Jesus wrestles with God:
Scheper, George L
THE BOOK BEHIND THE FILM Jesus wrestles with God GEORGE L. SCHEPER In the' 'holy furor'' surrounding Martin Scorsese's film Last Temptation, the figure who seems to have gotten lost is Nikos...
...In Kazantzakis's most brilliant stroke, the figure of Paul, preaching Christ-crucified, confronts the manifestly uncrucified Jesus with grandchildren on his knee...
...Kazantzakis tells the story in Report to Greco of meeting a fierce ascetic on Mount Athos, Father Makarios, who confided to the young Kazantzakis that he had spent his time wrestling with God...
...By comparison, a work which ultimately succeeds in demytholo-gizing, and remythologizing, the gospel story more consistently is the 1964 Gospel According to Matthew by Italian Marxist Pier Paulo Pasolini which, when all is said and done, remains the most serious and seriously disturbing translation of the gospel story into film...
...Paul proclaims that his Christ of faith is more real and more true than the shabby "reality" in front of him...
...As filmic treatments of novels go, Scorsese's Last Temptation is remarkably "faithful" to its original...
...However controversial it finally may be, there is far more to Kazantzakis's spirituality than is suggested by the fundamentalists' sad ire...
...In this country Kazantzakis is best known for his Dionysian-spirited earlier novel Zorba the Greek and the Cacoyannis film starring Anthony Quinn (and Quinn's subsequent Broadway rendition...
...With all his doubts and fears, the Jesus of the novel is a much more formidable figure than actor Willem Dafoe's halting Jesus...
...Despite the fundamentalists' rage, Kazantzakis's spirituality, ironically, can be construed as quite conservative...
...These searing dream-encounters shatter Jesus "' last temptation,'' freeing him to give his final assent to death on the cross...
...Christ tormented me," he says, "from my childhood years," adding, "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...
...This is no mere perversity on Scorsese's, or Kazantzakis's, part...
...One positive consequence of the protest is the film's opening disclaimer that it is a work of fiction, based on a novel, not the Gospels...
...Judas follows this up by denouncing Jesus as a traitor who deserted his post on the cross...
...With God!' I exclaimed in astonishment...
...Finally, what the film simply cannot capture is the novel's metaphorical texture...
...This has to do with Kazantzakis's idea of self-transcendence, that one's mission will always be precisely that duty which is hardest for one's own nature-as is the role of betrayer for the fiercely loyal Judas...
...He wrote a play, a poem, and two novels on the Christ theme, but the "subject remains for me inexhaustible, because the mystery of the struggles of man and god, of the flesh and the spirit...
...Unlike the revisionist formulations of liberation theology, feminist theology, or, especially, creation-centered spirituality, which seek to disconnect Christianity from the dualistic Manichean tendencies it picked up in the Hellenistic world, Kazantzakis's Christ does opt finally for a world-denying, transcendentalist, and even sexist spirituality, in which sexuality, marriage, and domesticity appear as "temptations" and mothers and sex-partners as the prime "tempters" to a life of stability and ease...
...Each of his commitments represented a disciplined study and ascetic devotion to the path of each of these "Leaders of the Soul" (his midlife attempt to come to terms with their conflicting prophetic voices was his magnum opus, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, a poem of 33,333 verses to which he single-mindedly devoted himself for thirteen years...
...All this has left an aura about Kazantzakis that he was just another in the long line of the twentieth-century's heterodox writers beloved by questioning college students and deplored by parents and church elders...
...That his spiritual quest ted him successively to Lenin, Buddha, St...
...Scorsese's use of Moroccan settings is visually stunning but obscures Kazantzakis's careful distinction between the pas-tureland of Galilee and the fever-inducing desert of Judea...
...God is the search for God...
...This Jesus is doing everything he can to "disqualify" himself from God's terrible call-he is wrestling with God...
...Paul and Judas, in the dream sequence, help Christ become Christ...
...Paul Schrader's script drastically cuts the novel...
...Following Christ's bloody tracks, we must fight to transubstantiate the man inside us into spirit, so that we may merge with God...
...There is no other way to reach God but this...
...And the shock of the "last temptation" is greater in the novel because it is not immediately apparent that one is reading a dream-vision, as is apparent in the film...
...But a close reading of the novel shows that Kazantzakis's Christ also has the spirit of Zorba in him, and that an almost pantheistic love and delight in the world as sacramental and holy balances his ascetic impulse...
