The Last Temptation of Christ

The spine is required. The carpenter who makes crosses for the Romans, the call he resists, the ministry, Judas’s commission, the cross, the vision and the waking: take any one away and the argument breaks. Without the vision there is no last temptation; without the commission the vision has no accuser when the old disciples come. What fails the subtractive test is repetition, and it holds the axis lowest of the twelve. The torment of a God who will not let him go is restated through the first third; the wanderings rehearse a conflict the prologue has already named; the disciples’ quarrels return in scenes whose work was done once; the narration states what a scene has just shown. Something near a fifth, mostly in the first half, could go without losing a turn. It stands just above the cap because the long approach is the weight the vision must lift: weariness with the torment is what makes the offered peace plausible.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. The hardest temptation is not to sin but to be good in the ordinary way, to marry, work, raise children and grow old, and a man reaches the divine only by refusing that happiness, at a cost others pay: Magdalene, his mother, the children he does not have. The vision makes this felt rather than asserted. The life on offer is not a fall but a decent life, and the angel who leads him to it is the tempter. Beside it stands a second disclosure, sharp and lasting: that a faith is made by its scribes and its apostle out of a life they do not need, as Paul in the vision preaches the risen Christ to the man who did not die and has no use for him. Both truths hold without the author’s metaphysic. Where the metaphysic of spirit ascending through matter, announced in the prologue and enforced by the narration, takes their place, it costs: as creed it does not hold, and the women are its instruments.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Elevation is frequent and of both kinds. The dreadful: a Zealot crucified on a cross the young carpenter has made; Lazarus raised as a rotting body brought back; the crucifixion itself. The warm: Magdalene’s house; the Baptist at the Jordan; the slow sweetness of the vision, years passing in a village; and the end, the waking on the cross to find he has not betrayed, and the last cry, which the narration takes as a beginning rather than an end. Between them, the old disciples arriving at the deathbed as Jerusalem burns is the book’s grandest scene. What holds the axis here is the register. It is ecstatic almost throughout, blood, sun, flesh and the cry, so that elevation becomes the book’s resting pitch and loses height by constancy, and some of it is reached by rhetoric rather than by event.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Myth built, not evoked, and built by bending the oldest myth of the West at its points of stress. The carpenter makes the occupier’s crosses, so that the instrument of his end is his trade. Judas, red-bearded and the strongest of the twelve, is charged by Jesus to betray him, and the archetypal traitor becomes the one who obeys hardest. Magdalene, the woman he refused, falls because of his refusal, so that his calling has a victim from the first. The temptation in the wilderness is moved to the cross and made a temptation by goodness, with Satan as a child angel. And the vision is a myth built inside the old one: a whole life in the space of a swoon. Each bend carries the plot; none is allusion. The particular stays particular: the shop and its shavings, Zebedee’s boats, the queue at Magdala. Held off the very top because the figures lean to allegory, Judas the deed, Peter the weak heart, Matthew the scribe, and because the archetype arrives from the Gospels at full strength before the book bends it.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The inheritance is the Gospels and Orthodox Christology, and the modern novel of the human Jesus: Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1863); George Moore’s The Brook Kerith (1916), in which Jesus survives the cross and lives on as a shepherd; D. H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died (1929), in which he survives and lies with a priestess of Isis. The human Christ, and a life after the cross with a woman, were not new in 1955. The turn is in placement. Kazantzakis keeps the Gospel outcome and makes the other life a temptation dreamed on the cross and refused, so that the heresy is lived inside an orthodox ending and the cross is chosen, not suffered; and he gives Judas the commission. The stake was real and paid: a novelist past seventy put his standing in his own church and country on the book. Held below the summit bar because the life with a woman belongs to Moore and Lawrence, and the obedient Judas had precedent, in Borges’s “Tres versiones de Judas” (1944) and the Gnostic tradition: the swerve is of arrangement more than of invention.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The life is told in order, and it ends in a vision that the reader takes for the narrative until the waking. Because the vision is told in the same realist manner as the ministry, chapter after chapter and year after year, the reader lives the temptation as Jesus does, accepts its reality, and loses it with him on the cross. Announce the vision as a vision and the book no longer knows how plausible, and how good, the refused life is. The prologue, in the author’s voice, frames the whole as one man’s spiritual exercise, so that the form is offered to the reader as the struggle it describes. Held where it is because before the vision the form is mostly a container: a sequence of Gospel episodes retold in an order the Gospels gave, whose shape another telling could carry. The instrument works fully in the last tenth, and the rest of the book is built to make it work.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: seventy years of argument have not closed the book. Theologians have read it both as heresy and as a deep orthodoxy of kenosis, a Christ who empties himself and must choose the cross as a man. The critics of Kazantzakis, Peter Bien chief among them in English, have read it through Bergson, Nietzsche and Ασκητική (The Saviors of God, 1927). And the text keeps its questions open: whether the vision is Satan’s deceit or God’s last trial; whether Judas is the most faithful of the twelve or simply used; whether the final cry is Christian victory or the author’s ascent of spirit. Held a step down because the author answers much himself, in the prologue and in narration that names the struggle as it happens; because the criticism is concentrated in a narrow field, and much of the controversy rereads the scandal more than the text; and because the book yields its force on the first reading more than on return.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The field is Greek prose fiction of the twentieth century and, as the book entered it in translation, the European novel of its decade, with the novel of Christ as the narrower field. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book made the inner life of a Christ tempted not by evil but by happiness the substance of a novel, written from a sensibility formed by Nietzsche, Bergson and Orthodox monasticism. It did not reorganise how novels are made, and Greek fiction after it largely went other ways; that holds the axis below the summit bar. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Zorba the book carried the modern Greek novel to readers abroad, and its premise and its figure of a Christ tempted by happiness were taken whole by Martin Scorsese’s film of 1988. Much of its fame runs through that film and through the scandals around the book and the film, which are presence rather than influence; the line often drawn to later novels of Jesus, Saramago’s and Mailer’s, is asserted more than documented and is not counted.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as its author published it in 1955; nothing is lost or assembled, and there is nothing to charge. Presence: seventy-one years of continuous print in Greek and, since 1960, in Bien’s English, with translation into many languages; steady reading in Greece, where Kazantzakis is a national author; renewed reading abroad after 1988. Fabric: its surface is not fixed to the 1950s, since its matter is first-century Galilee and a perennial theology. Held at the foot of the figure its span can show, not above it: part of its presence is borrowed from scandal and from the film, and fame is presence, not proof; outside Greece it is read more than taught; and its standing among Kazantzakis’s books rests partly on its notoriety.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Kazantzakis’s Greek as far as it can be judged here. Its sound, and its demotic vocabulary, are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged; what is judged survives any translation. The command of the set scene is strong: the Zealot’s crucifixion in Nazareth, Magdala, the Baptist, the monastery in the desert, the supper, the cross. Galilee is rendered through the senses, sweat, wood, fish and light, so that the sacred stands in a world of bodies. The making is load-bearing in the vision, which must be told without a seam, and is. Charged, and in the design rather than in any rendering: the characters speak in one voice, the author’s; the narration explains what scenes have shown; the exclamatory pitch flattens contrast; and the construction before the vision is episodic.

