Saviors of God

Nikos Kazantzakis

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781476706825
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

As a writer and philosopher, Nikos Kazantzakis struggled all his life with existential questions, once spending several months in a monastery in an attempt to attain a closer relationship with God. His relentless quest to understand the nature of life through travel, extensive reading, and constant conversation with a diverse array of compatriots ultimately led Kazantzakis to compose this book of "spiritual exercises" meant to help the reader achieve harmony between the countervailing human impulses toward an immortality-seeking asceticism and toward a more nihilistic and materialist view of death. As with all Kazantzakis's philosophical works, The Saviors of God sheds light on a mind uniquely suited to a nuanced examination of what it means to be human, and establishes a hopeful vision for a dazzlingly syncretic approach to spiritual life.

Introduction

The Spiritual Exercises of Nikos Kazantzakis

IN VIENNA toward the end of May 1922, and in his thirty-ninth year, Nikos Kazantzakis wrote to his first wife, Galatea, in Athens, that if she were suddenly to open the door of his room, she would be filled with compassion, for she would behold him sprawled on his bed, surrounded by antiseptics, his face bound with compresses which he was forced to change every half hour. He had come down with eczema! Nevertheless, he wrote, he was reading for the first time, with patience and calm, “the wonderful theory of Freud in regard to instinct and dream” He could not eat but through a straw, he could not shave, for several weeks he had not gone out of his room except at irregular intervals when the symptoms of his malady seemed to lessen. Within a week his “eczema” had spread from his lips and chin and mounted to his eyes and forehead. Soon all his face had puffed up until his eyes were but pinpoints in a loathsome blubber of flesh. His lower lip, swollen to many times its normal size, dripped with a peculiar kind of yellow liquid. Throughout June, July, and most of August—that is, during the remainder of his stay in Vienna—he remained closeted in his room, because an excursion into the outer world—to a lecture, a concert, an opera-would aggravate the attack. He had no recourse but to throw himself violently into a work which had been occupying him for some time now: a verse drama about Buddha and that ascetic’s renunciation of all sensory desires and temptations of the flesh. But at times despair would step through the bastions of work, and at evening, especially toward dusk, he sometimes found that he could not hold back his tears.

Neither pathologists nor dermatologists could discover the nature or cause of his disease, or help him in its cure. Yet from its inception he had met “a celebrated writer and professor of psychology at the University” who had gradually convinced him that his deformation was the result of strange psychological causes. According to this psychologist, Kazantzakis wrote his wife, his illness was the result “of a mental and spiritual disturbance which manifests itself in the body. Something like the wounds of St. Francis. He told me that I have a spiritual and mental energy beyond the normal, and that the body suffers the reaction.” He complained that he had not talked to anyone for months, that he had not laughed, that he came and went—as in Buddhist narratives—alone, like a rhinoceros. “I understand those hermits now,” he wrote, “who were attacked suddenly with leprosy when in their retreat they reached out toward God. Skin diseases were the most usual manifestations.” He had been brooding on his own ascetic inclinations, and his thoughts had become a mixture of bitterness and exaltation: “We set out from a dark point, we proceed toward another dark point—honest, clean, good—and are consoled. Because of my illness, perhaps, my soul has filled with heroic bitterness. I understand those heroes now who worked amid bodily wretchedness. To endure bitterness, yes—but at the same time, out of pride, not to enlarge your bitterness but to reach the opposite extreme—to invoke joy and health as though they were the general law. Never before have I been so prepared to perform a valiant deed as in these days when I am filled with loathing as I look on my face—bloated, wretched, with two small holes through which my glances barely pass. Dear God, if only we would not die before we have been given the opportunity to show that we are worthy of transmuting all we say into deeds!”

The psychologist had given him a book he had written in which he referred to a case exactly parallel to Kazantzakis’ own. The good doctor was even planning to quote, in a future work, some remarks of his patient about eros, and to describe three or four of his dreams. Thus, half in bitterness and half in a form of sublimated ecstasy, he found the strength and courage to endure as long as he could work on his verse drama about Buddha, but he found it insufferable to lie in bed, changing the compresses now every few minutes, or to awaken in pain during the night. “My dear,” he continued in another letter, “a mystical joy penetrates my life in this illness of mine because I am testing my endurance, because when all night long I hear the voice and laughter of men beyond my window, I do not groan, and in the early morning when the first bird quietly and timidly begins to sing within the great city, I can no longer hold back the tears of joy. It seems to me that regardless of all my harsh and evil qualities . . . something exists within me which is very kind and meek.”

