The Hero as Saint

THE WHITE STONE (271 pp.)--Carlo Coccioli--Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

Night is one way of defining day. Steeped in opposites, paradoxes and negations, modern religious fiction tends to define godliness in the same way. In the novels of Kafka, Mauriac and Graham Greene, the hero is conscious not of the presence but the absence of God, not of the nearness but the distance of divine grace, not of the order but the absurdity of God's universe. Obsessively self-abased, the religious hero is a man of little faith, and his heroism is to know it.

Such a hero is The White Stone's Don Ardito Piccardi, a priest haunted by the conviction that he no longer believes in God. As a religious novelist, Italian Author Carlo Coccioli, 40, is not quite up to the writing company he wants to keep. But with persistence, he tags manfully after the bigger models and every so often matches their literary stride.

Quest or Quarry? The White Stone is a sequel to Coccioli's Heaven and Earth (TIME, July 28, 1952), in which Don Ardito grew in power as a preacher while losing his capacity to love his fellow humans. That novel ended with an act of expiation in which the priest persuaded a German officer in World War II to execute him for acts committed by others. The present novel begins by reducing that sacrifice to irony. Perhaps as a symbolic agent for the humbling of Don Ardito's spiritual pride, the German officer stages a mock execution of the priest, complete with firing squad and blank cartridges, before shipping him off to a prison camp. In that moment Don Ardito suffers a murky but traumatic lapse of faith. Stripped of his calling, as he sees it, the priest no longer says Mass. Ceasing to pray, Don Ardito becomes the quarry of the Hound of Heaven.

What follows is one of those journeys through the circles of hell-on-earth, in which Don Ardito gradually acquires the stigmata of saintliness. This pilgrim's progress is made somewhat confusing by Novelist Coccioli, who chronicles his hero's life solely through scraps of letters, diaries and notebooks. In quest of his own soul, Don Ardito meets a homosexual who reminds him, in perverted fleshly form, of his own once fiery love of God. And he is tempted by a devil named Mr. Page (for pagan) who tells him that God is simply another invention of man's ego.

Loss or Dross? Though Don Ardito shuns his priestly duties, he is periodically seized by religious raptures. In one trance-like transport, he rises a yard into the air and German troops mysteriously call off a military operation. Inevitably, the priest's miracles are less convincing than his miseries. Yet through Don Ardito's occasional wonderworking, Novelist Coccioli compellingly argues his central thesis: that the saint is not a spiritual generator, but a spiritual conductor through whom the current of godliness electrically flows. It is apparent long before novel's end that Don Ardito had never actually faltered in his faith, and that what he had mourned as loss of soul was really the dross of self.

As a nightscape of a religious ordeal, The White Stone is emotionally somber but intellectually spirited. Novelist Coccioli has failed to solve the perennial problem with religious heroes--making goodness seem exciting. But he has succeeded in an only slightly less exacting task, making goodness seem godly.

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