Religious Syncretism and Conversion in Pietro di Donato’s "Christ in Concrete" (1939)

Abstract: This article explores the literarization of Southern Italian religious culture in Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete. Such a framework, which critics have singled out as a form of “cultural Catholicism” given its mingling of pagan, magical and religious forms of ritual and performance, will be reevaluated as a faithful depiction of a peculiar Southern Italian type of religious sensibility, aptly framed by Ernesto de Martino as “Southern Catholicism” in his seminal work Sud e Magia (1959). After briefly outlining how Southern Catholicism and South- ern Italian identity and ethnicity are represented in the novel, the argumentation will move to weigh the dynamic that these cultural markers play out with American work ethic and capital- ism, symbolized in the book in the ruthlessly pagan features of “great God Job”. Job, an almost supernatural entity demanding workers to sacrifice themselves to it continuously, acts as de Martino’s notion of negativo, which the characters try to oppose by employing archaic beliefs, prayers and practices steeped in Catholicity. Finally, Paul’s conversion to Job and his lapse from Southern Catholicism will be assessed as a trope that signals an abandonment of his Italian identity to embrace the pursuit of the American Dream fully.