The Last Temptation of Christ

A Note on the Author and His Use of Language BY P. A. BIEN

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.

His greatest ascetic fervor came after he had taken his degree at the University of Athens and gone to Paris to study philosophy with Henri Bergson. He decided to travel to Mt. Athos in Macedonia, famous for its ancient monasteries and its exclusion of all females-cows and hens as well as women. Kazantzakis remained on the Holy Mountain for six months, alone in a tiny cell, trying through spiritual and bodily exercises to achieve direct contact with the Saviour. Unsuccessful, he decided to renew his allegiance to a saviour he had already found during his studies in Athens and Paris: Nietzsche.

He was thereafter to renounce Nietzsche for Buddha, then Buddha for Lenin, then Lenin for Odysseus. When he returned finally to Christ, as he did, it was to a Christ enriched by everything that had come between.

He was able to return to Christ with conviction precisely because he experienced in his own right the temptations which Christ rejected as false saviours. The same young man who shut himself up in a cell on the mountain where no female has penetrated since the tenth century also came to know the joys of the hearth, for he married in 1911, and if he and his wife eventually began to live a great deal apart, the price in terms of loneliness which his spiritual searchings exacted from him is movingly attested to in his letters. (The marriage ended in divorce; Kazantzakis remarried in 1945)

He was also confronted, like Jesus, with the temptation of violent revolution in the cause of freedom. His knowledge of the heroism of the Cretan revolutionaries had left in him a fervent admiration for the active life, plus a desire to participate in it, and in 1917 this desire was whetted by two things: the Russian Revolution, and his association in a Peloponnesian mining venture with a dynamic man named George Zorbas-an experience immortalized in Kazantzakis’ novel, Zorba the Greek (1946), the principal theme of which is the conflict between action and contemplation. Two years later, having been appointed Director General of the Greek Ministry of Welfare, Kazantzakis had an opportunity to visit Russia, together with Zorbas, in an effort to secure the repatriation of Greek refugees in the Caucasus. The seeds were planted for his short-lived faith in the Bolsheviks.

This faith did not blossom, however, until the middle twenties. At the beginning of the decade he was still unsettled, still searching for his saviour. Although the author of numerous verse plays, and of translations from Bergson, Darwin, Eckermann, William James, Maeterlinck, Nietzsche and Plato, he still did not know the ultimate direction of his life. In Paris he had been tremendously impressed by Bergson’s vitalism: the life force which can conquer matter; he had also been so swept away by Nietzsche s idea of man making himself, by his own will and perseverance, into the superman, that he had gone on a pilgrimage to all the towns in Germany where Nietzsche had lived. Nietzsche, he later said, taught him that the only way a man can be free is to struggle-to lose himself in a cause, to fight without fear and without hope of reward. These lessons helped prepare him for his next saviour but one, Lenin.

Buddha intervened. In 1922 while staying in Vienna (where, incidentally, he had the opportunity of seeing psychoanalysts in action) Kazantzakis embraced the doctrine of complete renunciation, of complete mutation of flesh into spirit. Buddha, like Christ, was for Kazantzakis a superman who had conquered matter. Under this influence, and feeling a great turmoil in his soul, he began to write his credo, the Salvatores Dei. But this was in Berlin, where he had moved the same year. He lived there until 1924, during a period when Germany was prostrate and starving, racked by postwar inflation. Kazantzakis became friendly with a group of Marxists. Here was the cause he could give himself to! He had long been influenced by Spengler’s theory that cultures, like human beings, grow old and die; and the war and its aftermath seemed to him the last gasp of Western Christianity. He felt that twentieth-century man had been left in a void, had nothing to relate to, to hold on to-but that he had the potentiality of fashioning a new world and a new god for himself, if he would but seize the occasion. This was precisely what the Bolsheviks seemed to be doing, and Lenin became Kazantzakis’ new god. Besides, he reflected, how could a Cretan nursed on revolution and reckless heroism become a Buddhist? Impossible!

He was consumed with the desire to act, to do something concrete-and this meant he must go again to Russia. His desire became reality in 1925, when he spent over three months in the Soviet Union, but by this time a new hero, Odysseus, had already begun to attract him, and he had set to work on his epic, the Odyssey. In 1927 he returned to Russia for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, after having traveled through Palestine, Spain, Egypt, and Italy, where his sojourn in Assisi reflected an interest which flowered almost thirty years later in a magnificent novel on St. Francis. He returned from Moscow resolved to embark on a new life and began at once by writing newspaper articles about his experiences and addressing a mass meeting in Athens.

