Transubstantiation as a normative process: James Joyce and Carl Schmitt in 1922

Introduction

The European normative order in the years after the First World War was put to the test. As ‘the Great War stood as the graveyard of…positivist fantasies of logic and system’ (Materson, 2012: 482) and ‘dynasticism and divine right effectively disappeared as plausible means of legitimating political rule’ (Müller, 2013: 35), the question arose as to the extent to which regimes – old and new – were legitimized. The crisis did not only affect the fundamental norms of political order: the war had remade the world at its core. The actors of the European discourse felt it as, to use David Lloyd George’s (1915: 3) description from 1915, a ‘cyclone which is tearing up by the roots the ornamental plants of modern society…an earthquake’. They were under impression, that in everyday life ‘social and cultural constraints…exploded’ (Traverso, 2017: 178), and the discourse was filled with ‘the free coexistence of the most dissimilar ideas’ (Valéry, 1962: 27). Cultural continuity with the world before 1914 seemed to be broken, which resulted in ‘lack…of social recognition for the binding rules of conduct’ (Zirk-Sadowski, 2006: 307). To summarize this situation in one sentence, Europe at that time experienced, as Friedrich Hayek (1949: 417) called it shortly thereafter, a crisis of legitimacy: it was not clear which norms were binding and who should decide that they were.

Under such circumstances, a thinker interested in the subject of the normative order has three choices. He can describe the chaos, point to its sources or look for a remedy in the form of new norms and the way to establish them; in other words, not just ‘await a messiah’ (Gluck, 1991: 11), to use Karl Mannheim’s metaphor, but to look for ways in which he might come.

As for the first strategy, it was used even before 1918 by such thinkers as Georg Simmel and Max Weber, who were trying to find a sufficiently comprehensive sociological or philosophical model to grasp the growing disorder they were witnessing. As for the second, its champions were writers who created aphorisms that were surprisingly specific – though obviously not coherent – about the date when chaos started its reign in Europe: ‘on or about December 1910 human nature changed’ (Woolf, 1960: 320), ‘it was in 1915 the old world ended’ (Lawrence, 1994: 216), ‘the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts’ (Cather, 1968: v).

This last date in particular is relevant to the problem of the third strategy: the search for norms and for how to establish them not only in a given moment, but also in a world changed by what happened between 1914 and 1918. While in previous years European thinkers had focused on describing how the Great War had devastated the European landscape, in 1922 they simultaneously changed their aim and, as Michael Levenson (2017: 124) writes, ‘registered the effects of both the devastating war and the first acts of recovery from it’. The year 1922, as it becomes clear when we look at this year from a distance, was the year they began to ask in the words of the poet: ‘Shall I at least set my lands in order?’ (Eliot, 1963: 69).

Several works were published this year whose authors took up this theme – often not in the direct way, but as a reflection of the European Zeitgeist. Bronisław Malinowski, in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, wrote about the human drive for normativity; Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, pointed to language as the refuge of meaning; TS Eliot, in The Waste Land, turned to Buddhist mysticism. (These were not the only important books published that year; Ezra Pound was right when he wrote to TS Eliot in January 1922 ‘a grrrreat littttterary period’ (Eliot, 2011: 622) was beginning). Against the backdrop of all these 1922 texts, two stand out: James Joyce’s Ulysses and Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology.

The juxtaposition of these works – the first long, the second short; the first a novel, the second an essay; the first written by the Irish artist, the second by the German jurist – may seem surprising and raise questions: what did Schmitt and Joyce have in common? Or: what could the difference between such distinct works reveal? In other words: how can pieces of writing so distant from each other be different in a way that tells us something about the epoch in which they were written and strategies towards the problems of the latter?

As for the first question, both Schmitt and Joyce were members of the generation that would ‘sweep out the past century as surely as Attila swept across Europe’ (Hynes, 1991: 8). Both admitted to be seriously affected by the anxiety caused by the Great War: for Schmitt it was an event that represented ‘a pivotal phase in his intellectual development’ (Rogers, 2014: 123). For Joyce, the war was formative in the sense that it affected his writing to the extent, that, as James Fairhall (1993: 168) writes, the characters from his books live not only in their fictive frame but that of the world ushered in by the Great War. The manner of their writing was similar: Schmitt’s early Schattenrisse imitate ‘Joycean aesthetic’ (Emden, 2005). Both Schmitt and Joyce through their work were, in the words of Kieran Keohane (2011: 249), ‘responding to the crisis of European civilization of the interwar years’. This point was also made by other commentators, who, looking at the Irish and the German separately, have emphasized the aims of their work, which can be seen as finding a way out of European disorder after the Great War. Schmitt did so as a lawyer who, according to Jacob Taubes (1987: 54), ‘had one interest: that chaos should not prevail. At all costs.’ As for Joyce, according to TS Eliot (1975: 176) his Ulysses was developed as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape…to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy’.

From the last of these similarities stems another one, which I find one of the utmost importance, since it is the reason for the biggest differences between the German and the Irish. What Schmitt and Joyce have in common – and what makes them different – is not only their focus on the theme of norms as basic elements of order, but also the source they used to think about them: Catholicism. Both were Catholic philosophers and writers – though not in the way that Jacques Maritain or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin were, for both belonged to secular modernity, albeit in different ways. However, because of their Catholic upbringing, religious paradigms were rooted in their thinking, allowing Schmitt and Joyce to construct concepts that had a religious dimension. In this article I will argue that the tool for determining the legitimacy of norms in Europe after the Great War that Schmitt and Joyce used independently (and, most likely, without knowledge about each other) was transubstantiation, drawn from the thought of Thomas Aquinas. However, they translated it differently into the realities of their contemporary Europe, with different interpretations of how it could be a tool of normativity. The goal of this essay is therefore to analyse their interpretations of transubstantiation and check how the different attitudes of Schmitt and Joyce resulted in their different visions of its normative power in the world of norms changing after the disaster of the Great War.

As for normativity, in this text I will use its twofold understanding, derived from the thought of Joseph Raz (2009: 134). First, as social normativity, in which an event is transformed into norm if it is socially believed to serve the constitution of an order (what refers to order in general, represented in Joyce’s work); second, as justified, in which an event becomes a norm if it is justified by normative notions (this applies to the legal order – Schmitt’s).

