Rev. Don Beaudreault

April 22, 2001

The anguish was intense. I loved my body and did not want it to perish; I loved my soul and did not want it to decay. I fought to reconcile these two antagonistic, world creating forces, to make them realize that they are not enemies but, rather, fellow workers, so that they might rejoice in their harmony – and so that I might rejoice with them. (p. 277)

Nikos Kazantzakis

I recount my childhood years in detail…I remember frequently sitting on the doorstep of our home when the sun was blazing, the air on fire, grapes being trodden in a large house in the neighborhood, the world fragrant with must. Shutting my eyes contentedly, I used to hold out my palms and wait. God always came – as long as I remained a child, He never deceived me – He always came, a child just like myself, and deposited His toys in my hands: sun, moon, wind. "They’re gifts," He said, "they’re gifts. Play with them. I have lots more." I would open my eyes. God would vanish, but His toys would remain in my hands." (p. 39)

Years have passed. I tried to establish order over the chaos of my imagination, but this essence, the same that presented itself to me still hazily when I was a child, has always struck me as the very heart of truth. It is our duty to set ourselves an end beyond our individual concerns, beyond our convenient, agreeable habits, higher than our own selves, and disdaining laughter, hunger, even death, to toil night and day to attain that end. No, not to attain it. The self-respecting soul, as soon as he reaches his goal, places it still further away. Not to attain it, but never to halt in the ascent. Only thus does life acquire nobility and oneness. (p. 73)

Had nothing gone to waste, then? Considered separately, each of my intellectual ramblings and sidewise tacks seemed wasted time, the product of an unjelled, disordered mind. But now I saw that considered all together they constituted a straight and unerring line which knew full well that only by sidewise tacks could it advance over this uneven earth. And my infidelities toward the great ideas – I had abandoned them after being successively fascinated and disillusioned – taken all together these infidelities constituted an unshakable faith in the essence. It seemed that luck (how shall we call it? not luck, but destiny) had eyes and compassion; it had take me by the hand and guided me. Only now did I understand where it had guided me and what it expected me to do. It expected me to hear the Cry of the future, to exert every effort to divine what that Cry wanted, why it was calling, and where it invited us to go." (p. 453)

Nikos Kazantzakis

Who was this man Nikos Kazantzakis? The name Zorba – as in ZORBA THE GREEK is familiar, but not all who have heard of this passionate character would readily know that his creator is Kazantzakis. Nor would they comprehend the depth of the author’s spiritual/philosophical struggle to create such a larger-then-life individual.

Indeed, Nikos Kazantzakis was a modern-day crusader on a pilgrimage toward understanding those weighty issues of life’s meaning and purpose.

He was born in Crete in 1885 and attained his Doctor of Laws degree at the University of Athens. He studied in Paris under the philosopher Henri Bergson, and completed his formal academic studies in literature and art in Germany and Italy. He was the Greek minister of public welfare (1919-27) and minister of state (1945-46), during which he vainly tried to reconcile the factions of left and right. He lived in Spain, England, Russia, Egypt, Israel, China and Japan. Runner up for the Nobel Prize in 1951, he wrote over thirty novels, plays and philosophical treatises, including ones on Bergson and Nietzsche. He also translated many classics into Modern Greek. Among his most widely read books are ZORBA THE GREEK, THE GREEK PASSION, and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. He died in 1957.

For our purposes today, it is important for me to call to your attention, that despite his universally recognized literary and philosophical genius, he was railed against by the Greek church – which sought to excommunicate him for his ideas about religion; and at his death the Greek Archbishop refused to let his body lie in state in a church.

Let us continue his story as we weave his life and work together in an attempt to understand the essence of the man.

Truly, it is his semi-autobiography ("semi" because Kazantzakis liberally adds his poetic fancy) which has been a major influence in my philosophical life – to the extent that I can say that the man’s basic premise: the passionate attempt to reconcile the polarities of human existence, is my very own struggle. Obviously, I am not alone in this, but in studying his works for over 25 years, I increasingly become aware of how influential Nikos Kazantzakis has been in the formulation of my own world view.

The struggle, the war, the conflict between the basic, fundamental, core questions of life is the passion within Nikos – and is, to varying degrees the passion within each human being in his or her own way, some fervently undertaking the discords of existence and attempting to make them harmonious; while others merely accept or deny their inner questionings about such conflictive realities.

It is to Kazantzakis’ credit that he stayed the course of the battle, realizing that he would never reconcile such substantial differences, but that he could at least try to understand these competing forces.

For me, one of the most salient examples of this struggle between polarities and the attempt to understand the extremes occurred in 1988 when I was asked to preview the movie based on Kazantzakis’ book by the same name, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. As the Sacramento Unitarian Universalist minister, I was perhaps thought of by the editor of the SACARAMENTO BEE as an intervening or maybe countervailing force between the other two clergy representatives asked to attend the opening of the movie - a Catholic nun, and a Christian fundamentalist preacher.

Now, perhaps, to symbolize our ecumenical friendliness, the Catholic, the Fundamentalist and the Humanist-Taoist-Mystic which I was at the time, should have traveled in the same vehicle for the 90-minute trip to San Francisco. We did not. In fact, to date (13 years later) I have yet to meet those other critical spiritualists – other than to read their opinions in the paper the next day.

And if the three of us met today, I really don’t know what I would say. To make a long story a little shorter, let me just say that the other two in our Sacramento trinity pronounced the movie "apocryphal"– they didn’t like it!

Well, I didn’t particularly like it, either, much preferring the philosophical and poetic artistry of the book. But I did not oppose the movie because I thought it was making fun of Jesus. Or by making him all too human - especially obvious when he flirted with Mary Magdalene.