In 1928 he made his fourth trip to Russia. The Soviet government had given him a railroad pass, and he planned to travel from one end of the vast country to the other in order to write about the new saviour. But he found that his thoughts, instead of dwelling on the glories of the Revolution, drifted constantly to the Odyssey, the first draft of which he had just completed. He began to realize that everything he saw and heard must find expression not in propaganda but in art: his epic was to become a vast depository of all geography and all ideas. Kazantzakis now found his vocation-it was to create. Poetic creation was the Saviour! A basic distrust which he had always had for “big ideas” now applied itself to Marxism, which, despite his great enthusiasm, he had never considered able to satisfy the spiritual needs of men; and by the early thirties Kazantzakis’ allegiance to the communists had come to an end. (He continued to dream, however, of an ideal system which he called “metacommunism.”)

Thus, at the age of fifty, he threw all his energies into what he considered his sole duty-to forge, like Joyce, the uncreated conscience of his race; to become a priest of the imagination.

He brought to this task an intense religiosity compounded of Christianity, Buddhism, Bergson’s vitalism and Nietzsche’s superman; an intellectuality balanced by a distrust of pure ideas and an admiration for spontaneous action; a wealth of practical experience gained from his service in government, his travels, his business venture; and perhaps strongest of all, his love of the land and people of Greece, ancient and modern. He had incorporated into himself the thought of the sophisticated West, while still retaining the simplicity and the expressive emotions of the East. Most important for his ultimate aim, he was able to synthesize all this and find the ideal “correlative” in order to transubstantiate his experience into art. Odysseus was Greek, yet a man of the world; he was renowned for both wit and action; he was an exile, a tireless seeker after experience. He was also a superman, and Kazantzakis, in creating this gigantic epic, became a kind of superman in his own right. Living in near solitude, he worked feverishly from dawn to dark, eating but one scanty meal a day. Over a period of thirteen years he rewrote the Odyssey seven times, each time broadening its scope, until it came to include all he had ever seen and heard and thought.

In 1932 Kazantzakis translated the Divine Comedy into Modern Greek. Dante’s Odysseus, like Kazantzakis’, leaves Ithaca a second time, because “neither fondness for my son, nor reverence for my aged father, nor the due love that should have cheered Penelope, could conquer in me the ardor that I had to gain experience of the world, and of human vice and worth” (Wicksteed translation). But Kazantzakis’ relation to Dante goes much deeper than this. He saw in the Florentine a parallel to himself: a man with a burning desire for perfection, a man who sought to convert flesh into spirit by means of art; a man exiled and scorned by his people, forced to become a homeless wanderer. Lastly, Kazantzakis saw Dante as a champion of the language of the people as opposed to a traditional “literary” language.

Kazantzakis, like Yeats and Synge, felt that great literature must be national literature. He was convinced that the soul and life-blood of Greece was its peasantry, and that the great achievement and expression of the peasantry was the popular language, known as the “demotic.” He knew that the Greek people had (and have) an imagination “fiery and magnificent and tender”; in the Odyssey, therefore, as in all his works, he championed the demotic as against the “puristic” language favored by the Athenian intellectuals. In translation this element of his work is largely lost, and the English or American reader of The Last Temptation of Christ is in a sense cheated out of the exhilaration of meeting with a type of speech totally foreign to his own. Happily, although the flexibility of syntax and richness of vocabulary of demotic Greek cannot be reproduced in English, the language’s reliance on metaphor can often be conveyed. Demotic always prefers the concrete to the abstract: the sun does not “hang” in the sky, it “tolls the hours” (that is, it is suspended just as the bell is suspended in the campanile); a camel does not “get up,” it “demolishes its foundations”; the time is not measured by hours but by how many reeds the sun has advanced in the sky. If this love of metaphor is retained in English often at the price of awkwardness, this is but a small price to pay for some feeling, however slight, of the essential Greekness of this novel, which although set in the Holy Land, is peopled by Greeks in disguise. (Witness the use of Charon as personification of death; and the lyre in Chapter XXVII, played with a bow as it is to this day by the peasants of Crete.)

Since it is impossible to reproduce the actual words Kazantzakis used and since he looked upon the extraordinary love of words as the key to the peasant imagination, as well as its expression, it is important to say something further about the nature of the demotic vocabulary. Its richness and flexibility are due to the free borrowing of words over the centuries from Romans, Franks, Italians, Turks, Slavs and others; to the ease with which new words can be compounded from existing roots; to the continued existence of dialect areas; and the never-ending metamorphosing of words by villagers who are not yet sufficiently awed by grammarians (as the English have been since the seventeenth century) to abandon these extravagances.