Since understanding of this distinction, especially as it manifests itself in the use of the concept of transubstantiation, requires understanding of the concept itself, the next section then is devoted to its interpretation developed by Thomas Aquinas. The third discusses Joyce’s direct use of the concept in Stephen Hero and Ulysses, the fourth Schmitt’s, indirect, in Political Theology. In the fifth section I compare the two projects to show that while Joyce uses transubstantiation to establish an order in general by sanctifying social events, Schmitt limits its use to the formation of the legal order, since for him the order in general is determined by the sphere of theology – and the legal order is the secular one.

Transubstantiation before and after Thomas Aquinas

Although the concept of transubstantiation is not held in high esteem in theology today, it is sometimes used as a metaphor by philosophers. Its modern fate is thus on the exact opposite of the historical path the understanding of transubstantiation took several centuries ago.

For although it refers to the event of the Last Supper described in all Gospels – when, as Joseph Ratzinger (2003: 86) described it, ‘the Lord takes possession of the bread and wine; he lifts them up…even if, from a purely physical point of view, they remain the same, they have become profoundly different’ – and was made a dogma by the Lateran Council in 1215, it has caused a problem to theologians. The dividing line of their argument was the question if Christ’s body and blood from the Cenacle were real or ‘the contents of the Eucharist are spiritual’ (Chazelle, 2012: 248). The theologians’ dispute, although long, did not settle the matter; to do so, their reasoning needed supplementation with input from the field of philosophy. This task was undertaken by Thomas Aquinas, who performed a ‘critical appropriation of non-Christian work, done in the perspective and on the basis of the full commitment to Christian truth’ (Wawrykow, 1993: 86). The non-Christian work was Aristotle’s Physics – albeit used selectively, especially when it comes to the notion of the matter.

According to Aristotle (Physics, 184a–192b), the latter is eternal and can take on new forms, shaped by form; these forms are composed of the same substance as before. What changes, are the accidents that lay down the substance. The possibility of acquiring a new form – what Aristotle calls potentiality – is only the quality of the substance. Moreover, accidental properties are not actualized because they ‘depend on substances by the being-in relation’ (Wedin, 2000: 85).

Aquinas first addressed the problem of substance in De ente et essentia. Unlike Aristotle, he did not regard accidents as impossible to exist without it, claiming that they have ‘existence in act in a certain way’ (Aquinas, 1965: 32). For Aquinas, although substance is not composed of form and matter, it was being. However, while substance exists in a way separate from that which is not it, accidental properties remain being ‘through something’ (Aquinas, 1965: 33). Thus, it is impossible to know the accidents without knowing the substance – but not vice versa.

If already in his thinking about substance Aquinas went beyond Aristotle’s philosophy, the one about transubstantiation remains ‘“Aristotelian” only in the sense that forged money is money’ (Fitzpatrick, 1993: 11). Considering it in the three questions of the Summa Theologiae (Aquinas, 2006), he relies on three assumptions: first, that the matter is created by God; second, that the existence of accidents without substance is possible; and, third, that possible is also a miracle transcending the principles of physics. These three assumptions enable Aquinas to ‘insists on Christ’s substantial presence in the sacrament’ (Wawrykow, 2005: 159).

In the 75th question, Thomas wonders: ‘Is the body of Christ really and truly in this sacrament or only in a figurative way or as in a sign?’ (Aquinas, 2006: 53). He recalls Christ’s words from the Cenacle: ‘This is my body’ (Luke 22:19), as constituting ‘a promise, to be present, which he keeps when the Eucharist is correctly celebrated’ (Wawrykow, 2005: 159). According to this announcement, his presence during the Eucharist will not be symbolic. However, Aquinas writes, the body of Christ consumed in the moment of doing ‘this in remembrance of me’ is yet not his body that remains in Paradise. Its dimensions do not correspond to those of the consecrated bread and wine (Salkeld, 2019: 70). According to Aquinas, then, Christ is present during the Eucharist in his own way – as much real as non-physical.

There are three basic objections to be made to this conception on the basis of Aristotle. First, that during the Eucharist a substance of bread and wine becomes something it is not in its potentiality. Second, that bread and wine cannot become the body unless the form of the latter begins to exist in its matter. Third is the question of accidents: what remains of the bread and wine after the sacrament?

Aquinas refutes these objections by pointing out that the body of Christ is a different substance from the others. Therefore, for him the Eucharist ‘is not like any natural change, but it is entirely beyond the powers of nature and is brought about purely by God’s power’ (Aquinas, 2006: 53). If on the basis of Aristotle’s thought, it is not possible to think of a transformation from the Cenacle, it is because the Aristotelian imagination does not presuppose the existence of God. According to Thomas then, Aristotle was right when he said that matter, in order to transform itself, must contain the potentiality of what it will transform into. However, Aquinas thought that this kind of transformation was not yet transubstantiation – which ‘does not belong to the natural kinds of change, and it is called by a name proper to itself’ (Aquinas, 2006: 73). It belongs to the Aristotelian world insofar as it transcends it, and it can do so because God participates in it – as the creator of matter and because of that the one who possessed ‘the power of an infinite agent which bears on the whole being of a thing can bring about such a change’ (Aquinas, 2006: 74).

This transgression is made evident in the problem considered in questions 76 and 77, in which Aquinas explains what happens during the transubstantiation with the accidents. Although they do not constitute the substance of the Eucharist, the bread and wine consumed during the Sacrament still have the colour and fragrance from before the Sacrament. These are the accidents that have no substance and can be known by the senses, while the substance that is consumed can only be known by the intellect. While on the basis of Aristotle’s physics this event is impossible to happen, Aquinas (2006: 75) reminds that ‘God…by using his infinite power, is able to conserve an accident in being.’ Therefore, according to Thomas, whereas in the physical world substance is associated with accidents, when God appears, bread and wine, as Joseph Ratzinger (2016: 236) puts it, ‘lose their creaturely independence. They cease to exist simply in themselves in the manner befitting a creature.’

Let us now look at how Aquinas’ concept left its mark on European intellectual history. In the field of theology, it quickly gained popularity, but it was not without controversy. The dispute over the Eucharist – among other reasons – soon caused a schism in the Church. During the Reformation, Henry VIII tried to maintain it as a dogma in 1539, but Elizabeth I rejected it. In the Catholic Church, its status of a dogma was confirmed during the Thirteenth Session of the Council of Trent in 1551.

