The Borromean Rings In George Orwell's Animal Farm

In the novel Animal Farm, George Orwell creates a fable about animals rebelling and taking back their farm, but in doing so, they soon become workers of the pigs who eventually rule the farm. This situation is much like the Russian Revolution where Stalin is seen and viewed as Russia's hero by creating a better place when in fact Russia's state only grew worse. And the two leaders, Stalin and Napoleon, only had done good things whilst traitors or wrongdoers continued to come from others.
The Catholic Church adopted an ancient symbol, the Borromean Knot, to justify its central tenet that Jesus Christ was divine; that the Son, the Father, and the Holy Ghost were three inseparable elements of one entity called God. Joyce uses the same metaphor
of the inseparable triadic structure throughout Ulysses to elucidate a paradox. In reality, the gap between one individual’s consciousness and another cannot be bridged. Yet, by reading a fictional text, the reader is able to bridge the gap between himself and the Other through the use of interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness. Ultimately, Ulysses is a novel for which the literary community deemed him “heretical” because of his diversion from the norms.
RELIGION AS A SYSTEM OF METAPHORS
One of the divisive debates in the early stages of Christianity is the concept of the Trinity, one the Catholic Church holds sacred. Christ’s existence complicated the nature of God. The Council of Nicea meant to solve the controversy about whether Christ was begotten by the Father, similarly eternal, or created afterward. The Council was also intended to end the argument about whether or not the words could be found to reconcile the nature of God in the Old and New Testament. The Gnostics believed that “… the God of the Old Testament was a distinctly inferior being who had created or at least ruled this present evil world, while in Jesus was manifest a far higher form of God” (Bacon 536). The Gnostics held firm after the Council, and the division in belief about the nature of Christ continued, leaving a weakness in Church doctrine that would eventually be called heresy.
The Council resulted in the official Church doctrine, the Nicene Creed, which the Catholic Church uses as its profession of faith. The belief in the Father and the Holy Spirit are accompanied by the established doctrine on Christ’s relationship with God:
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made.
(Catechism)
The Church adopted an ancient symbol for the Trinity, the Borromean Rings. An initial look at the structure leads one to believe that it consists of three separate links, the configuration of which is actually a physical impossibility, since the rings would have to be linked in separate planes. Therefore, if one of the rings were removed, the other links would separate as well, which is why the rings represent the three-in-one nature of God: God is not three distinct entities but one entity composed of three elements.
The Borromean Rings are a metaphor, but one that results in the “mystery of all ages, now made manifest … to be felt rather than to be understood” (Bacon 532). The mystery, necessarily, required interpreters to be intermediaries between Man and God since laypeople could not understand God nor have a direct experience with this unknowable being. Christians are simply required to have faith, and any individuals who claimed to have communion with God were considered heretics by the Church. Ironically, Judaism also required a rabbi to interpret scripture for its followers, which was the very reason Christ was crucified. His profession that he had direct religious experiences with God threatened the authority of the chief rabbis. In Forbidden Faith, Richard Smoley
writes:
This was precisely the response Jesus evoked when he began to preach: “And they were astonished at his doctrine: doctrine: for he taught them as one that had authority and not as the scribes” (Mark 1:22). Naturally, the “scribes” – those with a purely external knowledge of religion – are bound to regard this person as a threat to their own power. (2)
Joyce was a Catholic, intended for the priesthood, but he was disillusioned with the Church on many levels. He rejected the mystery of the Trinity because the Church imposed its adherence to an incomprehensible mystery that limited the spiritual potential of ordinary people. At first, like Stephen Dedalus, Joyce was fascinated in the belief systems of Gnostic heretical sects because they maintained that it was possible for laypeople to experience God without an intermediary. He also became intrigued by reincarnation and “the eternal mother-faith that underlies all transitory religions” (Ellman 99). While Joyce never settled on any religion after denouncing the Church, he did begin to appreciate all religion as a “system of metaphors,” a system he would heavily employ in Ulysses. He would also become an author who astonished the literary “scribes” with his innovative and blasphemous work.
THE HERETICAL ARTIST
Similar to the Gnostics, Joyce believed that a person could experience the divine without an intermediary, but it wouldn’t happen through traditional religion. The artist is someone who is capable of seeing beyond the ordinary. Joyce’s ability to create access through fiction for the reader to cross into the unknown showed his own artistic gift. He did not believe “that the artist has any supernatural power, but that he has an insight into the methods and motivations of the universe” (Ellman 42).