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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2009
JOYCE'S THOMIST MASTERS
Throughout his life James Joyce evinced keen interest in a variety of philosophical approaches. During his student years he was a dedicated pupil of Aristotle and Aquinas. His early distrust of Platonism left him suspicious of idealism. Empiricism was unacceptable because of its scepticism, and his short-lived attraction to pragmatism turned to scorn because of the manner it debased the ideal of truth. For various aspects of their philosophies Joyce held Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico and Nicholas of Cusa in high regard. He admired Bruno as the father of modern philosophy; Vico probed the tangled web of thought and language into which Joyce would delve more deeply; Cusanus provided the logic of contradiction and harmony of opposites which allowed him to conceive of Finnegans Wake.
In honoured tradition, however, Joyce's favoured philosopher was the ‘master of those who know’; he regarded Aristotle as ‘the greatest thinker of all times’. Aquinas had bestowed on Aristotle the unique title of ‘philosophus’ – the philosopher; and it was largely under a thomist aegis that Joyce came to know the ‘allwisest Stagyrite’. ‘Steeled in the school of old Aquinas’, he graduated an Aristotelian. Typical for the thomist of his day, he would in fact have seen minimal difference between their strictly philosophical systems. According to opinion popular at the time, Aquinas simply baptised the philosoper of Stagira into the service of the Church.
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