Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ. P.A. Bien, translator. Bantam, 1955/1968.
I have been curious about this book since seeing the 1988 Martin Scorcese film adaptation, when I had to walk past a line of protesters to get into the theater. I remember the stark beauty of the film as well as Jesus’s struggle to manage and make sense of the human and divine elements of his being, and I remember how much I liked Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack for the film, which I have been listening to again for the first time in a long time. While I’m on a nostalgic tangent, the soundtrack album also turned me on to Gabriel’s record label Real World Records, which has released an amazing amount of extraordinary world music, and I just discovered the whole Real World catalog as a playlist on Spotify. When I began my reading life as a teen-ager, reading always seemed to be just me and the books I chose to read. Now, everything I read seems to evoke memories and experiences which insistently contextualize what I’m reading within the larger arc of my life.
I plucked The Last Temptation of Christ off a bookshelf. It came from my father-in-law, who was a Religious Studies professor and a big fan of Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek. I have not read any Kazantzakis until now. This is a lengthy review, and The Last Temptation is a lengthy book. Sometimes, novels have straightforward plots that are easy to follow, and sometimes they don’t. The Last Temptation is of the latter category. There is much that is entangled, and much that I felt the need to disentangle.
In nearly 500 pages, Kazantzakis takes the space to explore the existential, theological, psychological and historical ramifications of Jesus’s life and the choices he makes. Not to give anything away, but in the end Jesus resists temptation and is crucified (or chooses crucifixion), and time starts (again). The final two lines of the novel: “He uttered a triumphant cry: IT IS ACCOMPLISHED! And it was as though he had said: Everything has begun.” The ending is a beginning.
What makes this novel successful, and I think that it is very successful, is not the ending, which Kazantzakis treats as a given–the ending, or beginning, that we all know–but the conflicts, tensions, attractions, distractions, cultural and historical forces that lead to the crucifixion. Although Kazantzakis tells the story chronologically, the narrative line is anything but straight. It is much more a complex labyrinth through which Jesus–and everyone else for that matter–must constantly struggle to find the way through. It is that struggle which makes The Last Temptation of Christ so engaging.
In the western canon, beings who are both mortal and divine inevitably have problematic lives. Gilgamesh is a terror until his body finally humbles him and he becomes a good ruler. Achilles is a powerful warrior, who is perpetually angry because during the Trojan War circumstances–the war, the battles, other soldiers, either Greek or Trojan–consistentently elude his control, and whose heel finally betrays him. Being both human and divine is a hard journey, and Kazantzakis portrays Jesus as part of this tradition.
What is most notable about the novel are its instabilities. In Judea, Jews chafed under the dominion of Rome, and the desire to throw off the Roman yoke produced constant conflicts. Correlatively, the region also produced plenty of prophets who promised to explain the ways of God to man, promised salvation, promised the overthrow of Roman rule, promised the dominion of a unifying Jewish God. Rome felt the threat to its authority, so they caught and crucified these prophets and their followers to neutralize the threat, but which only produced more tension and conflict. For some, ridding Judea of Rome was a military matter, for others a religious matter, and for still others a mix of the two. As a carpenter, Jesus embodies some of these tensions, because he makes, transports, and sets the crosses for the crucifixions, both abetting the enemy and foreshadowing his own future. Jesus may be loved by his family, but he is despised as a traitor by his community.
Jesus seems to have three personalities, or should I say personality profiles, in the novel. Before God has revealed his divine purpose to him, when Jesus is still living at home and a “ragged carpenter,” he is bothered by visions and other divine interventions–e.g., angels painfully suppressing his libido–which leaves him feeling alienated, withdrawn, and confused. In Nazareth, there are rumors about his miraculous conception and birth, and that Mary’s husband, Joseph was struck by lightning to prevent the consummation of the marriage. Jesus blames himself for others’ suffering. Except for making crucifixes, he is not a dependable worker because of his tendency to disappear into the desert when he is depressed and needs to think through his confusion. For the crosses he builds, Jesus is hated and reviled, but he is protected by his uncle the rabbi, who claims that the they are God’s will. Jesus is an outsider within his own community. He wants to live a normal life but can’t. Mary would have him be normal, marry, have kids, but God seems to prevent this conventional path.
