The dual substance 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—Nikos Kazantzakis in “Prologue” to The Last Temptation of Christ
Suddenly I remember being a child in the cathedral. We, my mother, father and I, enter the oak doors with three windows each set into the wood and come into the coat room where another set of doors, these solid and smaller, are propped open creating a frame around the old women hanging heavy coats in the distance and the young married couple in the forefront on each side of the frame handing out pamphlets and greeting the newcomers. We walk past them and my parents say something and they say “blessed is the lord” and hand them a pamphlet. The man squats down, staring at me face to face, with a wide grin on his face and says, “blessed be the lord”. I see his thumb compress and decompress on the button of a silvery object held in his hand. The object clicks and a number changes, going up by one.
We turn the corner out of the vestibule and the church lies before me. The walls are made of bricks colored like peaches and the wooden pews are a deep brown lacquered and shiny. Up above is the vaulted ceiling where I presume God lives and below, where we sit, is a soft carpet tinted rich red like wine ran down from the altar to the back of the furthest pews where we stand now.
My dad leads my mom down the isle and I follow behind. We take a seat in the third pew from the front right by the edge of the isle. More and more people flow in, the older people wearing suit jackets and the younger people in t-shirts, until most of the congregation has arrived. For a while there is chatter and waving at people sitting across the room, but soon, as if on cue, everyone gets quiet. The pipe organ rumbles the floor with a pounding chord and the processional begins.
For a child much time seems to pass with sitting and standing, listening and singing, the peaceful shaking of hands and the passing of plates. The candle flicker distracts me up in the altar. Later, during the sermon, the brass radiators that surround the pews began to knock with a metallic thud and hiss and I think that someone must be trying to get in through the pipes. My mom hands me a minty-candy and for a while I just sit, suck, and stare at all that is around me.
Finally, I see the time I love, has arrived when the priest holds up the bread eclipsing the face of Jesus on the stained glass windows above the altar. Everyone is quiet and he sounds out “the body of Christ, given for you and for many” and with a tug he tears the bread in two pieces. Then he holds up a silver goblet and the bowl is transposed over the head of Jesus and the stem covers his neck and the body. “The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation”. And with that the first rows begin to filter into the central isle, funneling up towards the altar. My isle stands and walks out. We step up the two steps and are in the middle of the choir sounding like stereo up past the pulpit and the organ to the railing guarding the sanctuary like the picket fence around a mown lawn. We kneel on the blue cushions with the golden thread etched in crossed keys. A balding older man with a gray beard and round glasses approaches and hands me a wafer. Each person who receives the sacrament can either dip the wafer into the goblet or take a drink from its brim. I cup the piece in my hands waiting for him to leave so I can gobble it up before the woman carrying the wine comes. I eat the wafer and roll the thick chewed-up bread-body across my tongue and swallow. The woman bearing the wine comes over to me now. She smiles and places the cold silver of the goblet onto my lips holding the wiping cloth underneath my chin. The bearer tips up the vessel and I look deep into the bottom and see the sweet wine rushing toward me like the gentle tide of the ocean.
On the grave of author Nikos Kazantzakis’ in Crete is an epitaph reading “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free” (“Nikos Kazantzakis”). For the critically acclaimed twentieth-century writer life this quote embodies attest to the struggles and the successes of a man who was constantly involved in a philosophical struggle between nourishing the desires of the body or the desires of the spirit. Kazantzakis often took this characteristic from himself and set it into the characters he would write about. Sometimes he would create new characters to search for the correct path and other times he opted to choose preexisting characters that were potentially occupied by similar questions. The two most famous works of Kazantzakis— Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ— both embody this theme with Zorba being centered around a fictional character[1] rediscovering the glories of the flesh and The Last Temptation centered around an interpretation of Jesus and his temptations to succumb to the desires of the flesh and forgo his duty as the messiah. While Zorba was welcomed as one of the most beloved characters in twentieth century literature The Last Temptation of Christ was met with much more friction. Because of the representation of Jesus as being tempted by base human desires, Kazantzakis’ portrayal of the betrayal by Judas as necessary, and the complex love—largely romantic—Jesus held for Mary Magdalene the book was protested and banned from many reading lists and led to Kazantzakis’ excommunication from the Greek Orthodox church. However, Kazantzakis did not wish to undermine the figure of Jesus. Kazantzakis’ hope for those who read The Last Temptation is evident in the ending of his prologue where he states “I am certain that every free man who reads this book, so filled as it is with love, will more than ever before, love Christ” (Kazantzakis 4). Although taken by many as a book deploying a front on the authority of Jesus Kazantzakis’ had the opposite in mind— exalting him even higher in the minds of man.
