Berkley Center

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man terrified me. Well, at least the middle section. Everyone out there who has read it, I’m sure that you know the part that I’m talking about. Yep, ‘good ole’ Chapter 3.

To clarify for everyone else, this section of the book contains a priest’s 20-page-long sermon to high-school-age boys. A sermon solely concerning death, final judgment, and hell, that is. The priest, Father Arnall, lists ad nauseum, and in great detail, the horrors of hell that await the unconfessed sinner. In addition, the priest doesn’t just describe the frightening scene, he also attempts to explain, at length, the concept of eternal residence in this scene. Here’s a direct quote from this sermon that still brings shivers to my spine and sends sweat trickling down my neck as I read it again:

“Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness: and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all. Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended.”

Now, most of you probably skipped through the majority of that quote because it just seems so ridiculous and absurd and overblown and dramatic and wrong. Thanks to AP U.S. history and any other high school history classes, most American college students would call that passage “Jonathan Edwards Crazy Talk Re-Mix” and then move on. But then, in a quiet moment, after discarding the quote, between activities, your brain might murmur, “What if?”

Well, mine did, at least. And it got me thinking.

Why was I, even for a moment, considering the possible truth of this literary passage? Although born and bred right smack-dab in the middle of the American Bible Belt, I was raised in a progressive Baptist church and schooled by parents who believed solely in the benevolence of some “higher being.” Yet suddenly, in the middle of my reading, questions began to surface.

After all, who really knows what happens after death? No one has ever been to the land “beyond” and returned to tell the tale, and I have yet to hear respectable newspapers report on miraculous emergences of a gigantic God-like finger from the heavens (a la Monty Python) who points the way towards “the truth.” So, who knows? Maybe unbelievers are destined for a lake of eternal fire and darkness in the afterlife. Yikes...maybe I should start attending services again.

From my point of view, that’s the whole point of Father Arnall’s sermon. This fictional priest, along with countless genuine Irish brethren of his order, recognized one of the most powerful motivators of humankind—fear. Pushed and prodded by the terrors of the unknown, people can be persuaded to believe things that are crafted specifically to fill that troubling void. Subsequently, when any new idea, such as a different religion/afterlife belief/divine ideal, confronts this fear-driven individual in contemporary society, he or she might be tempted to react quite violently. After all, any idea that threatens the integrity of his or her religious beliefs could lead initially to disbelief and, ultimately, to eternal damnation. This form of religious teaching was not merely a product of Joyce’s imagination either. In fact, in the small group where we discussed Joyce’s work, several students, including the graduate student leader, shared personal experiences. They described their parents’ childhoods and adolescent memories of religious learning, recalling the exact descriptions of hell with which they had grown up in the biggest cities or the smallest villages of Ireland.

As these Irish priests, whether fictional or real, and their ideologies are laid to rest with the recent rise in tolerant sermons and gentle belief, the remnants of their teachings still linger in the minds of aging generations, the literature of past eras, and the scarred wounds from Ireland’s recent “troubles.” While we, the millennial generation, might be tempted to scoff at or scorn the fluid elasticity of past Irish people’s mindsets, it would be foolish and certainly dangerous to ignore the success of this apparent cultural brainwashing. Though there were countless varied causes behind Northern Ireland’s “troubles” between the Catholic and the Protestant communities, one might wonder if an example of this religious fear of the unknown provoked, in some way, the resultant violent acts.

As Maya Angelou once said, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” So, perhaps, in learning from Ireland’s history of religious friction, one might learn how to prevent future religious intolerance. While grossly simplifying the world’s religious troubles, I suggest that perhaps the subtraction of fear and the multiplication of simple faith in any religious upbringing might result in a suitable equation for progressive spiritual acceptance. If we could, somehow, eliminate the motivation of fear in any religious belief, I think that we might, at least marginally, reduce the number of violent reactions to differing dogmas and ideals. It has certainly worked for Ireland in the past 12 years.