After the crucifixion of the Zealot, the latest prophet, Jesus declares that he will continue to resist God’s will, but then he leaves home to head to the monastery in the desert where he he hopes to find God. He just wants to get away from other people, yet on his journey he encounters fishermen and day laborers who curse him for being superior and would kill him for being the crossmaker, and he stops for an old woman who warns him not to go to the monastery because God is in towns with homes, families, spouses, and children. This earthbound domestic view of God functions as counterpoint throughout the book to the conventional exalted, heavenly view of God and eternity. On the journey, Jesus also wants to avoid his cousin Mary Magdalene but his body takes him to her anyway. He wants Mary’s forgiveness, because he feels he is to blame for her turn to prostitution. She taunts him, feeds him and provides him a bed by the fire. He sleeps peacefully. Throughout the book, Jesus is caught between the divine and material worlds. He can be both comforted and tortured by both.
At the monastery, Jesus transitions to his first identity as Messiah. Messiah 1.0? The abbot is on a hunger strike and dying when he is visited by God through signs that tell him that the Messiah is present and that the monks must be ready for him. Jesus sees the abbot before he dies, and the abbot is happy. The rabbi, Uncle Simeon, comes from Nazareth. He tries to ease Jesus’s troubled mind and body but really cannot. Jesus’s new identity comes into its own at the home of Zebedee, the wealthy fisherman, and his wife Salome. Jesus has already avoided being killed by Judas, a zealot and assassin, who mysteriously demurs. Her fellow town’s people have turned against Mary Magdalene and pursue her, so she comes to Zebedee for protection. Barrabas, another zealot and assassin, and the gathered crowd would stone her. Jesus arrives, now speaking a gospel of love, and saves Magdalene: “You without sin cast the first stone.” Jesus’s alienation and confusion gives way to a message of love–honey comes from his mouth–which goes over well with some but not others. Women, the poor, and crippled are open to his love gospel. Andrew, Jonah’s son, is fully on board with Jesus, Magdalene too, of course. The wealthy, well-positioned, and older Judeans are not open to Jesus’s love, because they are afraid he will destroy the status quo and their beneficial place within it. Nonetheless, Jesus overcomes Judas’s resistance, and apostles begin to gather round him. They stop at Magdala for a wedding. Mary Magdalene comes along, which again ignites tensions with the families and matriarchs, who want to exclude her until Jesus tells the parable of the wise virgins and the foolish virgins, which is a story about inclusion. The town patriarch notes that inclusion breaks the law, and Jesus says that he follows his heart. Everyone becomes happy and celebratory. In this manifestation, Jesus is very much about partying and celebration: the ideal social moment when people come together. Jesus and his followers move on to Samaria, which is seen by Judas as contaminated land. Jesus rejects that idea, but Judas won’t drink or eat while they are in Samaria. The Samaritans are pretty testy, too, about the Galilleans presence, but Jesus smooths things out. Everyone who is divisive can’t challenge the joy and happiness of Jesus and entourage. Moreover, Jesus effectively tells parables to overcome resistance. His stories are powerful. Kazantzakis also includes a few of Jesus’s miracles, but they seem of secondary importance to his skills as a persuasive storyteller spreading a story of love. This is Jesus at his best.