...Beyond this, what most people seem to know, even if they have not read it, is that The Last Temptation of Christ earned Kazantzakis a place on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books and caused him to be denied Christian burial by the Greek Orthodox church...
...The crux of the spirituality of Kazantzakis's novel, and of Scorsese's film, is, of course, the notorious last temptation...
...The one ' 'Leader of the Soul'' that haunted Kazantzakis all his life was Christ...
...Parables which Christ could not possibly have left as the Gospels relate them I have supplemented, and I have given them the noble and compassionate ending befitting Christ's heart," said Kazantzakis...
...Perhaps that is what the fundamentalists instinctively sense, leading them to ignore the ascetic side of Kazantzakis's spirituality and to focus their outrage on the dramatization of the imagined sensuality of Jesus...
...It is a useful reminder that neither Kazantzakis nor Scorsese is rewriting history but both are responding imaginatively to the received tradition...
...Most of Jesus' revisionist teachings in the novel- tending toward universalism and pantheism-do not appear in the film...
...THE BOOK BEHIND THE FILM Jesus wrestles with God GEORGE L. SCHEPER In the' 'holy furor'' surrounding Martin Scorsese's film Last Temptation, the figure who seems to have gotten lost is Nikos Kazantzakis, the author of the 1955 novel upon which the film is based...
...Francis, and Christ is no indication of sophomoric shallowness...
...So Kazantzakis's Christ wrestles with God right up to the final bitter moment on the cross when Christ contemplates the vision of a calm and happy life and in a final triumph, rejects that vision, "loses" to God and says yes to his mission...
...But in doing so, Schrader comes up with a script less, not more, radical than the novel...
...The pages of my manuscript were often smudged because I could not hold back my tears...
...But more important, Paul and Judas play the role of what Kazantzakis elsewhere calls "saviors of God," saintly collaborators who assist in the great evolution and striving of everything to become God...
...His whole life was a labor of love to be true to an authentic quest for the Spirit...
...This little parable should dispel the misunderstandings of those who are upset by Scorsese's portrayal of a Christ who is not only confused, fearful, and tempted (which, as Andrew Greeley and other theologians have pointed out, is no more than a dramatization of Jesus' genuine humanity), but, more disturbingly, so evasive and resistant to God's call that at the opening of the novel and the film he works as a maker of crosses for the Romans...
...Where it tries to do so-as in the talking snakes and lion, or Jesus offering his heart to his disciples- the result is kitsch, not metaphor...
...Nevertheless, as a good-faith adaptation of Kazantzakis's landmark novel, Scorsese's Last Temptation has performed a service-for art, and for religion, and deserves the wider audience that the protests will insure for it.l insure for it...
...And you hope to win?' 'I hope to lose, my child.'" For Kazant-zakis, spiritual fulfillment means to lose-and to submit to union with God...
...Understandably, attention now focuses on Scorsese's film, but given the religious controversy that has erupted, surely it is helpful to understand the spirituality of the novel on which it 13 based...
...For Kazantzakis, Christ was the supreme and indispensable image of self-transcendence: "What attracted me and gave me courage above everything else was how-with what striving and derring-do, what frantic hope-the person [Jesus] who found himself in Christ set out to reach God and merge with Him, so that the two might become indissolubly one...
...One of Kazantzakis's revisionist ideas, of course, is that a reluctant Judas is recruited by Jesus to be his betrayer...
...A kind of lurid graphicalness and colloquialism seem to be both the strength and the weakness of Scorsese's film (the visualization of the baptism scene as a tribalistic event, backed by a sort of rock-opera score, makes that segment appear perilously close to a pastiche of Norman Jewison's unintentionally camp film version of Superstar...
...and while a sort of shocking grittiness and barbarism is conveyed by Scorsese's combination of desert landscape and Berber culture, the film lacks the intensely Hebraic character of Kazantzakis's novel...
...It distressed him that the ' 'cassocked representatives" of Christianity who have themselves done so much to distort Christ's reality, should so misjudge and misrepresent his purpose...
...What critics of the novel and the film seem consistently to have misunderstood is the role of Judas and of Paul in this sequence...
...is inexhaustible...
...But anyone who has read more than one work by Kazantzakis, and particularly his autobiography, Report to Greco, or his wife Helen's biography, may sense that Kazantzakis is arguably one of the major religious artists of our time...
...All roads are holy," he proclaimed-so long as one's road is a pilgrimage of self-transcendence...
Vol. 115 • September 1988 • No. 15