But the strictly Catholic meaning of transubstantiation was not the only one to endure until the epoch of Joyce and Schmitt. Although its concept was analysed as a religious one by Descartes, Leibniz, Locke and Hume, this trend stopped with Hegel. Transubstantiation appears for the first time in his writings on Christianity of 1799; nevertheless ‘it is apparent that Hegel is focusing on the metaphorical nature of this relation and the difficulty of grasping its movement’ (Allen, 2021: 49). He later used transubstantiation as a metaphor, writing to Goethe about ‘faith in the transubstantiation of inner and outer’ (Hegel, 1984: 700). Hegel was criticized by Marx, who claimed that the Prussian philosopher ‘takes over a familiar experience or institution and invests it with a new philosophical form and significance, but does little to analyse its real nature’ (Parekh, 1982: 82). However, Marx himself used transubstantiation as a metaphor to illustrate the value of money, as did Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006), indicating that it is ‘the trinity of dance, play and laughter that creates the transubstantiation of nothingness’ (Deleuze, 1986: 166).

This is how the concept of transubstantiation endured into the early 20th century. In 1904 it was used by Max Weber to illustrate the thesis of the disenchantment of the world (Weber, 1971). When Weber wrote his essay, he probably did not anticipate that Thomas’ idea would soon become a method of dealing with what the disenchantment in Europe had produced.

Molly Bloom’s blood: Transubstantiation in the work of James Joyce

James Joyce was brought up in the Catholic faith. He was first educated at a school run by the Jesuits, then with the Congregation of the Brothers in Christ (Bowker, 2013). This youthful experience resulted in his apostasy the year he entered college: ‘I found it impossible for me to remain in it on account of the impulses of my nature’ (Joyce, 1966: 48), he wrote in a letter. After his apostasy, however, he attended mass, therefore ‘when – and to what degree – Joyce lost his faith in the Roman Catholic Church specifically…remain lingering questions for readers’ (Hibbert, 2011: 196).

There are two possible answers to this question. The first, which I would like to reject, is that it happened completely, and to look for religious traces in his work is to read Joyce against Joyce. This answer is supported by Joyce’s criticism of the wealth of the Church (accompanied by his comparison of the Jesuits to lice) and the assessment of his brother, who stated that ‘it has become a fashion…to represent [Joyce] as a man pining for the ancient Church he had abandoned…Nothing could be further from the truth’ (Joyce, 1958: 130).

The second answer is more complicated. It stems from the suggestion that Joyce abandoned Catholicism because ‘he wanted to transfer the mythical structure of the Church from faith and doctrine to creative imagination’ (Frye, 1963: 256). This tendency is demonstrated by an excerpt from the memoirs of Joyce’s friend, who stated that she had never known someone endowed with ‘a mind so fundamentally Catholic in structure as Joyce’s own’ (Colum and Colum, 1958: 134). According to this answer, Joyce was neither apostate nor Christian, but someone in between, whose work was penetrated with the Christian spirit and who used instruments rooted in theology as a means for artistic, literary action. In this article, I will lean towards the second answer, and argue that Thomas’ concept was one of those instruments that Joyce used as a tool of the artist’s normative capacity of declaring, which one of the situations he was describing was sublime, therefore: which one rose above the normless chaos of everyday life.

Unlike Schmitt, the Irish writer was well aware that he was using the concept of transubstantiation – and this awareness started long before the Great War. His brother, Stanislaus, later recalled, that when he was a young man and announced, that he did not believe what the priests said, Joyce said: ‘You mean that you don’t believe in transubstantiation’ (Joyce, 1958: 103). The novelist then asked whether his brother therefore doubted the feasibility of the Joycean literary purpose: ‘I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own’ (Joyce, 1958: 104). It is this testimony, as well as Joyce’s later confession that during his whole literary life he studied ‘in the school of old Aquinas’ (Joyce, 1959: 152), which make it possible to read his works through the prism of Thomas’ concept.

This can be done from the earliest works, in which Joyce does not call transubstantiation by that word, referring to it as ‘epiphany’. In Stephen Hero, the protagonist defines it as a way of looking into the ‘the inside true inwardness of reality across the sextuple gloria of light actually retained’ (Joyce, 1963: 78). In this way Joyce states that beneath the surface of reality there is another that is revealed at certain moments – which are, however, difficult to identify insofar as an epiphany does not mean the appearance in a visible form of that which was hidden. ‘With this’ – Umberto Eco (1989: 28) writes – ‘Joyce again approaches the Thomist position in which the beautiful object would be that in cujus aspectu seu cognitione quietetur appetitus.’ An epiphany, the way he conceives of it, is ‘life observed, caught in a kind of camera eye which reproduced a significant moment without comment. An Epiphany could not be constructed, only recorded’ (Scholes and Kain, 1965: 95). Because its effect is not visible, the epiphany can be perceived by the intellect rather than by the senses – the latter, according to Aquinas, are focused on the accidents. By using the intellect, one can discern the substance – which, although at first sight is unchanged, shows its previously invisible forms.

Reading of Stephen’s epiphany as intentionally rooted by Joyce in the theology of Thomas should be started with the principles that must be fulfilled for it to occur as the writer outlines. ‘These principles have a respectable philosophic origin in the integritas, consonantia and claritas of Aquinas’ (Henry, 1946: 449) – however Joyce calls them by different names. He translates Thomas’ integritas as ‘wholeness’: the ability to perceive an aesthetic object as a whole, and this object is the everyday world. Thomas’ consonantia is defined as ‘synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension’ (Joyce, 1963: 155). Thomas’ claritas Joyce (1963: 111) connects with quidditas, explaining it as the moment ‘after the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality’. And while in the case of Stephen Hero such an attitude might make one agree with Wayne C Booth (1961: 327) – who calls the aesthetic theory of this novel ‘applied Aquinas’ – one factor makes it problematic. The difference between the latter and how transubstantiation is present in Ulysses reveals how Joyce’s account on this concept changed with the Great War.

This factor is the problem of the subject who sets the world into epiphany and for what purpose, other than an artistic one. Since Stephen Hero was written after Joyce’s apostasy, this subject cannot be the Christian God – even within the limits of the secular metaphor. It can be assumed that Stephen, who uses the pronoun ‘we’, is talking about himself; this assumption, however, must be confirmed by the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce, 2000).

