From the very beginning James Joyce's readers have considered him as a Catholic or an anti-Catholic writer, and in recent years the tendency has been to recuperate him for an alternative and decidedly liberal form of Catholicism. However, a careful study of Joyce's published and unpublished writings reveals that throughout his career as a writer he rejected the church in which he had grown up. As a result, Geert Lernout argues that it is misleading to divorce his work from that particular context, which was so important to his decision to become a writer in the first place. Arguing that Joyce's unbelief is critical for a fuller understanding of his work, Lernout takes his title from Ulysses, "I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help me to unbelieve?", itself a quote from Mark 9: 24. This incisive study will be of interest to all readers of Joyce and to anyone interested in the relationship between religion and literature.

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. Joyce and the church according to the critics 2. The Holy Roman Apostolic Church 3. Heresy, Schisma and Dissent 4. Joyce's own crisis of belief 5. Loss of religion in retrospect: from Epiphanies to Exiles 6. You behold in me a horrible example of freethought 7. Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state 8. After Ulysses Conclusion Select Bibliography Index