Afterwards, Jesus and companions go to Jerusalem, which is in the middle of a bacchanalian festival. As portrayed by Kazantzakis, Jerusalem is a gritty, urban space full of temptations and chaos, and it overwhelms Jesus’s gentle demeanor, so he flees. (There are a few episodes in the book when Jesus enters Jerusalem only to flee, because it is full of too many forces and dangers that put Jesus and his mission at risk. Jesus seems much more suited to be the Messiah for rural villages and countryside.) Jesus travels to the Dead Sea to meet and be baptized by John the Baptist, who recognizes Jesus for who he is. In a technicolor moment–the Jordan stops flowing, fish circle around Jesus and John, the spirit of the river appears–a dove flies down from heaven, speaks in a language that only John can understand and names Jesus the son of God. Thus begins Jesus’s transition to a new identity. Messiah 2.0. Jesus spends three days with John the Baptist and is overwhelmed by the force of his personality and his Old Testament call for violence, punishment, and exclusion, which runs counter to Jesus’s message of love. Jesus retreats to the desert to talk to God, only to be confronted by many versions of Satan. It’s all emotionally exhausting, and in the end in a dream of birds a blackbird comes to warn Jesus that Satan and God’s paths look alike.
Jesus returns from the desert to the town of Bethany, where he is once again at his best with people, particularly people who are welcoming and open. He meets Lazarus’s unmarried sisters, Mary and Martha, and everything goes well until the village elders and their wives show up–the status quo–to welcome Jesus but who immediately see him as a threat, despite his message of love, which clearly at this point has its limitations. When Lazarus announces the murder of John the Baptist by Herod, Jesus knows that his time has come, and, without much love, he prophesies the angels of madness, leprosy, and fire: the end of the world. Despite channeling John the Baptist, or perhaps because he does, Mary and Martha put him up for the night, letting him use the bedware that they has been keeping for their potential husbands.<--This becomes important at the end of the book.
But Jesus does not simply shift into a new identity as a reborn John the Baptist. Instead, he shifts between Messiah 1.0 and 2.0. Sometimes, Jesus speaks of love and inclusion, and sometimes he speaks of fire, war, an ax, and an ark built to escape fire rather than flood; sometimes, he gathers people in, and sometimes he lashes out in anger. Jesus is once again as unstable and unpredictable as the world around him. While the apostles, perhaps with the exception of Judas, were initially drawn to Jesus because of the love gospel, now they have to adapt to this new side of him, which makes them wary, because they can never know when he will be one or the other, telling a loving parable or offering an apocalyptic prophecy. The path to the crucifixion is labyrinthine. The divine and earthly forces that buffet Jesus are anything but straight, which is part of what makes this novel so interesting.
After Jesus returns from the desert to Jerusalem, he and the disciples quickly depart for Nazareth, only to find trouble and fear. No one seems to believe that Jesus has become what he has become, and everyone who represents the status quo is afraid of a revolution. There is conflict–stones thrown, etc.--until the rabbi, Uncle Simeon, calms things down, and Jesus et.al. can move on to look for some other town–a smaller village?--that would be open to them. Simeon, though, realizes that Jesus is the Son of God, sees a heavenly vision, and is happy that his greatest desire has been realized, just as he is drenched in rain, a new baptism. But as hard as he has become, Jesus still works to be ever more–and challengingly–inclusive. On the way out of town, he meets the tax collector, Matthew, who works for the Romans but gives up his position to follow Jesus, bringing with him an empty book to document Jesus’s mission. The other disciples shun him, though, because he works for the Romans. Matthew is the shunned, excluded outsider, who clearly belongs to neither the Romans nor Jews but is the perfect recruit for Jesus’s vision of inclusivity. Jesus then cures the paralyzed daughter of the Roman centurion, Rufus, which leaves Jesus a little aghast at his own power. After opening himself up to Rome, Jesus and the disciples head to Magdala, where Jesus becomes stern and promises fire. When asked to provide a kind word or a miracle, he doesn’t. He has lost patience and will not trade miracles for followers. He promotes a God and faith that transcends race, nation, and empire, where there are only the saved and unsaved. To that end, he takes both hard and soft approaches to convince others of the truth. But, in an act of love(?), Jesus does raise Lazarus from the dead at the request of his sisters and is, once again, astounded at his own power, which more than ever threatens both the Romans and Pharisees. Inspired by this new found power, Jesus would act as warrior and go to Jerusalem, tear down the old temple to build a new one. Jesus intermingles love and war, saying that he will invalidate the laws of Moses to create new laws of the heart, but everyone must follow and love him beyond everything else; earthly loves, like that of family, will not free one to ascend to heaven but only tie one to the world, which will be burnt away. Love becomes an exclusive through-line that links Authoritarian Jesus with Apocalyptic Jesus. Again, as Jesus creates and recreates himself, figuring out who he is and the nature and extent of his agency, everything is changeable.
