Atelier Aterui: "The names, however, are not, from one point of view, incongruous”: Saint Newman, Father Hopkins and James Joyce

"The names, however, are not, from one point of view, incongruous": Saint Newman, Father Hopkins and James Joyce

Eishiro Ito

Abstract

This paper explores the significance of John Henry Newman's canonization in 2019, an event anticipated by James Joyce in the late 1930s, and considers its resonance within the intellectual lineage connecting Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Joyce. Newman, invited by the Irish Catholic bishops to serve as the founding rector of the Catholic University of Ireland-- now University College Dublin, Joyce's alma mater-- exerted a lasting influence on Irish cultural life. Joyce himself engaged with Newman's legacy as a member of the Literary and Historical Society founded under Newman's auspices, where he presented his early papers "Drama and Life" and "The Poetry of James Clarence Mangan." While Joyce was only six when Hopkins, professor of Greek at UCD from 1884 to 1889, died prematurely, their indirect kinship is striking: both Newman and Hopkins, born into prosperous English families, abandoned the Church of England to embrace Catholicism, with Newman's role in the Oxford Movement inspiring Hopkins to convert and eventually to enter the Jesuit order, thereby marginalizing himself within English society. Joyce, for his part, repeatedly invoked Newman in his fiction--Stephen Dedalus declaring in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that Newman was "the greatest writer of prose" (P 75)--whereas Hopkins appears more obliquely in Finnegans Wake. Mary Colum's observation that Joyce's mind was "fundamentally Catholic in structure" underscores how deeply Catholicism shaped his imagination and his portrayal of Dublin's cultural identity, even as his work transgressed ecclesiastical boundaries, most notably by writing freely of sex. Joyce's paradoxical position, profoundly marked by the very tradition he resisted, places him in an uneasy but illuminating lineage alongside Newman and Hopkins, whose influence reveals the enduring entanglement of Catholicism and modern Irish literature.

Keywords: Catholicism, The Society of Jesus, University College Dublin, John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Oxford Movement

The full version is available in James Joyce Journal, Vol. 31, No. 2. The James Joyce Society of Korea, December 2025, 139-65.