The opening verses of John's gospel proclaim: "In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God.... All things were made by him; and without him
was not any thing made that was made.... And the light shineth
in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not" (1:1-5).
Light and darkness are symbolic in this formulation, and some
later Christian thinkers would reverse the arbitrary opposites
in order to articulate religious values different from the
Greek Logos. Thornton cites some critical efforts to
connect Stephen's language with Neoplatonic Christian writers
like the pseudo-Dionysius (a late 5th and early 6th century
Syrian theologian writing in Greek) and Henry Vaughan (a 17th
century Welsh poet writing in English), both of whom
propounded a mystical spirituality of transcending
sense perception and reasoning to enter "the darkness of
unknowing."
Stephen clearly echoes the beginning of John's gospel and
reimagines its message of a cosmic creative principle beaming
light down into the world. Instead of the Logos he
imagines an "obscure soul of the world," a "darkness
shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend."
The Platonic idea of a world soul was famously revived in the
16th century by Giordano Bruno, a daring proto-modern
philosopher whom the Catholic church condemned as a heretic.
Bruno was important to Joyce from Stephen Hero to Finnegans
Wake, and Stephen has already defended him in A
Portrait of the Artist. In his concluding diary he
recalls a conversation with one of his Jesuit priests: "He said Bruno
was a terrible heretic. I said he was terribly burned. He
agreed to this with some sorrow." The Brunonian idea that most
enraged Catholics, his belief in multiple worlds beyond the
earth, shows up in Proteus, again linked with
darkness: "Darkly they are there behind this light,
darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia,
worlds."
Stephen also associates darkness with the human form that the
Logos assumed in this world—i.e., Jesus. He thinks of
the Pharisees not comprehending the "long look from
dark eyes" that Jesus gave them. And like Bloom,
who tells the Citizen in Cyclops that "Your God was a
jew. Christ was a jew like me," he tries to imagine these dark
eyes in a face different from those limned by light-skinned
Christians. Mr. Deasy uses John's language to reinforce
anti-Semitic stereotypes: "— They sinned against
the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can see the
darkness in their eyes." Stephen not only opposes
such bigotry, he thinks of Averroes
and Moses Maimonides (one of them Muslim, one Jewish) as
"dark men in mien and movement." This racial
disagreement in Nestor anticipates Stephen's
encounters with Bloom later in the book. Bloom's dark clothes
ally him symbolically with Stephen, and the dark Jewish eyes that Mr. Deasy finds so
suspicious becomes one source of his mysterious attraction. In
Ithaca, Stephen also considers Bloom's "winedark hair," making
him Odysseus as well as Jesus.
The symbolism of darkness pops up too in Stephen's
contemplation of his own psychology and his creative
processes. Bending over Sargent at his sums, he thinks of the
secrets that lurk "in the dark palaces of both our hearts."
Recalling his time at the Sainte Geneviève library in Paris,
he imagines these dark presences as dragonlike: "and in my
mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of
brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds." This
meditation, prompted by the cavern-like darkness of the
library, strongly evokes the underground caves in William Blake's The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where dragons inhabit "a
Printing house in Hell" in which "knowledge is transmitted
from generation to generation." Blake's poem explicitly seeks
a transvaluation of values: Hell, symbolic of dark forces in
the human psyche that Christianity has traditionally defined
as evil (passion, energy, hatred), will be married to the
things defined as good (reason, self-control, love) to produce
a complete picture of humanity.
Having rejected Christianity more completely than Blake did,
Stephen nevertheless maintains a strong attachment to its
symbols, rituals, and creeds.
His own idiosyncratic poetic vision, when he produces it, will
not utterly abandon the structures of thought erected over two
millennia by the church. In some instances it will invert and
reinterpret them.
