Between con- and -substantiality intrudes the prefix "trans."
This may be a reference to Arius' belief that the Father "made" the Son, rather than
"begetting" him as the Nicene Creed would have it. In
Arian doctrine the Father is essentially different from, and
superior to, the Son. He transcends him, is transubstantial
rather than consubstantial. Alternatively, following Campbell,
"trans" might be read as referring to transubstantiation,
the Catholic doctrine that bread and wine become miraculously
changed into the body and blood of Christ during the sacrament
of the Eucharist. By this reading, "trans" and "con" would not
negate one another as Arian and Nicene Christology do.
Consubstantiality and transubstantiation both involve sharing
divine substance (between Father and Son, and between Christ
and the eucharistic meal), so the prefixes would intensify one
another, pointing toward the novel's preoccupation with metempsychosis,
transpersonal identification, and the coincidence of
opposites.
The next segment, "magnific," recalls the Magnificat,
an ancient church hymn based on the words that the Virgin Mary
utters when Elizabeth says, "Blessed art thou among women, and
blessed is the fruit of thy womb": "And Mary said, My soul
doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my
Saviour. For he hath regarded the low estate of his
handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall
call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath done to me great
things; and holy is his name" (Luke 1:42, 46-49). In Latin, magnificare
means to esteem or prize highly. When Mary says that her soul
magnifies the Lord, she evidently means something like
"manifests his greatness"—it is God's greatness, not her own,
that she celebrates. But one could infer that Mary has become
magnificent, as she certainly did in later Catholic practice.
For Campbell, "My soul doth magnify the Lord" signifies that
"God is within me," and this refers "not solely to the
condition of the Mother of God, two thousand years ago in
Judea, but to every one of us, here and now" (Mythic
World, Modern Words, 80). Magnificat implies
the interpenetration of self and other proclaimed in the
Sanskrit saying "tat tvam asi" (thou art that).
Divinity, argues Campbell, does not lie outside of human
nature and history; it is radically immanent in all people at
all times.
The implications of the next word, "jew,"
seem relatively straightforward. Jesus was a Jew. When God
took on human flesh, he came here as a Jew. And yet he was
rejected by his own people, leading many Christians through
the ages to accuse the Jews of killing their Lord. Leopold
Bloom walks through the novel as the object of such
antisemitic suspicions, but he demonstrates Christ-like
qualities of generosity and compassion and offers spiritual
assistance to Stephen. Although Stephen cannot be thinking of
Bloom when he coins his big word, it may anticipate the union
of the two men, who as Father-Son and "jewgreek" exemplify the kinds
of union of opposites implied by Campbell's tat tvam asi.
By contrast, the word "bang" seems open to
various interpretations. Sticking narrowly to the theological
disputes that Stephen ponders, Gifford says that it "suggests
both the controversial origin of Christianity and the
sustained controversy over Arianism." But the association of
God with explosive power could also support Campbell's idea of
immanent divinity. In Nestor, when Stephen is
confronted with the headmaster's traditional teleological idea
of "the manifestation of God" at the end of time, he points
toward the hubbub of the hockey game and says, "That is God...
A shout in the street."
For Stephen, creative and destructive power are immanent in
all things. He is terrified by a thunderclap in Oxen of
the Sun because, like his creator Joyce, he hears the
voice of God in thunder. Another possibility would be to hear
a reference to the divine
insemination of Mary, of whom Mulligan has sung "My
mother's a jew." "Bang" became a slang word for the sexual act
long before the 20th century. In a personal communication,
Vincent Altman O'Connor cites a usage in Aphra Behn's play The
Rover: "No, no, Gentlewoman, come along, adsheartlikins
we must be better acquainted—we’ll both lie with her, and then
let me alone to bang her."
Reading Christology or post-Christian metaphysics into
"contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality" is by no means a
stretch, but similar words had been coined earlier in the 19th
century. In an essay on James Joyce Online Notes, John
Simpson cites examples in the writings of the Irish poet James
Clarence Mangan, whom Joyce admired, and in popular
contemporary venues like spelling bees, songs, and pantomimes. Words like
"transmagnificanbandancial" and
"transmagnificandubandanciality," which carried little more
sense than the 20th century
"supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," originated at least as
early as the 1830s, possibly in America, and survived and
evolved for many decades. Joyce appears to have grafted the
Christian "consubstantiality" onto this existing rootstock. He
may well have found various kinds of theological significance
inherent within it, but the word's silly origins should
perhaps discourage excessively solemn interpretations.