By Andrew J. Clarendon

In sections six and seven of his great 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Pope St. Pius X defines the two foundational ideas of Modernism: first, “Agnosticism,” the “negative part of the system” in which “reason is confined entirely within the field of phenomena,” making any knowledge beyond the material impossible. Secondly, the “positive part” of the system: “vital immanence,” in which the explanation for meaning must be found within man since all knowledge outside of man either does not exist or is unattainable. It follows that “faith, which is the basis and foundation of all religion, must consist in a certain interior sense, originating in a need of the divine . . . emerg[ing] from the lurking-places of the subconsciousness.” This logically leads to the evolution of doctrine, since even the dogmas of the Faith—not to mention other concepts—are mere “images of the truth, and so must be adapted to the religious sense in its relation to man.” As Salusbury F. Davenport puts it in Immanence and Incarnation, vital immanence “is the wholly psychological process of the human consciousness unfolding itself . . . God as transcendent is lost to sight; no room is left for any kind of revelation; God is the permanent possibility of progress, He is ever projected as the ideal in advance of each successive stage of evolution and changes as the advance proceeds.” For the great twentieth-century philosopher Eric Voegelin, this view is a “modern Gnosticism” in which man with his immanent knowledge replaces the now irrelevant God. Further, it is not surprising these Modernist ideas are present in various works of art, especially literary ones, both before and after Pascendi. One need only recall the existentialist elements in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, published in 1851, or the announcement of man’s loss of faith in Matthew Arnold’s 1867 “Dover Beach.” Contemporaneous with Pascendi, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of the most highly regarded novels of the twentieth century and still a feature of high school and college syllabi, is an important illustration of this now ubiquitous principle of vital immanence.

Published in 1916, Portrait is a semi-autobiographical account of Joyce’s own youth, from his Irish-Catholic childhood to his college years and subsequent self-exile to the Continent. However, the novel is not written in a traditional way: there is little in the way of plot and no quoted dialogue. Narration in the usual sense is replaced by what is known as the stream of consciousness technique, a disregard for form that is analogous to other modern movements like atonality in music or cubism in art; John Senior comments, “The stream of consciousness technique . . . is an artistic error to begin with. Art, as Aristotle said, is not chronology but a ‘story’ that presupposes intelligent selection according to a form conceived in the mind of the artist.” Quoted conversations between characters is replaced by the free indirect style, so that the focus is more on the emotional reactions of the central character—Stephen Dedalus—than anything else. The action of novel, such as it is, essentially begins as Stephen is off to the same Jesuit-run boarding school that Joyce attended; one gets a sense of turn-of-the-century Irish Catholicism mixed with Irish nationalism and the struggle for independence combined with the world-famous Jesuit educational system. A sensitive and quiet boy, Stephen encounters his first examples of imperfect human nature in the clergy and then begins to feel isolated from his fellows. Later, Stephen experiences the teenage angst that has become a feature of modern culture and a million movies and shows in the decades since Joyce’s work. For Stephen, the budding Modernist, there are two elements to his years of burning adolescence: first, rebellion against everything he has been taught: “he had heard about him the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and to be a good Catholic above all things. These voices had now come to be hollow-sounding in his ears.” Secondly, and unsurprisingly, Stephen gives in to lust, even squandering a writing prize on Dublin prostitutes: “His blood was in revolt. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets . . . He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and exult with her in sin.” The sixteen-year-old Stephen continues in sin for months, even reflecting on how the spiritual writers are correct to note that one sin easily leads to another and to other types.

What makes Portrait more interesting than the average teenage rebellion story is what happens next. The next winter, Stephen participates in an Ignatian retreat with the rest of his class; Joyce dedicates some thirty pages to the retreat conferences and the profound impact they have upon Stephen. The scene in which Stephen finally confesses is faithfully depicted; the reaction to being back in the state of grace recalls that of many penitents past and future: “He strode homeward, conscious of an invisible grace pervading and making light his limbs. In spite of all he had done it. He had confessed and God had pardoned him. His soul was made fair and holy once more, holy and happy. It would be beautiful to die if God so willed. It was beautiful to live if God so willed, to live in grace a life of peace and virtue and forbearance with others. . . . How simple and beautiful was life after all!” The presentation of Modernism in Portrait cannot be fully appreciated without noting that Joyce fully understands and portrays the supernatural and even natural value of the sacraments.

It is at the point of conversion that stories like St. Augustine’s Confessions or Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov end. For the Modernist, however, Stephen’s conversion is only a waypoint. He lives a life of penance for a while, engaging in various actions to mortify his external senses. For the discerning reader, however, the element of individualism remains a common denominator: although he goes to confession a few times, there is no mention of spiritual direction. Stephen is so outwardly pious that the Jesuit rector asks him to consider a vocation to the priesthood, but it becomes clear that his conversion has no real roots. Stephen soon considers the life of virtue as he has been practicing it to be “too hard” and so gives up, but more importantly, he concludes that he must find his own individual way at all cost: “The voice of the [priest] urging upon him the . . . mystery and power of the priestly office repeated itself idly in his memory . . . and he knew now that the exhortation he had listened to had already fallen into an idle formal tale. . . . His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders. . . . He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.” Rejecting the idea of the seminary, Stephen attends University College, Dublin and begins to dedicate himself to the study of aesthetics and art. Like so many after him, Stephen’s rebellion is cemented while at university. The novel essentially ends with a conversation between Stephen and one of his college friends, Cranly, in which a few excerpts show how Stephen fully embraces the tenets of Modernism:

—Cranly, I had an unpleasant quarrel this evening. . . . With my mother . . . She wishes me to make my easter duty
—And will you?
—I will not serve, answered Stephen.

After discussing apostacy, Cranly recalls what Stephen had earlier defined as his life’s work:

—Yes, I remember it. To discover the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.

Finally, at the end of the conversation, Stephen’s final non serviam:

—Look here, Cranly, [Stephen] said. . . . I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can . . . But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.

With the beginning of the quest for perpetual vital immanence, the portrait of the Modernist is complete; the next to last line in the book is pompous, hubristic, and expected: “Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

While Modernism as the “synthesis of heresies” appeared in a particular historical context—the twin rejection of eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century Romanticism leading to torturous despair—the idea of rebellion leading to vital immanence is not new. Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer all warned against hubris, against man’s tendency to want to become God. Modernism is not just found in twentieth-century literature: it is at the core of the Hamlet problem, it is Ulysses’ chief sin in Inferno 26, it is the central error of man in ancient Greek mythology because it is at the core “of man’s first disobedience” in Eden, and it is the root of Satan’s non serviam. What is remarkable about our age is the nearly universal acceptance of this hubris, of vital immanence as a positive good. Now over 100 years after the publication of Portrait, the revolt has only grown deeper: from Modernism to post-Modernism, which rejects even the possibility of objective meaning, holding that there is no prior meaning for the Modernist to reject as everything is relative. No doubt such ultimately nihilistic views will continue to be held on this side of chastisement; for us, the future is not in subjective vital immanence, but as T. S. Eliot sings in East Coker: “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions / That seem unpropitious.”