Suddenly, toward the end of August, he packed his bags and left for Berlin. From there, on September first, he wrote his wife: “I was made completely well, in a miraculous manner, as soon as I left Vienna.” And two weeks later: “Fortunately I am still well. I hope that the Viennese psychologist was right, and that this spiritual sickness of mine passed forever as soon as I put some distance between myself and Vienna. If this is so, then it will have been a neo-ascetic case of great interest.” A month and a half later he wrote that he had torn up all the three thousand verses he had written on Buddha, that he was recasting the work in a new form, into something superior, more difficult, more severe than anything he had hitherto written, into something savage and bitter. But soon after, he set aside his portrait of the Great Negator of the senses, of the “last man” of Nietzsche, and began feverishly to hack out the terms of his own salvation, his own Spiritual Exercises—to write The Saviors of God¹ *

Twice, more than thirty years later, when I was collaborating with Nikos Kazantzakis on my translation of The Odyssey: A Modem Sequel ²—once in Antibes in the summer of 1954, and once again in the summer of 1956 at Bohinj, near Bled, in the Yugoslavian Alps—his lower lip swelled lugubriously to great size and dripped with a yellowish fluid, Pressing one soaking handkerchief after another against his lip, he tried serenely to ignore his affliction as something beneath notice, but at times his patience and his resistance would wear thin, and in one of the many moments of confidence that passed between us in work of such close and harmonious collaboration, he told me of the semantic incident which had led to his turbulence in Vienna, and which he had not revealed in his correspondence to his first wife. And he taxed me with the responsibility of making it known in time, with detachment, as “a neo-ascetic case of great interest,” serene in the knowledge that, regardless of “harsh and evil” qualities in his nature, something existed within him which was very “kind and meek.”

Soon after his arrival in Vienna he had gone to the theater and had found himself seated by chance beside a beautiful and charming woman. Though throughout his life Kazantzakis suffered from extreme shyness and could not even enter a restaurant without the companionable support of a friend, he found himself, somewhat miraculously, talking with his enticing neighbor. Both soon found themselves bored with the play, left together in the midst of the performance, and spent the evening walking the streets of Vienna in animated conversation. And then, to his own great surprise, Kazantzakis heard himself inviting the lady to his room; with what intention was not clear, even to himself. The lady replied that though she could not come that evening, she would be pleased to visit him on the following night. Kazantzakis went home and to bed, happy and delighted. But the next morning, when he awoke, he found his lips and chin swollen and spotted with what he first thought was eczema. He sent word to the lady that he could not see her that evening, and made an appointment for the following night; but day after day his condition worsened, his entire face became bloated; dermatologists could find no cause or cure for his malady, and he continued to postpone the much-desired rendezvous. One evening, unable to bear his misery and his imposed solitude, he attended the opera, and there during intermission, his face almost completely swathed in bandages, he was approached gingerly by a stranger who inquired if he might be permitted to ask a question. When Kazantzakis found himself acquiescing, the stranger politely asked, “Would you mind telling me what role eroticism plays in your life?” Kazantzakis was taken aback and shocked, but the stranger hastened to explain that his question was purely clinical, that he was a professor of psychology at the University, and that he would look upon it as a great favor if Kazantzakis would honor him with a visit to his office the next morning. He then apologized once more and gave his name: Dr. Wilhelm Stekel, whose books on psycho-pathology are known today throughout the world.

This was, of course, the anonymous professor of psychology to whom Kazantzakis had referred in his letters from Vienna to his wife. In the doctor’s office the following morning, he found himself once more responding easily to the doctor’s frequent and probing questions. He told Dr. Stekel that for years he had been obsessed by the Buddhist image of life, that now in Vienna he was struggling daily not only to capture the essence of this vision in a verse drama about Buddha, but that he had also resolved to live by every Buddhist principle, to renounce the senses, to eat sparingly, to control appetites of sight, feeling, and sound, to abjure and to castigate the flesh. Dr. Stekel listened with amazement, and when during the course of this passionate renunciation Kazantzakis inadvertently mentioned the lady of the theater, his appointments with her and their enforced cancellations, Dr. Stekel’s face glowed with unexpected understanding, and he exclaimed, “But my dear sir, this is extraordinary, extraordinary! Your malady was rather a common one in the Middle Ages, but is most rare in our own time. Indeed, I know of only one other case like it today. You have what was once called the saint’s disease. During the Dark Ages many dedicated souls retreated into the sterile desert or into dark caverns, there to atone, to drain their bodies of all temptations and to castigate the flesh. Occasionally, however, when they found the temptations of flesh too much to endure, they would run howling toward town for a woman. But on the way, to their great horror, their bodies broke out in sores and boils, their faces became flushed and bloated, a yellow liquid dripped from their pores until they fell on their knees in repentance, convinced that God was punishing them for their betrayal and had stricken them with leprosy. My dear sir, you are trying to live out of your century! It is not possible to emulate the saints today! I assure you that unless you not only renounce any possible contact with your Lady of the Theater, but also leave Vienna itself, your swelling will not recede. Your body, my dear sir, is suffering from remorse of spirit.”³