In this novel, Joyce proposes that in the transformation of one substance into another, it is the artist who plays a role of the priest: at the end of the novel Stephen replaces his initial Catholicism with the conviction about the ‘artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new…imperishable being’ (Joyce, 2000: 142). However, if in the Christian tradition the priest only assists in transforming the substance of bread and wine into flesh and blood, the artist transforms substances himself. Similar to the way he described himself in a conversation with his brother, Joyce calls Stephen ‘a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of existence into the radiant body of everliving life’ (2000: 185). Immediately after that passage, Stephen remembers ‘the radiant image of the Eucharist’ (2000: 186) and asks questions that refers to the questions 76 and 77 of Summa Theologiae: ‘Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone?’ (2000: 90–1).

This reference, however, is also problematic – because it is not a simple repetition. In A Portrait… Joyce rejects two of the important elements of Thomas’ philosophy. The first is Thomas’ theory of knowledge, which I discuss below, the second – his concept of God’s and human ability to create from De Regno (On Kingship), which I will discuss in the fifth section of this article.

As for Thomas’ theory of knowledge, Joyce dismisses it by rejecting Aquinas’ concept of claritas. Dedalus, calling it by this name, says that the latter is nothing more than ‘artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything’ (2000: 179). As Cordell DK Yee (1984: 33) comments on this passage, though ‘some have argued that Joyce’s omission of the term from A Portrait… indicates ironic intent – that Stephen’s theory is now deficient. But…the coherence of Stephen’s theory does not suffer by its absence.’ For Dedalus it is not necessary to see the world as a coherent place in order to see the uncanny hidden from the eyes but not from the intellect. The task of the intellect is rather to create coherence of the world out of chaos, not recognize it as already present in the perceived reality. In this way, the artist, being part of the world, transcends the world itself, thus becoming Aquinas’ God. According to Jacques Lacan (2016: 54), this is how Joyce in A Portrait… fulfils the task of becoming a divine father figure for his writing, and thus reinventing the literary canon.

This task, however, is not fully realized until Ulysses – one of the 1922 ‘children of the Zeitgeist’ (Litz, 1972: 5) in which Joyce makes full use of Aquinas’ concept to deal with the problem of this very epoch: ‘chaos of early twentieth-century modernity’ (Keohane, 2011: 259). Thomas is referred to in the very first scene of the novel, when Buck Mulligan says: ‘Introibo ad altare Dei’ (Joyce, 2001: 1). After speaking these words, Buck does not repeat the formula recited by the priest at the Eucharist. He paraphrases it to refer to an everyday activity: shaving. The passage in which Leopold Bloom recalls a thought formed under the influence of alcohol also refers to this dimension of the actions performed during the sacrament ‘Corpus: body. Corpse. Good idea the Latin.…Rum idea: eating bits of a corpse. Why the cannibals cotton to it’ (Joyce, 2001: 112). According to Francis Restuccia (1984: 334), transubstantiation is evident in this passage because Bloom, as a Jew, appears similar to ‘the Jews of biblical times, [who] in hearing about Last Supper, were shocked at the idea of human sacrifice’. Another moment is the scene in the bakery. After smelling the bread, Bloom comes up with an advertising slogan and transforms the smells into words. The slogan signifies the substance of the bakery, not its smells, which evoked not only the work of Bloom’s senses, but mostly and above all the effort of his intellect. Odors, as accidents, remain the chaos of everyday life, from which Bloom draws clarity: ‘The vulgarities of the everyday and memorable phases of the mind suddenly show forth, ripe with meaning, portending larger significance’ (Opest, 2016: 163). Another moment occurs in the episode devoted to Cyclops, when, while waiting for Bloom, Martin Cunningham hears the ringing of bells from the church and imagines the saints running to the pub. In an episode devoted to Nausicaa, when a woman flirts with Bloom, his thoughts flee to the hymn Tantum ergo, ‘marking the public displays of both the Eucharistic host’ (Opest, 2016: 164). As this one ends, Canon O’Hanlon begins another, in which we can find the following verse: ‘You have given them bread from Heaven’ (Joyce, 2001: 344).

And although Restuccia is right not only about Bloom’s drinking, but about all quoted passages – they all introduce the theme of transubstantiation – there is a need to explain what Joyce uses it for or how it differs from its use in his previous novels, therefore: why Ulysses can be seen as the normative work of art, while Stephen Hero and Portrait… are just the preparation to it. The final scene of the novel may serve as a clue, but only as a clue.

‘When blood is mentioned in Ulysses, we do well of course think of Christ’s blood’ (Restuccia, 1984: 338). In the finale, however, Joyce writes about a very distinctive kind of blood: menstrual fluid. As Molly begins to menstruate, she compares ‘this bloody pest of a thing’ (Joyce, 2001: 1141) with flowers. Although this association does not bring God to the mind of the reader, to Molly’s it does. She sees the flowers as proof of his existence: ‘all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying there’s no God’ (Joyce, 2001: 1143). As Richard Ellman (1986: 171) writes, Joyce thus equates Molly’s blood with that into which wine is transformed during the Eucharist; he ‘is establishing a secret parallel and opposition: the body of God and the body of woman share blood in common’. He connects the blood from the quasi-Eucharistical chalice from the beginning (the scene of Buck’s shaving) with the blood that Bloom ponders on the streets, wondering ‘how many women in Dublin have it today? Martha, she. Something in the air’ (Joyce, 2001: 536). Woman’s blood turns out to be a substance that in the process of transubstantiation transforms into flowers as proof of the existence of God – and the existence of God for ex-Catholic Joyce lies in the proof of the existence of order: the world is subjected to order because it is God’s creation.

However, this equation does not bring us any closer to the question who performs the transubstantiation in Ulysses. Bloom? Only in the scene in the bakery: as far as the whole novel is concerned, Jacques Derrida (1992: 253–310) compares him to prophet Elijah – the one who merely assisted Christ during the transfiguration on Mount Tabor. Stephen? According to Roderick Davis (1970: 122), he resembles ‘the young Moses “drawn out” by Pharaoh’s daughter’. Molly?

To find the answer to this question, one must ask another: who is the God in Ulysses, this, as Stephen calls him, ‘cry in the street’ (Joyce, 2001: 735). The answer used above – that he is the synonym of order – is insufficient, because, being present in a novel written by an ex-Catholic Joyce, he is also only a metaphor. Therefore, Ulysses’ God needs its secular equivalent in person, not in social condition. These questions guide us to another reading of this novel, through the prism of Aquinas’ De Regno and his ideas on heavenly and earthly creation, in which the novel is itself transcended. Before I take it up and show how normative Joyce’s transubstantiation can be, I will turn to Carl Schmitt’s vision of this concept.

