Marinos Pourgouris, Rutgers University*
In practicality the same circumstances under which Christ was born, his dark brother, the Antichrist, would be born, and he would work very much the same miracles but in order to seduce mankind.1
C. G. Jung's statement, given during his five-year-long seminar on Zarathustra, may be extended to express the parodic structure of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Out of a travesty of the Gospels Nietzsche's Antichrist is born to "seduce" mankind away from the paleontological Christian eschatology and into the new vision of the Overman. Jung called the tendency of any concept to give birth to its opposite enandiodromia.2 The same enandiodromic relationship exists between Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ3 and the story of Jesus Christ as it is revealed in the New Testament. Both Nietzsche and Kazantzakis employ a return to the historical moral arena in which the counter value-system was born. "As a historical being," writes Mircea Eliade, "man killed God, and after this assassination — this 'deicide' — he is forced to live exclusively in history."4 In myth, time is reversible: "a primordial mythical time made present."5 In other words, mythological time attempts a return back to the indeterminable epoch in which things 'originated.' The neo-historical modern era, however, is independent of the sacred mythological time, and thus a return to the moment when hierophany6 gains its meaning constitutes both a "deconstruction" and a "fixing." The death of God poses an enormous threat to life and its capacity for transcendence: The Last Man — a modern nihilist. Both The Last Temptation's and Zarathustra's return to the arena of Christian morals aims to shudder its moral foundations as well as to provide a process that overcomes the nihilist attitude of the Last Man.7
In essence, both The Last Temptation of Christ and Thus Spoke Zarathustra are statements of what we may call "historic mythologization." To clarify this point we first need to understand the relationship between myth and history as well as Nietzsche's perception of history. Similar to Nietzsche, Mircea Eliade places history before myth. "The historical event in itself," he writes, "however important, does not remain in the popular memory, nor does its recollection kindle the poetic imagination save insofar as the particular historical event closely approaches the mythical model."8 One should note at this point the importance of what Nietzsche termed "mnemotechnics" in the process of mythologization. In the second essay of his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche discusses in detail the importance of memory in the emergence of a particular morality. "If something is to stay in the memory," he writes, "it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory."9 As an intricate part of collective memory, mythology is indicative of a certain morality that reflects the value system of a particular society. However, it only "hurts" when this value system is of the strict "good vs. evil" morality.10 Nevertheless, Eliade perceives "the memory of the collective" as unhistorical: "the memory of historical events is modified, after two or three centuries, in such a way that it can enter into a mold of the archaic mentality, which cannot accept what is individual and preserves only what is exemplary. This reduction of events to categories and of individuals to archetypes, carried out by the consciousness of the popular strata in Europe almost down to our day, is performed in conformity with archaic ontology. We might say that popular memory restores to the historical personage of modern times its meaning as imitator of the archetype and reproducer of archetypal gestures...."11 The tendency to perceive history and mythology as opposites is apparent. History is irreversible and new; Mythology is primordial and "archaic." The collective memory does not preserve history-myth does. Is mythology then possible in the modern unhistorical era? Myth, one may suggest, died alongside God.
The answer to this question, however, is much more complicated. "The unhistorical," writes Nietzsche, "and the historical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people and a culture."12 The superhistoric man is bound to become a nihilist — a Last Man — since living entirely in history necessitates a life of insomnia. These historical men live a much more creative existence. According to Nietzsche, they "believe that ever more light is shed on the meaning of existence in the course of its process, and they look back to consider that process only to understand the present better and learn to desire the future more vehemently" (HfL 13). Life is "healthy, strong and fruitful only within a horizon" (HfL 10). Mythology, then, can work only as an enhancement of the present through a meaningful projection in the future. In essence, the process, which we have already labeled "historic mythologization," calls for the shift of the emphasis on the past to a constructed earthly "horizon." In such a scheme, the Overman becomes a Nietzschian hero whom we are asked to imitate. The analogy is not static: A hero becomes only in a process. Memory preserves the heroic, the greater-than-life, achievement. Zarathustra teaches the "character" of this hero, but the process can only be discovered, or better lived, by the individual.
