Goal of this article is to characterize the influence of religious discourse on the art of James Joyce from the point of view of how artist’s personality correlates with an artistic form, “life” and “writing” programs; there is an attempt to analyze, how Joyce scales his attitude to his material in his early works, how does he “overcome” the material while still remaining within the Catholic discourse. We raise the questions of the basis on which Joyce continues the Catholic discourse in his works, and on the reasons of this principal relative “insideness” of Joyce towards the religious discourse. Novelty of the work is due to the attempt to establish, how Joyce conceptualizes the religious discourse, making it the discourse on art. We conclude that there is a deliberate mismatch of material and goal in the works of Joyce, that is assumingly one of the basic characteristics of James Joyce’s early works.