[We are resurrecting posts that are relevant to the season of resurrection; this was first posted in August 2012. While it started to be about the film version of a book by Kazantzakis, it gradually focused more on Kazantzakis himself, a most gifted writer and deep thinker who struggled with his God. His life is more interesting than the thought-provoking book on which Scorsese’s controversial film was based.—Admin1.]
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Image from www.pappaspost.com
Credit Christians for respecting freedom of speech while upholding their religious beliefs, by going only as far as demonstrating outside theaters which featured this bold and avant-garde film. If you dared see the movie when it was released in 1988, you’d have been surprised; its box office success was due not so much because it was a great film but because of its content, offensive to Christians (so atheists, agnostics, the curious probably lined up to see their first ‘religious’ movie). In effect, all the demonstrating and protesting gave the movie more press than it deserved. In free-speech-protected-societies, notoriety is the way to go when you want free publicity; otherwise it would have been relegated to the so-so, low-budget, ignored religious film category.
Fortunately television brought this film right into my living room for free many years later, long after the controversy had died. Strangely, it was on Holy Week when all that the theaters and TV ever show are antiquated religious films like The 10 Commandments, Ben Hur, The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Robe; (update 2014: Noah, and yet another Jesus retelling.) But back to Christ’s ‘last temptation’ film; obviously the media censors took a break, not monitoring TV religious fare so this film managed to slip through OR, they didn’t read the title carefully, so that anything with Christ or Jesus in it got a General Patronage rating.
As little as I had known about the film, I was not about to pass up the opportunity to check out what about it was so offensive. By that time, I was a more broad-minded evangelical Christian; still, I was unprepared for its challenge to my long-held beliefs about Christianity’s God-Man Savior.
I think it planted a “serpent’s seed” in the subconscious “for future reference” compartment of my mental reservation because now, the serpent of doubt has been aroused . . . . I do remember that I was focused primarily on the peripherals, like Martin Scorsese’s miscasting of Willem Dafoe as Jesus whose features better fit Judas, and that I wanted to get a copy of the 1953 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis on which the film was based, wondering why he would dare rewrite the gospel plot.
Since it’s not gospel truth and in fact got a “rotten tomato” rating, and to save myself from having to write a summary, here’s a ready-made one—[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Temptation_of_Christ_(film)] which details far more than I can remember from my 1-time exposure over 2 decades ago—- [highlights mine]
Plot
The film begins with a man whispering in despair, “The feeling begins. Very tender, very loving. Then the pain starts. Claws slip underneath the skin and tear their way up. Just before they reach my eyes, they dig in. And I remember. First I fasted for three months. I even whipped myself before I went to sleep. At first it worked. Then the pain came back. And the voices. They call me by the name: Jesus.” Jesus of Nazareth (Willem Dafoe) is a carpenter in Roman-occupied Judea, torn between his own desires and his knowledge that God has a plan for him. This conflict results in self loathing, and he collaborates with the Romans to crucify Jewish revolutionaries.
Judas Iscariot (Harvey Keitel), originally sent to kill Jesus for collaboration,[1] instead suspects that Jesus is the Messiahand asks him to lead a revolution against the Romans. Jesus replies that his message is love of mankind; whereupon Judas joins Jesus in his ministry, but threatens to kill him if he strays from the purpose of a revolutionary. Jesus also has an undisclosed prior relationship with Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey), a Jewish prostitute, who asks Jesus to stay with her, a request that he considers before leaving for a monastic community. Jesus later saves Mary from a mob gathered to stone her for prostitution and working on the sabbath. Jesus compels the mob to spare her life, instructing “Which one of you people has never sinned? Whoever that is, come up here and throw these”, with Jesus offering two stones.[2] (As explained in the DVD commentary track, Scorsese deliberately avoided the overly familiar statement, “He who is without sin cast the first stone.”) Later, Jesus preaches to the crowd using many of the parables from the Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus acquires disciples, but remains uncertain of his role. He visits John the Baptist, who baptizes Jesus, and that night the two discuss their differing theologies and political views. John believes that one must first gain freedom from the Romans to achieve their end, while Jesus maintains that love is more important and people should tend to matters of the spirit. Jesus then goes into the desert to test God’s connection to himself, where he is tempted by Satan as a cobra, a lion, and a pillar of flame (voiced by Barbara Hershey, Harvey Keitel, and Leo Marks), but resists each of these and instead envisions himself with an axe, being instructed by John the Baptist in answer to Jesus’ dilemma of whether to choose the path of love (symbolized by the heart) or the path of violence (represented by the axe). Jesus returns from the desert to the home of Martha and Mary of Bethany (both sisters of Lazarus), who restore him to health and attempt to persuade him that the way to please God is to have a home, a marriage, and children. Jesus then appears to his waiting disciples to tear out his own heart and invites them to follow him. With newfound confidence he restores sight to a blind man, changes water into wine, and raises Lazarus (Tomas Arana) from the dead.
