Crunching along the shore, tapping shells and sand with his
cane, Stephen thinks, "Sounds solid: made by the mallet
of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity
along Sandymount strand?" The eternal principles here are
supplied by William
Blake, who conceived of "Los, the creator" as the
earthly form of one of the Four Zoas (the primal faculties),
and by Plato, who conceived of a δημιουργός (demiourgos) or
"creator" that fashioned the visible world. Stephen's idea of
"walking into eternity" was probably directly inspired by
reading Blake.
Timaeus, in Plato's dialogue of the same name, says that a
demiurge formed the world that we see about us. This deity
acts from benevolent intentions in the Timaeus,
fashioning the cosmos to be as good "as possible" (30b), as
much like the eternal Ideas as "necessity" will allow
(47e-48a). Later Gnostic works, by contrast, depicted the
Demiurge as a demon whose creative work is evil, trapping
mankind within the realm of matter. The Platonic position, it
should be noted, is much closer to the Christian view that the
world was made by a beneficent Creator who found his work to
be "good."
Blake's Los, mentioned in The Book of Urizen, The
Book of Los, America a Prophecy, Europe
a Prophecy (all mid-1790s), and Jerusalem (1804-20),
is also a creator, and like the Demiurge he inhabits an
intermediary plane between the visible and eternal worlds. He
is the fallen human form of Urthona, one of the Four Zoas.
Blake represents him as a smith beating his hammer on an anvil
(associated with the beating of the human heart) and blowing
the fire with large bellows (associated with the lungs). He
creates life, sexual reproduction, and consciousness, and as
the begetter of Adam he originates the line of biblical
patriarchs and prophets.
Thornton notes that, in a 1912 lecture, Joyce referred almost
verbatim to a characterization of Los in yet another of
Blake's works, Milton (1804-10): "For every Space
larger than a red globule of Man's blood / Is visionary, and
is created by the Hammer of Los." And, indeed, Stephen seems
to be regarding the work of Los in Proteus as an
occasion for "visionary" enlightenment, just as he drew on the
works of Jakob Boehme and
George Berkeley to read
the sights of the seashore as "signatures" or "signs" of
noumenal reality.
It is hard to know how many of Blake's works Joyce may be
drawing on, but the lecture suggests that at the very least he
was thinking of Milton. That work seems to have
supplied Stephen with his idea of walking into eternity, which
follows hard upon the mention of Los. Blake describes how
Milton entered him through his left foot: "And all this
Vegetable World appear'd on my left Foot / As a bright sandal
form'd immortal of precious stones & gold. / I stoop'd
down & bound it on to walk forward thro' Eternity" (I,
plate 21).
Blake also connects Los with a large pair of compasses,
suggesting the architectonic work of drafting the plan of
creation. In a famous plate, he represented Urizen as the
Ancient of Days extending an opened compass into the dark void
beneath him. Urizen and Los are opponents in Blake's early
works, each trapping the other within a human body. Does their
opposition (constructed as a binary of reason and imagination,
repression and revolution, denial of human passions and
gratification of them) somehow reinstantiate the ancient
debate about the goodness or evil of the created world?
Gifford notes that, "in Gnostic theory and Theosophy," the
Demiurge was called "the architect of the world."
These debates do not surface in Stephen's thoughts, but they
do beg the question of how he may conceive the "Demiurgos":
is it a force for repression and ignorance, or for liberation
and insight? No certain conclusions can be drawn from such
brief utterances, but Stephen's belief that he can access
eternity through the created world does not seem to bespeak a
Gnostic sensibility. It associates him instead with the view
articulated by Plato—and, later, by the early Christians—that
the Creation is good.
