"Just a little…spiritual matter": Joyce's "Grace" and the modern Protestant gentleman

Modernist authors were as much creatures of their culture as they were its critics. The best writers were consciously both; for instance James Joyce, as a formerly devout Catholic, had an inside advantage when he came to critique that Catholicism. Thus he went a step further than most modernists, in that his fiction both uses religion as a unifying framework and dissects it. Joyce's complex relation to Catholicism has spawned plenty of discussion and debate. Little has been noted, however, of his uses of Protestantism -- especially in its modernized liberal forms -- as an emblem of social climbing under the guise of a spurious spirituality.

Yet Joyce's view of the modern Protestant "gentleman" enlightens at least one text: the short story "Grace," whose language and ending have puzzled many. The tone is ironic, but the religious characters are patently sincere. They participate in what one cautious commentator describes as a "perfunctory though no less devout religious observance" (Torchiana 205) -- although "perfunctory" and "devout" are not merely unlikely companions but mutually contradictory adjectives. Moreover, the ending does not seem to deliver what it promises: the story that begins as a satirical Protestant temperance tract breaks off at the threshold of conversion. How, we wonder, could the author stop right there, before we discover whether religious observance will "make a new man" of Mr Kernan? The answers lie in the way Joyce cunningly wove modern Protestant concepts into the Catholic rhetoric of his story -- thereby critiquing both the Irish and the Protestant churches for equating religious practice with a social but static gentlemanliness. In fact, we can trace a straight path from the complications of nineteenth-century Protestantism to the rhetorical puzzles of "Grace."

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For most modernists, religion was consigned to a twilight zone of wistful, unsubstantiated beliefs. A quick overview shows why. From a common faith based on specific historical events, nineteenth-century Christian religion descended to "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Thus William James had described The Varieties of Religious Experience; and the very title given to those lectures shows to what degree by the end of the 1800s religious beliefs were considered "more like states of feeling than like states of intellect" (31, 370).

Modern religion might be based on and studied by science, but any privileges claimed for itself must stand apart from logical "states of intellect." Anthropology and biblical criticism had induced many religious thinkers to carve out a space of subjective experience as their domain. In endeavoring to preserve religion, either in form or in essence, these thinkers found it most prudent to focus on "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men." If religious experience was an affair of the emotions, its truths could no more be invalidated than they could be empirically affirmed. Social scientists could study results and deduce causes, like James finding the question of grounds of belief almost irrelevant: "By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots" (21).

However, the presumed irrelevance of origins led to a presumed irrelevance in general. Although believers did not necessarily control their religious experiences, the experiences were presumed to originate in the individual. Hence the individual became his or her own religious authority, and faith became not only subjective but privatized, another facet of modern individualism. In the popular mind, religion as private experience became a matter of "choice" or "preference" and therefore, as Peter Berger observes, "lacking in common, binding quality." Thus it could not fulfill "the classical task of religion, that of constructing a common world within which all of social life receives ultimate meaning." A religion that is no longer binding for the community widens the gap between one person and the whole; even those who find comfort in a privatized "religion of preference" lack means to communicate it to others. As Berger says, "Religion manifests itself as public rhetoric and private virtue. In other words, insofar as religion is common it lacks `reality,' and insofar as it is `real' it lacks commonality" (132-33). A binding, communal faith would seem an archaism or a delusion.

For Joyce, the above traits defined Protestantism, and leached into one facet of popular Catholicism. Of course not all Protestants followed the course of Feuerbach and the social scientists; and certainly the official Catholic Church, despite sporadic efforts at modernization, changed little until the mid-twentieth century. The privatization Berger describes affected even those groups clinging most tenaciously to their traditional orthodoxies. Indeed, the constant splintering of religious groups must have made a common faith seem, even to the faithful, increasingly a pipe-dream.