No, I disliked the film because I thought the actors didn’t really know how to act – especially Judas who had a strong Brooklyn accent (no offense to any of you who might have a similar sound – it’s just that I don’t think ANYONE had a Brooklyn accent in Jerusalem 2000 years ago).

Of course, I might be wrong…

So that is basically what I said in my movie critique in the Sacramento Bee. Need I add that my ego was stung by the BEE when I saw that the nun and the Fundamentalist had large photographs accompanying THEIR articles on the front page of the paper, while my little mug shot and brief, but beautifully sardonic comments were buried deep within the "who reads THAT part of the paper except the parakeets?" section!

Now, this was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg in the controversy of that movie. You might remember that the nation – if not the world – was taking up arms to defend the thing, or defeat it.

And so it was that when I appeared in line to see the first public showing of the movie in San Francisco, my fellow moviegoers and I were assailed by various kinds of verbal abuse – from presumably "religious" people.

For example, there were numerous demonstrators against the showing of the movie who carried posters condemning to hell those of us who were about to see the flick Thank goodness, I had previously been trained in the fine art of civil disobedience, or I might have attempted a bit of hellfire and brimstone preaching myself!

The most memorable scene for me, however, was that bevy of elderly woman dressed in black on their knees, hands folded in the traditional form of prayer, sporting huge silver crucifixes around their neck, and reciting various prayers on the theme: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

The police were there, too. And, of course, the press – which in this case, included me (kind of).

At any rate, I felt that the real movie was occurring outside the theatre and doubted seriously if the big screen could match up to it!

Well, life in this case, was almost as strange as fiction. Both "realities" put me into a "Dali-esque" frame of mind, in a phrase: "su-r-real!"

I can only imagine what Kazantzakis would have said about such an affair.

Well, I don’t have to imagine such, but merely quote what he thought of the general subject of human-divine duality – which for him was really the major existentialist dilemma of human history. As he said in his meditation work called Spiritual Exercises:

We can turn to that lusty character Zorba to see further evidence of the author’s struggle between the forces of humanity and divinity.

When he is asked by the Englishman, his initial "foil" who learns from Zorba what it means to be lusty:

the aging but ever exuberant Greek miner replies:

The Englishman replies:

Zorba counters with:

My friends, at the expense of being overly exaggerated in my comments, let me say that Zorba has just given us a pretty good analysis of that weighty philosophy called "Existentialism" (let us remember that Kazantzakis was an expert on Nietzsche).

Said Nietzsche who could have been saying this as an appraisal of Zorba’s philosophy:

"Existentialism" – the doctrine than we form our essence in the course of the life we choose to lead; the sense that we are responsible for creating our nature; and we put great importance on personal freedom, decision, and commitment.

This relates to Nietzsche’s character "The Madman" who asserts:

Whither is God…I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I…God is dead. God remains dead.. There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us – for the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher history than all history hitherto. (Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre, Walter Kaufmann, p. 126)

You see, for the Existentialist (Zorba or anyone else of his stripe), no God – that is, the God of Greek Christianity or any other creedal god – is necessary. One’s existence is enough. In honoring one’s self and attempting to get along with the world - if not improve it - one becomes Nietzsche’s "Superman" – voila, Kazantzakis’ Zorba.

A simple Greek laborer? Not at all!

But, oh, the sense of struggle Kazantzakis has in coming to terms with this roustabout heretic, this Zorba! The struggle to inculcate Nikos’ Greek religious background with its beliefs, liturgies, and applications of patriarchal and hierarchical spiritual laws, with this freedom of humanity to create its own nature, be its own person, express the attitude of Existentialism.

Kazantzakis speaks of the struggle in his life and work – this passionate theme that permeates his characterizations of – Jesus, St. Francis, and Zorba. Says he:

From my youth onward, my principal anguish, and the wellspring of all my joys and sorrows, had been this: the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.

How to bring them together? How to create harmony?

When it comes to the concept of the "divine," Kazantzakis shows the influence of his teacher Henri Bergson. No wonder the Greek Church opposed its native son! Nikos’ God was not a predetermined goal toward which a person proceeds, but spirituality ceaselessly and progressively created by nature as it evolves toward greater and higher refinement. In other words, Nikos did not presume to know anything about "God," but kept ever open to discovering new truths and possibilities.

He did, however, believe in the possibility of passion in human existence, that which Bergson called "L’elan vital" – the vital glow or spirit.

I think, too, that Kazantzakis would agree with Bergson when he said:

And it was the influence of his own sense of the continuity of his cultural and genetic heritages, along with the philosophical viewpoint of Bergson which led Kazantzakis to have a mystical sense of life and death – of its combative and complimentary nature.

Bergson’s ideas are echoed by Kazantzakis. But first the French philosopher, speaking of human destiny - if not of immortality:

And this passage from Nikos Kazantzakis, from his REPORT TO EL GRECO (pp. 100-01) where as a boy entering his adolescence, he visits his paternal grandfather’s grave. His father accompanies him. Here is a story of the continuity of generations – from father to son, down through time:

And we WILL remember you, Nikos. We will remember your struggle to gain clarity on human existence, to come to some kind of workable agreement with its ironies, dichotomies, and paradoxes. For you, this was and is the task of those who are most passionate about living. It is Zorba’s quest. And it can be ours!

So to Mr. Kazantzakis and to all those who attempt the arduous process of self discovery may we raise our glasses high and proclaim:

CLOSING WORDS:

(The reading is taken from a section in REPORT TO EL GRECO where the young Kazantzakis visits an ancient monastery in the Sinai desert. In this passage he is trying to explain to the abbot of the monastery why he wants to have a retreat.)

"All voices can be heard here in the desert," said the abbot. "And especially two which are difficult to tell apart: God’s and the devil’s. Take care, My child." (p. 260)

Nikos Kazantzakis

Don Beaudreault