Stephen's gently wise self-admonition, "Come out of them,
Stephen. Beauty is not there," is one of the more memorable
passages in Proteus. Thornton hears a possible
allusion to passages in the gospels in which Jesus
commands devils to come out of people who have been possessed.
The connection seems improbable, but it is supported by
another biblical allusion, Stephen's prayer in Scylla and
Charybdis, "O Lord, help my unbelief."
In Mark 1:23-26, a man "with an unclean spirit" cries out in
the synagogue, "Let us alone; what have we to do with thee,
thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us? I know
thee who thou art, the Holy One of God." Jesus replies, "Hold
thy peace, and come out of him," and the
unclean spirit violently leaves the man's body. (Mark's story
is repeated in Luke 4:31-36.) Mark 9:25-27 recounts
a similar event: "When Jesus saw that the people came running
together, he rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, Thou
dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him,
and enter no more into him. And the spirit cried, and rent him
sore, and came out of him: and he was as one dead; insomuch
that many said, He is dead. But Jesus took him by the hand,
and lifted him up; and he arose."
It is not clear exactly what these echoes, if present, could
add to one's understanding of Stephen's two sentences: he has
committed many youthful follies, but he has never been
possessed by a raging madness. It should be noted, however,
that the verse just before the passage in which the second
exorcism is narrated contains a saying that Stephen explicitly
alludes to later in the novel. The father of the possessed boy
tells Jesus how the spirit afflicts his son and says that
Jesus' disciples have not been able to cast him out (Mark
9:17-18). Jesus responds by bemoaning the "faithless
generation" that he must put up with (9:19), and tells the
father, "If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him
that believeth" (9:23). The father cries out, "Lord, I
believe; help thou mine unbelief" (9:24).
In Scylla and Charybdis Stephen repeats the
father's words as he tries to maintain his faith in himself as
a writer: "I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief."
Since he is thinking in the Proteus passage about
what he must do to realize his artistic calling—come out of
past follies, because they do not lead to Beauty—it does seem
that he may somehow be channeling Jesus' strong sense of
faith.