In The Last Temptation of Christ, Kazantzakis presents us with a feeble decadent turning into a life-transcending hero. And here is the problem: Is the conceptualization of Christ as a hero possible in the Zarathustrian vision? On the surface, parody answers the question: a common (invisible) space is needed to express the enandiodromic tension. Without the notion of a Christ, that of an Antichrist would be irrelevant.13 Before observing the process through which Kazantzakis rehabilitates Jesus in The Last Temptation, let us look into Nietzsche's understanding of the Christ-type. Nietzsche clearly distinguishes between the ecclesiastical Christ and Christ the evangel. Jesus of Nazareth is a feeble existence, unable even of impulsive resistance.14 He is removed from "the sense of touch" (Antichrist 29), hates reality (Antichrist 30), and his example rests on passive "not-doings" (Antichrist 39). This conception of the evangel clashes directly with the forceful, revengeful, and crude manners of ecclesiastical Christianity. The mere existence of Christ, a "great symbolist" who "accepted only inner realities as realities, as 'truths'" (thus dissolving everything "natural, temporal, spatial, historical" into mere signs), contradicts the ecclesiastical concepts of "god as person" and the "kingdom of heaven."15 For Nietzsche, the hierophanic presence of Christ represents the feeling itself that enters the "overall feeling of the transfiguration of all things (blessedness)" (Antichrist 34). This hierophany is precisely what the nirvana-seeker concept of Christ is fighting against. Nietzsche finds in this distinction between Jesus and the Church an ironic opposition: "Mankind lies on its knees before the opposite of that which was the origin, the meaning, the right of the evangel; in the concept of 'church' it has pronounced holy precisely what the 'bringer of the glad tidings' felt to be beneath and behind himself — one would look in vain for a greater example of world-historic-irony" (Antichrist 36). The focus of Nietzsche's condemnation of Christianity is the ecclesiastical derivation from the evangelical Christ. "I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered" (Antichrist 62; my emphasis). His understanding of Jesus' type is nonetheless one of a "typical decadent" (Antichrist 30).
The question still remains: Is it possible to make a hero out of Jesus? In Eliade's concept of the mythological function as an imitation of a heroic model,16 Jesus' life becomes a paradigmatic representation. Similarly, Nietzsche acknowledges the life of Christ as an indication of how to live. "This 'bringer of glad tidings'," he writes, "died as he had lived, as he had taught — not to 'redeem men' but to show how one must live" (Antichrist 35). Understanding Jesus in such a mythological frame, however, confronts us with a dangerous predicament: To perceive Jesus as a hero is for Nietzsche no less than 'idiotic': "M. Renan,17 that buffoon in psychologicis, has introduced the two most inappropriate concepts possible into his explanation of the Jesus type: the concept of genius and the concept of the hero ('héros'). But if anything is unevangelical it is the concept of the hero. Just the opposite of all wrestling, of all feeling-oneself-in-a-struggle, has here become instinct: the incapacity for resistance becomes morality here ('resist not evil'-the most profound word of the Gospels, their key in a certain sense), blessedness in peace, in gentleness, in not being able to be an enemy .... Jesus definitely presumes nothing for himself alone-and as the child of God everyone is equal to everyone. To make a hero of Jesus!" (Antichrist 29). The definition of the "hero" in Nietzsche becomes clear: A "hero" is one who engages in life-transcending contests. A heroic life is an individual existence that struggles toward the Overman. Unavoidably, it is an existence that necessitates earthly and bodily action.
Nietzsche's attitude toward the "hero" also reveals his perception of "mythology" as a function. On the one hand, it becomes a term similar to 'fiction,' therefore distancing itself from anything of real or historical value. On the other hand, mythology may be seen as the springboard for life's transcendence. It is the ability to unveil something greater than the nihilist tendencies that prevailed after God's death. This process implies the mythological function that underlines the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche attempts to redefine what is valuable in The Birth of Tragedy in precisely its transcending capacity: "Hellenism and Pessimism would have been a less ambiguous title-suggesting the first instruction about how the Greeks got over their pessimism, how they overcame it."18 It is precisely in his inability to overcome pessimism that Christ becomes an anti-hero in Nietzsche's mind. After all, the hero is defined in action and not in his "ideal" (or idealized) existence (Ecce Homo: "Birth of Tragedy" 2).