Eventually his ministry reaches Jerusalem, where Jesus performs the Cleansing of the Temple and leads a small army to capture the temple by force, but halts on the steps and begins bleeding from his hands. This convinces him that violence is not the right path and that he must die to bring salvation to mankind. Confiding in Judas, he persuades the latter to give him to the Romans, despite Judas’ inclination otherwise. Jesus convenes his disciples for Passover seder, later known as the Last Supper; whereupon Judas leads a contingent of soldiers to arrest Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, identifying him with a kiss. In the struggle to defend his master, Peter (Victor Argo) cuts off the ear of Malchus; whereupon Jesus reattaches it and turns himself over to the soldiers. Pontius Pilate (David Bowie) confronts Jesus and tells him that he must be put to death because he represents a threat to the Roman Empire. Jesus is subsequently flogged and a crown of thorns is placed on his head. He is then crucified.
While on the cross, Jesus converses with a young girl who claims to be his guardian angel (played by Juliette Caton). She tells him that he is neither the Son of God nor the Messiah, but that God loves him, is pleased with him, and wants him to be happy. She brings him down off the cross and, invisible to others, takes him to Mary Magdalene, whom he then marries. They are soon expecting a child and living an idyllic life; but Mary abruptly dies, and Jesus is consoled by his angel; wherefore he takes Mary andMartha, the sisters of Lazarus, for his wives. He starts a family with them, having many children, and lives his life in peace. Jesus is next seen as an older man who encounters the apostle Paul preaching about the Messiah and tries to tell Paul that he is the man about whom Paul has been preaching. Paul (who in this film has slain the resurrected Lazarus) repudiates him, saying that even if Jesus had not died on the cross, his message was the truth, and nothing would stop him from proclaiming that. Jesus debates him, claiming that salvation cannot be founded on lies.
Near the end of his life, an elderly Jesus calls upon his former disciples to his deathbed. Peter, Nathaniel, and a scarred John visit their master as Jerusalem is in the throes of rebellion; whereupon Judas comes last and reveals that the youthful angel who released Jesus from the crucifixion is in fact Satan. Crawling back through the burning city of Jerusalem, Jesus reaches the site of his crucifixion and begs God to let him fulfill his purpose and to “let him be God’s son.”
Jesus then finds himself once more on the cross, having overcome the “last temptation” of escaping death, being married and raising a family, and the ensuing disaster that would have consequently encompassed mankind. Naked and bloody, Jesus cries out in ecstasy as he dies, “It is accomplished!”, and the screen flickers to white.
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After posting this, I found Kazantzakis’ novel downloadable as ebook from amazon.com. The film does not compare to its literary version as films rarely do, but what turned out just as fascinating was the life of the author. It appears he had authored many other books, including Zorba the Greek and translated literary classics of antiquity such as Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy.
If atheists, agnostics and unbelievers thought they had found in Kazantzakis an ally to their anti-Christ cause, his Prologue says otherwise:
THE DUAL SUBSTANCES of Christ — the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain to God or, more exactly, to return to God and identify himself with him—has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. This nostalgia for God, at once so mysterious and so real, has opened in me large wounds and also large flowing springs. My principal anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows of my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between spirit and the flesh. Within me are the dark immemorial forces of the Evil One, human and pre-human; within me too are the luminous forces, human and pre-human, of God–and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met. The anguish has been intense. I loved my body and did not want it to perish; I loved my soul and did not want it to decay. I have fought to reconcile these two primordial forces, which are so contrary to each other, to make them realize that they are not enemies but, rather, fellow workers, so that they might rejoice in their harmony–and so that I might rejoice with them.
Every man partakes of the divine nature in both his spirit and his flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: it is universal. The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.
