Section
IV starts off with another example of how Stephen cannot doing anything
halfway. Stephen has changed from thinking of leaving religion behind at the
start of Section III to being completely devoted to God once again. Stephen
went from only satisfying his bodily needs to denying everything his body
wants. He chose to deny his senses so as not to be tempted. The paragraph on
page 31 continued on 32 talks about how he “mortifies” his body. As we had
said, Stephen does not do anything less than 110%, but this seems too far. To
purposefully deny his senses is insane and it seems to only distance himself
from other people in fear of further temptation.
As I was reading I
assumed that Stephen just took the priest’s words too seriously, but by the end
of the reading I was not too sure. This may seem like an unintended effect to
what the priest said when he said to Stephen never to commit his terrible sin
again, but at the end of part II of section IV Stephen is asked if he would
want to enter the priesthood. The priest said that God singles out one possibly
two or three people in an entire college to join the priesthood and he believes
Stephen is one of them. This would seem to be sign from God that what he is
doing is the right way to approach life. A life lived in such fear of
temptation that Stephen refuses to do anything but be in fervent prayer all the
time. Obviously this is no way to live so I think this is Joyce showing how
wrong some of the Church’s teachings can be when concerning very impressionable
young men.
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