In his Last Temptation, Nikos Kazantzakis dares to transform this Nietzschian anti-hero into a mouthpiece of Zarathustrian principles. To examine the validity of the Christ-Hero concept and the transubstantiation of Christ into a Nietzschian Antichrist, I suggest the heroic model as described by the mythologist Joseph Campbell. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell magnifies the "separation-initiation-return" formula to represent the "nuclear unit of the monomyth": "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."19 Can the figure of Christ as it appears in the New Testament be perceived as a hero in this Campbellian model? Since he represents the hierophanic manifestation of the thing itself, he ventures forth from the uncommon day world of the divine and into a region of the common (namely, the earthly). Eventually, he returns to the same divine world. Any attempt to understand this journey as educational or life transcending is literally sacrilege since it violates the dogma of Christ's divinity. Christ was the "savior" from the moment of his birth. Furthermore, the transcending process of the heroic journey is manifested in the hero's power, upon his return, "to bestow boons on his fellow man." Christ begins as a bestower of boons and ends as such. The narrative frame of his life begins with his magical birth and ends with his equally magical resurrection.20 The interval part of Christ's life, the journey, is indeed one of supernatural wonder not much different from the sort of wonder we find at its beginning and its end (namely the heavenly utopia). But we have so far attempted an application of the heroic model on the ecclesiastical Christ. Is an application of the same model to Christ the evangel possible? The project fails dramatically merely in front of the evangel's decadent inertia.
"The dual substance of Christ," begins Nikos Kazantzakis's Last Temptation"-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." Kazantzakis's Christ is introduced in the novel as a mortal man. His "dual substance" is by no means a state but rather a process. In fact, the relationship between man and God is nothing but a "yearning"; divinity is constantly sought but never attained. What is emphasized is not Christ's glorious telos but rather "his bloody tracks" (LT 2). The Last Temptation ends with the crucified Christ in order to stress his ephemeral nature as a historical being. As the story is not concerned with a magical birth, it is equally indifferent to the concept of the bodily resurrection. "In truth," writes Nietzsche, "there was only one Christian and he died on the cross." What we return to, then, is the historicity of Christ and the redefinition or the fixing of his evangelion.
In Zarathustra, the heroic frame is presented through the metaphor of the tightrope walker at the beginning of the first part: "Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman-a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under."21 What should be stressed here is Nietzsche's dialectical treatment of the metaphor. Man is a rope and always remains a rope. He is, as Nietzsche emphasizes, "a bridge"-a process-and "not an end." Indeed, as we have already discussed, it is the process that makes the hero-the adventurous space between his departure and his return. The tightrope walker departs from one tower and struggles over the rope until he reaches the second tower. He stands firmly only on the towers, but what defines him as a "skillful" or a "clumsy" acrobat is the walk. The "fabulous forces" that this Nietzschian hero must encounter are the "spirit of gravity," the "nausea," and the figure of the "jester." The role of the jester is essential in this heroic model. We have already discussed Eliade's conception of myth as a "faithful repetition" of paradigmatic models and applied this vision to the process of the Overman.22 The heroic adventure is reserved only for strong spirits. The heroic process focuses, on the one hand, on the individual quest of the hero, but on the other it requires a collective attitude of a heroic aristocracy whose will transcends life. If the boundaries of the heroic must be laid out-and they are laid out in Thus Spoke Zarathustra — they must encompass within them the most worthy arena in which the human spirit can struggle.
