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THE CRETAN GLANCE

The Spirituality of Nikos Kazantzakis


L. Michael Spath, D.Min., Ph.D.

OPENING READING – From Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises
A vehement Eros runs through the Universe. It is harder than steel, softer than air. It cuts through and
passes beyond all things, it flees and escapes. It is a Militant Eros. Behind the shoulders of its beloved it
perceives mankind surging and roaring like waves, it perceives animals and plants uniting and dying, it
perceives the Universe imperiled and shouting to it: "Save me!" Eros? What other name may we give that
impetus which becomes enchanted as soon as it casts its glance on matter and then longs to impress its
features upon it? It longs to merge with the other erotic cry, to become one till both may become
deathless. It approaches the soul and wishes to merge with it so that "you" and "I" may no longer exist. It
smashes the duality of mind and body, to merge all breaths into one Divine Monad. In moments of crisis
this Erotic Love swoops down on human beings and binds them together. It is a breath superior to all of
them, independent of their desires and deeds. It is the Spirit, the breathing on the earth of what human
beings call God. And it comes in whatever form it wishes - as dance, as Eros, as hunger, as religion, as art,
and does not ask our permission.

MEDITATION
We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as
we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment.
Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death. But also as soon as we are born we begin the
struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this
many have cried out: The goal of life is immortality. In the temporary living organism these two streams
collide: the ascent toward composition, toward life, toward immortality; the descent toward
decomposition, toward matter, toward death. Both streams well up from the depths of primordial
essence. And both opposites are holy. It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace
and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate
our thinking and our action.

CLOSING WORDS
Our profound human duty is not to interpret or to cast light on the divine rhythm of the universe, but
to adjust, as much as we can, the rhythm of our fleeting life to it. Only thus may we mortals succeed in
achieving something that might be considered immortal, because we collaborate with something that is
Deathless…. Every person and nation, every plant and every animal, every god and demon charges upward
like an army inflamed by an incomprehensible, unconquerable, indomitable Spirit. We struggle to make this
Spirit, this vital Energy visible, to give it a face, to encase it in words, in allegories and thoughts and
incantations, that may not escape us. But it cannot be contained in the letters of an alphabet – not in all the
letters of all the alphabets in the world – which we string out in rows, we know that all these words, these
allegories, these thoughts, and these incantations are, once more, but a new mask with which to conceal
the Abyss.
THE CRETAN GLANCE
The Spirituality of Nikos Kazantzakis
L. Michael Spath, D.Min., Ph.D.

INTRODUCTION
In a little park on a hilltop overlooking the city of Heraklion, Crete, there is a solitary tomb with no name, no
date of birth or death. It is hewn out of black Cretan marble, jagged, crude, and cracked. The first time I was
there, lying on the tomb, wrapped in tinfoil, was a solitary fire-red rose – the second time, a spray of browning
white roses – a simple wooden cross made out of two unplanned branches casting its shadow across the roses.
On the tombstone, written in Greek was the epitaph: Den elpizo tipota. De phobumai tipota. Eimai leuteros. “I hope
for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” It is the tomb of the author of Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis.

He was not buried in a church cemetery as was the custom because he had been excommunicated by the
Orthodox archbishop in Athens, among whose reasons was one of Kazantzakis’ other books, The Last Temptation
of Christ, which coincidentally had already banned in the 1950’s by the Roman Catholic Church – and remains
banned to this day – made into the 1988 Martin Scorsese movie. But on his native Crete, he was granted secretly
on this hilltop set apart, a private Christian burial.

If there has been a single influence in whom I have found a kindred spirit and who has shaped my own
understanding of the energies, passions, desires of the human heart – of my heart and my mind and my spirit –
and the transcendent rhythms of the universe, it is Nikos Kazantzakis. He is my patron saint.

He was born in 1883 in Heraklion, Crete, still under Ottoman rule; his mother a pious Orthodox woman, his
father a farmer who sold feed to shepherds in surrounding villages. Schooled by Franciscan monks, he went off
to university in both Athens and Paris to study Philosophy. He was an accomplished novelist and playwright,
and even served for a short period in the Greek government as Minister of Social Relief for refugees during the
Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature on numerous occasions,
losing in 1952 by one vote to Albert Camus.

