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PARTISAN REVIEW
ence. The relevant part of the letter reads: "The 'old Catholic' Augus–
tiner Kirche is a good example of a Mookse gone Gripes. I t separated
from Rome in '71 when the infallibility of the Pope was proclaimed a
dogma, but they have since gone more apart. They have abolished
auricular confession; they have the Eucharist under two species, but
the faithful receive the cup only at Whitsun. I see no prayers to the
BVM or the saints in their prayerbook and no images of these or her
round the church. But most important of all, they have abolished the
filioque
clause in the creed concerning which there has been a schism
between the East and the West for over a thousand years, Rome saying
that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father and the Son, Greece
and the East Orthodox churches that the procession is from the Father
alone,
ex patre
without
filioque.
Of course the dogmas subsequently pro–
claimed by Rome after the split are not recognized by the East, such
as the Immaculate Conception-See the Mookse and the Gripes [Note:
This is of course in
Finnegans Wake.
F. B.] that is East and West, par.
beginning, 'When that Mooksius' and ending 'philioque.' All the gro–
tesque words in this are in Russian or Greek for the three principal
dogmas which separate Shem from Shaun. When he gets A and B on
his lap C slips off, and when he has A and C he loses hold on B...."
Joyce alluded to the split of 1871 in the course of a conversation
with me in Zurich, but all that I can remember of it (perhaps the
question interested me little at the time) is his final word: "What I
can't understand," he said, "is, why do they boggle at the infallibility
of the Pope if they can swallow all the rest." The Holy Roman Catholic
Apostolic Church in its Irish form was a net he had flown by, but
having won the freedom he needed, he could admire the Church as
an institution going on its own way unperturbed in obedience to the law
of its own being. "Look, Budgen," he said. "In the nineteenth century,
in the full tide of rationalist positivism and equal democratic rights for
everybody, it proclaims the dogma of the infallibility of the head of
the Church and also that of the Immaculate Conception."
Joyce's attitude toward the Christian religion was twofold. When
he remembered his own youthful conflict with it
in
its Irish-Roman
form he could be bitterly hostile, but in general, viewing it as a whole
as an objective reality and as epitomized human experience, and from
a position well out of reach of any church's authority and sanctions,
it was for him a rich mine of material for the construction of his own
myth. Then he was a collector displaying all a collector's ardor, as
in the case of the
altkatholische Kirche
referred to above.
Little as I suppose the Anglican
via media
would have appealed
