Nikos Kazantzakis: The Last Temptation of Christ

He saw Jesus, like Odysseus, as engaged in this struggle, and as a prototype of the free man. In The Last Temptation of Christ Jesus is a superman, one who by force of will achieves a victory over matter, or, in other words, is able, because of his allegiance to the life force within him, to transmute matter into spirit. But this over-all victory is really a succession of particular triumphs as he frees himself from various forms of bondage-family, bodily pleasures, the state, fear of death. Since, for Kazantzakis, freedom is not a reward for the struggle but rather the very process of struggle itself, it is paramount that Jesus be constantly tempted by evil in such a way that he feel its attractiveness and even succumb to it, for only in this way can his ultimate rejection of temptation have meaning.

This is heresy. It is the same heresy that Milton, led by his scorn of cloistered virtue and his belief in the necessity of choice (ideas shared by Kazantzakis), slipped into on occasion-as when he declared that evil may enter the mind of God and, if unapproved, leave “no spot or blame behind.”

The fact that Kazantzakis not only slipped into this heresy but deliberately made it the keystone of his structure should give us some clue to his deepest aims. He was not primarily interested in reinterpreting Christ or in disagreeing with, or reforming, the Church. He wanted, rather, to lift Christ out of the Church altogether, and-since in the twentieth century the old era was dead or dying-to rise to the occasion and exercise man’s right (and duty) to fashion a new saviour and thereby rescue himself from a moral and spiritual void. His own conflicts enabled him to depict with great penetration Jesus’ agony in choosing between love and the ax, between household joys and the loneliness and exile of the martyr, between liberation of the body alone and liberation of both body and soul. Kazantzakis tried to draw Christ in terms meaningful to himself and thus, since his own conflicts were those of every sensitive man faced with the chaos of our times, in terms which could be understood in the twentieth century: he wished to make Jesus a figure for a new age, while still retaining everything in the Christ-legend which speaks to the conditions of all men of all ages. The measure with which the reader of this book feels (perhaps for the first time) the full poignancy of the Passion will be the measure of the author’s success.

Kazantzakis, like Odysseus, had an unconquerable ardor to gain experience of the world. In 1957, against the advice of his physicians (he had been suffering from leukemia since 1953), he accepted an invitation to visit China. On the return trip he fell ill due to a smallpox vaccination which was given him inadvertently in Canton, and was hospitalized in Germany. There his last days were cheered by a visit from Albert Schweitzer, who had been one of the first to recognize his greatness. His remains were flown from Germany to Athens, preparatory to interment in Crete. Though his European fame had by this time convinced the Greeks that they should welcome him as a national hero, their Archbishop firmly refused to allow his body to lie in state in a church, in the normal manner. In Crete, however, he was granted a Christian burial, and a colossus, seemingly right out of one of his books, seized the coffin and lowered it single-handedly into the grave.

Riparius, N. Y.

P. A. BIEN

I should like to record my indebtedness to my wife Chrysanthi for her great patience in elucidating the nuances of Greek idioms; to Mrs. Helen Kazantzakis, the author’s widow, for explaining many difficult words; to Mrs. Boule Prousalis and Mr. Manos Troulinos for aid in Cretan dialect; to Mr. George Yiannakos, agriculturalist, who put his intimate knowledge of peasant life and language at my disposal; to Mr. F. I. Venables and Mr. George C. Pappageotes for valuable suggestions; and to Mr. C. H. Gifford and my colleagues at Bristol for true Hellenic enthusiasm.