It is within these Zarathustrian heroic boundaries that the Kazantzakian Christ struggles. He is introduced to us around the age of thirty. Evidently, he is precisely at the same age as Zarathustra, as well as the biblical Christ, when he detaches himself from the world of the "common." Unlike the evangel, however, he is described as a feeble quivering carpenter in Nazareth. His fear of resistance (against both the Romans and the Judaic moral structure) is such that he resolves to making crosses to crucify the various rebel-Messiahs that preach the end of Roman rule. Kazantzakis restores Jesus, at the opening of the work, to the historic Nietzschian perception of his decadent anti-heroism. Indeed, he makes a mockery of Jesus in the same manner that Nietzsche attacks Ernest Renan's poor illustration of Jesus as a hero. However, this weakness is precisely what will later turn the "metamorphosed" Jesus of The Last Temptation into a life-transcending hero. The function of the transformation is apparent: only out of a mortal can a hero be born; only out of the decadent may a new spirit evolve.
Ironically, the voice that announces Jesus' pitiful image, and that later awakens him from this litharge, is no one else's than that of the Antichristian figure of Judas the Iscariot: "You're a coward, a good-for-nothing traitor ..." (LT 24). The transition of the hero to the realm of adventure requires the appearance of a herald. "The familiar life horizon has been outgrown," writes Campbell, "the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand." 23 In the Kazantzakian philosophy, a similar concept awakens man from his lethargy: "1. But suddenly a convulsive cry tears through me: 'Help me!' Who calls? 2. Gather your strength and listen; the whole heart of man is a single outcry. Lean against your breast to hear it; someone is struggling and shouting within you.... 9. This is the moment of greatest crisis. This is the signal for the March to begin. If you do not hear this Cry tearing at your entrails, do not set out."24 The role of the "herald" who delivers this "convulsive Cry" in The Last Temptation is performed by Judas. Jesus will then isolate himself in the desert in order to discern this call. The "desert" becomes the holy ground where the spirit struggles to unite the fragmentary human wills into one creative Will to power. "It was ever in the desert," writes Nietzsche, "that the truthful have dwelt, the free spirits, as masters of the desert."25 Once more, the desert becomes the process through which the Hero must struggle and transcend himself. Like Zarathustra, Kazantzakis's Christ isolates himself before beginning his teachings: in that "wilderness" the seed of the Overman is laid. This isolation also works as a parodic reconstruction of Christ's forty-day isolation in the desert in the Gospels. But how can god struggle with his 'perfect' spirit? The three temptations posted by the Devil are overcome with great ease and in accordance with the passive attitude of the evangel.
The Kazantzakian Christ transcends his spirit in the wilderness. The process is strikingly similar to Zarathustra's perception of the three metamorphoses of man's spirit. In other words, in order to deconstruct and then reconstruct the desert episode of the gospels, the three temptations of the Bible are replaced with those described in Zarathustra's "Three Metamorphoses." In Nietzsche, the spirit becomes a camel; the camel a lion; and the lion, finally, a child."26 In The Last Temptation, Jesus is given each stage as a resolution-a telos. In other words, he is tempted to remain in one of the first two stages or to make a third, more luring, but equally decadent, choice.27 The first temptation that comes to struggle with Jesus' spirit is a serpent28: "The serpent had now pressed its hard, cool, round breast against Jesus' own and was sliding slowly, tortuously, wrapping itself around him. Jesus grew pale, closed his eyes, saw Magdalene's firm, high-rumped body wriggling along the shores of Lake Gennesaret, saw her gaze toward the river Jordan and sigh. She extended her hand-she was seeking him; and her bosom was filled with children: his own. He had only to twitch the corner of his eye, to give a sign, and all at once: what happiness! How his life would change, sweeten, become more human!" (LT 257).
The spirit is asked to carry the placid burden of a common life. In its best capacity, the camel-spirit is able to withstand a lot without buckling, most of all life's burden, but it always remains a slave. The common space between Kazantzakis's serpent temptation and Nietzsche's camel-spirit lies in their inability to transcend life. No matter how great the capacity of the camel, the choice is still easy: the spirit becomes a slave of the morality that loads it. The point is made clear when this temptation returns to haunt the crucified Jesus in a dream. He will make the camel/serpent choice in his dream in a spirit that "renounces and is reverent" until this vision of slave-conformity turns into a nightmare that awakens him on the cross. The human tragedy of Jesus ends joyfully in his utterance "It is accomplished."