Resurrecting Lazarus gives Jesus a new idea, a death wish. He wants to die and be resurrected, after which he saves humankind and builds a new Jerusalem. He tells this to Judas, who is disappointed, because Judas, the perpetual warrior, imagined the Messiah coming from heaven with a sword, resurrecting all the Jews and their horses and driving Rome out of Israel, a horrific fantasy that makes Jesus’s self-sacrifice sound rather tidy. Yet before Jesus is ready to make that sacrifice, he tries once again to enter Jerusalem with his disciples and a small army of his followers willing to fight, make a stand at the temple, and start the war he has been prophesying. But faced with the forces arrayed against them, Jesus pulls back and retreats, leaving his disciples confused and disheartened and questioning their commitment to him. His other followers disappear as they retreat. Jesus is more and more alone isolated, not unlike he was at the beginning of The Last Temptation. Was Jesus’s purpose for the assault on the Temple to fail and leave him isolated? Hmm. Subsequently, with the complicity of Judas, he finalizes that isolation at the Last Supper, which provides both a moment of community and its dissolution when the Romans’ arrest Jesus. There may be a clean, logical way of thinking that leads from love to war to death–from an expansive, inclusive vision to a single, self-sacrificing individual–but I think that Kazantzakis’s labyrinthine narrative does a much better job at capturing that logic.
At the crucifixion, Jesus is abandoned by his disciples. Only the tavern keeper, Simon the Cyrene, supports him, fights for him, carries the cross for him. Jesus is condemned by the Pharisees for violating and threatening Judaic law, and then they handed him over to the Romans to be crucified. Pontius Pilate actually washes his hands and lays the guilt for Jesus’s crucifixion on the Jews, which they readily accept, while pardoning Barabas the thief and murderer. Everyone–including the poor, the disabled–abandon Jesus: the disciples out of weakness and cowardice, and the poor and disabled because he didn’t “cure” them of their poverty and infirmities. From below the cross, Simon sees, not Romans and Romany, but a host of angels doing the work of the crucifixion as well as a cherub who stabs Jesus in the heart. Heaven kills its own. Kazantzakis works very hard to strip Jesus of almost everything but his solitary existence.
Before he dies, and here are the last temptations, Jesus faints and dreams. The cross has turned into a giant blossoming tree with 33 chirping birds. He is visited by his guardian angel(Not!), who says that God has sent him to save Jesus from crucifixion and that the crucifixion was just a dream to give Jesus a taste of real suffering. The Guardian Angel then acts something like the ghosts in “A Christmas Carol.” First, fulfilling one of Jesus’s deepest human desires, the angel takes Jesus to his wedding with Magdalene, after which the couple retreats to a lemon bower to consummate the marriage. All seems sweetness and light, and then Magdalene leaves while Jesus sleeps, but his soul leaves his body to follow her like a camera. The Guardian Angel, who is really Lucifer, in the guise of a young black boy, leads her to a rocky, thorny desert where she is stoned to death because she is a prostitute. Jesus’s soul returns to his body, but when he wakes up he cannot remember what his soul has seen. His Guardian Angel informs him of the death of Magdalene and then offers a compensatory theory that there is only one woman in the world but with different faces. This is a temptation, an earthly desire fulfilled and then withdrawn as painfully as possible? Even in a tempter’s dream, Jesus cannot be allowed to simply love? Even in a dream, love has to be unstable, like everything else in the novel? Or is Lucifer just not very good at creating happy fantasies? Perhaps the latter.