However, to eventually lift up the figure of Jesus to the capstone of existence Kazantzakis first had to set him in an opposing symmetrical point— equally low as his ascension is high— to create space for narrative movement and discovery. This idea appears in the epigraph to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets that read, “the way up is the way down” (Eliot 10). Potentially, this may disturb logical systems of thought but to the mind turned toward the divine this notion is wholly acceptable; after all, this portion of The Last Temptation is pulled from the Bible with God sending Jesus down before his eventual ascension. Traditionally, readers of the Gospels focus on the divine nature (the “high” point) of Jesus all the while forgetting that being made man encompasses more than the experience of physical pain during the Passion. It is in this obscured aspect of Jesus, the experience of being man, which the “low” point is shown. In The Last Temptation of Christ this low point is typically captured by metaphors tying Jesus to “the earth”, “the flesh”, “the kingdom of man” or any other synecdoche used to embody the broad concept of human existence. With human existence acting as the low point and Christ’s ascension being the high point, the space between the two extremes becomes a battlefield where it is a struggle to ascend through this zone. What becomes Jesus’ gift— what he brings to humanity— is a model of action and knowledge able to transcend the attractive temptations of human existence for the discovery of individual sacred duty.
The novel begins with Jesus at one of the lowest points on his journey. He appears to the reader as weak, full of fear and doubts, and reluctant to assume the path he is meant to tread. In an early moment of push-and-pull between Jesus and God Jesus counters the will of God by saying the he does not “’care about the kingdom of heaven. I like the earth. I want to marry… not the earth, not the kingdom of this world—it’s Magdalene I want to save’” (Kazantzakis 28). Despite his awareness of needing to “save” “the kingdom of this world” he rejects the call to action and opts to care for his earthly concerns embodied here in his desire to wed Mary Magdalene. At this stage in his journey Jesus’ character counterpart is his mother Mary who claims, “’I don’t want my son to be a saint… I want him to be a man like all the rest. I want him to marry and give me grandchildren. That is God’s way.’ ‘That is man’s way,’ said John softly…’the other is God’s way’” (Kazantzakis 169). Mary, whose woes in this novel truly embody the mater dolorosa[2], is largely focused on familial concerns and the continuing of the lineage. The desires of Jesus in this case echo his mother’s desires. Also, we see that the attachment of Jesus to the flesh occurs as a result of the presence of Mary Magdalene suggesting that women are potentially the harbors of this desire and are Jesus’ biggest foil to his journey. Later in the novel, during the final temptation, Mary (Lazurus’ sister) even says, “I don’t seek God’s mercy. I’m a woman; I seek mercy from my husband. And I don’t knock at God’s door either, asking like a beggar for the eternal joys of Paradise. I hug the man I love and have no desire for any other Paradise. Let’s leave the eternal joys to the men” (Kazantzakis 472). Mary’s generalization of women practically establishes this concern for romantic love— more largely understood as an earthly subject— as something that detracts from concern for the “eternal joys of Paradise”, the path that Jesus must follow.
Another group of people in The Last Temptation who reject the call to the divine are the masses of commoners who listen to Jesus’ sermons and follow him around the landscape. However, unlike the women, who seemingly know that they are rejecting the path to the divine by their attachments to the earth, the commoners appear to be unaware that they are making this rejection and forgoing their duty to follow Jesus’ words. After being inspired by one of Jesus’ sermons they quickly diminish to their previous state when “their daily cares crushed down on them again. This was a flash of lightning—they had let themselves be swept away, but now it had passed and they had been recaptured by the wheel of everyday need” (Kazantzakis 191). These people, farmers, merchants, carpenters, mothers, fathers, etc. heard the sermons and were truly filled with inspiration for doing their own duty but quickly regressed into the worries of their jobs and families. In the “Burnt Norton” section of Eliot’s Four Quartets he sums up these people who are seemingly “distracted from distraction by distraction/ filled with fancies and empty of meaning” (Eliot 17). Unable to sacrifice the stuff that dominates their ordinary lives the commoners are much like the conflicted Jesus— able to see what their duty is but unwilling to act and give up those attachments that make pursuing their duty impossible.
Later in the novel we see Jesus finally beginning to renounce the world of flesh and heeding his call to action and going out in search of his destined path. Jesus leaves home and sets out towards a monastery in the desert. Along the way he is given bread by a woman who tries to talk him out of going through with his plan. After leaving her behind and continuing on his way he says, “’I can’t stand the sight of men… I don’t want to see them; even the bread they give you is poison. Only one road leads to God: the one I chose today. It passes amidst men without touching them, and comes out in the desert’” (Kazantzakis 73). The meaning of the bread, a form of nourishment, should be taken metaphorically as meaning that even the nourishment given by men is still of men thus attracting attachment and desire rather than focus on helping one along their path— a road taken to the desert; in other words, the place where mans presence is absent leaving Jesus to focus only on his duty.
In the same way that the women and the commoners reflected Jesus’ early state the character of Judas, the Redbeard, mirrors Jesus at this stage in his journey. We learn from Judas that he’s “working for a great purpose… and whoever works for a great purpose, even if he’s the humblest of the lot, he becomes great” (Kazantzakis 116). An overwhelming sense of purpose and desire to act flows from Judas evident even his symbolic red beard, the colors of which, are typically representational of passionate disposition.
In addition to being a follower of Jesus Judas also belongs to a secret brotherhood intent on the liberation of Israel. It is from this association that we are able to uncover the catalyst behind Judas’ willingness to act. Judas is largely nationalistic placing his whole being towards the realization of the liberation of Israel from the Romans. The flaw in Judas’ character appears in a lesson from the Bhagavad-Gita, a sacred text to the Hindu faith largely concerned with questions of sacred duty and action: “truly free is the sage who controls/ his senses, mind, and understanding,/ who focuses on freedom/ and dispels desire, fear, and anger” (Bhagavad-Gita 63). Although Judas’ deepest wish is to free Israel from Rome he himself is acting without freedom from desire thus making himself not a free man. At times Jesus also acts but in the bounds of desire. His disciples witness his sermons of love only to have him change and embrace fire and the axe— the tenants of John the Baptist. It seems that Jesus desires the role of being the messiah so much that he does not use discretion in following the way set before him and instead pursues the role with a fervor that misleads him.
This notable characteristic also becomes the reason that Judas is purposefully chosen to play the role of the betrayer. Close to the hour of the betrayal Judas asks Jesus “’why did you choose me?’” to which Jesus answers “’you know you’re the strongest. The others don’t bear up” (Kazantzakis 411). The “others” Jesus refers to are the disciples who do not show the same inclination to action that Judas does and when he states that Judas is the “strongest” it is simply for his strength of commitment to act towards anything that may free Israel. Perhaps Judas can be considered a sort of tragic hero. By being flawed with a mind that disallows him from acting for that which is beyond desire Judas is actually performing his sacred duty, as laid out by God, to betray Jesus in order that Jesus will be crucified and mankind saved; it is this flaw of desire that both holds him back from ultimate transcendent ability but also allows him to perform his part in the journey of Jesus.
Finally, towards the end of the novel, Jesus finally makes that mysterious mental maneuver leading him towards the highest state of ascension. Jesus reflects that “suddenly he again heard the mysterious footsteps which had been mercilessly following him for such a long time… but now they were not behind him; they were in front, guiding him” (Kazantzakis 304). All through the novel prior these footsteps, tied to what he calls his “curse” but can be also understood as his destiny, have been behind him as he has been attempting to act without proper guidance. However, in this moment he finally allows the footsteps of his destiny to be in front of him and assume the role of guide meaning that finally his action has adopted proper guidance. In this he has gained something that he did not have prior which now allows him to not only perform action but right action. The main difference between action and right action is the extent of the discipline of the performer of the action. Discipline, as we learn in the Gita, is “when his controlled thought/ rests within the self alone,/ without craving objects of desire,/ he is said to be disciplined” (Bhagavad-Gita Gita 67). The main tenant of discipline is the absence of these “objects of desire”. To reiterate, this is the flaw of Judas that Jesus shares at some pints; he performs action but does not perform action with correct discipline and is instead focused on the fruits of action. Thus right action can be loosely defined as action performed only for the reasons that they must be performed and not for any worldly gain.