The decision of the sovereign: Transubstantiation found in the work of Carl Schmitt

Like Joyce, Carl Schmitt was also brought up in the Catholic faith – but under different conditions. While ‘in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, Catholics were prone to a similar “second-class citizen”’ (Hollerich, 2007: 149), Schmitt’s family was radically Catholic. His father belonged to the Zentrum party and three uncles were priests. His parents wanted Schmitt to put on the cassock too: he was sent to a Catholic elementary school. And although eventually he became a lawyer, his religious identification remained strong enough to dictate his career choice: ‘Schmitt’s exposure at a young age to the hierarchical norms of the Catholic Church…further cemented his faith in the institutional logic of hierarchy’ (Mehring, 2016: 74). It was Catholicism and religion that led Schmitt to think juristically in the terms of order and the undesirable exception to it, which reveals the construction of the order itself.

The influence of religion did not, however, make Schmitt an uncritical Catholic. If in later years Jacob Taubes (1987: 75) emphasized that he was a ‘striver from the ostracized minority of Catholics’, his early experiences with the Church were also marked by a sense of alienation. In his private journal he repeated after Erasmus that if someone seeking spirituality saw bishops’ palaces, he would laugh (Schmitt, 2003: 267). Similarly, in his academic work, Schmitt criticized the Romantic view of Catholicism (in which ‘the image of Catholicism is installed in the romantic pantheon along with every conceivable genius’ (2017: 6)) and the Catholic concept of natural law. The latter, he wrote, not only blocked the entrance of modern philosophy into theological thinking, but was a semblance of that, what weakened the Church. Commenting in 1919 on the proposal that the latter, as a moral arbiter in social matters, should have no influence on legislation, he stated that it was unfit to do so because it lacked ‘real power’ (Schmitt, 2005a: 24, 99).

Political Theology (Schmitt, 2005b) was published three years later. Three circumstances of when and by whom this text was written seem worth mentioning in the context of both transubstantiation and the European turbulence at the beginning of the decade after the Great War: first, Schmitt’s experience of the German Revolution, because ‘the chaos of this period, the violence and uncertainty about one’s personal security, greatly affected Schmitt’s thinking and attitudes’ (Bendersky, 1983: 96). Second, at the beginning of the 1920s Schmitt’s first marriage was coming to an end – and already getting married Schmitt, in a way, left the Catholic Church: his wife was a Protestant. Third, Political Theology was meant as a part of a memorial book dedicated to Max Weber, who died in 1920. And while Schmitt’s essay could therefore be seen just as a response to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, if Weber’s text was an attempt to describe a segment of the world (the countries that had adopted that religious system), Schmitt’s project was wider, responding from a Catholic perspective to Karl Barth’s Protestant The Epistle to the Romans or the Judaic works of Martin Buber. Below I will argue that Schmitt, in his ‘new conception of Catholic universalism’ (Cristi, 1993: 286) wanted to make the theological horizon a synonym of the horizon of order itself and, in the latter, develop an argument about using transubstantiation as a method of creating law by choosing events from social life. At the same time, he used transubstantiation, which he did not call that name, in a transgressive way: although he wrote the text as a devout Catholic – therefore his initial assumption was that the world is created by God, and as created by God it is a specific totality and order – the role he ascribed to secularization allows us to consider transubstantiation in Political Theology as hidden, but present. This role was a consequence of the fact that just as Joyce was in his use of transubstantiation the artist, Schmitt was a jurist, and, as William McCormick (2022: 112) writes, his arguments are lacking in Revelation: ‘What interests Schmitt in theology is not really the revealed truth of Christianity but the political legitimation religion as a genus can offer’ – and legitimation here also means the specific means of making a particular sphere its source.

However, the juristic perspective does not seem in Political Theology that obvious. The power to decide on the norms is held in this text by the sovereign – as, according to the famous passage, ‘he who decides on the exception’ (Schmitt, 2005b: 6), which means the exception to the legal norm. Sovereign’s decision does not derive from any legal entitlement, but from his assessment of the existential situation in which the community he leads finds itself; it is precisely the fact that he makes it that indicates that he is a sovereign: ‘From the liberal constitutional point of view, there would be no jurisdictional competence at all. The most guidance the constitution can provide is to indicate who can act in such a case’ (Schmitt, 2005b: 7). This is because the emergency situation is conceptually impossible under positive law before it occurs – and the same applies to the means of dealing with it legally. For Schmitt then, to announce the state of exception is to put it within a legal framework that does not exist in the moment the decision is made. By deciding to suspend the law, the sovereign states that it does not normalize reality any more. At the same time, this moment is not an anomie, but a legal institution: time outside the antiquated law, when the sovereign can draw from reality in order to create a legal order that is adequate not to a world that has fallen out of joint, but one that has this experience imprinted in its history. In other words, at the moment of the state of emergency (whether at the moment of the breakdown of the legal order or at a moment preceding such a breakdown), the sovereign creates the law that will apply to the ordered world thereafter, but at the same time does not create that world and order itself. This world and order has its own norms, but they are not legal norms – and, as Kirk Wetters (2006: 31) writes, Schmitt distinguishes between several kinds of norms, and ‘the written “rules” (Regelungen), unwritten social norms, “measures” (Mafinahmen), “orders” (Anordnungen as well as Befehle)’ should not be confused with the legal norm itself,

The association of such a process with theology comes naturally because of the passage, which opens the third chapter of Schmitt’s essay: ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’ (Schmitt, 2005b: 36). However, to describe sovereign’s creation indicated above as transubstantiation, one must ask not which theological category the state of exception, according to Schmitt, reflects – it is the miracle, and transubstantiation as the Real Presence of Christ belongs to this category (Conn, 2002) – but how it does so. If Schmitt’s political theology is ‘ambiguous program for a conceptual history. It can be carried out as diagnosis of epochs, a political theory, or as a history of metaphysics’ (Mehring, 2014: 109), its ambiguity lies in the fact that Schmitt’s project is situated between two theological-political narratives as distinguished later by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (2020: 249–59): the appellative and the juristic. They differ in the way in which within their conceptual boundaries God’s presence in the world is real. If in the appellative the sovereign makes constitutional claims from theological assertions, and the juristic means the theological legitimation of the existing order, in his 1922 project Schmitt is on to something else. Since ‘many reminiscences of theology also appear in the details of the argumentation’ (Schmitt, 2005b: 38), he sees in it the source of the norms of competence that justify the existence of the secular institutions and the relationship between them. Theology serves him as a divine description of the structure of the world, where divines is the legitimation of putting this structure into the secular formulas of authority, the language of which is law. Secular legal instruments, especially norms, thus derive their legitimacy from the fact that they duplicate the space of theology as a description of an ordered whole, while at the same time not being the theological concepts themselves. Contrary to Robert Kraynak’s (2001: 87) interpretation, Schmitt’s political theology should not be read as an imposition of theological categories on political life, but as a transgressive rooting of political categories in the secularized horizon of theology as the description of whole.