Languages are said to mirror the character of the peoples who speak them, and if so, demotic Greek shows us a race to whom imagination and audacity come before precision and efficiency. To comprehend how completely different this language is from present-day English (English too once had many of the fluid characteristics of modern Greek), the reader is invited to contemplate the noun aspálathos, the name of a shrub which, as one might expect in Greek, also has four or five completely different names. To add to this multiplicity, the base-word aspálathos undergoes seemingly unlimited metamorphoses in the various parts of Greece. The vowels, for example, are juggled in numerous ways, as can be seen in the forms aspilathos, aspálathos, aspólat-thas and asphélachtos; the endings are altered: aspálathrous, aspálethres, aspálathras; the accent is shifted: aspalathròs, asphelechtòs; the original gender (masculine) is changed to feminine: aspálathra, and neuter: aspálatho; the first syllable is discarded: spálathos, sphelachtòs, etc.; consonants are added: aspálarthas, or altered: asphálachtos; and so on and so on, until we find such nearly unrecognizable forms as xelaphtós, aspádaros, aspálichtro and spólasso.

Now see what else the peasant imagination can do with this word In Crete, the suffix eas is added to form aspalatheàs which means “an area covered with aspalathos” (or more precisely in English, since aspalathos is the plant we know as “hairy broom”-“an area covered with hairy broom”). This noun is then turned into an adjective-and here we can see how the audacious metaphorical language of the peasants comes into being. The Cretan farmer, observing his dingy gray cat near an aspalatheàs, notices that the cat and the area of aspalathos have the identical color. He therefore begins to call his-and soon all similar cats-“area-covered-with-hairy-broom” cats, using the new adjective to mean “dingy gray.”

It is obvious that in the hands of an imaginative artist the potentialities of a language with such flexibility, such love of words for their own sake, such metaphorical richness and syntactical and grammatical looseness, are unlimited. The nature of the demotic vocabulary, for instance, enabled Kazantzakis in the Odyssey to apply over two hundred distinct epithets to Odysseus. (They are catalogued by Kazantzakis’ friend and biographer, Mr. P. Prevelakis.)

But it is also obvious why the “purist” professors of Athens, whose experience with area-covered-with-hairy-broom cats is apt to be limited, should want to curb the extravagance and looseness of the demotic by purging foreign and dialect words and by stabilizing spelling, grammar and syntax more or less according to Atticistic Greek, the traditional literary language.

In championing the demotic, Kazantzakis felt he was defending the soul of the common people against the unimaginativeness of pedantic intellectuals and, even more important, against the ever-expanding forces of newspaper jargon and faulty composition courses in the schools. He was violently attacked not only by the purists but by the advocates of demotic, who claimed he went out of his way to use obscure words. But he zealously defended his position, and the fact that his work does so well convey the spirit of the people is perhaps the best proof that he was right.

The Odyssey was published in 1938. Soon after came the Second World War, and after that the Greek Civil War, during which Kazantzakis served for a short period as Minister of National Education in a quixotic attempt to reconcile the opposing forces. He resigned in despair, now more than ever convinced of what he had known for many years: that because of the political and religious situation in Greece he must live in exile. He settled in France (eventually at the ancient Greek city of Antibes on the Riviera) and entered public life once more as Director of the UNESCO Bureau of Translations. But after eleven months of intense labor he decided that he was not accomplishing what he had hoped to, and he resigned in order to devote all his energies to his own writing. This was in 1948, when he was sixty-five years old. Encouraged by friends and his wife, he decided to try his hand at a novel written in a fully traditional style. In two months he finished The Greek Passion. This unbelievable spurt of creativity continued and enabled him to produce in the nine years that remained to him a total of eight books, including Freedom or Death, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Poor Man of God (St. Francis). By the time he was seventy he found himself known all over Europe: his novels were translated into thirty languages and he was nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Prize, losing in 1952 by just one vote. But with all this success came increasing bitterness. The Greek Passion raised a furor in Greece which brought him close to excommunication. Next, with the publication of Freedom or Death, the newspapers branded him a traitor to Crete and the Hellenes: Kazantzakis, who for all his admiration of the peasants never romanticized them, had shown both the good and bad sides of Greek heroism.

The Last Temptation of Christ fanned the inquisitional flames all the more, but by this time Kazantzakis-who had experienced thirty years of non-recognition and then, when recognition came, the complete misrepresentation of his aims-had learned the Nietzschean lesson that the struggle for freedom must be fought not only without fear but without hope.

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