: the claim that beyond
the mutable region of the earth and moon lie “fifty-five
immutable celestial spheres,” perfectly “circular and
changeless.” If so, Joyce is rather naturally associating
Aquinas with the cosmological ideas of his master, Aristotle—a
philosopher whom Joyce also read with great devotion, and whom
Stephen invokes repeatedly in Nestor,
Proteus, and Scylla
and Charybdis.
Both of these philosophers, like Joyce himself, possessed
highly logical intellects and liked to categorize information.
Joyce once told a friend, “I have a grocer’s assistant’s
mind.” Early in the first chapter of A Portrait, he
has six-year-old Stephen write inside his geography book a
note that charts the categorical levels connecting him to the
highest reaches of the divinely ordered universe:
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe
