Where Do We Find God?
On Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ
In The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis, the Jesus we meet is a bit of a loser.
He disappoints his mother constantly. When he goes to propose to his childhood sweetheart, Mary Magdalene, he has a fit, rejects her, and traumatizes the girl so badly she turns to prostitution. He is over thirty and has no prospects beyond his own small vengeance, making crosses that the Romans use to crucify would-be Messiahs, thwarting God’s mission to the Israelites. Theorists have speculated for years as to how Jesus started his miracles as an unmarried man older than 30, which would have been practically unheard of in Galilee at the time. Kazantzakis’s answer is that he is a loser.
The Jesus we meet struggles to accept his destiny, spends his entire life fighting against it. He describes it as torture and a curse, at one point personifying the curse in his vision of an armored bird-woman stalking him through Galilee. His mother Mary, who rakes her nails over her cheeks countless times throughout the first 100 pages of the novel, at one point asks the Rabbi Simeon why God has chosen this destiny for her son. “Because he loves him,” is the response from the rabbi.
Jesus faces a higher calling than most, which means that his experience of internal turmoil is more intense than most. Yet his experience is similar to the turmoil most humans experience when they try to live a good life. In his introduction, Kazantzakis wrote, “my principal anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward have been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.” The earthly joys of daily life contrast with the aspiration to something higher. Jesus has renounced all of the joys and temptations of daily life (except for fear and shame, which the book names as temptations and sins), but has not found the higher calling yet, in part because he is afraid of it. There is ambiguity throughout the book if his higher calling even is real, or if he has conjured it up for himself in his angsty battle with the limits of his own life. Morton P. Levitt in his article “The Modernist Kazantzakis and ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’” calls him “unmistakably a man and only potentially a god.”
The duality of spirituality is balanced in different ways by different characters in the book. The women tend to lean towards a more earthly faith, one which finds joy in the everyday. Jesus learns this the hard way when a woman who gives him bread on his journey becomes angry with him when he says he is going to the monastery. “Wherever you find husband and wife, that’s where you find God, wherever children and petty cares and cooking and arguments and reconciliations, that’s where God is too,” she tells him, a sentiment echoed more or less by other female characters in the book. This division of spirituality along gender lines, where women are assigned the “baser” form, can be misogynistic: woman cannot understand the higher mysteries of God. However, it shows that women value their faith more than the men do. Women are not able to go on mystical quests to find God, they are tied to the hearth and the family, yet they find ways to find faith in their everyday life.
The entire book is about dualities: Jesus and the Messiah he helps execute, Jesus and Judas, Jesus and John the Baptist, Jesus and Lazarus, Jesus and himself. The first scene in the book is of Jesus’s dream of a broken band of 12 demons pursuing him, a parallel to the 12 apostles (who are also a bunch of losers).
Even after he accepts his fate as the Messiah (or a Messiah) of sorts, Jesus struggles to balance the duality of his faith mission. At first, he spreads a mission of love, describing himself not as a prophet (who can be scary, off-putting figures), but as a bridegroom. After his encounter with John the Baptist and his desert fast, he comes back with a more fiery version of his faith, heeding John’s advice that Fire is the first daughter of God.
Even though Jesus’s message evolves over time, it is delivered with clarity. That clarity is not enough for his apostles (who besides being losers, are kind of thick and self-interested). The same people who followed him are the ones who bay for his blood because they never understood his message of salvation, they just wanted selfish benefits. Even his apostles are cowardly, self-centered, and self-interested, rarely getting his message. Only Judas, who spends most of the book deciding whether he hates or loves Jesus, understands him. The vision that his apostles create of him, whether it’s Matthew’s gospel or the teachings that a reformed Paul later preaches, have nothing to do with Jesus the man himself. When Jacob outlines his view of the church that will follow Jesus, with its own hierarchies, laws, Pharisees and Saducees, Jesus is horrified. “You crucify the spirit, Jacob,” he shouts. “No, no, I don’t want that!” But what Jesus wants does not matter anymore, what the truth of his life is does not matter anymore, the faith that will be spread will not matter anymore.
Kazantzakis maybe anticipated the reaction to his book when he wrote this scene. The Greek Orthodox Church attempted to ban all of his work in response to his book, attempted to excommunicate him, and denied him funeral rites. The Catholic Church proscribed the book, and the later movie by Scorsese also faced significant challenges. As Levitt puts it in his article, the book was “dangerous to those accustomed to easy belief in a cardboard Messiah.” A Jesus with doubts, with humanity, is not easy to worship.
That is a shame, because the book is not written by someone that hates Jesus or Christianity (Kazantzakis was a devout Orthodox believer). It is written by someone who knows the Gospels extremely well, who knew the words of the prophets, and wanted to write something exploring the ambiguities within the work itself (because for all of the church’s attempts to hide them, there are ambiguities) and his own spiritual struggles. Kazantzakis has such an encyclopedic knowledge of the Gospels that I was afraid to write this piece, because I know that I am missing something.
As someone who struggles with my own faith, I loved this book. I especially loved the revised versions of the parables that Kazantzakis’s Jesus offers. One in particular brought tears to my eyes. When recounting the story of the wise and foolish virgins, instead of telling the classic ending of the parable, Jesus asks Nathaniel what he would do.
Nathaniel says, “I would let them in.”