CULTURE SHOCK:THE LATE and rightly lamented James Simmons wrote perhaps the best critique of James Joyce in his poem The Catholic Church's Revenge on James Joyce, writes Fintan O'Toole.
He accused the great novelist as having reproduced the very thing he had rebelled against by creating, in opposition to the church's authoritarian majesty, "a towering Gothic prose cathedral".
This "most democratic of writers", Simmons argued, had ended up making his own church: "So the people cower/ coming near his creation and sidle in, astounded,/ and wait for official experts to show them round it."
Whether or not you agree with this view of Joyce, there's no doubt that Simmons put his finger on one of the stranger dilemmas for those writers who declare war on the Catholic Church in which they have been raised.
In the theatre, Protestant playwrights as diverse as Samuel Beckett and Stewart Parker have found ways of railing at God, albeit in her absence. Catholic or ex-Catholic dramatists have found it harder to really confront religion head-on.
It is striking, given the centrality of Catholicism to southern Irish identity in the 20th century, how little drama has been made of it.
We've had lots of plays about priests (the work of Paul Vincent Carroll, for example), some brilliant engagements with the torments of faith and doubt (Thomas Kilroy's Talbot's Box and Brian Friel's masterpiece, Faith Healer). But there's arguably only one great play that really goes after God: Thomas Murphy's The Sanctuary Lamp.
Murphy's success in this extraordinary play, currently on stage in his own superb production at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Dublin, illuminates the reasons why others have had such trouble with the subject.
An ex-Protestant like Beckett could make a feck of God, as in the scene in Endgame where Hamm begins to pray but, getting no response, breaks off in discouragement with the immortal line "The bastard. He doesn't exist."
Ex-Catholics, carrying the whole burden of that religion's ritual theatricality, find it harder to simply shrug it off.
The psychological need is, as Simmons suggested of Joyce, to build "towering Gothic prose cathedrals" of their own. And that's both very difficult and maddeningly paradoxical.
When you walk into the Samuel Beckett Theatre and see Monica Frawley's stunning set, the immediate impression is that Murphy, in a play that caused ructions on its debut in 1975, was indeed constructing his own cathedral. Frawley's design is a series of great church pillars that ascend beyond our view. The impression of vastness is cleverly enhanced by a remarkable sound design (by Ivan Birthistle and Vincent Doherty) that gives the actor's voices the reverberations of a vast, echoing space.
At one level, the play itself has this same sense of grand scale. It is heavily freighted with myth. The basic structure - one set, one day, one story - is Greek (it is interesting that both Joyce and Murphy used the Greeks as an alternative to Catholicism).
The Oresteia, especially the third part of that trilogy, Eumenides, lies beneath the surface, with Harry, the circus strongman a version of the Orestes who arrives at the temple pursued by the Furies - in this case his friend and betrayer Francisco.
There is also the Catholic imagery of the sanctuary lamp, of the Holy Family, and of St John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul. There are elements of Fellini's La Strada, of Beckett, and even of Shakespearean soliloquy.
With all this grand mythic architecture, it might seem that Murphy too is trapped in James Simmons's paradox of having to construct a literary church tower from which to fire missiles at the church.
But what makes The Sanctuary Lamp such a good play is the way Murphy simultaneously builds his cathedral and knocks it down.
This is almost literally true - much of the physical action of the drama involves the disarranging of the church. Harry tests his strength by trying to lift the pulpit - which he ultimately manages to do.
The vestments, cushions, crosses and candles are thrown around, wielded as weapons, or used for the mundane tasks of keeping warm. And in one of those brilliantly simple physical images that are a hallmark of Murphy's gift, the confession box is laid on its side and used as a bed for three lost souls.
All of this is the outward expression of the play's inner drive, its insistence on looking for the divine within fallen, desperate, unheroic humanity.
While Harry and the waif Maudie are both looking for forgiveness in the church, Francisco asks the question in which Greek drama, through Euripides, culminates: "Who's going to forgive the gods?" Francisco also gets a line that's funnier, and even more devastating, than Beckett's "The bastard. He doesn't exist."
"God made the world, right?", he asks. "What has he done since?" But this never amounts to mere disrespect. Murphy's achievement is to hold opposites in tension.
The play's highly wrought mythological structure is balanced by its anti-heroic focus on the mess of its characters' lives and by the madcap irreverence of its humour.
Its attack on organised religion and its railing against God is balanced by its deeply compassionate sense that we need someone to listen to us, even if it's only a light in a lamp.
In the end, both Harry and Francisco invent their own theologies, Harry imagining the souls of the dead finding each other in space and time, Francisco longing for the now-abolished Limbo in which fat babies sit under trees eating bananas.
Neither of these theologies, it should be noted, requires cathedrals.
