the sermons remind me of my secondary school days

Joyce's passages of fire and brimstone, and Stephen's classification of himself as a sinner, besides providing me a road map of my post-mortal future, remind me strangely of what Foucault says of homosexuality:

Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.

[History of Sexuality]

which is not to suggest that Daedalus was homosexual, but rather that his outward acts of fornication now informs his identity, his soul: he's now a species of sinner going to hell.

I'll admit to not being a fan of joyce (prefer nabokov for my dose of literary genius), and, fried out as i am, may have missed stuff, but: given how closely catholicism is tied into the irish identity, i wonder if stephen's sexual sins, by making him a bad catholic, also make him a bad irishman. taken this way, perhaps we could say that it is, in a sense, colonialism that informs stephen's guilt over his promiscuity since the fervent catholicism (in education and religion) is related to the history of Ireland as a colony.

it seems a stretch, but then again, we do witness this phenomena in our own time and space: for instance in the debate over things like keeping 377 of the penal code, and the peculiar arguments of certain ministers whose european religion motivates a desire to keep english law.