But where did Jesus’ transcendence into right action come from? The Gita points us to the lesson that “action imprisons the world/ unless it is done as sacrifice; freed from attachment, Arjuna, perform action as sacrifice!” (Bhagavad-Gita 44). When we consider the roots of “sacrifice” means “to make sacred” it becomes evident that action must not be full of the concerns of man but rather full of that which is sacred. We find that acts become sacred when “free from attraction, fear, and anger,/ filled with me, dependent on me,/ purified by the fire of knowledge, many come into my presence” (Bhagavad-Gita Gita 52). So, to make human action sacred it is necessary to somehow evoke a presence of the divine. Possibly the most common evocation of the divine is what appears in the Hamlet passage where he has just talked to the Ghost and resolves to act:
O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?
And shall I couple hell? Oh fie! Hold, hold, my heart,
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter
(I.v 93-105)
The key to this passage is memory. Through a remembrance of the divine action becomes full of divinity thus making the maneuver to right action. In order to convert his action to right action he must keep his mind on a remembrance of God. In the Gospels Jesus confirms this belief when at the last Passover supper he breaks bread and drinks wine asking the disciples to “do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). It is in this lesson of the remembrance that we find the salvation Christ brought to the world— divine knowledge of how to rediscover the divine in the world.
In this way The Last Temptation of God is largely Gnostic with the belief that Christ’s gift is knowledge (“gnosis”). The knowledge that the divine must be considered during all action is largely spurred on by the realization of Jesus that “Everything is of God, he reflected; everything has two meanings, one manifest, one hidden. The common people comprehend only what is manifest. They say, ‘This is a snake,’ and their minds go no further; but the mind which dwells in God sees what lies beyond the visible, sees the hidden meaning” (Kazantzakis 150). Interestingly, this idea was highly integrated into the lives of Paleolithic hunters who thought:
“anything, however lowly, could embody the sacred. Everything they did was a sacrament that put them in touch with the gods. The most ordinary actions were ceremonies that enabled mortal beings to participate in the timeless world of ‘everywhen’. For us moderns a symbol is essentially separate from the unseen reality to which it directs our attention, but the Greek symballein means ‘to throw together’: two hitherto disparate objects become inseparable…when you contemplated any earthly object, you were therefore in the presence of its heavenly counterpart. This sense of participation in the divine was essential to the mythical worldview: the purpose of a myth was to make people more fully conscious of the spiritual dimension that surrounded them on all sides and was a natural part of life” (Armstrong 16).
However, Jesus knows that the common people have become out of touch with the presence of the divine so integrated in past times like the times of the Paleolithic hunters. Jesus laments, “the world had gone astray. Instead of ascending to heaven it was descending to hell. The two of them together, God and the Son of God, would have to toil to bring it once more onto the correct road” (Kazantzakis 281). Thus, we see the point of Jesus’ descent to earth— to once again reveal that God is present in all objects. He transmutates more than the bread and the wine; he transmutates all objects to reveal their divine inner presence.
Unfortunately, the common people appear to be guilty of having “had the experience but missed the meaning” (Eliot 93). The divine knowledge brought by Jesus although necessary to complete transcendence is not the only part of the equation. For one to gain “true” knowledge one must assimilate the tenants of right action into sacred duty and this is very difficult. One of the more notable discussions on the pains of achieving true knowledge occurs in the mind of Mr. Ramsey in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse:
“if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had not sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q… But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation” (Woolf 34).
We also hear echoes of this struggle in the statement “one man among thousands/ strives for success,/ and of the few who are successful,/ a rare one knows my reality” (Bhagavad-Gita Gita 73). For what Woolf calls “Z” and the Gita considers “{Krishna’s} reality” the path is difficult. This difficulty in actual achievement of the sacred knowledge is perhaps why Kazantzakis chose “‘IT IS ACCOMPLISHED!’” as Jesus’ final words in the novel (Kazantzakis 496). We see that the grand accomplishment of Jesus has been to ascend to “Z” and truly know the reality of God something that we must do in order to truly be Christ-like.
