ABSTRACT
James Joyce was deeply troubled by the Catholic bias against sexual desire when it emerged during his adolescence. Joyce elaborates that theory of beauty as a variant of Aquinas's theory that the requisites for beauty are "integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance", which Joyce conceives as successively unifying experiences. The clear radiance of the esthetic images, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony". The emotional damage to Joyce by his early immersion in Christianity with its psychologically fragmenting anti-sexual morality eventually motivated his effort to unify in an epic novel the vast range of human experiences. Joyce leads his readers to wonder accusingly what kind of mind, what kind of religion could think up such a scenario of eternal damnation for sexual activity and pound it into the minds of young men who are just learning to deal with their sexuality while learning to love.
