And it is to this Providence that we must trace the three institutions common to every society: Church, Marriage, Burial. This is not Bossuet’s Providence, transcendental and miraculous, but immanent and the stuff itself of human life, working by natural means. Humanity is its work in itself. God acts on her, but by means of her. Humanity is divine, but no man is divine. This social and historical classification is clearly adapted by Mr. Joyce as a structural convenience - or inconvenience. His position is in no way a philosophical one. It is the detached attitude of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist ... who describes Epictetus to the Master of Studies as ‘an old gentleman who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water.’ The lamp is more important than the lamp-lighter. By structural I do not only mean a bold outward division, a bare skeleton for the housing of material. I mean the endless substantial variations on these three beats, and interior intertwining of these three themes into a decoration of arabesques - decoration and more than decoration.

I'm not quite sure what I just read. Maybe somebody else will.