Re-Writing Jesus: Christ in 20th-Century Fiction and Film

Graham Holderness

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472573339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

At the heart of Christian theology lies a paradox unintelligible to other religions and to secular humanism: that in the person of Jesus, God became man, and suffered on the cross to effect humanity's salvation. In his dual nature as mortal and divinity, and unlike the impassable God of other monotheisms, Christ thus became accessible to artistic representation. Hence the figure of Jesus has haunted and compelled the imagination of artists and writers for 2, 000 years. This was never more so than in the 20th Century, in a supposedly secular age, when the Jesus of popular fiction and film became perhaps more familiar than the Christ of the New Testament. In Re-Writing Jesus: Christ in 20th Century Fiction and Film Graham Holderness explores how writers and film-makers have sought to recreate Christ in work as diverse as Anthony Burgess's Man of Nazareth and Jim Crace's Quarantine, to Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ and Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. These works are set within a longer and broader history of 'Jesus novels' and 'Jesus films', a lineage traced back to Ernest Renan and George Moore, and explored both for their reflections of contemporary Christological debates, and their positive contributions to Christian theology. In its final chapter, the book draws on the insights of this tradition of Christological representation to creatively construct a new life of Christ, an original work of theological fiction that both subsumes the history of the form, and offers a startlingly new perspective on the biography of Christ.

1

‘Half-god, half-man’: Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ

You may have heard of the Blessed Mountain.

It is the highest mountain in our world.

Should you reach the summit you would have only one desire,

and that to descend and be with those who dwell in the deepest valley.

That is why it is called the Blessed Mountain.

KAHLIL GIBRAN¹

I

For Nikos Kazantzakis, Jesus was both truly man and truly God, and the novelist set himself the task of finding some means of representing this unique being within the boundaries of prose fiction:

Great things happen when God mixes with man. Without man, God would have no mind on this Earth to reflect upon his creatures intelligibly and to examine, fearfully yet impudently, his wise omnipotence. He would have on this Earth no heart to pity the concerns of others and to struggle to beget virtues and cares which God either did not want, or forgot, or was afraid to fashion. He breathed upon man, however, giving him the power and audacity to continue creation.²

Although apparently denying divine omniscience (and indeed attributing to God indifference, amnesia and fear), Kazantzakis here fleshes out a persuasive model for understanding the purpose of incarnation. Mortal consciousness provides a perspective on existence that must be epistemologically different from divine knowledge. To know earthly intelligence, feel human pity, encounter ‘the struggle to beget virtue and cares’ – these are forms of experiential awareness accessible only to man or to an incarnate God. When Kazantzakis’s work was published, this image of a passible God provoked outrage, particularly in his own Greek Orthodox Church,³ while today it has become much more familiar. Indeed Alister E. McGrath goes so far as to suggest that it has become a ‘new orthodoxy’ for modern Christians to speak of a God who suffers within our world.⁴ Rowan Williams finds this emphasis as far back as the post-Apostolic writings of Ignatius of Antioch:

God was active to save in Jesus of Nazareth; but this activity extends to the suffering and death of Jesus. Is this suffering (so to speak) purely ‘instrumental’ to God? Or is it his suffering?⁵

In the twentieth century Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jürgen Moltmann, Kazoh Kitamori⁶ and many others have written eloquently of the pain and suffering of God, of ‘the love of the Son and the grief of the Father’.⁷ If Jesus lived fully as a man of his own time, in Brian Hebblethwaite’s words, ‘subjecting himself to the limitations of real humanity in order to achieve his purposes of revelation and reconciliation’,⁸ then he suffered as a man; if God was truly revealing himself in Jesus, then as Hebblethwaite says, the incarnation must also have left its mark on God:

It lies at the heart of Christianity to suppose that God’s omnipotence was both exercised and revealed in his becoming man, subjecting himself to cruel limitations and dying a cruel death. Moreover, that humanity and that human experience are believed to have been permanently taken into the being of God.⁹

The suffering of Jesus, says Rowan Williams, is in some way ‘taken into God’.¹⁰ ‘God’s “pain”’, affirms Kitamori, ‘is at once his “love”’.¹¹ ‘I felt’, wrote Kazantzakis in his notebook, ‘the “suffering god” deeply within me’.¹²

God, affirms Kazantzakis, is incomplete without man. But the contrary is also true:

But man, without God, born as he is unarmed, would have been obliterated by hunger, fear and cold; and if he survived these, he would have crawled like a slug midway between the lions and lice; and if with incessant struggle he managed to stand on his hind legs, he would never have been able to escape the tight, warm, tender embrace of his mother the monkey.¹³

By divine afflatus alone man becomes capable of intellectual and emotional creativity. As recipient of that godly breath, he acquires ‘the power and audacity to continue creation’ and to do God’s work in the world.¹⁴ ‘Man without God’ is a mere animal, haunted by his anthropoid ancestry, and struggling to extricate himself from the coils of evolution. But conversely God without man could have no direct physical knowledge of the human existence that he himself had created.

