The Last Temptation of Christ—Nikos Kazantzakis

Cake or Death?

Crucifixion Corpus Hypercubus, by Salvador Dali

The temptation in question, offered by Satan to Christ at the moment of crucifixion, reminds me of the one offered to Achilles by his mother, Thetis. Why don’t you give up all this heroic nonsense? Find yourself a nice girl and settle down? Get a farm; raise a big family. Satan offers Jesus a similarly long, idyllic life instead of a horrible, painful death. Jesus has already delivered his message. Satan merely offers to let him skip the crucifixion part, and take early retirement instead. In contrast, Achilles would have given up not just his early death but all the glory leading up to it. In both cases, though, the hero prefers an early, meaningful death to a long, happy, peaceful, but otherwise insignificant life. Generation after generation will hear the stories about Achilles and those about Christ. Saint Paul, moreover, has the whole death and resurrection story ready to go and preaches it whether Christ dies young in agony or old in comfort. What could possibly upset the critics so much? Kazantzakis merely treats the Gospels as inspirational myth, not as historical fact.

Kazantzakis’s gives us a thoroughly human Jesus, not a god or son of a god pretending to be a man. Instead, the Jesus of the novel has no clue what God has planned for him. He has no message in mind when he sets out to Jerusalem. Torn by guilt, fear, desire, and doubt, he follows an unknowable path, trusting only that when the time comes he will know what to say and what to do.

I know that not everyone grew up hearing Bible stories like I did. The ones I remember have very simple narratives that leave enormous gaps. Preachers at church service would build interminable sermons on these short, comforting narratives and draw deep moral lessons from them. Kazantzakis does more. He takes all these names and stories and fleshes them out with vivid details that speak to the reader’s imagination and enrage the critics. The Scriptures don’t say much about Christ’s early career, for example. The Gospel of Mark calls Jesus a carpenter, while that of Matthew calls him the son of a carpenter. In both versions, we see Jesus as a humble worker. Kazantzakis gets a lot more specific, starting in the first chapter. He lets Jesus keep his carpentry skills, but has him building, not sofas and cabinetry, but the crucifixes used by the Romans to strike terror into the Jews. His profession makes him not an unknown craftsman but a notorious figure, hated as a traitor to his own people. The shame his profession brings to him fills him with guilt. I don’t recall anything like that from Sunday school.

The Gospels give us story outlines, parables, and sayings, not systematic doctrine. It took centuries of exegesis, hermeneutics, and philosophical reflection to give us theology. But all of the systematizing starts from the words of the scripture and generally assumes their truth. Kazantzakis, however, takes the Gospels as true only in the manner of myths and legends, not in the manner of police reports. Myths and legends can reveal deep psychological and spiritual truths in a way that mere facts never could. So, Kazantzakis does not deny the truth of scriptures, but he does reject the centuries of quibbling about things like whether Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and a colt (Matthew 21:2-7) or just on a colt (Mark 11:2-7, Luke 19:30-35, John 12:14-15). But those centuries of quibbling over such things have produced a mountain of doctrine and dogma that has shaped world history and the lives of billions of people across the globe.

Kazantzakis bases many scenes in the novel on the familiar stories from the Gospels describing miraculous events. He retells the stories about Jesus feeding of the multitudes, walking on water, raising the dead, and other incidents but avoids any commitment to their supernatural character. The moral truth of Christ’s message does not depend on miracles. Nor does the emotional power of his story. We should love each other even if Jesus never actually walked on water. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. You should still love your neighbor. But Kazantzakis still includes the stories, because, even demythologized, they convey the awe-inspiring struggle between flesh and spirit. Take the story of loaves and fishes. In a world where everyone struggles to find enough food to survive, what story would best convey the power of love, one where the crowd receives miraculous handouts from heaven or one where strangers share with each other the small amounts of food they brought for themselves? As a novelist, Kazantzakis prefers a version that illustrates the moral point, dismissing the rumors of miracles as distractions.

Nikos Kazantzakis had already achieved an international reputation with Zorba the Greek when he published The Last Temptation of Christ in 1955. Simon and Schuster then came out with an English translation by P. A. Bien in 1960, the version I read. Martin Scorsese eventually turned the novel into a film in 1988. I remember the protests by religious groups at the time which included a terrorist attack on a theater in Paris, and Scorsese had to hire some bodyguards when the death threats from the love-thy-neighbor crowd became too credible. Kazantzakis himself suffered some consequences. The Greek Orthodox Church never took the step of excommunicating him, but it came close. Some Roman Catholics even sought to ban the book.

Kazantzakis uses a clever narrative style to avoid affirming or denying the miracles attributed to Christ. He describes the perceptions of witnesses. Everyone in the novel suffers from poverty, hunger, disease, and superstition. Their perceptions suffer and become confused. Dreams, visions, fantasies, hallucinations, seizures, blackouts, daydreams fill the pages, so that the reader floats on a sea of unfiltered experiences, unable to find a line separating the real from the imagined. So Kazantzakis might tell us what the disciples saw, for instance, without telling us whether they saw correctly. And really, who cares about the physical reality, when the story powerfully conveys spiritual torment? But apparently, for a lot of people, it changes everything to describe a fiction as “based on a true story.”