The stronger the soul and the flesh, the more fruitful the struggle and richer the final harmony. God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The Spirit wants to have to wrestle with flesh which is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear. Struggle between the flesh and the spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission, and finally—the supreme purpose of the struggle—union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which he invites us to take as well, following in his bloody tracks.
This is the Supreme Duty of the man who struggles—-to set out for the lofty peak which Christ, the first-born son of salvation, attained. How can we begin? If we are to be able to follow him we must have a profound knowledge of his conflict, 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 martyrdom’s summit, the Cross.
Image from quoteseverlasting.com
I never followed Christ’s bloody journey to Golgotha with such terror, I never relived his Life and Passion with such intensity, such understanding and love, as during the days and nights when I wrote The Last Temptation of Christ. While setting down this confession of the anguish and the great hope of mankind I was so moved that my eyes filled with tears. I had never felt the blood of Christ fall drop by drop into my heart with so much sweetness, so much pain.
In order to mount to the Cross, the summit of sacrifice, and to God, the summit of immateriality, Christ passed through all the stages which the man who struggles passes through. That is why his suffering is so familiar to us; that is why we share it, and why his final victory seems to us so much our own future victory. That part of Christ’s nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand him and love him and to pursue his Passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives. We struggle, we see him struggle also, and we find strength. We see that we are not all alone in the world: he is fighting at our side.
Every moment of Christ’s life is a conflict and a victory. He conquered the invincible enchantment of simple human pleasures; he conquered temptations, continually transubtantiated flesh into spirit, and ascended. Reaching the summit of Golgotha, he mounted the Cross.
But even there his struggle did not end. Temptation–the Last Temptation–was waiting for him upon the Cross. Before the fainted eyes of the Crucified the spirit of the Evil One, in an instantaneous flash, unfolded the deceptive vision of a calm and happy life. It seemed to Christ that he had taken the smooth, easy road of men. He had married and fathered children. People loved and respected him. Now, an old man, he sat on the threshold of his house and smiled with satisfaction a he recalled the longings of his youth. How splendidly, how sensibly he had acted in choosing the road of men! What insanity to have wanted to save the world! What joy to have escaped the privations, the tortures, the Cross!
This was the Last Temptation which came in the space of a lightning flash to trouble the Saviour’s final moments.
But all at once Christ shook his head violently, opened his eyes, and saw. No, he was not a traitor, glory be to God! He was not a deserter. He had accomplished the mission which the Lord had entrusted to him. He had not married, had not lived a happy life. He had reached the summit of sarifice: he was nailed upon the Cross. Content, he closed his eyes. And then there was a great triumphant cry: It is accomplished! In other words: I have accomplished my duty, I am being crucified, I did not fall into temptation . . . .
This 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, all three have already been conquered. Christ suffered pain, and since then pain has been sanctified. Temptation fought until the very last moment to lead him astray, and Temptation was defeated. Christ died on the Cross, and at that instant death was vanquished forever. Every obstacle in his journey became a milestone, an occasion for further triumph. We have a model in front of us now, a model who blases our trail and gives us strength.
This book is not a biography; it is the confession of every man who struggles. In publishing it I have fulfilled my duty, the duty of a person who struggled much, was much embittered in his life, and had many hopes. 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. —-N. KAZANTZAKIS
Image from skipthegreek.blogspot.com
NSB@S6K:
Sorry, this has become some sort of a rambling blog. I would title this: “Looking for God in all the wrong places . . . .” because I am wondering why it had never once occurred to this indefatigable God-seeker who travelled far and untiringly sought truth from various sources including the whole spectrum of intellectuals of his time, from the irreligious to the fanatically religious, to simply read the first part of his Christian Bible which might have led him to the Hebrew Scriptures which would have undoubtedly led him to discover the One and Only True Saviour of mankind and creation—YHWH. He would have discovered how simple YHWH has made it for man to reach Him through partaking of the Tree of Life, living the TORAH and knowing Him through His Sinai revelation . . . not the complicated theology he had been taught and embraced. If he did investigate the Hebrew Scriptures and yet chose to remain within his Christian beliefs, then it’s such a pity, because for those of us who discovered this truth even late in life, we now know that despite adversities in this world, life in YHWH is a joy and a celebration, the true Sabbath and Shalom, not unnecessary suffering and a lifetime of struggle and wondering, wondering, wondering . . .
