This first in a two-volume project on the lives and writings of two men of literary genius, poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and author James Joyce explores the widely divergent worldviews and temperaments that reflect in their writings. Each man developed an abstraction and vocabulary regarding the nature of insight, vision, and discovery and the conditions and processes which generate them. Joyce takes the religious term “epiphany” and secularizes it to connote a sudden flash of deep insight into the beauty of a thing, a recognition of the integrity, wholeness, symmetry and radiance unique to it. Both men borrow from the idea of haecceitas ('thisness') first proposed by medieval thinker John Duns Scotus. Despite the far-reaching differences between the two men - one at times coarse and vulgar, the other pious and supremely devoted to his God - each suffered periods of profound darkness and despair. This first volume concentrates on Joyce with a particular focus on his magnum opus “Ulysses.” Author William Gibbons, a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was prompted to undertake his study of Joyce, controversial for his apparent (but misread as Gibbons believes) rejection of Christian faith, and for his reputation for lewdness in his writing, after sensing Joyce’s appeal for justice in reading “Ulysses,” initially banned for obscenity. Joyce made his call for justice for his novel, while at the same time intentionally making it extremely difficult for the reader to respond to this appeal, especially for one whose sensitivities are immediately repulsed by much of Joyce’s style. Gibbons concludes Volume One with an expression of gratitude for having studied this most unique man, for having “strained” (a good Hopkins verb) to do justice by him and for coming away from it all with both a deeper commitment to principles of justice and of virtue, and a feeling of warmth and compassion for this most singular man, James Joyce.