Crisis and Loss of Faith

Crisis and Loss of Faith is a recurring spiritual conflict in which doubt reaches beyond disagreement with Church policy to unsettle belief in Christ, God, and the grounds of moral life. Most fully developed through Massimo Alberti and Lelia, the crisis also exposes the pressures of religious authority and public identity. The novel places doctrinal uncertainty beside acts of prayer, charity, and fidelity, without treating any one of them as a simple cure for doubt.

Massimo Alberti: from Church conflict to uncertainty about God

Massimo’s crisis has a long history, though its full dimensions become clear only as he prepares to honor Benedetto, the teacher whose influence once held his faith together. As a student in Rome, Massimo encountered Benedetto in a village in Lazio. While Benedetto lived, Massimo’s doubts did not disturb him: he could question particular decisions by Church authority without imagining that he might rebel against it. After Benedetto’s death, however, attacks on the teacher and hostility toward Massimo as his disciple joined with the corrosive influence of radical criticism. The combined pressures gradually weakened the beliefs that had once seemed secure.

Massimo understands his predicament as different from a casual rejection of Catholicism. He does not describe himself as abandoning religion over disliked forms of worship or doctrines he finds absurd. His deeper fear is historical and theological: perhaps Christianity, like the religion of Moses before it, will be superseded by a higher religious form, leaving the Church as the remnant of something once living. That possibility raises a personal question he cannot evade: whether he is called to serve as a precursor to a new revelation, even if doing so means opposing the faith he has publicly defended. His anguish comes partly from not knowing whether such a calling is real or whether the question itself marks the disintegration of his beliefs.

The struggle also threatens Massimo’s sense of who he is. He has written, lectured, and argued publicly in religious controversies, and the resulting moral identity has served as both support and confinement. In Milan, he feels attacked from opposing camps: some regard his loyalty to Church law as weakness, while others condemn his willingness to think and write in a modern spirit. His involvement in religious action thus becomes difficult to separate from his private belief. Breaking with Rome would mean not only a change in conviction but also a rupture with the public self he has built.

The funeral and the collapse of certainty

The return of Benedetto’s remains for burial at Oria sharpens Massimo’s conflict. He wants to honor his dead friend and teacher, but a public tribute seems to affirm beliefs that are no longer his. Refusing would feel like an insult; taking part risks hypocrisy. Massimo knows that Benedetto embodied complete adherence to the Catholic Creed, confidence in the Church, and humble obedience to its authority. He fears that speaking at the funeral would dishonor the very person whose memory he most reveres if he can no longer affirm Benedetto’s convictions.

By this point, the crisis has moved beyond separation from Rome. Massimo’s doubts about Catholicism are followed by doubt about Christ as divine and risen; he fears that belief in a personal God may be next. The speed of the collapse seems sudden, but he recognizes that Church obligation had long been holding together beliefs already weakened by criticism, reading, and conversation. When that authority is rejected, the fragility becomes visible. One night he lights a lamp, kneels before an image of Christ and Peter on the waters, and pleads inwardly for faith. The effort fails to restore certainty. He extinguishes the light, mocks his own reaction, and finds that his attachment to Lelia persists despite his attempts to reject it.

His account to Donna Fedele makes the uncertainty more precise rather than resolving it. He imagines that, if death came, he could ask for a priest and receive the sacraments sincerely, from humility before death rather than pretense. Yet he does not take this possibility as proof that his former belief has returned. He feels himself still in unstable waters, and fears that his present uncertainty may deepen until even belief in God disappears. The image of reaching a solid depth offers no assured destination: it registers his desire for rest from conflicting currents, not a settled doctrine.

Lelia’s rejection and her search for belief

Lelia’s crisis develops along a different path. She remembers trying to remain attached to the religion taught at school, although it did not appeal to her, because she feared the emptiness beyond it. She distrusted religious novelties that seemed destructive rather than constructive and, for a time, preferred the traditional teaching associated with the clergy at Velo. She also objected to Marcello Trento and Donna Fedele speaking about the Gospel as though laypeople could interpret it for themselves. Her early position was uncompromising: either the whole religious system or nothing.

That position breaks when she sees the people who represent the system becoming entangled with one another and with conduct she cannot accept. Her account includes the provost, the chaplain, the provost’s sister, her father, and Francesco Molesin, an associate of her father. Rather than continuing to defend the whole on the strength of its claims, she concludes that she would rather accept nothing. But this negative conclusion does not satisfy her. Lelia tells Donna Fedele that she cannot simply decide to believe or disbelieve at will, and denies that Donna Fedele caused her loss of faith. Her anger had colored what she said, but the underlying uncertainty remains.

Lelia’s account of belief is inseparable from her relationships. As Donna Fedele lies gravely ill, she asks whether Lelia intends to add the loss of faith to her other sorrows. Lelia responds by objecting to the assumption that belief can be commanded, then urges her friend not to speak as though death were certain. The exchange shows both their difference and their intimacy: Donna Fedele’s faith gives her a language of prayer and hope, while Lelia’s uncertainty makes that reassurance difficult to receive.

In a letter to Massimo, Lelia describes the kind of faith she wishes she could find. She imagines a God she could worship in the woods of Dasio, beside the ravine and the lake, or in a married life; a God who requires love and forbids hatred, without official intermediaries, incomprehensible dogmas, burdensome practices, or promises and threats about the afterlife. This is a request, not evidence that she has recovered belief. Her letter shows her reaching toward a religious life freed from the institutions and doctrines she has rejected, while admitting that she does not know how to analyze her own feelings clearly.

Love, charity, and competing testimonies

The novel sets these crises beside forms of commitment that survive uncertainty. Massimo continues to care for people in need. In Muzzaglio, he treats a recovering man who lives in squalid isolation after domestic misfortune, bringing him food each morning and trying, with help from two women in Dasio, to improve his circumstances. He also hopes to persuade the man’s wife to take him back and to keep the black sheep the man fears losing. This work does not settle Massimo’s theology; it shows that his capacity for practical compassion remains active while his beliefs are coming apart.

Benedetto’s funeral brings the conflict between private doubt and public religious witness into the open. In his address, Don Aurelio acknowledges that Benedetto may have erred in theological arguments, but insists that his defining work was to call people back to the spirit of the Gospel through life and action. He presents Benedetto as obedient to the Roman Catholic Church and asks his listeners to forgive those who condemned or mocked him. The speech offers a forceful account of Benedetto’s faith and of Don Aurelio’s own convictions; it does not answer the questions Massimo has raised about the future of Catholicism or his own belief.

The surrounding acts of faith further resist a single resolution. Marcello Trento, aged seventy-two, turns toward the darkened sky over Mount Torraro in prayer, thinking of death as a solemn prospect of reunion with those he loves, yet feeling both sweetness and tremor before God. Near the end of his life, Donna Fedele receives the last rites and viaticum after a sudden worsening of her illness. These scenes present belief as lived devotion and preparation, in contrast to Massimo’s and Lelia’s unsettled searching. The novel leaves the contrast intact: religious practice, moral action, and love remain consequential, but the characters’ crises cannot be reduced to a debate settled by one testimony or one act of devotion.