As far as I know there are no photographs from the top of the
pillar that show the churches that Stephen mentions. But all
three are still standing. "Rathmines' blue dome" is a
church called Our Lady of Refuge (more fully, Church of Mary
Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners) in the suburb of Rathmines,
just beyond the Grand Canal
about three kilometers south of the pillar. The blue
appearance (many observers would have called it green) came
from a large oxidized copper dome. A catastrophic fire
destroyed the church in 1920 and the entire heavy dome smashed
down through its supports, but insurance money enabled quick
rebuilding. The beautiful new dome, completed in 1923, is
taller and more elaborate than its predecessor, but it too was
designed to weather to a blue-green hue, and it continues to
provide a striking visual landmark.
"Adam and Eve's," known more formally as the Church of
the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, is an old Franciscan
church that figures prominently in Finnegans Wake:
"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend
of bay." These opening words evoke the water flowing past
Merchant's Quay on the south bank of the Liffey. The church
lies just off that street, slightly more than a kilometer
west-southwest of the pillar. It too has a blue-green dome,
but Stephen does not mention that fact.
The last church he thinks of, "saint Laurence O'Toole's,"
is
a Gothic Revival limestone structure built in the 1840s and
50s several blocks north of what in Joyce's time were working
docklands on the Liffey, and about one and a half kilometers
east-northeast of the pillar. Its majestic four-stage tower
and spire, at the entrance to the nave, command views in the
area and were said to be the last landmark seen by emigrants
leaving Ireland from the North Wall.
To see these three churches at various points on the skyline
(south, west-southwest, east-northeast), Anne and Flo must be
walking around the viewing platform—a neat trick of suggesting
movement non-narratively. But Stephen may also be subtly
weaving a political thread into the story. Two of the churches
would have carried patriotic associations for any Irish
nationalist. Lorcán Ua Tuathail, later "saint Laurence
O'Toole," was a 12th century monk who became the first
Irishman elected Archbishop of Dublin, a town ruled by Danes
and Norwegians. He was canonized by Pope Honorius III in 1225,
and later became Dublin's patron saint because, as archbishop
at the time of the Norman invasions, he protected the city's
inhabitants, using the respect and trust he inspired in all
who met him to obtain clemency from the bloodthirsty knights
besieging his city.
"Adam and Eve's" gained its colloquial name because,
when Catholic religious observances were prohibited by penal
laws in the 18th and early 19th centuries, the Franciscans
secretly held Mass for worshipers who entered through the Adam
and Eve Tavern next door to the church. Joyce mentions the
church's services in Cyclops, when the narrator
despises Bob Doran for "talking against the Catholic religion,
and he serving mass in Adam and Eve’s when he was young
with his eyes shut, who wrote the new testament, and the old
testament." Ithaca alludes specifically to the
surreptitious masses of earlier times when Stephen and Bloom
find a spiritual bond in belonging to despised faith
communities: "their dispersal, persecution, survival and
revival: the isolation of their synagogical and
ecclesiastical rites in ghetto (S. Mary’s Abbey) and
masshouse (Adam and Eve’s tavern): the proscription of
their national costumes in penal laws and jewish dress acts:
the restoration in Chanah David of Zion and the possibility of
Irish political autonomy or devolution."
As for the Rathmines church, the question of "political
autonomy" (republican independence) or "devolution" (greater
self-rule within the British empire) that dominated Irish
political discourse in the early 20th century impacted that
sacred space dramatically in January 1920. For some time,
members of the Dublin IRA, assisted by a church official who
belonged to "A" Company, had slept in the church whenever
police came looking for them at their houses (making it, as
Frank McNally pointed out in an Irish Times column a
couple of years ago, a Refuge of Shinners). When the great
fire broke out, it became difficult to conceal the fact that
"A" Company had also been storing large quantities of weapons
and ammunition in the church's vaults.
An article dated 5 August 2013 on the Dublin history blog Come
Here to Me!, written by Donal and indebted to a 2012
book by Las Fallon titled Dublin Fire Brigade and the
Irish Revolution, describes the chaotic scene that
resulted: firemen furiously pumping water from the Grand
Canal, the church's dome threatening to come crashing down,
and republican soldiers rushing into the burning building to
retrieve munitions. After the fire was extinguished, there was
fear that British authorities might find remaining arms during
clean-up operations, so IRA man Michael Lynch (according to
testimony he gave to the Bureau of Military History) went to
talk to DFB Captain John Myers, whom he knew to be "a very
fine fellow and, from the national point of view, thoroughly
sound and reliable in every way." Myers assured Lynch that no
one would ever know about any guns found in the rubble, and he
was true to his word.
This history, only recently compiled, may well be dismissed
as something that Joyce, in his distant continental exile,
could not possibly have heard about. But on this, as on so
many other points, Ulysses gives its readers just
enough telling details to make them question their
incredulity. In Circe, when Bloom is sentenced to
death by the Inquisition, the sentence is carried out by the
Dublin Fire Brigade, led by Myers:
THE FIRE BRIGADE
Pflaap!
BROTHER BUZZ
(Invests Bloom in a yellow habit
with embroidery of painted flames and high pointed hat. He
places a bag of gunpowder round his neck and hands him
over to the civil power, saying.) Forgive him his
trespasses.
(Lieutenant Myers of the
Dublin Fire Brigade by general request sets fire to Bloom.
Lamentations.)
THE CITIZEN
Thank heaven!
BLOOM
(In a seamless garment marked I.
H. S. stands upright amid phoenix flames.) Weep not for
me, O daughters of Erin.
(He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces
of burning. The daughters of Erin, in black garments,
with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their
hands, kneel down and pray.)
Catholic church services, a stash of gunpowder, Dublin Fire
Brigade troops, and John Myers: the coalescence of these
details must, at a minimum, be deemed a very strange
coincidence. If Joyce did intend for his three churches to
carry nationalist associations, he could not have chosen a
more opportune vantage than Nelson's Pillar, a symbol of
British military might towering over a street identified with
Ireland's foremost promoter of
Catholic rights. O'Connell's political career
represented one long assault on the penal laws of Nelson's
era. His statue at the
bottom of the street (unveiled in 1882) challenged Nelson's
statue (erected in 1808) in front of the Post Office. To this
nationalist protest in bronze, Joyce arguably added two in
print. Stephen's three "different churches" speak back to the
tower from which they are viewed, and when Florence and Anne
"pull up their skirts" and expose themselves to the admiral
they cast a
spell to drive him out of Ireland.
