A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Chapter 3 Part 3

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chapter three, Part three of A Portrait of the Artist
as a young Man. This is a LibriVox recording. All
LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information
or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by
Peter Bobby. A Portrait of the Artist as a young

(00:23):
Man by James Joyce, Chapter three, Part three. Voices spoke
near him on hell, I suppose he rubbed it into you. Well,
you bet he did. He put us all into a
blue funk. That's what you fellas want, and plenty of
it to make you work. He leaned back weakly in

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his desk. He had not died. God had spared him.
Still he was still in the familiar world of the school.
Mister Tate and Vincent Heron stood at the window, talking, jesting,
gazing out at the bleak rigs, moving their heads. I
wish it would clear up. I had arranged to go

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for a spin on the bike with some fellows out
by Malahide. But the roads must be knee deep. It
might clear up, sir, the voices that he knew so well,
the common words, the quieter of the class room when
the voices paused, and the silence was filled by the
sound of softly browsing cattle as the other boys munched
their lunches. Tranquility lulled his aching soul. There was still time,

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Oh merry, refuge of sinners, intercede for him, Oh virgin undefiled,
save him from the gulf of death. The English lesson
began with the hearing of the history. Royal persons, favorites, intriguers,
bishops passed like mute phantoms behind their veil of names.

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All had died, all had been judged. What did it
profit a man to gain the whole world if he
lost his all? At last, he had understood, and human
life lay around him, a plain of peace, whereon ant
like men labored in brotherhood, their dead sleeping under quiet mounds.

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The elbow of his companion touched him, and his heart
was touched, And when he spoke to answer a question
of his master, he heard his own voice, full of
the quietude of humility and contrition. His soul sank back
deeper into depths of contrite peace, no longer able to
suffer the pain of dread, and sending forth as she

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sank a faint prayer, Ah, Yes, he would still be
spared he would repent in his heart and be forgiven,
and then those above those in heaven would see what
he would do to make up for the past. A
whole life, every hour of life. Only wait all, God,

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All all. A messenger came to the door to say
that confessions were being heard in the chapel. Four boys
left the room, and he heard others passing down the corridor.
A tremulous chill blew round his heart, no stronger than
a little wind, And yet, listening and suffering silently, he

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seemed to have laid an ear against the muscle of
his own heart, feeling it close and quail listening to
the flutter of its ventricles. No escape. He had to confess,
to speak out in words what he had done and thought.
Sin after sin, How how Father Aye. The thought slid

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like a cold, shining rapier into his tender flesh confession.
But not there in the chapel of the college. He
would confess all every sin of deed and thought sincerely,
But not there among his school companions. Far away from there,
in some dark place, he would murmur out his own shame,

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And he besought God humbly not to be offended with him.
If he did not dare to confess in the College chapel,
and in utter abjection of spirit, he craved forgiveness mutely
of the boyish hearts about him. Time passed. He sat
again in the front bench of the chapel. The daylight

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without was already failing, and as it fell slowly through
the dull red blinds, it seemed that the sun of
the last day was going down, and that all souls
were being gathered for the judgment. I am cast away
from the sight of thine eyes. Words taken my dear
little brothers in Christ, from the Book of Psalms, thirtieth,

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chapter twenty third verse, in the name of the Father,
and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, ah men.
The preacher began to speak in a quiet, friendly tone.
His face was kind, and he joined gently the fingers
of each hand, forming a frail cage by the union
of their tips. This morning, we endeavored, in our reflection

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upon Hell, to make what our Holy Founder calls in
his Book of Spiritual Exercises the composition of place. We endeavored,
that is, to imagine, with the senses of the mind,
in our imagination, the material character of that awful place,
and of the physical torments which all who are in
Hell endure. This evening, we shall consider for a few

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moments the nature of the spiritual torments of hell. Sin, Remember,
is a twofold enormity. It is a base consent to
the promptings of our corrupt nature, to the lower instincts,
to that which is gross and beast like. And it
is also a turning away from the council of our
higher nature, from all that is pure and holy, from

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the Holy God himself. For this reason, mortal sin is
punished in hell by two different forms of punishment, physical
and spiritual. Now, of all these spiritual pains, by far
the greatest is the pain of loss, so great in fact,
that in itself it is a torment greater than all

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the others. Saint Thomas, the greatest Doctor of the Church,
the Angelic Doctor, as he is called, says that the
worst damnation consists in this that the understanding of man
is totally deprived of divine light, and his affection obstinately
turned away from the goodness of God. God, remember, is