In the prologue Kazantzakis highlights his understanding of Jesus as a model human: “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 blazes our trail and gives us strength” (Kazantzakis 4). The model of Christ is largely summed up by the “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?” (Kazantzakis 2). How can we learn from the model of Kazantzakis’ Christ and begin to be Christ-like? While rejection of the fruits of the earth is an eventual state of mind along this path this does not mean to completely separate oneself from society and live like an ascetic. Rather, we need to fully comprehend what life on earth means: “’to eat bread and transform the bread into wings, to drink water and to transform the water into wings. Life on earth means: the sprouting of wings’” (Kazantzakis 493). The question we must ask ourselves, religious or not, is how can we begin to tread the path of Jesus, Arjuna, and all others who attempt to apply the sacred knowledge and transcend to the place where we sprout wings.
The last trickles of sangria flow into my mouth and I pull the glass away from my lips. I re-center my reading glasses on the bridge of my nose, rock myself gently in the blue chair, and turn the page to the final paragraph of The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis. As my eyes pass over the final ink marks the momentum of the five hundred-page novel comes at me. After those last tense seconds I close the book and place it on my lap while I ease back in the recliner. I have finished reading the book no doubt but I still do not feel that the book is truly done—I feel that it still has more to tell me. I pick up the book again and look at the cover staring beyond the picture deep into the soul of the book itself waiting for it to speak. As I hold the book I see how it is like the cathedral itself; the covers holding the book together like brick and mortar, the white paper spread out like holy space, and the words being the robes, the alter flowers, the candle flames, the priest, the bread and the wine, the body and the blood. The whole book, this church, shines through my cornea, the lens, onto my retina, and shoots like lightning along the optic nerve towards the entanglement of God. Suddenly I remember being a child in the cathedral… and in one space all these memories, words, and ideas converge upon one another until all are made manifest in a spinning whirlwind igniting my minds tinder like wildfire on the silhouetted treetops of the mountains.
Then it is over. The moment could not last forever. It came and was gone in the plummet of one grain of sand down an hourglass. Shocked and disoriented I look around and feel the commonness of the room. Common bed, common chair, common book, common reader. The fraying knot in my chest leaves me desperate to again be in the glorious presence where these things, these common things, are transformed into gold. I strain to recall the revelation of a moment before. At first there is nothing but the silence of the bedroom. Then, far off, on the fringe of perception, swaying over the abyss of all that is unnoticed, I faintly hear an echo of waves breaking on the shore. Burning everything else but the sound I can imagine the tide washing in flooding the beach with infinite droplets of water and then quickly rescinding back out into the ocean. In the distance over the saltwater some gulls are flying circles through the sun. I have to shade my eyes and squint to see their graceful bodies passing into the fire, burning away, and reemerging on the opposite side of the circle, born anew. The waves break again and I imagine walking over the beach. Each step I take leaves a delicate imprint where my foot had been. I stop walking and dig my toes into the sand finding the presence of the flood, still there, but buried deep down. The cold water washes my toes and I know that the sudden shiver is divine but eternal submersion would be unbearable. As I watch the push and pull of the tide, each curl and splash, I now see the affectionate movement of the divine, coming and leaving with protective urgency, and it is then that I hear the butterfly whisper of God, almost imperceptible now, reminding me “easy, you know, does it, son.”
Works Cited
Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth. New York: Canongate, 2005. Print.
Bhagavad-Gita. Trans. Barbara Stoler Miller. New York: Bantam Dell, 1986. Print.
Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt Inc., 1943. Print.
Kazantzakis, Nikos. The Last Temptation of Christ. Trans. P.A. Bien. New York:
Scribner, 1960. Print.
“Nikos Kazantzakis” bookrags.com, Encyclopedia of World Biography, n.d. 18 Apr. 2010. Web.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Eds. David Bevington & David Scott Kastan. New York:
Bantam Dell, 2005. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. To The Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1927. Print.
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