Is there a great Christian social novelist? The acknowledged masters—Dickens, Hugo, and Tolstoy—were geniuses with a certain respect for religion, but they weren’t orthodox. Graham Greene was interested in unsettled characters, alienated from society. Marilynne Robinson and Sigrid Undset’s books are fundamentally about family dynamics, and deal with larger social issues through that lens. Dostoevsky is perhaps a better candidate, yet I think of him as a novelist of the anguished soul. My preferred candidate is Alessandro Manzoni, an Italian writer, scholar, and poet, who only published one novel. But what a novel it was.

Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi was written in the 1820s. It’s been titled The Betrothed in many of its English translations. It was renowned in the 19th century; Verdi called it a “gift to humanity” and dedicated his great Requiem to the novelist’s memory. In 1909, here in America, Charles W. Eliot chose it for inclusion in what became the Harvard Classics: the famous “five foot shelf of books” that Eliot intended to contain all that is needed for a liberal arts education. Yet Manzoni’s stock seems to have fallen in the English-speaking world over the last century. Penguin Classics keeps an English translation in print, but it’s hard to find much critical discussion of Manzoni. In Italian culture, his reputation is secure, although it seems the lengthy book is the bane of many high school students.

Perhaps some of our contemporaries find the plot too simple. The Betrothed is not the kind of story where the characters make a subtle psychological journey. It is, rather, an episodic historical fiction in a vividly realized setting. The heroes are Renzo and Lucia, the titular promised spouses, who live in a village on the shore of Lake Como. A powerful and dastardly noble wants Lucia for himself, and so he sends his goons to intimidate the village priest, who then refuses to perform the marriage. Renzo and Lucia have to flee the village, and they then have a series of separate adventures and meet interesting characters. The story carries them through some particularly tumultuous years in Milan’s history, culminating in the bubonic plague of 1630, during which Renzo and Lucia finally reunite.

More likely, it’s Manzoni’s overt piety that’s fallen out of favor. As a young man, Manzoni was an atheist, but he had the peculiar fortune to fall in love with and marry a woman from a Calvinist family. Soon after the marriage, she converted to Roman Catholicism, and it wasn’t long before Manzoni himself became a devout Catholic. The most heroic characters in The Betrothed are religious. Lucia’s faith is humble but deep: In every trouble, her first instinct is to trust God and ask for Mary’s intercession. Another major character, Father Cristoforo, is an energetic Capuchin friar who helps Renzo and Lucia early in their journey. Cristoforo’s story, relayed in a few chapters, is a study of how God can transform the vices of pride and anger into courage and zeal. And then there’s Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, a real historical figure (and the nephew of St. Charles Borromeo) whom the characters meet along the way. Manzoni depicts Federigo himself as something close to a saint.

When I think of exemplary figures of holiness in other novels, I think of Dostoevsky’s Elder Zossima, or the bishop in Les Miserables. These men seem to be holy despite the church around them; they are solitary in their sanctity. In English literature not only are saintly figures rare but they are often not placed very high in the hierarchy: it’s almost a trope to hold up one particular good pastor as a standard by which the rest of the church can be criticized. Manzoni inverts this English trope: in The Betrothed, it’s the village priest who is a comical coward, and it’s the bishop who is saintly. And the novel doesn’t just hold up one good bishop as the counterexample to general ecclesiastical vice; Manzoni situates his figures of holiness in the context of the institutional Church. Cristoforo’s zeal for charity is limited by the orders of his superiors, who are perhaps a little more worldly than he is, and yet Manzoni never hints that this is a bad thing. Cristoforo welcomes the discipline of his Order; he knows that he needs it. And during the plague, Federigo Borromeo inspires the priests of Milan by his own example, so that only the priests and the Capuchins manage any real degree of self-sacrifice and service.