Most people can’t even pronounce the name of Nikos Kazantzakis, much less identify him. Yet, Kazantzakis—who was nominated for the Nobel Prize by Albert Schweitzer and failed the award by only one vote—continues to be an internationally celebrated author.
Kazantzakis’s novels, which have earned him at least commercial recognition, range from buffoonery in Zorba the Greek to blasphemy in The Last Temptation of Christ. Last Temptation was condemned by the Orthodox church, banned by libraries, and scorned by critics as “lukewarm cheapness.” Nevertheless, Kazantzakis has his admirers, and his writings, if not fully accepted by academics, should not be ignored by Christians.
Although repelled by Kazantzakis’s theological aberrations, Christians will paradoxically be attracted by the intensity of the spiritual struggle in which he is engaged. His writings were an attempt to give form to the invisible struggle within his soul. “The entire time a person creates,” he wrote, “he has the morning sickness of the woman nourishing a son within her vitals.”
The conflict between flesh and spirit that produced his literary paroxysms pursued him relentlessly. The theme of his writings invariably involves this irrepressible conflict, this agonizing struggle of which salvation was the goal. Kazantzakis’s understanding of salvation cannot be grasped apart from struggle—a fierce encounter between two forces that would lead him down into the abyss or liberate him upward to God. “My struggle to make a synthesis of these two antagonistic impulses has lent purpose and unity to my life,” he declared.
His writings, particularly The Last Temptation of Christ, underscore the agony of that conflict. In that book, Christ epitomizes the ferocity of that struggle. In his search, Kazantzakis seizes upon Christ, metaphorically and autobiographically, as the consummate struggler who refused to capitulate to the cowardice that keeps so many from salvation. For all of us, the temptation is to give up or give in, when our intention should be to give away ourselves in love to God.
“That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: it is universal.… But among responsible men … the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.… Struggle between the flesh and the spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission and finally the supreme purpose of the struggle—union with God.”
Struggling Saints
Kazantzakis does not espouse orthodox Christology, but he sees Christ’s life as the pattern for the true agonist—the straggler. He would certainly concur with Miguel de Unamuno who contends that “Christianity must be defined ‘agonistically,’ polemically, in terms of struggle.” And as we follow Christ “we must relive his anguish: his victory over the blossoming snares of the earth, his sacrifice of the great and small joys of men and his ascent from sacrifice to sacrifice, exploit to exploit, to … the Cross.”
The attraction of such figures as Saint Francis of Assisi (about whom he wrote) and Albert Schweitzer (with whom he spent time in Lamberéné) for Kazantzakis was their compelling commitment to the conflict in which he was engaged. With saintly stubbornness, they stood as a rebuke to the savagery of their times, and with Christlike compassion they ministered to the disinherited. Neither holed up in a cave, aloof from society’s struggles; and neither surrendered to the immoral tyranny that confused spirituality with worldly success.
Of Saint Francis, Kazantzakis wrote: “I love him because by means of love and ascetic discipline, his soul conquered reality—hunger, cold, disease, scorn, injustice (what men without wings call reality) … subdued reality, delivered mankind from necessity, and inwardly transformed all his flesh into spirit.”
Kazantzakis joins with them in rebuking a culture that claims to be Christian, but that elevates success of the flesh to the ranks of saintliness. Kazantzakis would take a dim view of much current evangelicalism that seems to equate salvation with effortless indulgence and stressless satiety. Present-day stragglers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mother Teresa would rank first in Kazantzakis’s hierarchy of sainthood.
As they fight the forces of evil, combatants for Christ are identified by their wounds; the battle scars are the evidence of sainthood. Kazantzakis and the late A. W. Tozer (although greatly divergent in theology) would share similar sentiments. As Tozer wrote: “It is easy to learn the doctrine of personal revival and victorious living. It is quite another thing to take our cross and plod on to the dark, and bitter hill of self-renunciation.”
Reclaiming The Christ
Kazantzakis’s rejection of the Christianity he encountered did not keep him from searching for the virile and vital in Christ’s life. His reinterpretation of the Gospels was not to correct mistaken notions of Jesus so much as to reclaim a Christ whose humanity touched his own and whose temptations mirrored his.
