Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas by Fran O'Rourke (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas by Fran O'Rourke Thomas Hibbs Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas. By Fran O'Rourke. Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2022. Pp. 334 (hardback). $90.00. ISBN: 978-0-8130-6863-3. Reflecting on the influence on artists of Jacques Maritain's Thomistic account of beauty, Yves Simon observed, That an artist should be interested in scholasticism . . . and should use the principles of this philosophy to understand and explain what is going on in the vanguard of painting, music, and poetry in the twentieth century, will remain one of the best surprises that ever confronted historians of philosophy. (John Griffiths and Yves Simon, Jacques Maritain: Homage in Words and Pictures [New York: Magi Book, 1974], 5]) The friendships cultivated by Jacques and his wife Raissa with numerous writers and artists, including Georges Rouault, Igor Stravinsky, and Jean Cocteau, prompted many artists to be intrigued by Scholasticism. Perhaps no twentieth-century artist was more of a student of Scholasticism than the Irish novelist [End Page 506] James Joyce. From his Catholic education in Dublin through his own independent reading of Aristotle and Aquinas, Joyce was imbued with Scholasticism. The greatest of Joyce scholars, Richard Ellman, reports on a conversation Joyce had with someone who had complained that Aquinas's work had nothing to do with them. To which Joyce responded peremptorily, "It has everything to do with us" (44). Joyce is somewhat dismissive of modern philosophers, especially in comparison to Aristotle, whom he calls the greatest of philosophers. In many of his writings, from the early unfinished manuscript Stephen Hero, through Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, right through the hugely influential novel Ulysses, Joyce scatters references to Aquinas, often going so far as to depict characters appealing to Aquinas in debates, sometimes quoting him verbatim in Latin, or quarreling about how to interpret his texts. The influence of Thomas Aquinas on Joyce was explored in Joyce and Aquinas, a beautiful little book by the Jesuit William T. Noon (Yale University Press, 1958). But Noon was not a philosopher; where he attends to big questions in Aquinas's texts, his focus is almost always theological. Moreover, in his treatment of the sources of Joyce's knowledge of Scholasticism, his work is incomplete or even misleading. Fran O'Rourke's new book, Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas, remedies these shortcomings in Noon's study. We know that Joyce spent time during his stay in Paris writing out passages from Aristotle into a notebook, what has come to be known as Joyce's Early Commonplace Book. In the last chapter, O'Rourke includes an annotated analysis of the quotations from Aristotle that Joyce included in the Commonplace Book. O'Rourke goes further in demonstrating how attentive Joyce was to, and in how many contexts he had opportunities for, the study of Aristotle and Aquinas. Previous studies have ignored the popularity of Thomistic philosophical handbooks, which supplied not only explications of the texts and teachings of Aristotle and Aquinas but also often compared them to modern philosophical alternatives. O'Rourke's mastery of the relevant sources—in the primary texts of Aristotle and Aquinas; in the proximate, mediating texts available to Joyce; and in Joyce's own texts—render this a magisterial treatment, sensitive to both the obvious and the subtle ways in which Aristotle and Aquinas surface in Joyce's fiction. If O'Rourke demonstrates that Joyce had greater access to Aristotle and Aquinas than most previously have seen, he is also careful to point out the ways in which Joyce misinterprets or departs from these sources. The influence of Aquinas on Joyce is most evident from the famous discussion of the nature of beauty in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, wherein the character Stephen Dedalus explicates the famous three marks of the beautiful. While Noon and others hypothesize that Joyce had his knowledge of beauty only through Maurice de Wulf's Aesthetic Theory according to Thomas Aquinas, O'Rourke shows that he likely learned of it from his conversations with his Jesuit professor of Italian. Whatever the source, Joyce, or at least his character Stephen, gives a peculiar twist to...