I really enjoyed studying this at uni. My favourite passage was the hellfire sermon. I have drawn on it many a time since to demonstrate Medieval religion to little Year 7s.
I've just looked it up. The sermon is about seven pages long.
"Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseus loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions and millions of fetid carcasses massed together in this reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell."
And that's just the smell! The sermon goes on to describe the horrors, the tortures that would be faced by those in hell. And then the pupils at Stephen Dedalus' school are reminded of the sins they might commit that could send them to hell. No wonder this sermon sparked off Stephen's questioning.
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Best James Joyce book by far -the rest is bull, especially Finnegans Wake.
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