The Last Temptation of Christ (73 page)

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

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.