“Christ passed through all the stages which the man who struggles passes through. That is why his suffering is familiar to us.… That part of Christ’s nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand him, and love him and pursue his Passion as though it were our own.… We struggle, we see him struggle also, and we find strength.”
Kazantzakis felt that theologians did not understand his writings nor were they capable of understanding Christ’s struggles. In their world of hermetic aloofness, theologians, he contended, know nothing about the temptations from which struggle comes.
In his writings and in his life, Kazantzakis confronts us with an agony—the anguish that struggle necessarily brings and that the Christian life, taken seriously, cannot avoid. That Kazantzakis never found the freedom that Christ alone gives is to be regretted. That he did not shrink from the struggle he saw in Christ is to be admired.
EDWARD KUHLMAN1Edward Kuhlman is professor of education at Messiah College, Grantham, Pennsylvania. Jonathan D. Evans is assistant professor of English at the University of Georgia.
Close Encougners on Golden Pond
Last summer’s Cocoon—like Close Encounters and the Star Wars films before it—drew its language and imagery from the memory of Christian belief without making any commitment to Christian teaching.
But Tom Benedek’s screenplay added to the fairly routine plot of alien visitation several related social issues: the inordinate valuation of physical youth, concern for the social position of the aged, and the widespread desire to extend human life indefinitely.
Death and the aging process leading to it are problems faced by most of Cocoon’s characters. And the aliens offered a possibility that cannot fail to look attractive to the aged and to those who love them: to be taken up like Enoch to another plane where, as one character says, “We’ll never be sick, we won’t get any older, and we’ll never die.” Christians recognize this echo of scriptural promises.
Several characters think that averting normal human mortality is “cheating nature”: “Nature dealt us our hand of cards,” Bernie protests, “and now suddenly at the end of the game you want to reshuffle the deck.” But Ben later remarks to his wife, “I’ll tell you—the way nature’s been treatin’ us lately, I don’t mind cheatin’ her a little.”
As the mean age of the American populace advances and the leading edge of the post-World War II generation draws closer to retirement at the end of this century, films addressing aging and the inevitability of death will undoubtedly appear more frequently.
On Golden Pond heralded this trend several years ago; Cocoon explored the subject sensitively and imaginatively. Its quasi-spiritual answers borrowed Christian concepts but not the Christian message. Evangelicals can articulate this message as mortality becomes a more visible social and artistic issue. We know that our Redeemer lives.
JONATHAN D. EVANS
Religion in Russia
Reports of religion in Russia are full of contradiction: critics like Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have you believe that the leadership of the Orthodox church is mere show—and that like all good shows it is sold out. Others point to the apparent sincerity of Orthodox clergy and the genuine risks that they have chosen to live with just to keep the faith visible in an atheistic society.
Despite the inherent difficulties in knowing much of anything about Soviet life, producer Eugene Shirley has brought us a well-documented and profoundly moving account of the religious life of the Soviet people in Candle in the Wind.
Shirley’s documentary is a study in contrasts: the spiritless state-endorsed civil wedding and the Orthodox celebration for which bride and groom may risk their careers to be crowned queen and king of creation; the pallid lifelessness of Lenin’s corpse, preserved as a holy relic of the revolution, and the mysterious presence shining through the painted Orthodox icons; the grim determination of the secret kingdom of the gulag and the forced public smile of Soviet culture.
Candle in the Wind brings us rare sights: historical footage, never before shown in the West, of the Bolshevik revolution and Lenin’s burial, his picture carried icon-like behind his coffin; Jews celebrating a circumcision in secret; evangelicals conducting a clandestine baptism. (The secret religious meetings, the Soviets claim, were shot in Hollywood.)
And Candle in the Wind brings us rare insights: The power of the Muslim people. (By A.D. 2000, they will make up one-third of the Soviet population.) The yo-yo treatment of the Orthodox church, alternately persecuted and tolerated by the Soviet leadership.
Marred by the omission of references to the “registered” Protestant groups and by taking only the slightest notice of the 10 million Roman and Eastern Rite Catholics, Candle in the Wind is nevertheless worth the attention of church and school groups. It is available for purchase or rental from Pacem Productions, 110 S. D St., Suite 111, San Bernardino, California 92401. Watch for it sometime this fall on PBS television.
DAVID NEFF