This becomes particularly clear when we consider why in Schmitt’s work ‘the exception is different from anarchy and chaos, order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not of the ordinary kind’ (2005b: 12). As I mentioned above, for Schmitt, the legal system as order is derived from the world, which is also order, because – and Schmitt as a Catholic does not use this as metaphor – it was created by God. An order, however, both in its divine and secular manifestation, does not mean the absence of contradictions. It means that the latter can have a legal character in the legal order, because they have an orderly character in the world order – if we can find them there, it means for Schmitt as a Catholic that it was God who put them into the structure of reality. As part of the ‘political theory…that claims to be founded on faith in divine revelation’ (Meier, 2002: 82–3), Schmitt’s concept is based on the belief that state of exception, as unforeseeable before it occurs, has a legal character – but given to it ex post, in the world in which what was unforeseeable (from the human, not the divine perspective) is a new normal and can be described by norms. At the time of the exception, its legal recognition is impossible because ‘there exists no norm that is applicable to chaos’ (Schmitt, 2005b: 13). Described after its termination, the exception is, however, not unlawful, and becomes ‘legal order [which] can be cognised as a uniform and coherent order’ (Croce and Salvatore, 2021: 1171) while containing the description of the exception. To put this in Thomas’ terms, as in the world created by God the possibility of an exception to Aristotle’s physics is contained, in the law ‘the rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything’ (Schmitt, 2005b: 15). Just as the Eucharist reveals the principles that govern substances and accidents when God does not intervene in the world, the exception, according to the German jurist, shows the legal construction of the normal situation. The latter, as a juridical moment, is created as normal in the legal sense – but not created as situation itself – at the moment of the exception, of abnormal situation, at the point in time, when the sovereign, from the events of the non-legal order selects those that will ex post become the law. However, before they are transubstantiated into the latter, they are just as abnormal and exceptional as everything else that is occurring before the moment the sovereign transubstantiates them.

It is this legal creation that makes it possible to demonstrate Schmitt’s vision of the state of exception as transubstantiation. By distinguishing between order and legal order, Schmitt states that in the former, divinely created as order, there are occurring concrete events that should, brought into abstract form from a concrete and individual event, be part of the latter, secular. Transubstantiation during the state of exception thus consists of what the sovereign, as the secular equivalent to omnipotent God, decides when it lasts, and is from the human perspective perceived as chaos. The sovereign chooses – but does not create – the events taking place during this chaos to be the part of the legal order, understood as the legal normality to be in force only after the state of exception has ceased. His choice transubstantiates social events, which are already the part of the order as the one created by God, into parts of the legal order as the secular sphere: he does not make them orderly in the divine sense, but gives the legal character to what was already ordered in the divine sense. This bestowal takes place through his decision, because, according to Schmitt (2005b: 20), ‘like every other order, the legal order rests on a decision and not on a norm’.

Thus, although the sovereign’s decision comes from the outside of the legal space and ‘frees itself from all normative ties’ (Schmitt, 2005b: 12), it is legal as a way in which the sovereign acts in reality. He is not in its making a legislator and does not enact positive legal norms, for before a given mode of behaviour becomes a norm, it must exist in the order in general: the world. The moment of the state of exception is thus ‘lawless void, a legal black hole, in which the state acts unconstrained by law’ (Dyzenhaus, 2005: 2011), which, at the same time, is constrained by order: for it is contained in the structure of the world as such, and only from it does law derive.

Schmitt thus points out that new norms as modes of behaviour are contained in the structure of the world seen as divine creation before they assume legal – that is: secular – character, but it is the decision of the sovereign that is necessary for the latter to take on this character. The sovereign transubstantiates social life from the divine order during a period of chaos in order for it to become a legal, secular norm. The contingency that these events thus lose is, first, concreteness (the events that become norms lose their character as events); second, chaoticness (from a legal point of view); third, the divine character, because they change the sphere in which they operate from the divine order to the legal order. The specificity of Schmitt’s 1922 project will be revealed when we understand how as normative is the project of transubstantiation as presented by Joyce in Ulysses.

Two horizons, two transubstantiations

Both Joyce and Schmitt were modernists. The heterogeneity of modernism – defined by Michel Foucault (1984: 40) as an approach, not a school – however, made them different. As one can detect from the very first work in which they are mentioned together – Georg Lukács’ The Ideology of Modernism – as the basic point of disagreement between the Irish and the German should be regarded the concept of the subject. While Joyce saw it as transformated by reality, which was ‘dynamic and developmental…[Schmitt] embraced this doctrine of the eternal incognito’ (Lukács, 1964: 27–45). This difference results in the different normative characters of the transubstantiation applied by Schmitt and Joyce. While Joyce developed its concept presented in Ulysses (and his earlier novels) consciously drawing from the work of Aquinas and introduced transubstantiation as a secular model of making everyday events sublime as parts of the (or: parts of his) artistic creation, Schmitt did something else: without any reference to Thomas, he presented the vision of the transformation of concrete events into abstract and thus normal because of the decision of the sovereign. However, both Schmitt and Joyce developed their work on the concept of transubstantiation for the same reason, which I have highlighted above: to find and propose a remedy for the chaos that has engulfed their contemporary Europe. Because of this reason, and the way it manifested itself in their writings, Schmitt’s and Joyce’s visions of transubstantiation differed even more.