Kazantzakis listened with astonishment and disbelief, and though he continued to visit the psychologist and to read the literature he was given, he could not easily admit the psychosomatic origins of his disease or that conflicts of the spirit could so deform the flesh, At the same time he continued to go stubbornly from pathologist to dermatologist, until in despair he finally packed up his bags and set out for Berlin. He told me then that to his utter astonishment, and yet with a quickening inner awakening, he felt better almost as soon as he stepped on the train, and that within an hour his swelling had receded, He professed himself baffled to understand why he suffered from similar swellings after that from time to time; yet the incident had so impressed him that he made it part of the central symbolism in many of his works, particularly in Zorba the Greek and The Greek Passion.⁴ In the latter work, written in 1948, the young shepherd Manolios has been chosen to play the role of Christ in a Passion play given by his native village. But when he feels tempted to visit the widow Katerina, the village prostitute who is to play the Magdalene, his cheeks, his lips, his chin, his entire face swells up like a drum and drips with a thick and sticky liquid: “It was all bloated, his eyes were not more than two tiny beads, his nose was lost between his ballooning cheeks, his mouth was a mere hole. This was no human face, but a mask of bestial flesh, repulsive.” The Pan-like, wild mountain boy Nikolio tells Manolios how his own grandfather had once tried to become a monk but had desisted because whenever he ran to the village to find a woman, he broke out in boils and leprosy, for God sent him such disease to defeat the Tempter. In Zorba the Greek, written in 1941-43 (but depicting autobiographically what had occurred in 1917, five years before Kazantzakis had gone to Vienna), he describes himself as a young man in his thirties filled with admiration for the un-inhibited sons of the flesh, like Zorba, yet an ascetic and intellectual himself, who for years now had been writing a life of Buddha, living in a world of “compassion, renunciation, and air.” He writes how the Evil One had tempted him in the shape of a woman with powerful thighs and buttocks, and how he wrote his life of Buddha in an exhausting frenzy to exorcise her image: “I wrote in what guise the Tempter had come to Buddha, how he took on the shape of a woman, how he pressed his firm breasts against the thighs of the ascetic, how Buddha saw the danger, mobilized all his powers and routed the Evil One. ... And so I was painfully endeavoring to transform the violent desire of the flesh into Buddha.” The young intellectual concludes that writing his Buddha “was no literary game but a struggle against a tremendous force of destruction lurking within me, a duel with the great NO which was consuming my heart, and on the outcome of which my life hung.” ⁵ Kazantzakis was to take up and abandon his verse drama of Buddha from early youth till old age, and he did not publish the play in its final form until 1956.

In Berlin, during the four months between September and late December of 1922, the troubled ascetic was writing and rewriting his Buddha, striving by means of the purgation which poetry affords to exorcise the demon from his heart. “Buddha is the last man,” he writes in Zorba, “That is his secret and terrible significance. Buddha is the ‘pure’ soul which has emptied itself; in him is the Void; he is the Void. ‘Empty your body, empty your spirit, empty your heart,’ he cries. Wherever he sets his foot, water no longer flows, no grass can grow, no child be born.” And then suddenly, toward the end of December, Kazantzakis ripped away the mask of Buddha which had clung to his face so fiercely as to seep into it and deform it, and with a cry turned his real face resolutely to more naked sources, striving in an agony that characterized all his efforts to hew out, like Moses, the elemental principles of his life. In early August, from Vienna, he had written his wife: “I am in a hurry to publish whatever I have written till now that I may give myself completely to a new work, clearly my theology”; but as Mr. Pandelis Prevelakis informs us in his most penetrating and informative book Nikos Kazantzakis and His Odyssey, Kazantzakis had kept such a work in mind for eight or ten years previously, as evidenced by several of his posthumous notes.⁶ In his still unpublished book of memoirs, Report to El Greco, Kazantzakis writes: “All my life I struggled to stretch my mind to the breaking point, until it began to creak, in order to create a great thought which might be able to give a new meaning to life, a new meaning to death, and to console mankind.” His letters to his wife from Vienna had been filled with prophetic utterances of a slowly distilled vision, and now he was trying to capture it on paper: “I am writing Spiritual Exercises, a mystical book wherein I trace a method by which the spirit may rise from cycle to cycle until it reaches the supreme Contact. There are five cycles, Ego, Humanity, Earth, the Universe, God. I describe how we ascend all these steps, and when we reach the highest how we live simultaneously all the previous cycles. I am writing it deliberately without poetry, in a dry, imperative form. I tell you much about this because it is the last fruit of my search. When will the search end? Or perhaps my purpose is only the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Prologue
• The Preparation
• The March
• The Vision
• The Action
• The Silence
• Appendix
• About the Autnor
• About the Translator
• Endnote
• Copyright