Books: Son of Man

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (506 pp.)—Nlkos Kazantzakis—Simon & Schuster ($6).

When Nikos Kazantzakis was buried in Crete three years ago, a tall, unknown peasant stepped suddenly from the crowd, seized the coffin and lowered it single-handed into the grave. It was a giant’s gesture which the dead man himself might have planned. For the author who wrote a brilliant modern sequel to The Odyssey and stirred the world with Zorba the Greek believed that man’s destiny is determined by his own acts in the face of life, death and God.

Nietzsche’s superman was one of his first ideals; Henri Bergson’s matter-mastering Life Force was his first philosophy, followed by bouts with Buddhism and Leninism. Though he sometimes sounded like an atheist and proclaimed that man creates God in his own image, Kazantzakis was agonized by the struggle for faith and haunted by the figure of Christ. His 1948 novel, The Greek Passion—in which a group of villagers with roles in a passion play are forced to act out their roles in real life—movingly restated the old idea that if Christ returned to earth he would be crucified again. But Kazantzakis’ real struggle with the Son of Man came in his final book, The Last Temptation of Christ, a searing, soaring, shocking novel in the form of a “biography” of Jesus.

The skeleton of his story, which earned Kazantzakis the censure of the Greek Or thodox Church, contains such orthodox dogma as Jesus’ virgin birth, miracles, divinity and (in forecast) resurrection. But Kazantzakis’ Christ is far more man than God—a man torn, like Kazantzakis himself, between flesh and spirit, dark and light. “Within me,” he wrote, “are the dark immemorial forces of the Evil One, human and prehuman; within me too are the luminous forces, human and prehuman, of God—and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met. The anguish has been intense.”

Promenade on Saturday. Intense is a mild word for the anguish of every single character in The Last Temptation of Christ.

Joseph is a hopeless paraplegic. On the day of his betrothal to Mary he was struck by a bolt of lightning, and ever since he has lain paralyzed, sweating and gasping with the effort to say one word, syllable by agonized syllable: “Adonai”—the prophet’s word for God. “And when he had finished this entire word he would re main tranquil for an hour or two until the struggle again gripped him and he began once more to open and close his mouth.”

The Virgin Mary herself is no cool, pale fresco by Fra Angelico—blue rings encircle her eyes in her “dark, wheat-colored skin,” and she is miserable about her son Jesus’ brooding and preaching: “God sent me but one boy, and he a blemished one.” She wants him to be a man “like everyone else . . . Let him marry a nice young girl from a respectable home—with a dowry; let him be a liberal provider, have children, and then we’ll all go out together every Saturday to the promenade—grandma, children and grandchildren—so that everyone can admire us.” Her eyes are drained by constant weeping, and when she cries, it is not for her son but “for her own wasted life.” She implores Christ’s followers not to listen to him: “He’s ill … ill … ill.”

Jesus himself is a thin ascetic with thick lips, a hooked nose and large black eyes, “full of light, full of darkness—all intimidation and sweetness. Flickering like those of a snake, they stared at you from between the long lashes, and your head reeled.” He has had his own portion of tragedy before the story begins; as a young man he had been in the act of proposing to Mary Magdalene when he was felled by an epileptic seizure and carried off frothing. The shock set “proud-gaited, high-rumped Magdalene” on a career that made her the most famous prostitute in Galilee; one memorable scene has Jesus waiting to see her at the end of a line of her sweating, itching clients.

Moreover, Jesus is loathed by everyone in Nazareth because, as a carpenter, he makes crosses on which the hated Romans crucify the prophets that rise periodically to liberate Israel. He struggles against God’s call, but eventually he finds that he must surrender. And so his ministry begins, first in the preaching of love and forgiveness, then, after his baptism—by a wonderfully wild and frightening John the Baptist—in his stern proclamation that the end of the world is at hand.

