Here’s a curious trend across negative reviews of A Portrait of the Artist…: they very often say the only good part was the sermon about hell in chapter 3. Most of these reviewers enjoy it because no other extended section in the book contains less stream of consciousness, scene switching, and pretentious diction. True enough, but Father Arnall’s hell sermon carries even more virtues than that. Here, for once in his writing career, Joyce gave the Catholic Church a fair chance to speak in his writing, and did not reduce it to a strawman or sardonic caricature. Much as Milton, perhaps by accident, made Satan too sympathetic in Paradise Lost, Joyce, definitely by accident, allowed his mortal enemy to shine too much in this chapter.

The chapter opens with Stephen feeling confused over his deep sexual sinning. He’s part ashamed, part apathetic, and part reveling in it. Sometimes he wants nothing to do with God, and sometimes he feels a strange, mystical attachment to the church’s mysterious rituals, and especially the pure virgin Mary. We also learn outright what could have been guessed: that lust was the central fountainhead from which sprang all other sin and blasphemy in Stephen’s (and Joyce’s) life. Bottom line: Joyce’s burning hatred of Christianity really was ultimately about not being free to bang all the hot chicks he wanted without guilt.

With this background, Stephen goes on a retreat where Father Arnall preaches a powerful, deeply Biblical, and even aesthetically stunning series of sermons on death, judgment, and hell. Stephen is scared senseless, and begins to fear hell tremendously. Overcoming great embarrassment about his sexual sin, he makes full confession to a priest, and feels a weight lifted from his soul, and a flood of piety rushing in. As this new season of humility and repentance dawns, Stephen’s thoughts even become less riddled with tedious erudition and faux sophistication. The reader thus gets to enjoy several pages of a more natural reading experience.

As for the sermon, what can be said? A tour de force of fearless truth telling about sin, righteousness, submission, rebellion, grace, judgment, and antinomianism. A discourse on Satan serves as the greatest highlight. He was cast to hell, says Father Arnall, for declaring:

non serviam: I will not serve.

Such would soon become the cri de coeur of Stephen and Joyce as well. Both knew themselves to be taking up the mantle of Satan.

Intentionally or not, Joyce made the sermon the centerpiece of the book several times over. By simple page count, it falls right in the middle of the text. It occurs in the middle chapter of the book, and spans the middle of that chapter as well. And no other incident in the rest of the story so thoroughly dominates a chapter. For the rest of the book, the sermon stands as a sort of acid test for Stephen. From henceforth, one of two crystal clear paths may be taken: submission or rebellion.

No other chapter exposes quite so plainly Joyce’s bankruptcy as an original thinker. As critics from Carl Jung and H. G. Wells on down would point out, Christianity stood at the heart of Joyce’s writings; he could never escape it. He hated the faith, rejected the faith, and lambasted the faith, but he could never forget and move past the faith. Far moreso than many other allegedly great authors, Joyce blatantly stole his greatness from God. Instead of leaving gospel truths alone, he transmuted them into ugly inversions. Herman Melville, another clown in the Ivory Tower Cabal’s ‘greatest author ever’ sweepstakes, operated in much the same way. Rage at the God of Calvinism wrote Moby-Dick and Clarel. Rage at the God of Catholicism wrote the Joyce canon.

So, a hearty salute to all the reviewers out there who cited the hell sermon as the only good point of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. They’re more right than most of them probably even realize.