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a being infinitely good, and therefore the loss of such
a being must be a loss infinitely painful. In this
life we have not a very clear idea of what
such a loss must be. But the damned in hell,
for their greater torment, have a full understanding of that
which they have lost, and understand that they have lost

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it through their own sins, and have lost it forever.
At the very instant of death, the bonds of the
flesh are broken asunder, and the soul at once flies
towards God. The soul tends towards God as towards the
center of her existence. Remember, my dear little boys, our
souls long to be with God. We come from God,

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We live by God, and we belong to God. We
are His Inalienably. His God loves with a divine love
every human soul, and every human soul lives in that love.
How could it be otherwise. Every breath that we draw,
every thought of our brain, every instant of life, proceed

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from God's inexhaustible goodness. And if it be pain for
a mother to be parted from her child, for a
man to be exiled from hearth and home, for friend
to be sundered from friend, oh, think what pain, what
anguish it must be for the poor soul to be
spurned from the presence of the supremely good and loving Creator,

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who has called that soul into existence from nothingness, and
sustained it in life, and loved it with an immeasurable love.
This then, to be separated forever from its greatest good
from God, and to feel the anguish of that separation,
knowing full well that it is unchangeable. This is the

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greatest torment which the created soul is capable of bearing.
Pain a damni, the pain of loss. The second pain
which will afflict the souls of the damned in hell
is the pain of conscience. Just as in dead bodies,
worms are engendered by putrefaction, so in the souls of

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the lost there arises a perpetual remorse from the putrefaction
of sin, the sting of conscience, the worm as Pope Innocent,
the third calls it of the triple sting. The first
sting inflicted by this cruel worm will be the memory
of past pleasures. Oh, what a dreadful memory will that be.

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In the lake of all devouring flame, the proud king
will remember the pomps of his court, the wise but
wicked man, his libraries and instruments of research, the lover
of artistic pleasures, his marbles and pictures and other art treasures.
He who delighted in the pleasures of the table, his
gorgeous feasts, his dishes prepared with such delicacy, his choice wines.

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The miser will remember his horde of gold, the robber,
his ill gotten wealth, the angry and revengeful and merciless murderers,
their deeds of blood and violence in which they reveled,
the impure and adulteress, the unspeakable and filthy pleasures in
which they delighted. They will remember all this and loathe

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themselves and their sins. For how miserable will all those
pleasures seem to the soul condemned to suffer in hell, fire,
for ages and ages. How they will rage and fume
to think that they have lost the bliss of heaven,
for the dross of earth, for a few pieces of metal,
for vain honors, for bodily comforts, for a tingling of

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the nerves. They will repent. Indeed, and this is the
second sting of the worm of conscience, a late and
fruitless sorrow for sins committed. Divine justice insists that the
understanding of those miserable wretches be fixed continually on the
sins of which they were guilty. And moreover, as Saint
Augustine points out, God will impart to them his own

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knowledge of sin, so that sin will appear to them
in all its hideous malice, as it appears to the
eyes of God himself. They will behold their sins in
all their foulness and repent, but it will be too late,
and they will bewail the good occasions which they neglected.
This as the last and deepest and most cruel sting

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of the worm of conscience. The conscience will say, you
had time and opportunity to repent, and would not. You
were brought up religiously by your parents. You had the
sacraments and graces and indulgences of the Church to aid you.
You had the minister of God to preach to you,
to call you back when you had strayed, to forgive

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you your sins, no matter how many, how abominable, if
only you had confessed and repented. No, you would not.
You flouted the ministers of holy religion. You turned your
back on the confessional. You wallowed deeper and deeper in
the mire of sin. God appealed to you, threatened you, entreated,

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you to return to him. Oh, what shame, what misery.
The ruler of the universe entreated you, a creature of clay,
to love him who made you, and to keep his law.
No you would not. And now though you were to
flood all hell with your tears, if you could still weep,
all that sea of repentance would not gain for you.

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What a single tear of true repentance shed during your
mortal life would have gained for you. You implore now
a moment of earthly life wherein to repent in vain
that time is gone, gone forever, such as the threefold
sting of conscience, the viper which gnaws the very heart's

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core of the wretches in hell, so that filled with
hellish fury, they cursed themselves for their folly, and curse
the evil companions who have brought them to such ruin,
and cursed the devils who tempted them in life, and
now mock them and torture them in eternity, and even
revile and curse the Supreme Being, whose goodness and patience
they scorned and slighted, but whose justice and power they

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cannot evade. The next spiritual pain to which the damned
are subjected is the pain of extension. Man in this
earthly life, though he be capable of many evils, is
not capable of them all at once, inasmuch as one
evil corrects and counteracts another, just as one poison frequently

