Religion is sometimes defined as an attempt to establish a more complete explanation of life. Perhaps this is why certain creative artists are seen as at odds with religion, their works an attempt to establish a more complete explanation of life. Shakespeare is a prime example. Emily Dickinson is incomprehensible without a knowledge of the Christianity she prosecuted. James Joyce is infamous for a worldview thought irreligious, if not anti-religious.
Shakespeare had reasons for keeping his religion private. Dickinson was more religious in her tendencies than her writing suggests. Likewise Joyce.
Claims that Joyce is a religious writer have gained traction over the past few years; some believe it is more like reclamation. When we read Ulysses the matter of Irish religion bedecks its pages.
The aesthete Buck Mulligan on page 1 delivers words of the Mass jocoseriously while shaving; he later sings a risqué self-made satire called 'The Ballad of Joking Jesus'. Stephen Dedalus employs Thomas Aquinas to explain the reality of Sandymount Strand, a beach on Dublin Bay. The main character, Leopold Bloom, an assimilated Jew, wanders into a church where he misinterprets the liturgy to comic effect. The one character in the novel quoted as definitely believing in God is the raunchy and adulterous Molly Bloom.
It is little wonder that the puritanical Catholic hierarchy were offended by this adverse picture of Dublin life. It acted against the strict moralism they wished to instil throughout a nascent Irish Free State.
Suppressing Ulysses in Ireland was one of the great imaginative losses for that growing nation; it was denied a version of its selfhood that took until the 1980s to discover. But it was also a religious loss. Undeniably, Joyce worked to undermine and question the dominant Catholicism of his upbringing, but this is quite a different thing to saying that he was opposed to religion, or had no religious sensibility.
Literature like Ulysses is not given to typecasting. Mulligan turns out to be a Wildean believer in Hellenism who preaches a delusory form of Irish classicism. Dedalus rejects priesthood, choosing instead the priesthood of artistic creation. He searches for a father figure who can free up the quandary of his own frustrated intellectualism.
That figure turns out to be Bloom, someone wrestling with the conflicting