The second metamorphosis in Zarathustra is that into the lion: the enslaved camel now becomes a conquering lion. In The Last Temptation, the vision of the "domestic" serpent is also replaced with the vision of the lion. Confronted with this majestic vision, Jesus asks, "Who are you?" and the Lion answers: "Yourself-the hungry lion inside your heart and loins that at night prowls around the sheepfolds, the kingdoms of this world, and weighs whether or not to jump in and eat. I rush from Babylon to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to Alexandria, from Alexandria to Rome, shouting: I am hungry; everything is mine!" (LT 260). In Zarathustra's "Three Metamorphoses," the camel obeys the moral command of "thou shalt," but the lion, the narrator says, is needed for "the creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred 'NO'...."29 In Kazantzakis, with the appearance of the lion, Jesus feels "his heart grown more and more ferocious" (LT 261). He is fed up with the camel-like humility, with offering the other cheek, and with being gentle. Maddened, he gets up and girds himself "interminably with an invisible sword." The feeble biblical representation of Jesus becomes, through a second temptation, a ferocious lion-like warrior. He now wants to conquer the "four kingdoms"30 of the earth. Soon, however, the vision of the lion also collapses and the four kingdoms "become four handfuls of ashes" (LT 262). The "sacred 'No'" and the "I will" also become concepts of dependence. The lion now depends on the prey; it becomes the hunter but also the hunted. Christ has turned from decadent inertia to paralyzing anger and conscious self-interest.
A last, a more creative metamorphosis is needed to overcome the lion's anger and dependence. Zarathustra teaches the transformation of the lion into a child: "For the game of creation ... a sacred 'Yes' is needed."31 The child-spirit wills its own will. It enjoys an impulsive (self-propelled) creative process, innocence, and forgetfulness. In The Last Temptation the will of the child is misinterpreted into a temptation. The concept is interesting: As Jesus awakens from the vision of the lion, a dazzling light blinds him and a voice is heard: "Do you remember when you where a small child still unable to walk, you clung to the door of your house and to your mother's clothes so that you would not fall, and shouted within yourself, shouted loudly, 'God, make me God! God, make me God! God, make me God!" (262-63). The voice goes on to make a stunning proposal to Jesus. I can make you a god! And even more, "the son of God!" The parody is apparent. Kazantzakis manipulates the power of transcendence that the child-spirit has in order to present the vast dichotomy, which Nietzsche had already exposed, between Christ the evangel and the ecclesiastical Christ. The misapplication here resembles a teleological misperception of the Overman. The Kazantzakian Christ always struggles within the earthly arena. The proposal represents a union with what his spirit is striving toward. The problem, of course, lies within the static understanding of a telos. Both Nietzsche and Kazantzakis stress the importance of the "yearning" and the "bridge" in conceptualizing the New Christ and the Overman.
Unlike the Christian institutions that corrupted and misinterpreted the teachings of Christ, Nietzsche's view of Christ as a nihilist who, nevertheless, made a choice of an ideology suggests, to say the least, a possibility for the rehabilitation of Jesus' image. Such an understanding could only be achieved through a deconstruction and a historic remythologization of the figure. Christ becomes an example of a struggling man, as Zarathustra becomes the prophet of the "Struggling Man" concept. Ironically, Kazantzakis's attempt in The Last Temptation is to turn Christ into a Zarathustrian disciple. Interestingly, both Zarathustra and Christ remain alone, without disciples, at the conclusion of their journey. It is their destiny to remain alone. It is the comic aspect of the tragedy-the sacred "Yes"-that finds one nailed on the cross uttering triumphantly "It is accomplished" and the other leaving the cave with his disciples behind "glowing and strong as a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains."
* This article is dedicated to Walter Sokel.
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Notes
1. Carl Gustav Jung, Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra, ed. James Jarrett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) 12-13.
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2. The word was originally used by Heraclitus.