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corrects another. In hell. On the contrary, one torment, instead
of counteracting another, lends its still greater force. And moreover,
as the internal faculties are more perfect than the external senses,
so are they more capable of suffering. Just as every
sense is afflicted with a fitting torment, so is every

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spiritual faculty, the fancy with horrible images, the sensitive faculty
with alternate longing and rage, the mind and understanding with
an interior darkness more terrible even than the exterior darkness
which reigns in that dreadful prison. The malice, impotent though
it be, which possesses these demon's souls, is an evil

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of boundless extension, of a limitless duration, a frightful state
of wickedness, which we can scarcely realize unless we bear
in mind the enormity of sin and the hatred God
bears to it. Opposed to this pain of extension, and
yet coexistent with it, we have the pain of intensity.

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Hell is the center of evils, and as you know,
things are more intense at their centers than at their
remotest points. There are no contraries or admixtures of any
kind to temper or soften in the least the pains
of Hell. Nay, things which are good in themselves become
evil in hell company. Elsewhere a source of comfort to

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the afflicted will be there a continual torment. Knowledge, so
much longed for as the chief good of the intellect,
will there be hated worse than ignorance. Light, so much
coveted by all creatures, from the Lord of creation down
to the humblest plant in the forest, will be loathed intensely.

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In this life, our sorrows are either not very long
or not very great, because nature either overcomes them by
habits or puts an end to them by sinking under
their weight. But in Hell the torments cannot be overcome
by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity, they
are at the same time of continual variety, each pain,

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so to speak, taking fire from another and re endowing
that which has enkindled it with a still fiercer flame.
Nor can nature escape from these intense and various tortures
by succumbing to them. For the soul is sustained and
maintained in evil, so that its suffering may be the greater,
boundless extension of torment, incredible intensity of suffering, unceasing variety

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of torture. This is what the Divine Majesty, so outraged
by sinners, demands. This is with the holiness of heaven
slighted and set aside for the lustful and low pleasures
of the corrupt flesh requires. This is what the blood
of the innocent Lamb of God shed for the redemption
of sinners, trampled upon by the vilest of the vile insists.

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Upon last and crowning torture of all the tortures of
that awful place is the eternity of Hell. Eternity. O
dread and dire word, eternity. What mind of man can
understand it? And remember? It is an eternity of pain.

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Even though the pains of hell were not so terrible
as they are, yet they would become infinite, as they
are destined to last forever. But while they are everlasting,
they are, at the same time, as you know, intolerably intense,
unbearably extensive. To bear even the sting of an insect
for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What must

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it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell forever, forever,
for all eternity, Not for a year or for an age,
but forever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this.
You have often seen the sand on the sea shore.
How fine are its tiny grains, And how many of

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those tiny little grains go to make up the small
handfuls which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine
a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching
from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million
miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles
in thickness. And imagine such an enormous mass of countless

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particles of sand, multiplied as often as there are leaves
in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean,
feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms,
and the vast expanse of the air. And imagine that
at the end of every million years, a little bird
came to that mountain and carried away in its beak

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a tiny grain of that sand, How many millions upon
millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried
away even a square foot of that mountain, And how
many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried
away all Yet at the end of that immense stretch
of time, not even one instant of eternity could be

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said to have ended. At the end of all those
billions and trillions of years, eternity would have scarcely begun.
And if that mountain rose again after it had been
all carried away, and if the bird came again and
carried it all away again, grain by grain, and if
it so rose and sank as many times as there

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are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops
of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers
upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals. At the
end of all those innumerable rides using and sinkings of
that immeasurably vast mountain, not one single instant of eternity

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could be said to have ended. Even then, at the
end of such a period, after that eon of time,
the mere thought of which makes our very brain real dizzily,
eternity would have scarcely begun. A holy saint, one of
our own fathers, I believe it was, was once vouchsafed

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a vision of hell. It seemed to him that he
stood in the midst of a great hall, dark and silent,
save for the ticking of a great clock. The ticking
went on unceasingly, and it seemed to this saint that
the sound of the ticking was the ceaseless repetition of
the words. Ever, never, ever, Never ever to be in Hell,

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never to be in Heaven, Ever to be shut off
from the presence of God, never to enjoy the beatific vision,
Ever to be eaten with flames, gnawed by vermin, goaded
with burning spikes, never to be free from those pains,
ever to have the conscience upbraid one the memory, enrage,

