Lelia's loss of faith

Lelia’s loss of faith is not a simple rejection of religion but a crisis in which institutional distrust, personal attachment, and fear of spiritual emptiness converge. She comes to regard the religious authorities and believers around her as compromised, yet unbelief offers no lasting satisfaction. Her eventual appeal to Massimo Alberti is therefore less a settled creed than a search for a form of faith grounded in love and freed from the structures she has come to distrust.

Origins and an all-or-nothing faith

Lelia’s later account traces her crisis to an earlier, uneasy attachment to religion. The faith she encountered at school did not appeal to her, but she clung to it because she feared the emptiness that might follow its loss. She also resisted religious novelties, which seemed to her destructive rather than constructive. Her instinct was to accept religion whole or reject it altogether: while she could accept the whole, she did so; when she could no longer do so, she concluded that nothing was preferable.

That rigidity was bound up with her understanding of who could interpret religious truth. Lelia distrusted Marcello Trento and Donna Fedele because, as laypeople, they spoke about the Gospel as if they had the right to interpret it. She regarded the religion represented by the archpriest and chaplain of Velo as more legitimate, but that attachment also collapsed. In retrospect, she says she could not withstand seeing the people who seemed to embody religious authority associated with one another: the archpriest, his sister, the chaplain, her father, Girolamo da Camin, and his friend Francesco Molesin. The account identifies this association as the point at which her confidence failed; it does not spell out every grievance behind her judgment. Her turn toward nothingness is thus both a response to people and a crisis of the absolute standard by which she had tried to distinguish true religion from corruption.

A crisis confessed to Donna Fedele

The conflict becomes explicit in Lelia’s exchange with Donna Fedele, who challenges her for treating the loss of faith as a further hurt to inflict while Donna Fedele is gravely ill. Lelia answers that belief and disbelief cannot simply be chosen at will. She also clarifies that Donna Fedele did not cause her to lose faith: she had spoken in anger, though that earlier anger did not undo the underlying crisis. Her insistence reveals the difference between a deliberate attack on her friend and an inward change she does not feel able to reverse.

Donna Fedele responds by saying that she will pray for Lelia in this life and the next, and urges her not to let pride govern her when she becomes an adult and independent. Lelia remains silent rather than accepting that diagnosis. Their exchange makes the crisis relational as well as theological: Donna Fedele experiences Lelia’s unbelief as a painful separation, while Lelia resists having it explained as either a chosen insult or a moral failing. The scene does not resolve their disagreement, but it shows that Lelia’s uncertainty has consequences for someone who loves her and whose own life is nearing its end.

Massimo Alberti and the search for another faith

Lelia’s understanding of her own unbelief takes shape alongside Massimo Alberti’s account of his religious crisis. Reading his letter to Donna Fedele, she learns that his doubts had begun long before, had been held in check by his devotion to his teacher, Benedetto, and had deepened after Benedetto’s death. Massimo describes a growing suspicion that Catholicism might be succeeded by a higher religious form, and fears that breaking with it could leave him without any positive religious certainty. His crisis is not identical to Lelia’s, but it gives her a language and a companion for the spiritual uncertainty she cannot settle alone.

In her own letter to Massimo, Lelia describes herself as governed more by passion than by reasoning and admits that she cannot give a clear analysis of her religious feelings. She presents his departure from his earlier beliefs and Catholic-renewal ideas as a source of happiness to her, but her own history makes clear that she is not simply adopting his position. She had once resisted religious innovations; now she asks him for a faith she can accept. The shift is less a doctrinal conclusion than a reversal in where she believes spiritual authority might be found.

The faith Lelia asks for is personal and ethical. She imagines a God she could worship in the woods of Dasio, beside the waterfall, on the lake, or in a married couple’s room; this God would require love and forbid hatred, without official mediators, incomprehensible dogmas, burdensome practices, promises of paradise, or threats of hell. Nature and intimacy become the settings in which she can imagine religious attention, while love supplies its central obligation. Yet she does not claim that this vision has restored belief. She asks Massimo for a faith because nothing has not satisfied her, and because she cannot return to the religion she once tried to accept whole.

Consequences and unresolved belief

The limits of Lelia’s crisis appear in the future she imagines if Massimo rejects her. She says she would not kill herself because she had promised not to, and would not enter a convent because she no longer had faith. Instead, she would try to remain near Massimo, seeing him occasionally while keeping herself out of his sight. The alternatives she rules out make clear that religious loss has practical as well as inward consequences: a religious vocation is no longer available to her, but her promise against suicide remains binding.

Lelia’s account therefore leaves unbelief suspended between refusal and longing. She cannot accept the religious world represented by people she has come to distrust, but neither can she rest in the absence of faith. Her proposed substitute is an intimate, non-institutional devotion organized around love, one that she asks of Massimo rather than declaring as her own achieved conviction. The tension is central to the state: Lelia has lost her former faith, yet continues to seek a ground for belief and a way to live that does not reduce religion either to obedience without trust or to nothingness.