While Schmitt’s work, especially Political Theology, is obviously designed with the above mentioned goal in mind – as Jacques de Ville (2017: 101) writes, what Schmitt wanted to do from his earliest essays was to play the role of katechon, the figure in world history that blocks its further course he developed in his late writings, treating his work from the beginning of his career as ‘a battle against the “hastener” of the rule of the anti-Christ’; moreover, his more practical writings, focused on the legal acts of the Weimar juridical system, gave Schmitt possibility to accomplish this goal by, for example, arguing for the extension of the powers of the President of the Reich (Engelking, 2019) – it may first seem problematic to find a similar goal in Joyce’s work. If we follow Lukács’ interpretation – that Ulysses describes both a disintegrated world and a disintegrated subject – it is difficult to see that this novel contains the possibility of thoughts and ideas about what must happen for the disintegration to end. In order to make them visible, we have to, first, supplement Lukács with another interpreter, also quoted above – TS Eliot, who found in Ulysses a realization of literary elitism – and, second, show how Joyce’s and Schmitt’s works can be interpreted through the prism of Thomas’ concept other than transubstantiation: that of political power from De Regno. The difference between the power of the priest who assists in Christ’s miracle of changing bread and wine into his body and blood and the power of the ruler of the political organism and an artist will shed light on how Ulysses was for Joyce a normative project.

In his review of this novel, written as early as in 1923, TS Eliot (1975: 175) stated that what Joyce was doing in his novel ‘[was] manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’. Contrary to accusations that he is a dadaist (or benevolent identifications of Joyce with this group), Eliot argued that Joyce is a classicist, and that the chaos in Ulysses results from the material Joyce has taken to build his novel on. However, he stated, it is the framing it as a novel that deprives it of its chaotic nature – and by framing Eliot meant that the framework fundamental to European culture, Odyssey, was used to tell Bloom’s story. According to Eliot, then, by inscribing one day from the life of the Dublin Jew into the scheme of the adventures of Ulysses, Joyce transformed it into something as sublime as the latter; to use Thomas’ term, he transubstantiated it. By being made the story of Ulysses, everyday activities of Leopold Bloom become the 20th-century substitute of the fundamental story of European canon, no more the tale of one day in Dublin.

Eliot’s remarks take us back to the point I mentioned above, where I suggested that between Stephen Hero and Ulysses Joyce underwent a transformation: he no longer made an artist the one who transubstantiates the everyday into art the protagonist of his work. He alluded to Aquinas’ concept, but he did not explain which of the characters should perform the sacrament. Therefore, to understand the character of this transubstantiation, we should no longer – as I did in the previous sections of this essay – ask, which character precisely is in Ulysses in the role of the priest during the Holy Mass. The question about who is transubstantiating everyday events into Odyssey on the pages of Joyce’s novel cannot be answered by reading Ulysses on the level of events; to answer it, the novel should rather be perceived as a whole. Joyce’s novel must be seen as a work of art in which the author placed clues relating to Catholicism in order to bring transubstantiation to another point of reference. The latter is the story of Odysseus that serves as a ‘form of order he believes to be capable of counteracting the disorder’ (Nikopoulos, 2017: 293). Joyce uses Homer’s poem to transubstantiate events that are incongruous with it: his Ulysses ‘sets heroic Odysseus…against the bathetic figure of Bloom striving to stay afloat in modern society’ (Crang, 2005: 215). Regardless of the lack of symmetry, the use of such a framework allows the Irish writer to remove the chaotic nature of Leopold Bloom’s life. The latter becomes an accident in the Aquinasian sense. On the level of the novel as a whole, Joyce then assigned himself the role of the one who performs the transubstantiation and decides to tell an everyday story as an odyssey. On the level of the characters in the book, however, since there is no clear indication as to whether it is the artist who is to perform it, we should say that each and every one of them, from Buck in the first pages to Molly Bloom in the last, performs it precisely because of the actions in which they see the appearance of divine order in shaving or menstrual blood. Therefore, the one who performs transubstantiation in Ulysses, is James Joyce himself as an artist who is performing his 1922 novel: by choosing events he makes parts of the story from the everyday life of the everyman Dubliner, he elevates them.

This very creation is the aspect of his writing that separates Joyce from Aquinas. The Irish writer imbues his characters with the power that, according to Thomas’ ideas in De Regno, cannot be a characteristic of any being other than God, particularly not the political ruler definitely not the artist. Only God, Thomas argues, can create, and man is God’s creation, incapable of forming creations himself (Aquinas, 1949; II.2.98): ‘Human beings cannot create as God creates; they only govern what God creates. And kings do not exercise “universal” government, but only “particular” government over a specific territory. Moreover, as Aquinas notes, very few kings found kingdoms’ (McCormick, 2022: 96–97). Thus, by transubstantiating actions of Leopold Bloom (understood also as Joyce’s creation) into something sublime because part of the novel titled Ulysses, Joyce transcends the horizon of Christian theology, which turns out to be for him only a metaphor useful for thinking about order in the circumstances of chaos. When the latter reigns, Joyce seems to be saying, inscribing the everyday actions into the model of basic European story makes the former sublime and the latter an ‘old story for our modern times’ (Homer, 2017: 1), as Emily Wilson recently translated the beginning of Homer’s epic.

Joyce’s project of Ulysses is normative in the sense, that it uses what Raz would call social normativity. It transforms events into norms based on the belief that they serve the constitution of the order, and the belief is the result of tautology: they serve the latter, because they have been successfully inscribed into the order, which is the novel. By inscribing to it the everyday events from the times of chaos, therefore, Joyce creates the space of order in the work of art; his project is a non-theological transubstantiation of chaotic into orderly.

Carl Schmitt does not refer directly to Aquinas’ concept of transubstantiation – however, the method by which the sovereign transforms the events of social life into secular law during the state of exception in his Political Theology, being essentially different from Joyce’s use of this concept, is at the same time more faithful to Thomas’ original idea. The reason for this is that in Political Theology Schmitt equates the horizon of order – from which the legal order emerges – with the horizon of theology. This equation is well illustrated by how Schmitt’s contemporaries misunderstood his use of the divine. The first misinterpretation was made by Hans Kelsen, who considered Schmitt a naturalist, the second – by Karl Löwith, who thought of him as a nihilist. Although their critiques are conducted from different perspectives, Kelsen and Löwith share a lack of understanding of the same issue: the place of theology in Schmitt’s thought. Kelsen equates it with natural law, while Löwith (1984: 55) believes that in Schmitt’s essay there is no theology at all: ‘Schmitt’s concept…is characterised by the fact that it is primarily a counter-concept to the Romantic one, and that it is secularised, only bordering on a theological conception.’ According to Löwith, even the famous opening statement of its third chapter does not have a divine basis, because while stating the importance of theology, at the same time Schmitt glorifies secularization. He uses theological argumentation as a veil, Löwith argues, and tries to mask the fact that he even does not believe in God.