In this remarkable meditation, Kazantzakis links the dual substance of Christ with the dual nature of man as the product of both nature and God. Creationism and evolution are juxtaposed as respectively theocentric and anthropocentric explanations of the universe. Evolution gets man up onto his hind legs. But the breath of God makes him want to stand. In his autobiographical work Report to Greco, Kazantzakis recalled the two great lightning bolts of scientific knowledge that shook his faith as a young man: the solar system and the theory of evolution.¹⁵ The latter destroyed for him the creation story of Genesis:

The Lord God did not breathe into his nostrils the breath of life, did not give him an immortal soul. Like all other creatures, he is a rung in the infinite chain of animals, a grandson or great-grandson of the ape. If you scratch our hide a little, if you scratch our soul a little, beneath it you will find our grandmother the monkey!¹⁶

Obsessively the young Kazantzakis used to watch the behaviour of a neighbour’s pet monkey, now seen as ‘a caricature of man’. He writes, ‘Was this my grandmother? . . . was I not a son of God, but of the monkey?’¹⁷ He gives the monkey wine to drink and finds himself in its quasi-sexual embrace; as he writes, ‘Its whole body pressed against mine, it kept sighing like a human’.¹⁸ He views the encounter as a ‘black Annunciation’ and the monkey as some ‘dark angel departing from my window’.¹⁹ This attempt to bond with a simian is seen in the autobiographical narrative as both a liberation from dogma and a temptation to embark on a downward course of rediscovering the animal life of the flesh to search for the dark human roots that Darwin had uncovered.

Kazantzakis’s view of the ‘dual substance’ of Christ assumed then that the two natures were utterly distinct, absolutely different and violently inimical one to another. In taking on human flesh, Jesus inherited and inhabited the contaminated body of human evolution, which Kazantzakis considered a dark material vulnerable to the influence of chthonic powers. Human beings, made equally in the image of God, share this ontological conflict:

Within me are the dark immemorial forces of the Evil One, human and pre-human; within me too are the luminous forces, human and pre-human, of God – and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.²⁰

Christian theologians throughout the centuries have struggled to define this ‘absolute paradox’ as Kierkegaard called the incarnation, to keep the two natures distinct, yet to explain their mysterious concurrence, and to understand how the two natures could have interacted in the one person, Jesus Christ. Kazantzakis’s talk of God ‘mixing’ with humanity seems to fall into the ‘heresy’ the confusion of the natures, against which those early credal statements sought so carefully to guard:

Now this is the catholic faith, that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, without either confusing the persons or dividing the substance.²¹

More than any other foundational doctrine of Christianity, this supposedly symmetrical and stable relationship between the persons of the Trinity has proved in practice a site of controversy. Kazantzakis was a novelist rather than a theologian, but his imaginative attempts to revalue the two natures, to think and feel across what St Thomas Aquinas called that great ‘impassible’ boundary,²² deserve to be read alongside the more fully developed philosophical arguments of contemporary Christology.

II

Kazantzakis’s Jesus is predominantly human, ‘full of weakness, self-doubt, and ambivalence’.²³ He is not at first consciously aware of his own divine status, his mission of salvation or his destiny of crucifixion. He encounters his divinity as something hostile and alien: a possession, a persecution, a haunting. Although messianic hope is second nature to him, as he is physically and emotionally joined to the suffering body of the Israelite people,²⁴ he does not initially associate the coming with his own destiny. God comes to him as a dementia, a seizure or the sensation of claws dug into his skull. This seems less like a perfect hypostatic union than an uneasy affiliation between a weak and fearful human consciousness and a slumbering, latent divinity. Throughout the novel Jesus retains a love of life and of the earth, which seems to conflict with his divine destiny. This attachment is focused in his love for Mary Magdalene, his soul mate.²⁵ In interior dialogue with a divine voice (a conversation dramatized as Jesus talking to himself), he affirms this conflict and this loyalty:

I don’t care about the kingdom of heaven. I like the earth. I want to marry, I tell you; I want Magdalene.²⁶

In the anachronistically named desert ‘monastery’ (a version of an Essene community that also recalls Kazantzakis’s own experiences of monastic communities as described in the ‘Mt. Athos’ and ‘Sinai’ chapters of Report to Greco), Jesus confesses and is absolved,²⁷ although in orthodox teaching he was of course incapable of sin: ‘His subjection to human weaknesses in common with us did not mean that he shared our sins.’²⁸ Kazantzakis relates a number of Christ’s parables but then supplements them with alternative endings. Lazarus, for instance, persuades God to refresh the rich man for all eternity,²⁹ and the foolish virgins are invited into the wedding.³⁰ Kazantzakis writes, ‘Man forgives . . . is it possible then that God does not?’³¹ He even conceives the possibility that ultimately God’s mercy might prove infinite, and the devil be welcomed back into heaven like the prodigal son.³² He gives Judas a special place in the working-out of his destiny, flirts closely with p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Half-god, half-man’: Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ
• 2 Human and sacred: Anthony Burgess’s Man of Nazareth and Franco Zefirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth
• 3 Science and religion: Jim Crace’s Quarantine
• 4 Cross and altar: Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ
• 5 God or man? Mark Dornford-May’s Son of Man
• Ecce Homo : A life of Christ
• Notes
• Index