Book Review: Saint Mary of Egypt. A Modern Verse Life and Interpretation

In broad terms, the central theme of O’Rourke’s inquiry is the question of identity in Joyce’s writings. The question of identity is ultimately a philosophical question; the principle of identity is considered the first law of reality, and in Joyce’s work and life the question of the self and its identity loom large. Who is he? Irish, Catholic, European, himself? Identity also brings the questions of change and permanence, unity and diversity to the table. These are questions which Aristotle had addressed, using the categories of potency and act, matter and form, substance, accident and soul. Joyce found these categories invaluable in grounding the enduring identity of his characters. Throughout Ulysses, dialogues between Stephen Dedalus and Bloom and Buck Mulligan offer us a privileged view of the contrast between the reductionist approach of Mulligan and Bloom to human self-identity, (‘sure it’s all just corpuscles or whatever’) and Stephen’s own Aristotelian sense of the presence of an eidos, form or rationale giving shape and animation to the material ‘stuff’ of the world, be that stuff cells or atoms or corpuscles (cf. pp. 50–51, 109–10). Finally, Joyce’s theory of aesthetics owes much to Aquinas, though for O’Rourke he missed out on the metaphysical heart of Aquinas’s thought on beauty as a transcendental quality of reality, turning Aquinas into an aesthete. Ironically, the aesthetics which drove him from the Church, according to one critic quoted by O’Rourke, is derived from Aquinas, albeit from Joyce’s partial reading of him (p. 204). Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas is a tour de force which helps to see Joyce against the background of his initial philosophical formation in Aristotle and Aquinas, a formation which moulded his approach to the philosophical questions which arise in his works; questions which the philosophia perennis, the philosophical tradition emerging from classical thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle had raised and were creatively received and rethought by Aquinas and other medieval thinkers, Christian and Muslim.