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Kazantzakis’ religious vision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Peter Bien
Peter Bien*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College
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Extract

Although Kazantzakis had a profound religious vision that may even be compatible in some ways with Christianity, he makes certain Christians extraordinarily angry. The most recent incident involved Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film of The Last Temptation. Rev. Bill Bright of the Campus Crusade for Christ offered to buy the master print of the film for $10,000,000 so that he could burn it. When the distributor refused and the film opened, a moviegoer attempting to see the picture in New York City had to run a gauntlet of Catholic monks on their knees praying for his soul and Protestant fundamentalists haranguing him about damnation, for which he would surely qualify if her merely entered the theatre. But this was only the most recent incident. In the 1950s the same novel, plus some pages of Kapetán Mihális, inspired the Greek Orthodox Church to prosecute Kazantzakis and attempt to excommunicate him. Kazantzakis responded: ‘You gave me your curse, holy Fathers. I give you a blessing: May your conscience be as clear as mine, and may you be as moral and religious as I am. The same novel was placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books. And when it appeared in the United States in 1960, it moved Protestant fundamentalists in California to insist that it be removed from libraries — a tactic that turned the book into a best seller. But the Greek Orthodox Church’s opposition goes back much further. Bishop Athanasios of Syros, in a memorandum to the Church’s Synod in 1928, condemned Kazantzakis’ major philosophical work, Askitikì, plus some journalistic articles, as anti-religious, quoting — as did Bill Bright — isolated passages out of context, for example: ‘God … is not the kindly family-man we thought. He is cruel, he does not care about individuals.’ And when Kazantzakis dared in the same year in a public lecture in Athens to suggest that if we want to understand what faith is we should look to Russia rather than the Church, he was subpoenaed by the public prosecutor for insulting the state and disturbing civil tranquility.

Type
Research Article
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 20 , 1996 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1996

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References

1. See Bien, Peter, ‘Scorsese’s Spiritual Jesus’, The New York Times, 11 August 1988, p. A25 Google Scholar. Further details of the extensive campaign against the film are given in les Keyser, Martin Scorsese (New York 1992) 185-6. For example: ‘By August 1988 almost 8,000 pickets had formed around the [Universal] studio offices, security measures were instituted, and bodyguards were accompanying even minor Universal executives…. Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, which garnered 60,000 new members during its campaign against The Last Temptation of Christ, picketed Lew Wasserman’s home, preaching loudly on the doorstep of the Jewish chairman of MCA, Universal’s parent corporation…. Wildmon … [demanded] to know “How many Christians are there in the top positions of MCA/Universal? …” Mother Angelica, founder of the Christian Eternal Word network … opined [on CNN] that this “movie will destroy Christianity.” On 9 August 1988 the U.S. Catholic Conference called for a nationwide boycott of the film, the first such boycott the conference had ever recommended.’

2. Prevelakis, Pandelis, (Athens 1965) 669 Google Scholar.

3. Bishop Athanasios of Syros, 17 March 1928, 84; cited in Bien, Peter, Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit (Princeton 1989) 111–12 Google Scholar.

4. (Iraklion), 19 February 1925, 1; cited in Bien, Politics of the Spirit, 93-94.

5. [continued], (Iraklion), 22 February 1925, 1; cited in Bien, , Politics of the Spirit, 95 Google Scholar; reprinted in Kyriakos Mitsotakis, (Athens 1972) 126ff.

6. [Letter to ] Nea Estia 74 (15 November 1963) 1689-90.

7. Compare at the end of a letter to Angelos Sikelianos, 24 December 1941 (Eleni N. Kazantzaki, [Athens: Eleni N. Kazantzakis, 1977] 471; Kazantzakis, Helen, Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography Based on His Letters [New York 1968] 403)Google Scholar.

8. Faith, it should be remembered, is not the absence of doubt but the will to believe despite the presence of doubt.

9. Geertz, Clifford, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. Michael Parker Banton, 1-46 (New York 1966) 4 Google Scholar.

