Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957)
Kazantzakis is the modern Greek writer in whom philosophy and fiction refuse to separate. He wrote the novels the world knows — Zorba the Greek, The Last Temptation of Christ, Christ Recrucified, Freedom or Death, and the 33,333-line Odyssey: A Modern Sequel — but before any of them he wrote philosophy, translated Nietzsche and Bergson, and produced in 1927 a small prose-poem called Ascesis / The Saviors of God that is probably the most condensed Nietzschean-mystical text of the twentieth century. The novels are the public face; the philosophy is what the novels are about.
He was born on Crete in 1883, while the island was still under Ottoman rule, in a world where the question of whether Greeks would survive as Greeks was still open. That context stayed with him. His whole career is an attempt to answer one question: what does a human being make of itself when the old gods — Orthodoxy, classical Hellenism, Marxism, Nietzschean atheism — have all been lived through and none of them is enough?
The Two Philosophies
Two nineteenth-century philosophers shaped him more than anyone else.
Nietzsche arrived first. As a young doctoral student in Paris from 1907 to 1909, Kazantzakis wrote his dissertation on [[friedrich-nietzsche-on-the-philosophy-of-right-and-the-state|Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State]] — the first serious Greek-language reception of Nietzsche and still one of the clearest short expositions of the will-to-power politics. What he absorbed: the diagnosis of European modernity as nihilism, the critique of Judeo-Christian slave morality, the ideal of the Übermensch as the human being who creates earthly values from strength, the eternal recurrence as the final test of life-affirmation. The “Cretan glance” — Kazantzakis’s phrase for the heroic gaze that meets the abyss without flinching and without consolation — is the Dionysian attitude in Cretan dress.
Bergson arrived second. Kazantzakis attended Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France and later translated him. From Bergson he took the élan vital — the upward-striving creative life-force pushing against the inertia of matter — and welded it onto Nietzsche’s will to power. The synthesis: life is the unending struggle of Spirit against Matter, of the upward drive against the downward pull, and the heroic human being is the one who sides with the ascent.
That synthesis produced Ascesis (Saviors of God, written 1922–23, published 1927), the metaphysical skeleton of everything that followed. The short book claims that God is not a being above us but a struggling will within us — a force calling to be transfigured, and depending on us to be saved. “We are weak,” Kazantzakis writes, “we are nothing — yet a mystical power greater than ourselves uses us, greater than we can bear.” The human task is not to worship God but to save God — by taking matter and pushing it toward Spirit, at the cost of our own comfort, sanity, and sometimes life.
The Novels as Philosophy
Once Ascesis is in place, the novels read as applications.
Zorba in Zorba the Greek (1946) is Bergson’s élan vital given human form — the man who dances even when the coal mine collapses, who knows all the philosophers only in order to throw them away in favor of the body, who refuses to let his freedom be diminished by history, tragedy, or age. The narrator — the bookish philosopher — is the intellectual who has to learn, humiliatingly, that his books have only half the answer.
Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ (1955) is the most Nietzschean reading of the Gospels anyone has attempted without calling it that. Kazantzakis’s Jesus is a man violently torn between the ascetic ideal (the dove of God, the demand of sacrifice) and the will to life (a family, children, the ordinary joy of being human). On the cross, he is given one last dream — what if he had chosen the other path? The dream unfolds. It is sweet, it is human, it is everything he renounced. He wakes to find himself still on the cross. “It is accomplished.” The whole novel is the rewriting of Christ as a Nietzschean-Bergsonian self-overcomer whose final act is not the martyrdom of the ascetic ideal but the conquest of the temptation of ordinary life by the ascetic ideal — freely chosen, for the first time. The Vatican put the book on the Index.
Odysseus in Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938) is Kazantzakis’s Übermensch — the hero who, having come home to Ithaca, discovers that home is not enough, sails away again, outlives every civilization he passes through, and finally dies at the South Pole, singing. Thirty-three thousand lines in seventeen-syllable verse. It is the most extreme thing he wrote.