To understand how Schmitt’s vision benefits from the concept of transubstantiation, we have to show the inadequacy of these critiques. Let us begin with Kelsen’s. In assessing their era, he and Schmitt agreed, arguing that ‘ours is a “relativistic” age in which the belief in “absolute” moral truths necessarily has waned’ (Scheuerman, 2020: 95). Whereas the consequence of this assessment was in Kelsen’s case the praise for democracy, Schmitt saw no guarantee in its mechanisms. He reached into the realm of theology as (Löwith was not wrong) secularized by centuries of using it to structure western legal thinking, but (Löwith was not wrong) still determining the structure of order, because of the divinity of the later. Transubstantiation, then, is for Schmitt a method of placing events from the social sphere within the legal sphere that does not imply an arbitrary course of action, but allows the sovereign to recognize which events contribute to legal order: not create them, to refer to Aquinas’ De Regno, but to choose them, as those that are transformed from the divine into the secular: legal.

As performing transubstantiation through lawmaking, in terms of Thomas’ theology the sovereign plays a dual role in Schmitt’s work. He is the counterpart of God in the sense that he transforms, but because of the fact that he transforms an everyday event from the divine order into a norm as secular he at the same time differs from God. What limits him is the idea of order, which is the structure of the world itself. Thus, unlike Löwith thought, such lawmaking does not imply an affirmation of nihilism. The sovereign, in making a decision, is bound by the reason for which he makes it, and the decision is itself divine, unlike its effect. In other words, the sovereign performs transubstantiation, but the one that is inverted.

Although his components of legal order are orderly before they build it, Schmitt does not say that they are synonymous: ‘Even in 1922, Schmitt was aware of the distinction between order and legal order’ (Herrero, 2015: 205). The former is not normative in the sense that, while being ‘based on given norms [it does not] produce new norms…The order is “normative” not because it follows pre-defined norms, but because it defines norms’ (Heller and Matteo, 2020: 61). For Schmitt, norm does not precede order; order only determines the general shape of what the norm should serve. Before the transubstantiation of an event into a norm, a given phenomenon, while it contributes to order as divine, is not a norm. It is only the sovereign’s decision confirming its character that makes it so, moving it from the space of order into the space of legal order.

Was Schmitt, then, the faithful disciple Aquinas in his reversed transubstantiation? McCormick (2022: 101) argues that Schmitt’s ‘political theology is a practical science – it is a program for political action. For Aquinas, it is a theoretical science – it provides principles for reflection upon politics.’ This objection does not touch the basic building block of Schmitt’s thinking: the recognition of theological space as primary in relation to juridical secular space in the sense that it is the theological that sets the horizon of human imagination and modes of action, which are later secularized. Such a horizon brings Schmitt close to Aquinas’ belief that human beings cannot create as God, only govern what God created. It also makes it possible to see in Schmitt’s project of normativity from Political Theology an example of what Raz called justified normativity: in the concept of the German jurist, the event becomes a norm, when it is justified by normative notion. The latter is the divine character of the world as created in an orderly way by God. However, before the action of the sovereign, elements of the latter are not norms; only after the sovereign confirms their legal character, it becomes them. Therefore, Schmitt’s project can be read as a postulate to strengthen the institution of the sovereign in his contemporary Germany (very much similar to the postulates present in his more practical writings, such as his reflection on article 48 of the constitution of the Weimar Republic). It is in this strengthening Schmitt sees the way from the chaos of his contemporary times, but, as a devout Catholic, in making his political postulate he never rejects the religious dimension of transubstantiation and the conviction of the order as created by God. In Political Theology, these two issues are linked, because Schmitt’s horizon is above all the Catholic, religious horizon, in which the German jurists sees the basis of bringing order to his contemporary, post-Great War continent.

Joyce’s case is different. He uses transubstantiation more consciously than Schmitt, but the horizon of his thinking is classical. He understands it not as it was understood in pre-modern literature, where classicism ‘may be well considered…the opposite of the ordinariness of daily life’ (Norris, 2016: 66). By Ulysses, Joyce states: everyday events are sublime, but they must be clothed in the proper form to constitute order. Transubstantiation is part of this thinking, but it is stripped of its divine dimension. In this way Joyce’s work, mainly Ulysses, turns out to be detached from Aquinas when compared with Schmitt’s Political Theology.

Conclusions

Not long after the publication of Political Theology, the failed annulment of his first marriage put Schmitt outside the Church: ‘While it was normal for Catholics to distance themselves from the Church after failed annulment petitions, nothing in Schmitt’s process was normal’ (Saralegui, 2021: 58). The rupture meant for him the need to find a sphere other than theological in which he could seek roots for a political decision – the chaotic circumstances in his contemporary Germany did not transform themselves into political and social order, but the chaos intensified. Only after the fall of the Third Reich did Schmitt return to religious thinking, but transubstantiation – also transubstantiation in camouflage – did not appear in it.

Joyce’s case is – again – different. His final work, Finnegans Wake, is a novel built on the concept of original sin. However, he treats the tenets of the Catholic faith in it even more freely than in Ulysses: ‘He employs Christian and Hebraic myths as he does various Islamic, Hindu, pagan and secular myths as representative of mankind’ (Benstock, 1961: 422). Transubstantiation can be found among these myths – but it does not occupy as prominent a place as it occupied in his previous works. It does, however, serve a similar purpose to the one it served in Ulysses, for the novel, too, remains an example of the ‘harmonious, symmetrical structure’ (Norris, 2019: 31).

Regardless of the differences in their conceptions of transubstantiation, Joyce and Schmitt were interested in the same thing: ways of establishing order. The former used Aquinas’ concept to establish order as such; the latter, in the reversed way, to establish legal order. The former saw normativity in placing the phenomena of everyday life within the structure of the myth constitutive to the western canon by the characters committing the original sin and believing that they themselves are gods; the latter in the pre-eminence of the horizon of theology in relation to the horizon of secular law. For the former, Catholicism was a tool – determining the way of establishing order; for the latter: a divine map of the structure of reality. What other differences in their modernisms resulted from their different, not only religious identifications, is a topic for another article.