Nikos Kazantzakis - The Last Temptation of Christ

The endurance of the tiny old men gave out and they all collapsed in one heap onto the ground. Their memories had been reawakened; they had begun to feel young again, to remember the kingdom of heaven, the thrones, the majesty. Suddenly they broke out into the dirge. Groaning and wailing, they beat their foreheads against the stones.

All at once Jesus too burst into sobs. He cried, “Judas, my brother, forgive me!” and started to rush into the redbeard’s arms. But Judas jumped back, put out his hands and would not let him come near. “Don’t touch me,” he shouted. “I don’t believe in anything any more; I don’t believe in anyone. You broke my heart!”

Jesus stumbled. He turned, searching for something to catch hold of. The women, fallen prone on the ground, were pulling out their hair and screaming; the disciples were looking up at him with anger and hatred. The Negro boy had disappeared.

“I am a traitor, a deserter, a coward,” he murmured. “Now I realize it: I’m lost! Yes, yes, I should have been crucified, but I lost courage and fled. Forgive me, brothers, I cheated you. Oh, if I could only relive my life from the beginning!”

He had collapsed to the ground while speaking and was now banging his head on the pebbles of the yard.

“Comrades, my old friends, say a kind word to me, comfort me. I perish, I am lost! I hold out my hand. Does no one of you rise to place his palm in mine or to say a kind word to me? No one? No one? Not even you, John, beloved? Not even you, Peter?”

“How can I speak, what is there to say?” wailed the beloved disciple. “What was the witchcraft you threw over us, son of Mary?”

“You deceived us,” said Peter, wiping away his tears. “Judas is right: you broke your word. Our lives have gone to waste.”

All at once from the pile of tiny old men there arose a unified whining din.

“Coward! Deserter! Traitor!”

“Coward! Deserter! Traitor!”

And Matthew lamented: “All my work gone for nothing, nothing, nothing! How masterfully I matched your words and deeds with the prophets! It was terribly difficult, but I managed. I used to say to myself that in the synagogues of the future the faithful would open thick tomes bound in gold and say, ‘The lesson for today is from the holy Gospel according to Matthew!’ This thought gave me wings, and I wrote. But now, all that grandeur has gone up in smoke, and you-you ingrate! you illiterate! you traitor!-you’re to blame. You should have been crucified. Yes, if only for my sake, so that these writings might have been saved, you should have been crucified!”

Once more the unified whining din arose from the heap of tiny old men.

“Coward! Deserter! Traitor!”

“Coward! Deserter! Traitor!”

At that moment Thomas rushed in from the doorway. “Rabbi,” he cried, “I won’t leave you now that everyone is abandoning you and calling you traitor! No, I won’t abandon you, not I, not Thomas the prophet. We said the Wheel turns. That’s why I won’t leave your side. I’m waiting for the Wheel to turn.”

Peter rose. “Let’s go!” he shouted. “Judas, step in front, lead us!”

Gasping, the tiny old men got up. Jesus was stretched out on the ground, face down, his arms spread wide. He filled the entire yard. They held their fists over him and shouted.

“Coward! Deserter! Traitor!”

“Coward! Deserter! Traitor!”

One by one they shouted, “Coward! Deserter! Traitor!”-and vanished.

Jesus rotated his eyes with anguish, and looked. He was alone. The yard and house, the trees, the village doors, the village itself-all had disappeared. Nothing remained but stones beneath his feet, stones covered with blood; and lower, farther away, a crowd: thousands of heads in the darkness.

He tried with all his might to discover where he was, who he was and why he felt pain. He wanted to complete his cry, to shout LAMA SABACTHANI… He attempted to move his lips but could not. He grew dizzy and was ready to faint. He seemed to be hurling downward and perishing.

But suddenly, while he was falling and perishing, someone down on the ground must have pitied him, for a reed was held out in front of him, and he felt a sponge soaked in vinegar rest against his lips and nostrils. He breathed in deeply the bitter smell, revived, swelled his breast, looked at the heavens and uttered a heart-rending cry: LAMA SABACTHANI!

Then he immediately inclined his head, exhausted.

He felt terrible pains in his hands, feet and heart. His sight cleared, he saw the crown of thorns, the blood, the cross. Two golden earrings and two rows of sharp, brilliantly white teeth flashed in the darkened sun. He heard a cool, mocking laugh, and rings and teeth vanished. Jesus remained hanging in the air, alone.

His head quivered. Suddenly he remembered where he was, who he was and why he felt pain. A wild, indomitable joy took possession of him. No, no, he was not a coward, a deserter, a traitor. No, he was nailed to the cross. He had stood his ground honorably to the very end; he had kept his word. The moment he cried ELI ELI and fainted, Temptation had captured him for a split second and led him astray. The joys, marriages and children were lies; the decrepit, degraded old men who shouted coward, deserter, traitor at him were lies. All-all were illusions sent by the Devil. His disciples were alive and thriving. They had gone over sea and land and were proclaiming the Good News. Everything had turned out as it should, glory be to God!

He uttered a triumphant cry: IT IS ACCOMPLISHED!

And it was as though he had said: Everything has begun.

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST is the summation of the thought and experience of a man whose entire life was spent in the battle between spirit and flesh. Out of the intensity of Kazantzakis’ struggle, and out of his ability to reconcile opposites and unite them in his own personality, came art which succeeded in depicting and comprehending the full panorama of human experience.

If the scope of Kazantzakis’ art was remarkable, even more remarkable was the scope and diversity of his life. He was an intellectual-the author of treatises on Nietzsche, Bergson and Russian literature, the student of Buddhism, the translator into Modern Greek of Homer, Dante and Goethe-but at the same time he knew and loved ordinary uneducated people, and it was to them that he always gave his greatest allegiance. Though he traveled over most of the world, restless and uprooted in a self-imposed exile, his native Crete remained his true spiritual home, and his devotion to it and to the peasantry into which he was born in 1883 (his father dealt in feeds and kept a small farm) gave his writings that sense of the “spirit of place” which is such an important ingredient of great literature. It was in Crete that he first came to know the shepherds, farmers, fishermen, innkeepers and peasant entrepreneurs who people his novels; it was in Crete too that he first experienced revolutionary ardor, his childhood being spent in an atmosphere where dare-devil hard-drinking heroism was the highest virtue, a virtue best exemplified for the boy by his own father. But when this ardor exploded in 1897 into an uprising against the Turks, young Kazantzakis, who was evacuated to Naxos, suddenly found himself in an atmosphere quite opposite to the one in which he had grown up: he was placed in a school run by Franciscan monks. There, studying French and Italian, he received his introduction to Western thought. More important, he was introduced to a new virtue, contemplation, and to the heroism of a very different kind of father-Christ.

These early experiences set the pattern for a lifetime in which Kazantzakis, constantly torn between the need for action and for ascetic withdrawal, was to search untiringly for his true father, his true saviour-for the meaning of his, and our, existence.