“A Priest of the Eternal Imagination”: Modern Spiritual Authority in Joyce

Abstract This article sets out to understand the literary fascination with priesthood in the first half of the twentieth century—an office that simultaneously represents the paralysis of vestigial tradition, the possibility of a new spiritual order, and the complex hierarchies operating across literary, ecclesiastical, and occult spheres. Departing from typical scholarly accounts of modernist religion and spirituality, which create a binary axis between the orthodox religion and secular modernity, the article uses A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses as case studies to show how James Joyce and other authors of the period are invested in the crystallization of new rituals, sanctifications, and forms of esoteric knowledge. In this effort, occult and spiritualist practices become not only genuine alternative models of priesthood but also—alongside more orthodox hierarchies—mechanisms for realizing the underlying conviction that new forms of literature and thought require new forms of spiritual authority to organize, disseminate, and structure them. Running through this article is Stephen Dedalus’s aspiration to become “a priest of the eternal imagination”—a line that, often taken to merely signal artistic ambition and ecclesiastical refusal, points toward the reinvention of priestly power at the heart of the modernist project.