Intense passion appeals to me more than anything else in a work of art. My favorite novels, movies, or music reach an extreme emotional pitch beyond which it seems impossible to go, but then keep going to a new level, and then to another. I want a work of art to exhaust me, to wring me dry and leave me weeping. Music can do this because it occurs in time. That is, new levels of intensity can emerge from unresolved earlier passages. Novels, too, can build later experiences on earlier ones, climbing higher and higher like a Shepard tone. Kazantzakis does this very thing. The Last Temptation, I would say, above all else, explores the phenomenology of religious frenzy.

The Jesus of this novel suffers from the first to the last paragraph. Embedded in matter, he longs for the spiritual. Jesus exemplifies the human condition laid bare, stripped of all its masks and bereft of its evasions. The son of Mary belongs to the earth; the son of man belongs to time and history; the son of God belongs to eternity. These aporias tear him apart. Kazantzakis says this in the Prologue.

The book was written because I wanted to offer a supreme model to the man who struggles; I wanted to show him that he must not fear pain, temptation or death—because all three can be conquered. …

This book is not a biography; it is a confession of every man who struggles.

Kazantzakis presents Jesus as a model for suffering, true, but more importantly, as a call to suffering. Evading the suffering of a mortal being longing for immortality amounts to denying the human condition itself. Because we recognize our own mortality, we may face it or run from it. In the words of Eddie Izzard, “Cake or Death?”

I’ll offer an example of the sort of thing that bothers people about the novel. Matthew diligently records the words and deeds of Jesus and often works on his written account at night. One night, while the other disciples sleep, Matthew starts to write the story of Christ’s birth, but as he begins,

[H]is fingers stiffen. The angel had seized him.¹ He heard wings beat angrily in the air and a voice trumpeted in his ear, “Not the son of Joseph! What says the prophet Isaiah: ‘Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son’ …

The voice then dictates the story of the virgin birth. Matthew resists.

But Matthew grew angry. He turned toward the invisible wings at his right and growled softly, so that the sleeping disciples would not hear him: “It’s not true. I don’t want to write, and I won’t!”

Mocking laughter was heard in the air, and a voice: “How can you understand what truth is, you handful of dust? Truth has seven levels. On the highest is enthroned the truth of God, which bears not the slightest resemblance to the truth of men. It is this truth, Matthew Evangelist, that I intone in your ear … Write: ‘And three Magi, following a large star, came to adore the infant. …’ ”

The sweat gushed from Matthew’s forehead. “I won’t write! I won’t write!” he cried, but his hand was running over the page, writing.

In his sleep, Jesus hears Matthew struggling, and he wonders what is going on.

Jesus had a presentiment that God must be over him. He closed his eyes so that he would not disturb the holy possession.

Later, Jesus asks to see the book over which Matthew has been so fervently laboring. Matthew explains that he has recounted the life of Jesus. As he reads, Jesus’ expression changes from surprise to worry to anger, and he finally throws the notebook on the ground.

“What is this?” he screamed. “Lies! Lies! Lies! The Messiah doesn’t need miracles. He is the miracle—no other is necessary! I was born in Nazareth, not in Bethlehem; I’ve never even set foot in Bethlehem, and I don’t remember any Magi. I never in my life went to Egypt …”

His rant continues until Matthew timidly insists that an angel has been dictating it to him at night. Gradually, Matthew’s words get through to Jesus and he calms down. He ultimately relents.

“Write whatever the angel dictates,” Jesus said. “It’s too late for me to …” but he left his sentence unfinished.

Notice in these passages how Kazantzakis describes what Matthew sees or hears, rather than what happens. Kazantzakis says that Matthew hears wings and a voice, not that wings flap or someone speaks. Because the novel describes experiences, anyone wondering what really happened (in the fiction) might never reach a definitive conclusion.

I’ll conclude with a passage I found quite moving. Before the soldiers arrive to take Jesus, he looks toward Jerusalem, “dressed all white in the moonlight.”

“Father,” Jesus murmured, “Father who is in heaven, Father who is on the earth: the world you created is beautiful, and we see it; beautiful too is the world which we do not see. I don’t know—forgive me—I don’t know, Father, which is the more beautiful.”

He stooped, took up a handful of soil and smelled it. The aroma went deep down into his bowels. There must have been pistachio nearby, and the ground smelled of resin and honey. He rubbed the soil against his cheek, neck and lips. “What perfume,” he murmured, “what warmth, what brotherhood!”

He began to weep. He held the soil in his palm, not wanting to part with it ever.

§ § §

Since my Decade reading list includes several books from the Holy Bible, and since Kazantzakis has embellished the accounts of the life of Jesus, it makes sense for me to compare Kazantzakis with the Gospel of Matthew as a followup to this week. Also, since Saint Paul doesn’t get much respect from Kazantzakis, I’ll read some of the Pauline letters. So I intend to read The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, and three letters of Saint Paul: 1 Corinthians, Hebrews, and Romans. I will approach these books as major contributions to world literature, not as sacred scripture, the word of God, or historical accounts. As such, I care more about how they affect me than how they track history.

If that excursion works, I would like to tackle Thomas Mann’s tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers, a massive retelling of the last twenty or so chapters of Genesis.

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Works mentioned in this post

The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis, translated by P. A. Bien

The Last Temptation of Christ, directed by Martin Scorsese (1988)

Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis

The Gospel According to Saint Matthew

1 Corinthians

Hebrews

Romans

Joseph and His Brothers, by Thomas Mann

1. I take this as how Matthew understands his loss of control, not as the narrator’s authoritative account. It strikes me as too glib to take seriously.