So, to finish off (in case you’ve managed to read this far down), here’s more about the author, written by P.A. Bien [translator of the original Greek novel]:
THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST is the summation of the thought and experience of a man whose entire life was spent in the battle between spirit and flesh. Out of the intensity of Kazantzakis’ struggle, and out of his ability to reconcile opposites and unite them in his own personality, came art which succeeded in depicting and comprehending the full panorama of human experience.
If the scope of Kazantzakis’ art was remarkable, even more remarkable was the scope and diversity of his life. He was an intellectual—the author of treatises on Nietzsche, Bergson and Russian literature, the student of Buddhism, the translator into Modern Greek of Homer, Dante and Goethe—but at the same time he knew and loved ordinary educated people, and it was to them that he always gave his greatest allegiance. Though he travelled over most of the world, restless and uprooted in a self-imposed exile, his native Crete remained his true spiritual home, and his devotion to it and to the peasantry into which he was born in 1883 (his father dealt in feeds and kept a small farm) gave his writings the sense of the “spirit of place” which is such an important ingredient of great literature. It was in Crete that he first came to know the shepherds, farmers, fishermen, innkeepers and peasant entrepreneurs who people his novels; it was in Crete too that he first experienced revolutionary ardor, his childhood being spent in an atmosphere where dare-devil hard-drinking heroism was the highest virtue, a virtue best exemplified for the boy by his own father. But when this ardor exploded in 1897 into an uprising against the Turks, young Kazantzakis, who was evacuated to Naxos, suddenly found himself in an atmosphere quite opposite to Western thought. More important, he was introduced to a new virtue, contemplation, and to the heroism of a very different kind of father—Christ.
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 intiringly 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 10th 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 him in 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 Revoltuion, and his association with 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 20s. 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 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 in 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 20th 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 a 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 Oddyssey. In 1927 he returned to Russia for the 10th anniversary of the Revolution, after having traveled through Palestine, Spain, Egypt, Italy, where his sojourn in Assisi reflected an interest which flowered almost 30 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 4th 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 30s 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 age 50, 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. . . . The Odyssey was published in 1938.
. . . In 1932 Kazantzakis translated the Divine Comedy into Modern Greek.
There are paragraphs of interesting material about how translations from one language to another simply cannot compare to the original; I’m picking up on the final commentary:
The Last Temptation of Christ fanned the inquisitional flames all the more, but this time Kazantzakis —who had experienced 30 years of non-recognition and then, when recognition came , the complete misrepresentation of his aims—had learned the Nietschean 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 book] 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 int he 20th century the old era was dead or dying—to rise to the occasion and exercise of man’s right (and duty) to fashion a new saviour and thereby rescue himself from a moral and spiritual void. His own conflicts enable 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 an thus, since his own conflicts were those of every sensitive man faced with the chaos of our times, in terms which could be understood int he 20th 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.
Image from quotepixel.com355
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 singlehandedly into the grave.
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NSB@S6K: Ah, how dramatic! Martin Scorsese should have made a film about Kazantzakis himself, the man’s biographical sketch is so absorbing to read! By the way this tidbit is out of order though informative: I’ve been pronouncing “Scorsese” as any Filipino would — “Is-kor-se-se” — only to hear on TV the proper pronunciation is “Skor-seize”; see how much you learn from reading this insufferably long and rambling blog, but patience my friend, as I always say there is a point to all this.
In closing and in sum, may I repeat the two quotations I chose from Kazantzakis many memorable statements. Truly this man was a genius, unknown and appreciated only by those who have heard about him. Surely he didn’t score many points among Christians with his “Last Temptation” . . . . still, what a mind, what literary talent, what a gifted writer; too bad his lifelong angst over his relationship with his God did not take him to where it took us—-the God on Sinai, the God of Israel, the God of the “Old Testament” portion of his Catholic Bible.
He should have learned from his own words:
- “you can knock on a deaf man’s ears forever” . . .
- “the real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darknesses.”
And, how I wish he applied the quote used as his eulogy not to his death but to what he would have discovered as his ‘tree of life” had he returned to the alleged ‘roots’ of his New Testament faith, the Hebrew Scriptures; then he could have really died happy with his own words:
“Thank you Lord for bringing me where I did not want to come.”
Here’s my rephrase to describe every Sinaite’s journey:
“Thank You YHWH, for finally directing me to the path I should have taken when I faced that fork on the road several times in my journey of faith.” AMEN.NSB@S6K