Score: 7.8 / 10

One law governs the book: the divine is achieved in struggle, by spirit refusing the flesh it loves, and every rest is a temptation. Take the two most distant elements: the disciples’ comic bickering over places in the kingdom, and the crucifixion. Both measure how far each man is from that refusal. The queue at Magdalene’s door and the desert monastery are flesh and the ascetic flight from it, both found wanting. The vision’s domestic years and Jerusalem burning are the good life and the history it ignores. The range is wide, from comedy and the brothel to theology and apocalypse, and it holds under the one law. Charged: the law is sometimes enforced by the narrator rather than borne by events; and the book’s ironic view of scripture, a gospel made by its writer and a Christ made by his apostle, sits uneasily beside its own visionary claim, a tension between demystifying and mystic registers that the book does not resolve.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Held, through one man, and integrated rather than listed. Consciousness: Jesus’s torment and Judas’s, and the long interior of the vision. The family: Mary his mother and her grief that her son will not marry, Zebedee’s household, the vision’s marriage and children. Labour: the carpenter’s bench, the fishermen’s boats. The state: Rome and its centurion, the Zealots, the priests and the Sanhedrin, crucifixion as policy. History: occupation and insurrection, and the fall of Jerusalem in the vision. The sacred: the axis of the whole. The natural order: the desert, the lake, the seasons the vision passes through. The joining is the achievement: the cross is at once a trade, a state’s instrument and the centre of the sacred. What holds the axis here is that the social and political orders are figures in the spiritual drama more than agents in their own right, and much of the world beyond Jesus passes as allegory.

Score: 8.3 / 10