(2005)
Clergy and laity alike have denounced Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel, The Last Temptation of Christ. When it first appeared, the Greek Orthodox Church condemned it, the Vatican placed it on its Index of Forbidden Texts, and conservative-evangelicals around the world protested its allegedly blasphemous portrayal of a human, struggling Messiah who “succumbs” to the devil's final snare while on the Cross: the temptation to happiness. Assuredly, the sentiments surrounding this novel, at least in the first thirty years or so, were very strong. When Martin Scorsese decided in the early 1980s to adapt The Last Temptation of Christ for the silver screen, even stronger feelings were expressed. After fifty years, however, the time seems right to re-examine the novel, the man, and the film, locating Kazantzakis and his work within an important debate about the relationship between religion and art (literary and cinematic).
Darren J. N. Middleton’s volume contains original essays by Martin Scorsese, the film critic Peter Chattaway, and Kazantzakis’s translator, Peter A. Bien.
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church times (27 december 2006)
“Middleton reminds us that compelling storytelling — such as Kazantzakis’s novel about Jesus’s being tempted on the cross to renounce his calling and get married — is likely to incite others. Hence the hostile reception the book and the film received. The Last Temptation of Christ was rectifying an imbalance between Jesus’s divinity and his “pale Galilean” humanity. ‘My principal anguish, and the wellspring of all my joys and sorrows, has been the incessant merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh,’ Kazantzakis writes. As several authors here acknowledge, Kazantzakis’s starting point is the Chalcedonian Definition’s Platonic dualism, divine and human initially being separate entities. Daniel Dombrowski argues that Kazantzakis graduates towards a one-nature Jesus, a contemporary form of Monophysitism. Others, such as Lloyd Baugh, believe that Martin Scorsese, the director, reduces theological understandings of Jesus to anthropology. The ambivalence we have about our flesh — particularly sexuality — is noted by Peter Chattaway, a film critic. Other chapters take up the quest for the historical Jesus, identifying the sources that Kazantzakis drew upon (Ernest Renan’s 1863 life of Jesus among others), as well as philosophical influences. The most interesting chapter is by Pamela Francis, who distances herself from Western thinking by examining Gregory of Nyssa’s concept of epektasis. Our flesh, which is by no means evil, is always stretching to attain further goodness, until finally it reaches its goal, deification. Kazantzakis, though, makes no mention of any pre-existent state of divinity. Does that make him a heretic, or a partner in theological conversation?”