Luke's gospel recounts an unbeliever's challenge which Jesus
answers by invoking two ancient commandments from Deuteronomy:
"And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him,
saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? He
said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?
And he answering said, Thou shalt love thy God with all thy
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and
with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. And he said
unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt
live. But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And
who is my neighbour?" (10:25-29).
Jesus answers the lawyer's implicitly selfish question with
the parable
of a Jew who travels from Jerusalem to Jericho and runs into
thieves who rob him of his clothes, wound him, and leave him
half dead by the side of the road. A priest happens by, sees
the man, prudently crosses to the other side of the road, and
passes on. A Levite does the same thing. But a passing
Samaritan, one of a sect that was bitterly at odds with the
Jews, "had compassion on him, And went to him, and bound up
his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own
beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him"
(10.34). Which of these three men, Jesus asks, do you think
was a "neighbour"? The lawyer can only say that it was the
Samaritan, and Jesus tells him, "Go thou and do likewise." He
thus implies that pious outward observance of a received
religion counts for little. The heretic fulfilled the divine
command better than the priest and the Levite.
Joyce scrupulously reproduces the biblical story: a thug
knocks Stephen to the ground, where he appears half dead, and it is a
member of a despised race, not one of Dublin's pious
Catholics, that helps him to his feet, restores his scattered
articles of clothing, escorts him to a place of safety and
recuperation (a cabman's shelter, standing in for the inn),
physically supports him as he staggers out, and takes him into
his own home. Bloom's action is admirable, but this
mock-heroic novel will not let him play the part of a hero in
any straightforward, sentimentally inspiring way.
For starters, the inept prose narration distances attentive
readers from simple acceptance of what they are told. "Good
Samaritan" is a cliché, but this sentence undermines
unreflective reception of the cliché with the phrase "orthodox
Samaritan fashion." By definition, and by conscious
intention in Jesus' parable, Samaritans are not orthodox; they
are the walking embodiments of heterodoxy. Putting these two
words together is the first howler in a flood of poor prose
techniques that this episode will unleash on its readers.
Joyce also undercuts the trope by implicitly connecting it
with an allusion to the same biblical passage eleven chapters
earlier, in Lotus Eaters. When Bloom steps into St.
Andrew's church he sees that there are not many people in it,
only some members of a women's sodality, and thinks, "Pity so
empty. Nice discreet place to be next some girl. Who
is my neighbour?" If the church were more crowded, he
thinks, he could sit down beside some pretty girl and
worship her from anear. This kind of neighborliness is not
exactly what Jesus had in mind, any more than Bloom's
lusting after the next-door servant girl in Calypso
was. In Circe Bloom becomes a kind of Christ-figure
himself and advocates for some distinctly un-Catholic
values: "free love and a free lay church
in a free lay state." In him, Jesus' admonition to love
generously acquires a sexual expression that is anything
but orthodox. Readers are not invited to condemn Bloom,
but neither are they invited to see him as the usual kind
of hero.