The Strong One. Along the way, Novelist Kazantzakis crams his book with gamy characters, gutty incidents and casual anachronisms. His description of freshly resurrected Lazarus, dazed and stinking of death, plucking off the worms, squeezes a new measure of realism out of the miracle. And his disciples are minor masterpieces of winy characterization. They are no heroes; Peter’s nickname, for instance, is “Windmill,” for his susceptibility to every change in the breeze of opinion. Matthew is “short, stout, jaundiced; his hands yellow and soft, his fingers inky, nails black; he had long hairy ears and a high voice like a eunuch’s.” The one strong man of the lot is a red-bearded giant named Judas Iscariot.

He belongs to the underground resistance group called Zealots—fanatical nationalists who assassinate Romans and collaborating Jews. He has been assigned to murder Jesus for his traitorous cross-making, but in the end he cannot bring himself to go through with it. Instead he follows along with the disciples, unsure whether or not Jesus is out to save Israel, and wincing with disgust every time the Master talks about loving enemies and turning cheeks. When Jesus preaches the end of the world, Judas begins to like him better; gradually his eyes and his heart are opened to accept him as the Messiah and the Son of God. And he finally betrays him to the high priest only because Christ asks him to. The theory, not original with Kazantzakis,* is that Christ complimented Judas by assigning him the most difficult role of all—betraying him and bringing down on himself the contumely and hatred of future generations. “You are the strongest of all the companions. Only you, I think, will be able to bear it. I have said nothing to the others, nor will I. They have no endurance.”

In developing his idea of Christ’s last temptation, Kazantzakis treats himself, as he does elsewhere in the book, to an uninhibited kind of lysergic-acid fantasy that will leave many a reader more dazed than dazzled. Dying on the cross, Jesus uttered the ancient cry from the Psalms: “Eli, eli, lama sabacthani? [My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?]” Between the words eli, eli and the rest, Author Kazantzakis shows him seized by a dream that contains the “last temptation”—the lure of the good life unburdened by divine mission.

In the dream Christ is saved from the Cross by an angel and restored to the world of men, in which he marries Mary Magdalene, fathers children, begins to live contentedly. Even on the Cross, the author implies, Christ could have chosen this happy human lot; had he really wanted it, it would have happened. But (still in the dream) Judas accuses him of deserting his mission. In a passage typical of the author’s high hyperbole, Judas reminds Christ of the days when he spoke “about heaven and earth, what joy that was, what freedom, what richness! The grapes seemed as big as twelve-year-old boys. With a single grain of wheat we were filled . . . And the stars: what splendor, what an outpouring of light in the sky! They weren’t stars; they were angels. No, they weren’t angels; they were us—us, your disciples, and we rose and set, and you were in the center, fixed like the north star, and we were all around you, dancing.”

And so Christ rejects the last temptation; he wakes to find himself dying on the Cross again. “He uttered a triumphant cry: IT IS ACCOMPLISHED! And it was as though he had said: Everything has begun.”

Death Vanquished. In The Last Temptation of Christ, Kazantzakis has combined the raw materials of Scripture and his own incendiary imagination to set a blaze that illuminates his Manichaean struggle between flesh and spirit. Believers in the Christ of the Bible will recoil from his Jesus as too human, too stained with paradox and with base details of existence. And yet believers in the Christ of humanism—the mere moral teacher and mortal prophet—will recoil even more sharply from this Jesus as too divine, too plainly in the grip of God. The contrast is inevitable, for Kazantzakis was trying to express his own mystical belief that God and man are one. By his own testimony he wrote the book “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; all three have already been conquered.

“Christ suffered pain, and since then pain has been sanctified. Temptation fought until the last moment to lead him astray, and Temptation was defeated. Christ died on the Cross, and at that instant death was vanquished forever . . . I am certain that every free man who reads this book, so filled as it is with love, will more than ever before, better than ever before, love Christ.”

-Goethe, among others, theorized that Judas betrayed Jesus (with his tacit approval) to help fulfill the Messianic prophecy.