A Priest beyond Good and Evil.

Jean Sulivan, Eternity, My Beloved. Translated from the French by Sr. Francis Ellen Riordan. Introduction by Joseph Cunneen. St. Paul, Minn.: River Boat Books, 1999. 146pp. $15.00 (paper)

Eternity, My Beloved is a novel about novel-writing. The subject of the work is Jerome Strozzi, the priest-director of a seminary in Switzerland who is forced to return to Paris during the German Occupation. He tries to deal with the problems of the young and unemployed, but soon his informal parish is focused on the street-walkers of Pigalle and Clichy. Sulivan presents Strozzi through his relationships with several characters: Paquerette, one of a family of prostitutes; Elizabeth, also a prostitute, who is a Jew and the mother of a child; and Elaine, a lesbian. He reminds me of the Cure d'Ars, Joseph Vianney, the nineteenth-century pastor-confessor of a poor village, but Strozzi is a maverick priest living in a post-Christian urban society.

The novel, however, is far from simple hagiography, avoiding conventional narrative and pious language, Instead, it recreates the process by which Jean Sulivan discovered Strozzi's life and the meaning of his priesthood. Because the narrator is called "Sul" within the text, and the name Jean Sulivan appears on the cover, there is a mixture of genres, including a personal and intimate journal with a spiritual journey of its own. Indeed, the narrator has resisted Strozzi's influence on the book he is writing. Sulivan had started out to do a book about the reformed prostitute Elizabeth, anticipating a lurid underworld.

But Elizabeth kept speaking about Strozzi; from the outset Sulivan complains, "Strozzi stole my novel."

The psychological and spiritual journey that marks Sulivan's work is especially challenging for a Catholic writer who is aware of the rich but burdensome tradition of images and symbols that western Christianity has created. The art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance each provide a representation of the spiritual ideals, religious institutions, and historical actualities of their age; how can a Catholic writer invent a form and language that will reflect our post-Christian age? In his 1964 novel, Mais il y a la mer (The Sea Remains, 1969. o.p.), Sulivan embodies the problem in Ramon Rimaz, a retired Spanish Cardinal living in a cottage next to the sea. Rimaz has, in a sense, been stripped of his vestments, his office, and his function. As a man he must confront his present existence (a housekeeper, a chance friendship with a boy on the beach, an encounter with a neighbor) and make sense of a life devoid of the imagery and authority of his history. The anonymous narrator finds in the image of nature, spec ifically the sea, a basis for a lyrical reconciliation with the immanent God.

The Sea Remains won the Grand Prix Catholique de Litterature, partly because the form and content reflected sympathetically on the Cardinal. On the basis of that success Sulivan asked for and received permission to leave his pastoral duties in order to pursue his vocation as a writer full-time. In 1967 he moved to Paris, living quietly in a run-down neighborhood and writing over a book a year until his death after an automobile accident in 1980. In his "spiritual journal," Morning Light (Paulist Press, 1988), Sulivan reiterates what he had said previously: "To write is to lie a little less." The priest (Lemarchand) who invented the writer (Sulivan) carries into the fiction "concepts, ideology, and institutions" from an earlier time that the writer still struggles with in the present.

In a sense Eternity, My Beloved might be seen as an historical text, a novel about the state of religious life in Paris before and after World War II, seen from the perspective of a writer living in the 60s, shortly before May 1968 produced the rebellion of the young against an entrenched bourgeois system of education. Mauriac's Woman of the Phraisees had already attacked the rigidity and hypocrisy of bourgeois religious life. Although Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest is set in a poor rural parish, its description of the crisis of religion in France and its diary form obviously influenced Sulivan. (Like Bernanos, Sulivan writes in short units, from a few lines to several pages, 107 sections in 136 pages, arranged arbitrarily, without chronology, reflecting the fractured disorder of discovery.) Eternity, My Beloved, however, was written after Vatican II and reflects the renewed sense of hope that the Council engendered. With Latin no longer the universal language of the church, Sulivan attempts to find a new language for what the translator calls "that" -- the inexpressible, the mystical, the representation of the presence of God here and now - particularly in the character of Strozzi.

In this historical moment in the U.S., marked by a plethora of spiritual autobiographies, Eternity, My Beloved offers an unusual artistic experience and a challenging spiritual analysis. Whatever differences they are between the social and religious histories of France and the United States, we share the same post-Christian culture, at the heart of which, as Sulivan shows in this book, is the attitude toward sex. The epigraph, which provides the title, is from Nietzsche: "I have never found the woman by whom I would want to have a child, except this woman that I love, for I love you, eternity, my beloved." Strozzi is represented as a man beyond social and institutional constraints who faithfully maintains a spiritual presence among the marginalized members of his parish.

Sulivan's narrator begins with skepticism about Strozzi's relationships with prostitutes, noting that he signs his letters to them, "Je t'aime." The prostitutes, in turn, calls Strozzi a "dummy," but nonetheless depend on him to save them from Nazis, police, pimps, and thugs. What language is there to describe a person who has gone "beyond good and evil" -- or any label that ideology or theology creates? Much of the last third of the novel is a meditation on the word "love," deconstructed by Sulivan until it transcends its tabloid associations and becomes friendship, an eternity of love.

American Christians who brave the reading Eternity, My Beloved are in for an unsettling experience, challenging their esthetic categories, their religious assumptions, the very language they use in trying to describe the saints among us. After recovering from their participation in Sulivan's journey, however, they may well hope, as I do, for more translations of the work of this remarkable priest-writer.