One central mystery of Christian doctrine, Incarnation,
reconciles the humanity and the divinity of
Christ. Another, the Trinity, reconciles the divinity of
Christ with the divinity of God. To early theologians Jesus of
Nazareth was clearly different from the "father" in heaven
whom he mentions or addresses often. But he was also divine,
and in a monotheistic religion he must therefore be identical
with the invisible God in heaven. This contradiction exercised
the best minds of the early Christian church, and it doubtless
troubles many believers still. (Nora Barnacle, who was more
religious than her partner, nevertheless asked him in
perplexity, “Jim, is Jesus and God the same?”) Ingenious
theologians came up with a solution: Father and Son (and also
Holy Spirit) are different "persons," but they are united in a
single divine nature, or "substance."
The Trinitarian doctrine enshrined
in the Nicene Creed was illustrated in the later Middle
Ages in the image of a Scutum Fidei or Shield of
Faith: a triangle showing that the Persons are distinct from
one another but all the same God. Accompanying text often made
clear that Father is not Son and Son is not Father, but both
are God.
"Valentine," or Valentinus, lived in the 2nd century
AD, when the early church was only beginning to differentiate
its teachings from those of the Gnostics. Gnosticism regarded
the material world as evil and taught that salvation meant
escaping the realm of matter. Although Valentinus thought of
himself as a Christian, he was also a Gnostic, and taught that
the world had been created not by God but by a quasi-Platonic
Demiurge—a malevolent
one. Christ came to liberate mankind from materiality, but
since he was God, and good, he could not be thought to
participate in any way in that materiality. He was therefore
conceived as purely spiritual, not incarnate. Stephen thinks
in Telemachus of “Valentine, spurning Christ’s
terrene body” and thus breaking the Christological
link between physical humanity and spiritual essence expressed
in the doctrine of Incarnation.
"Sabellius," an influential theologian of
the 3rd century about whom little is known today, directly
contested early Trinitarian thinking. He denied the threefold
quality of the deity, arguing that the supposed persons were
simply personae: masks, faces, external aspects. Human
believers looked at the incarnate Son who was crucified and
resurrected and saw something very different from the
unapproachable Ancient of Days who had laid the foundations of
heaven and earth. But in themselves these two Persons, and
likewise the Holy Spirit, were simply one God who chose to
manifest himself in different ways. By this logic, Tertullian
objected, the Father could be said to have suffered on the
cross just as the Son did, since they are essentially the
same. Stephen criticizes Sabellius in Telemachus as "subtle,"
reasoning that he "held that the Father was Himself his own
Son." (He repeats this characterization in Scylla
and Charybdis.) The subtlety seems really to be
Stephen's own, prompted by Mulligan's taunt that he “proves by
algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather
and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.” But
Sabellius simply denied that the terms Father and Son named
anything essential.
"Arius," who figures
also in Proteus, lived in the late 3rd and early
4th centuries. He conceived the Persons of the Trinity in an
essentially Plotinian manner, as hierarchically ranked
processions. God the Father, “the only true God,” first
created the Logos (the pre-incarnate Son) “out of
things nonexistent.” The Logos similarly created the
Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit created the material
world. Arian teaching thus subordinated the Son to the
Father. It was espoused by several of the Germanic tribes and
by many people within the Roman empire: ordinary believers,
priests, bishops, nobles, even some emperors. Its contest with
Trinitarian thinkers was decisively resolved at the first
council of Nicaea (325), which condemned Arianism as a heresy
and promulgated the view that, in the words of the Nicene
Creed, the Son was “begotten, not made, being of one substance
with the Father.” Originally written in Greek, this Creed used
the word homoousion to indicate that Father and Son
shared the same ousia or essential, immaterial
being. The Greek term was translated into Latin as consubstantialem,
meaning “of the same substance.” Stephen affirms this crucial
element of the Nicene Creed when he thinks in Proteus
of Arius “Warring his life long" upon the doctrine of
consubstantiality.
If Stephen has been reading Dante as avidly as Joyce himself
was at this time of his life (and it seems that he has), it
may be that he includes Sabellius and Arius in his catalogue
of "heresiarchs" in part because Thomas
Aquinas does so in canto 13 of the Paradiso.
Dante has Thomas comment on those who reason falsely about
ultimate reality, including Parmenides and Melissus of ancient
Greece: "Such were Sabellius and Arius and the fools /
who misread Scripture" (127-28).
"Photius," or Photios, was a powerful Greek
cleric of the 9th century. The Orthodox church regards him as
a great father who defended traditional doctrine from a Roman
heresy, while Catholics view him as an arch-heretic. In his
time the two churches were pulling apart from one another, in
a historical process stretching back to the division of the
Roman empire and the collapse of the western half. As
Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius opposed the Pope in Rome
over questions of political authority and also over Rome’s
effort to add a single word to the Nicene Creed, filioque
(“and from the Son”). This word had been circulating for
several centuries in the west, and the Romans wanted the creed
amended to make clear that the Holy Spirit proceeds both “from
the Father and from the Son.” The Greeks in
Constantinople, relying on the creed as written, affirmed that
the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. From Stephen’s
perspective, the Orthodox position is regrettable because it
accords primacy to the Father, whereas Catholic doctrine
affirms the potency of Father and Son equally.
Telemachus identifies Stephen symbolically with
Telemachus and Hamlet, two unhappy sons devoted to absent
fathers. Like them, Jesus was a young man in the familiar
human world whose life had meaning in relationship to a
ghostly, absent father. This relationship suggests how human
life encompasses spiritual possibilities—a central concern of
Stephen’s aesthetics.
