(1996)
It is often assumed that Nikos Kazantzakis's religious views were unorthodox and heretical, and therefore unworthy of a place in the history of Christian thought. We may see it as a part of a wider, Christian faith still in the making. Unlike so many studies of Kazantzakis, God's Struggler is a carefully planned attempt to argue that while Kazantzakis occupied the so-called borderlands between belief and unbelief throughout much of his life, he nonetheless was possessed with an intense awareness of the sacred. His spiritual roots ran deep. He struggled with received theological wisdom, inherited ideas about the divine, and sought to bring new life to timeworn religious notions. He wrestled with God.
Contributors include: Michael Antonakes; John S. Bak; Peter Bien; Demetrios J. Constantelos; Jerry H. Gill; Ann M. Pederson; and, others.
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Literature and theology 12.1 (1998)
“God’s Struggler offers an intricate analysis, within philosophical parameters, of the major religious themes in the work of Nikos Kazantzakis. It compares process with stasis, oneness with plurality, free will with predestination, spirit with materiality, a hero with a saint, death as ‘God’s kiss on man’ with death as the eternal abyss, and existentialism with cosmic universality. The eleven essays included in this volume reveal depth and inventiveness; if these binaries sound a trifle over-schematic, this is perhaps inevitable in a volume dedicated to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment readings of religious and cosmic systems in Kazantzakis’s work. While the book’s epicentre could be described variously in terms of Christology, pneumatology, soteriology or eschatology, the more specific focus is on Kazantzakis as provocateur of Christianity, since God for him is far from an immutable, static perfection. Polyphony dominates in the collection. The holy texts, the ecclesiastical fathers, Luther, Darwin, Bergson, Kierkegaard, Jung and Whitehead generate some of the primary arguments here, reflecting the widely pendulous thought of its subject, which swings from Buddha to Saint Francis, from Christianity to communism and from St. John of the Cross to Nietzsche.”