But Kazantzakis gives him another chance, and the Guardian Angel flies Jesus to the home of Mary and Martha, Lazarus’s unmarried sisters, while theorizing that heaven is reached when there is harmony between earth and heart: that is, heaven can be reached on earth. This claim is foreshadowed at the beginning of the book when Jesus is on the way to the monastery and the old woman he talks to tells him that God is not at the monastery but in families, homes, and villages. That woman now seems like a manifestation of the devil, planting a seed that grows in his second attempt to provide Jesus a happy temptation. The devil is much more successful the second time around, but even then there is a limit to what he can do. Jesus takes up with both Mary and Martha (one woman, two faces), and they produce many, many children, who in turn produce many, many grandchildren. The household is full of life and full of bliss. As a carpenter, Jesus now makes cradles rather than crosses. In the domestic space, heart and earth harmonize: heaven on earth. Over this paradise presides the Guardian Angel as a small black boy who plays the pipes and leers, Blake's songs of innocence and experience combined? Moreover, he makes the claim that progeny is eternity, reinforcing the heaven on earth that Jesus experiences here. In this hermetic domestic space, Jesus decides that he is the son of man rather than the son of God. In a novel that is rife with instability, here for a moment is a stable space of happiness. Given the life that Jesus has known, that stability is a significant temptation.
But the devil doesn’t have complete control over the domestic space or the outside world, where in this alternative timeline Jesus did not die on the cross but was whisked away, so the world does not have a savior. The devil cannot control the resulting disturbances, and they begin to invade the domestic bliss. First, Simon the Tavernkeep comes to tell him that Pontius Pilate has been crucified, or he has himself crucified because of the guilt he feels over washing his hands of the responsibility for allowing Jesus’ crucifixion to go forward. Second, Saul, now Paul, shows up to tell the story of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. When Jesus tells him that he is Jesus, that he wasn’t crucified and resurrected, that that story was just a dream sent by God, Paul simply feels even freer to spread the word that he has been spreading, even after Jesus calls him on the lie. When Jesus says that he will intervene, the latter scoffs and claims Jesus doesn’t have the power, because people want the resurrection/redemption narrative, and if Jesus is not going to deliver it Paul will. Jesus may have holed up in his own personal heaven, but the rest of the world is still looking for salvation. Jesus’s claim that he is the son of man rather than the son of God does nothing to assuage the people’s need for a savior, and Paul sees the power vacuum and steps into it. For the first time in this space of domestic bliss, Jesus is frustrated and angry, he yells, and his family is frightened. His stable happy life is rocked, but the Guardian Angel manages to reassert control. Finally, years later, when Jesus is as an old man, the Guardian tells Jesus that the end is near. Jesus dismisses him, but the Guardian/Satan complains that Jesus doesn’t appreciate what he’s done for him all these years, that he is owed something(his soul?), but Jesus says that he is free, so Satan releases the protections he’s used. Then the apostles show up as old, decrepit men, beaten up by time and life, and escaping the Roman siege of Jerusalem (70 CE). They clearly did not have Jesus’s luck. Judas upbraids Jesus for having betrayed his word that he would die on the cross and be resurrected, that he would be the Messiah everyone sought and who might be a comfort in this harrowing moment. Judas and the apostles feel betrayed. Jesus feels guilt and shame and asks forgiveness: by doing so, he chooses crucifixion, to fulfill his destiny as the Son of God. He has resisted temptation, Satan disappears, and Jesus wakes up in agony dying on the cross. The right ending, which is a beginning.
With or without the final temptations, the route Kazantzakis traces to Jesus’s crucifixion is circuitous, and it is that circuity which makes the novel work.