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3. Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, trans. from the Greek by P. A. Bien (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation LT.
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4. Mircea Eliade, The Quest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969) 48.
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5. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. from the French by Willard Trask (New York: A Harvest Book, 1959) 68.
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6. The term is proposed by Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane to express that "something sacred shows itself to us" (11). I find the word appropriate to express the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.
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7. I include a brief synopsis of Nietzsche's influence on Kazantzakis's thought to familiarize the reader with the concepts I will be discussing: In his autobiographical work Report to Greco (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), Kazantzakis (1883-1957) presents Nietzsche and Bergson as the two greatest philosophical influences of his life. (Bergson was Kazantzakis's teacher when he was studying at the Sorbonne in France.) Kazantzakis wrote his doctoral dissertation in France (1909), entitled "Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Justice." "Nietzsche enriched me with new agonies," he writes, "and taught me to transubstantiate misery, bitterness, and uncertainty into pride" (Report to Greco 445; my trans.). The influence of Nietzsche on his work is clear from the production of his first theatrical plays in Athens, but it becomes evident with the publication of Zorba the Greek. (A more appropriate translation is "The Life and Works of Alexis Zorba." As Peter Bien has suggested, Zorba is presented as a Dionysian celebration of life placed next to his Apollonian writer-boss). The Last Temptation of Christ was finished in 1951 and was first published in German because of apparent difficulties in finding a Greek publisher. The Greek Holy Synod attempted Kazantzakis's prosecution on the count of blasphemy (before the book was published in Greek). In 1954, The Last Temptation was placed on the index of forbidden books. Kazantzakis celebrated Nietzsche's birthday every year (in a parallel tradition to that of the martyr-day celebration in Orthodox Christianity).
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8. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) 42.
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9. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) Genealogy II, 3. Subsequent references to both works are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by chapter and aphorism unless otherwise noted.
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10. The complex cosmic mythology of ancient Greece presented itself as an all-encompassing impulsive projection of the human psyche.
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11. Mircea Eliade, The Myth 44.
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12. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980) 10. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation HfL.
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13. Nietzsche acknowledges the importance of the Judeo-Christian decadent values in the creation of a stronger and healthier society whose exposure to this "sickness" creates the necessary antibodies.
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14. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York : Penguin, 1976) aphorism 29 and 35. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by aphorism.
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15. "The 'kingdom of heaven'," writes Nietzsche, "is a state of the heart-not something that is to come 'above the earth' or 'after death'." The Antichrist 34.
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16. See The Sacred and the Profane 97-98.
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17. Ernest Renan (1823-1892). Nietzsche apparently refers to Renan's Vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus).
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18. Ecce Homo: "The Birth of Tragedy" 1. They overcame it of course to a great extent through the staging of tragedies.
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19. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon, 1961) 30. In an explanatory note, Campbell attributes the word monomyth to James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.
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20. In fact, the two events represent the core of Christian celebrations: Christmas and Easter.
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21. Prologue, aphorism 4. In The Portable Nietzsche p. 126-27.
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22. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred 99.
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23. Campbell 51.
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24. Nikos Kazantzakis, Spiritual Exercises, trans. Kimon Friar (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960; rpt. 1982) 64. The Spiritual Exercises is Kazantzakis's only explicitly philosophical work. Often, his novels deal with an application of the concepts he explains in this work.
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25.In The Portable Nietzsche 215.
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26. The Portable Nietzsche 137. Subsequent references to the three metamorphoses are quoted from this aphorism.
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27. The Zarathustrian transformation into a child takes a slightly different meaning in Kazantzakis. As I will discuss later, the third temptation misuses the child-spirit to tempt Jesus.
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28. In using a serpent instead of the Zarathustrian camel, Kazantzakis aims to draw an association between this temptation and Jesus' desire for Mary Magdalene, who is continuously associated with the serpent in the novel. In essence, Jesus overcomes his biblical nature by being able to desire a woman.
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29. In The Portable Nietzsche 139.
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30. That is, Babylon, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Rome.
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31. In The Portable Nietzsche 139.
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