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the mind filled with darkness and despair, never to escape,
ever to curse and revile the foul demons who gloat
fiendishly over the misery of their dupes. Never to behold
the shining raiment of the blessed spirits, Ever to cry
out of the abyss of fire to God for an instant,
a single instant of respite from such awful agony. Never

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to receive even for an instant God's pardon, ever to suffer,
never to enjoy, ever to be damned, never to be saved, ever, never, ever, never, Oh,
what a dreadful punishment, an eternity of endless agony, of

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endless bodily and spirits will torment without one ray of hope,
without one moment of cessation, of agony, limitless in extent,
limitless in intensity of torment, infinitely lasting, infinitely varied, of
torture that sustains eternally that which it eternally devours, of
anguish that everlastingly preys upon the spirit while it racks

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the flesh, an eternity, every instant of which is itself
an eternity, and that eternity an eternity of woe. Such
is the terrible punishment decreed for those who die in
mortal sin by an almighty and a just God, Yes,
a just God. Men reasoning always as men are astonished

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that God should mete out an everlasting and infinite punishment
in the fires of hell for a single grievous sin.
They reason thus, because blinded by the gross illusion of
the flesh and the darkness of human understanding, they are
unable to comprehend the hideous malice of mortal sin. They
reason thus, because they are unable to comprehend that even

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venial sin is of such a foul and hideous nature,
that even if the omnipotent Creator could end all the
evil and misery in the world, the wars, the diseases,
the robberies, the crimes, the deaths, the murders, on condition
that he allowed a single venial sin to pass unpunished,
a single venial sin, a lie and angry look, a

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moment of wilful sloth. He the great omnipotent God, could
not do so, because sin, be it in thought or deed,
is a transgression of His law, and God would not
be God if he did not punish the transgressor A
sin an instant of rebellious pride of the intellect made
Lucifer and a third part of the cohorts of angels

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fall from their glory. A sin, an instant of folly
and weakness, drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and
brought death and suffering into the world. To retrieve the
consequences of that sin, the only begotten Son of God
came down to Earth, lived and suffered, and died a
most painful death, hanging for three hours on the cross. Oh,

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my dear little brethren in Christ Jesus, Will we then
offend that good Redeemer and provoke his anger? Will we
trample again upon that torn and mangled corpse? Will we
spit upon that face so full of sorrow and love?
Will we, too, like the cruel Jews and the brutal soldiers,

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mock that gentle and compassionate Savior who trod alone for
our sake the awful wine press of sorrow. Every word
of sin is a wound in his tender side. Every
sinful act is a thorn piercing his head. Every impure
thought deliberately yielded to is a keen lance transfixing that

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sacred and loving heart. No, No, it is impossible for
any human being to do that which offends so deeply
the divine majesty, that which is punished by in eternity
of agony, that which crucifies again the Son of God
and makes a mockery of him. I pray to God
that my poor words may have availed to day to

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confirm in holiness those who are in a state of grace,
to strengthen the wavering to lead back to the state
of grace the poor soul that has strayed. If any
such be among you, I pray to God, and do
you pray with me, that we may repent of our sins.
I will ask you now, all of you, to repeat

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after me the act of contrition. Kneeling here in this
humble chapel, in the presence of God. He is there
in the tabernacle, burning with love for mankind, ready to
comfort the afflicted. Be not afraid, no matter how many
or how foul the sins, if only you repent of them,
they will be forgiven you. Let no worldly shame hold

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you back. God is still the merciful Lord, who wishes
not the eternal death of the sinner, but rather that
he be converted and live. He calls you to him.
You are his. He made you out of nothing. He
loved you as only a god can love. His arms
are open to receive you, even though you have sinned

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against him. Come to him, poor sinner, poor vain and
erring sinner. Now is the acceptable time. Now is the hour.
The priest rose, and, turning towards the altar, knelt upon
the step before the tabernacle in the fallen gloom. He
waited till all in the chapel had knelt, and every

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least noise was still. Then, raising his head, he repeated
the Act of Contrition, phrase by phrase, with fervor. The
boys answered him, phrase by phrase. Stephen, his tongue cleaving
to his palate, bowed his head, praying with his heart, O,
my God, O, my God, I am heartily sorry. I

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am heartily sorry for having offended THEE, for having offended THEE.
And I detest my sins, and I detest my sins
above every other evil, above every other evil, because they
displease THEE, my God, because they displease THEE, my God,

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who are so deserving, who art so deserving of all
my love, of all my love. And I firmly purpose,
and I firmly purpose, by thy holy grace, by thy
holy grace, never more to offend THEE, never more, to
offend THEE, and to amend my life, and to amend

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my life. End of Chapter three, Part three,