The Last Temptation of Christ
June 8, 2020
Ethan Maurice
By: Nikos Kazantzakis Intro:
Along with many other books that winter, I read The Last Temptation of Christ in the silent, fluorescent, faded breakroom of a Flagstaff, Arizona motel. Often with only a dozen or so guests to check-in each three to eleven PM shift, there was a lot of downtime.
At the time, I was particularly feeling the weight of the path I had chosen to walk in life. This depressing motel, splitting a bedroom and rent with my in-college brother, the heaviness of winter — this innate call into the unknown I had answered with the past five years of my life, “it brought me here?” I couldn’t help but ask myself.
But the way Kazantzakis’s Jesus profoundly struggles, doubts, and ultimately overcomes in those five hundred pages… it was a molotov cocktail defiantly hucked into the waning fires of my spirit. I closed that book for the final time and looked up and suddenly loved those rusty, white-aging-to-yellow lockers on the wall, my soggy peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and all that my journey touched.
Initially, I assumed it was my situation at that moment that triggered such a powerful response in me. But well over a year later, and my eyes run across that book on my (actual) bookshelf, and I ring with this crazy emotional charge and want the whole of my path, not just the sunny side of it.
I include The Last Temptation of Christ among the best I’ve ever read.
“The Last Temptation of Christ fanned the inquisitional flames all the more, but by this time Kazantzakis—who had experienced thirty years of non-recognition and then, when recognition came, the complete misrepresentation of his aims—had learned the Nietzschean 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 Last Temptation of Christ 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 overall victory is really a succession of particular triumphs as he frees himself from the 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.”
P.A. Bien
“Judas, my brother,” the youth repeated, “the crucifier suffers more than the crucified.”
“The Lord puffs and wants to incinerate the world, and up come the snakes to make love! For a moment the old man’s mind succumbed to the enticement and wandered. But suddenly he shuddered. 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 behind the visible, sees the hidden meaning. These snakes which crept out today in front of the doors of the cell and began to hiss at precisely this moment, just after the son of Mary’s confession, must assuredly have a deep, concealed meaning. But what is that meaning?”
“Where? Toward what? They themselves did not know; all they knew was that they were suffocating.”
“The more he approached the people and perceived their anger-filled eyes and the dark, tortured fierceness of their expressions, the more his heart stirred, the more his bowels flooded with deep sympathy and love. These are the people, he reflected. They are all brothers, every one of them, but they do not know it—and that is why they suffer. If they knew it, what celebrations there would be, what hugging and kissing, what happiness!”
“Look at the faith of the birds in the air. They neither sow nor reap, and yet the Father feeds them. Consider the flowers of the earth. They do not spin or weave, but what king could ever dress in such magnificence? Do not be concerned about your body, what it will eat, what it will drink or wear. Your body was dust and will return to dust. Let your concern be for the kingdom of heaven and for your immortal soul!”
“Jesus smiled and looked into the old man’s eyes. This was not the first time he had seen rapacious jaws, the fat naps and quickly-moving eyes of the glutted. They made him shudder. These people ate, drank and laughed, thought the whole world belonged to them; they stole, danced, whored—and had not the slightest idea that they were burning in the fires of hell. It was only at rare times, in sleep, that they opened their eyes and saw… Jesus looked at the old glutton, looked at his flesh, his eyes, his fear—and once more, the truth inside him became a tale.”
“He who drinks of the water of this well will thirst again,” Jesus answered, “but he who drinks the water that I shall give him will not thirst again for all eternity.”
“The old law instructs you to honor your father and your mother; but I say, Do not imprison your heart within your parents’ home. Let it emerge and enter all homes, embrace the whole of Israel from Mount Hermon to the desert of Idumea and even beyond: east and west—the entire Universe. Our father is God, our mother is Earth. We are half soil and half sky. To honor your father and your mother means to honor Heaven and Earth.”
“Do not fear death, comrades. May it be blessed! If death did not exist, how could we reach God and remain with him forever? Truly I say to you, death holds the keys and opens the door.”
“Life on earth means: to eat bread and transform the bread into wings, to drink water and transform the water into wings. Life on earth means: the sprouting of wings.”
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