The Last Temptation of Christ (72 page)

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.