In Proteus Stephen turns away from his thoughts about
priests to recall a time when he seemed to be heading toward
that vocation: "You were awfully holy, weren't you?" This
period of the character's life was narrated in part 4 of A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Part 2 of A Portrait concludes with young Stephen's
first visit to a prostitute.
Part 3 is devoted to his spiritual wrestling with that carnal
choice, fueled in no small measure by a religious retreat in
which a gifted preacher does his magniloquent best to inspire
sheer terror in his young charges. For the impressionable and
imaginative Stephen, the horrific scene-painting of hellish
tortures works. Desperate, he confesses to a priest at the end
of the chapter and is granted "Another life! A life of grace
and virtue and happiness! It was true. It was not a dream from
which he would wake. The past was past."
Part 4 begins, however, with a sardonic tone suggesting that
this new life offers no release from the banal drudgery,
baffled desire, and self-delusion of other forms of life.
Stephen throws himself into a heroic regimen of perpetual
worship. He mortifies every form of sensory pleasure and
desire. He agonizes over whether he has truly changed, and
seeks new forms of repentance. But an air of futility hangs
over the whole enterprise, accentuated at moments by savage
authorial irony: "His life seemed to have drawn near to
eternity; every thought, word and deed, every instance of
consciousness could be made to revibrate radiantly in heaven:
and at times his sense of such immediate repercussion was so
lively that he seemed to feel his soul in devotion pressing
like fingers the keyboard of a great cash register and to see
the amount of his purchase start forth immediately in heaven,
not as a number but as a frail column of incense or as a
slender flower."
By the time represented in Ulysses, Stephen has
progressed far enough in self-knowledge that he can take over
from the narrator the job of mocking his spiritual ambitions:
"You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might not
have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine
avenue that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes
still more from the wet street." As the confusion
of spiritual and sexual desires here would suggest, Stephen
found that the religious life did not satisfy his keenest
longings. At the end of Part 4 of A Portrait, when
offered an opportunity to enter the priesthood, he walks away
from it to pursue his calling as an artist and seek carnal love.