Captain Michalis in Freedom or Death (1950) is the Cretan hero dying for a freedom that has no guarantee of succeeding. The title is the Cretan slogan against the Ottomans. It is also the Bergsonian-Nietzschean ethical demand.
Why He Matters
Kazantzakis matters because he is the writer who takes the post-Christian philosophical crisis absolutely seriously without choosing either nihilism or a return to faith. The European twentieth century spent enormous energy on the question of what comes after Christianity. Nietzsche diagnosed the collapse. Sartre built an ethics of freedom in the vacuum. Camus proposed lucid revolt. Kazantzakis proposed something stranger: a mysticism without a God, a religious attitude directed toward an entity that does not yet exist and that it is the human task to help into existence. This was heresy to the Church and eccentricity to the philosophers. It is also the most fully realized imaginative response to the dead-God situation that modern literature has produced.
He matters, second, because he is the literary bridge between Nietzschean philosophy and the European novel. Mann is the other candidate for that role, and Mann is the greater prose stylist, but Kazantzakis is the more philosophically explicit. A reader who wants to see what Nietzsche’s diagnoses look like when a novelist has lived inside them for forty years reads Kazantzakis.
Third, he is one of the writers who reminds the reader that modern Greece is part of Europe’s philosophical conversation. Too often Greek literature gets folded into the Ottoman-to-present political narrative. Kazantzakis belongs in the same room as Mann, Sartre, Camus, and Malraux.
Style
A peculiar blend of philosophical declaration and folkloric Cretan earthiness. His Greek is a deliberate synthesis of demotic peasant speech and neologistic compound coinages of his own invention. English translation loses half of it. The prose rhythm is lyric and declarative, unafraid of grandeur, and not always modernist in temper — Kazantzakis is often closer to Homer, to the Orthodox liturgy, or to the ballad tradition than to Joyce. Some readers find the register exhausting. Others never read anything else.
Works on This Site
- Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State (1909) — the doctoral dissertation; the intellectual foundation of everything that came after.
Novels not yet on the EN side: Zorba the Greek (1946), The Last Temptation of Christ (1955), Christ Recrucified (1954), Freedom or Death (1950), Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938), Ascesis / The Saviors of God (1927), Report to Greco (1961, autobiographical).
Connections
- Nietzsche — the foundational teacher. The dissertation is Kazantzakis’s systematic exposition; the whole novelistic corpus is Kazantzakis’s application. The Übermensch, the will to power, the eternal recurrence, the ascetic ideal as problem — all are the Nietzschean vocabulary of Kazantzakis’s fiction.
- Schopenhauer — the predecessor Kazantzakis inherits through Nietzsche. The pessimism of the Will is present in Ascesis, but it is always overcome by the élan vital.
- Sartre — the contemporary on the other side. Both start from the death of God; Sartre builds existentialist ethics, Kazantzakis builds a heretical mysticism. The student in Sartre’s humanism lecture is the modern problem Kazantzakis’s novels also address — what do you do, knowing there is no guidance and the choice must be yours?
- Dostoevsky — a great admiration. Kazantzakis read Dostoevsky obsessively; the Christ of The Last Temptation is in some sense an answer to the Christ of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.
- Mann — the parallel great-European twentieth-century novelist-philosopher. Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation are, from opposite ends of Europe, both meditations on the Nietzschean problem.
Lineage
- Predecessors: Nietzsche (the philosophical spine); Bergson (élan vital — the creative life force); Schopenhauer (the pessimism inherited and overcome); Homer (the Odyssey’s shape and meter); Cretan folk tradition (the demotic register, the heroic ethos); Orthodoxy (the liturgical rhythms, even as belief falls away).
- Successors: Modern Greek literature broadly (Seferis, Ritsos, Elytis all read him); Martin Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988 — the film); the postwar Catholic-Marxist-Existentialist inter-conversations about who Christ is and what the Gospel means when God is problematic; any writer of the mid-twentieth-century who tried to make Nietzsche a literary rather than only a philosophical inheritance.