10. Markakis, Petros, (Autumn 1959) 35 Google Scholar.

11. Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution (London 1911) 261 Google Scholar. Bergson’s élan vital wills to become alive. In order to become alive, it must collaborate with matter. But matter is not anything separate. Life, Bergson writes, is the vital current ‘loaded with matter, that is, with congealed parts of its own substance’ (252). Once the life force has created life, it tends to divest itself of its congealments in order to return to pure energy. Rocks evolve successively into plants, animals, and humans; sensation develops into instinct, intelligence, and finally self-consciousness. But then change moves towards inertness, heterogeneity towards homogenity. This, rather than negating the life force’s original ‘desire’, leads to a consummation that the life force itself brings about. Both life and death are willed by the same ‘god’. Death is life’s crown because the sloughing off of matter releases the primal force from the weight of its own heterogeneous congealments, enabling its vitality to be unencumbered once again in its will to become alive. Annihilation equals fulfilment in this creative action that unmakes itself.

12. Kazantzaki, Eleni N., Le dissident: biographie de Nikos Kazantzaki (Paris 1968) 504 Google Scholar; Kazantzakis, Helen, Biography, 496 Google Scholar; letter of 23 March 1951.

13. Kazantzakis, Nikos, Report to Greco (New York 1965) 173 Google Scholar.

14. Hick, John, Evil and the God of Love (London 2 1977) 43–4 Google Scholar.

15. Kazantzakis, Nikos, The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises (New York 1960) 116 Google Scholar; Salvatores Dei. (Athens 21962) 81. Compare Teilhard de Chardin: ‘One after the other all the fields of human knowledge have been shaken and carried away … in the direction of the study of some development. Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true’ (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man [New York 1961] 217-8).

16. Saviors of God, 130. (Askitikí, 94).

17. Saviors of God, 118; Askitikí, 83.

18. Saviors of God, 118; Askitikí, 83-4.

19. See Hick, , Evil and the God of Love, 236 Google Scholar.

20. One of his favourite metaphors for this is the beautiful flower that grows most luxuriantly on top of a pile of dung.

21. This is basically what was denied by those who objected to Scorsese’s film of The Last Temptation. In Kazantzakis’ view, Jesus was truly tempted, feeling sexual urges, etc., but overcoming them. The opposition could not admit this degree of participation in worldliness by a being they considered perfect.

22. Hick, , Evil and the God of Love, 214–5 Google Scholar.

23. Hick, , Evil and the God of Love, 237 Google Scholar.

24. Gilkey, Langdon, ‘God’, in Christian Theology: An Introduction to its Traditions and Tasks, eds. Hodgson, Peter C., King, Robert H. (Philadelphia 1982) 82 Google Scholar; cited in Darren Middleton, J.N., ‘Nikos Kazantzakis and Process Theology. Thinking Theologically in a Relational World’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 12 (1994): 61 Google Scholar.

25. Pailin, David A., God and the Processes of Reality: Foundations for a Credible Theism (London 1989) 27 Google Scholar; cited in Middleton, ‘Thinking Theologically’, 62.

26. Dombrowski, Daniel A., ‘Kazantzakis’ Dipolar Theism’, Sophia 24/2 (1985): 8 Google Scholar.

27. Hartshorne, Charles, A Natural Theology for Our Time (La Salle, Illinois 1967) 127–8 Google Scholar.

28. Middleton, , ‘Thinking Theologically’, 69 Google Scholar.

29. Hick, , Evil and the God of Love, 246, 249 Google Scholar.

30. Middleton, , ‘Thinking Theologically’, 71 Google Scholar.

31. Report to Greco, 509; italics added.

32. Saviors of God, 130-1; Askitiki, 94-5.

33. It is worth noting that the Byzantine mystics speak of God in dipolar fashion when they describe him as a ‘profuse unity’ (precisely the consummation that Kazantzakis wished for his own life: see Helen Kazantzakis, Biography, 166.

34. Prevelakis, , Tetrakósia grommata, 77 Google Scholar.

35. Prevelakis, Pendelis 3 (1977) 30 Google Scholar.

36. Lambridi, Elli, (11 March 1939) 11 Google Scholar.

37. Cronk, Sandra, Dark Night Journey: Inward Re-patterning towards a Life Centered in God (Wallingford, Pennsylvania 1991) 21 Google Scholar.

38. Saviors of God, 129; Askitikí, 93.

39. Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London 1957) 48.

40. Lossky, , Mystical Theology, 25 Google Scholar.

41. Saviors of God, 130; Askitikt, 93-4.