Strait Is the Gate

HEAVEN AND EARTH (318 pp.)--Carlo Coccioli--Prentice-Hall ($3.50).

When a novelist chooses religion for his theme and a priest for his hero, he faces as hard a problem as fiction can pose. His hero must be a man of faith--and if that faith is to ring true, the novelist cannot, like Homer or Hemingway, give his hero the sort of dash that enlivens the worldling in fiction. His moral lapses are less endurable than in another man; ultimately, and foreseeably, he must prove his mettle by self-denial.

These are some of the reasons why most religious novels are dull or mawkish. The author's embarrassment shows up in the way he fidgets about in the shallow end of his narrative pool, or the wild high-dives he takes into the deep. Sometimes he tries to avoid these extremes by holding on to the guardrail and pulling himself around the edges, often out of his depth, but never going under.

Who Believes It? In Heaven and Earth, Italian Novelist Carlo Coccioli uses his characters as a guardrail. He tells most of his story through their mouths, and thus remains at a safe distance himself. His priestly hero, Don Ardito, is one of those men who, like Tolstoy, struggle to tell the world that it has totally forgotten what Christianity is. "We say that the Father sent His Son to earth in the flesh and that the Son died ... in order to redeem us ... And we say further that every day we are allowed to repeat His sacrifice for our eternal salvation. We have said that millions of times ... for the past 20 centuries, but who believes it? Who believes it strongly enough to act in conformity with his belief?"

Not the priests, says Don Ardito. "Compromise, moderation, restrained zeal, a constant effort to be 'human' and please the general public, all these mixed in with personal greed and jealousy--isn't that the portrait of the average priest? . . . How many of us priests ... act as if the truth we preach were a spiritual reality, not a mere symbol?"

Don Ardito's Expiation. Heaven and Earth describes Don Ardito's pilgrim's progress toward the spiritual reality of his faith. When he arrives at the rectory in his small mountain parish and is warmly welcomed by the lusty young woman who was his predecessor's housekeeper, he boots her out. When a rich parishioner commits adultery, Don Ardito ignores his cash value to the parish and bars him from Communion till he breaks off his affair. When he sees that he needs more learning to make his message effective among the educated, he drives himself to grinding study.

Don Ardito is deplored, detested, vilified. But he is also adored: even anticlerical partisans call him "the saint." The flaw in his character is that he is so intent upon his crusade that he cannot pause to deal with individual problems. Even as he climbs to fame as a preacher, he shrinks as a human being; he cannot give simple love to those who need it from him.

Heaven and Earth ends with an act of expiation. Don Ardito persuades a German officer to execute him for acts committed by the partisans. In this way, Author Coccioli attempts to bring all nations, creeds and parties within the sphere of his theme--to throw Don Ardito's girdle of love around the earth.

It is not surprising that Coccioli fails to bring off this master throw. "How incapable I am of explaining!" writes one of his characters of Don Ardito. "What was there about his words that makes them ring with such intensity? ... I could weep over my own ineptitude. It is all the crueler because as soon as I stop writing I can see the essence of his secret in absolute clarity."

This is every novelist's problem in a nutshell. But it is particularly the problem of the novelist who tries to portray convincingly the mind and soul of a religious hero.

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