THE DIVINE EROTIC CRY


“My entire Soul is a Cry, and all my work a commentary on that Cry,” he writes at the beginning of his spiritual
autobiography. “That which interests me is not humanity, the earth, or heaven, but the Fire that consumes
humanity, earth and sky.” He divides his life into four stages, each identified with one of “four great souls”: his
life begins with a traditional embrace of the Orthodox Christ, but this was too constricting; so he turned to the
Buddha’s inner peace, but this was too flesh- , too world-denying; third, Lenin’s Marxist revolutionary activism,
but this was devoid of the transcendent; so finally, he embraced Odysseus (Ulysses in the Roman myths), but
transcending Homer, a heroic Odysseus who “develops the courage and integrity to embrace the great
contradictions of human existence, its joys and tears, without flying into an imaginary world.” (Zarathustra)

Kazantzakis writes:
We see the highest circle of spiraling powers, and have named it God. We might have given it other names:
Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence….
God is not a being, all-knowing, all-holy, almighty. Nor is God a predetermined goal toward which history
proceeds, but an increasingly and progressively evolving Eros, an erotic Spirit in creation itself, an élan vital,
a vital, animating energy at the heart of the universe and within the human heart. God is an erotic wind and
shatters all bodies that he might drive on, a divine eros always working through blood and tears.

The pilgrimage of the truly spiritual struggle leads you through ego and race and humanity into the natural world,
the earth and the heavens, and plunge oneself into the Invisible Energy that permeates all things. “Behind all
appearances, I divine a struggling, fiery essence which some call God. This spark leaps from generation to
generation; I want to leap and to burn with it. This flame that consumes the world; I want to merge with it.”
God – if one must use that word – is the creative surge within all matter, the evolutionary process itself.
ODYSSEUS
You remember the story where Odysseus, anticipating the Sirens sweet seductive song that has plunged previous
sailors to their rocky deaths, plugs the ears of his shipmates with beeswax, but instructs them to tie him to the
ship’s mast; he leaves his ears unplugged so that he might experience, might taste the full seduction longing of
longing for the dark Abyss, staring into the face of seductive death, and to live, with courage, live. Odysseus, for
Kazantzakis, becomes the archetype of the spiritual struggler, his great spiritual hero.

Odysseus holds the two great opposing forces in a dynamic tension, a creative synthesis, as Kazantzakis puts it,
“like that round fruit which two lips make when they are kissing” – there is the luminous, rational, and civilizing
impulse of Apollo, the solar god; and there is the dark, intoxicated, primal breaker-of taboos, Dionysius, the god
of wine and ecstasy. For Kazantzakis, Apollo is the supreme ideal of Western religion, to save the ego from
annihilation, salvation from death, a personal god, symbolic of spirit, and embodied in the figure of Saint Francis
of Assisi. And Dionysius (who originated in India) is the supreme ideal of Eastern religion, the achieve-ment of
union through the dissolution of the ego into the Ground of all being, an impersonal energy, symbolic of the
flesh, and embodied in the figure of Zorba. Both are necessary, both divine, both belong to Odysseus.

So it was, in the winter of 1938, the culmination of a twelve-year process, Kazantzakis finally published his The
Odyssey: A Modern Sequel to Homer’s original, written in 24 books (one for each letter of the Greek alphabet) and
in 33,333 lines. Homer’s original epic, as you recall, details Odysseus’ ten-year journey home after the ten-year
Trojan Wars. He arrives at his home in Ithaca and slaughters the suitors who wait to marry his beloved and
mourning supposed widow, Penelope, and they live happily ever after. Yet in Kazantzakis’ sequel, Odysseus
soon tires of the idleness, the security, the “sweet Mask of Death” of family, country, friends, and duty.

For, Kazantzakis tells us in this myth, the goal of life is not the safety and security of home, no matter how one
defines home, although we dream of such security – “there’s no place like home” – but rather, the never-ending
quest, the incessant voyage in search of home. So he sets off again. The true home is the struggle for home, the
journey toward home. Kazantzakis’s Odysseus epitomizes the hero who “transubstantiates flesh into spirit,” but
holds on to them both, because the spirit evolves in and through the flesh, because the spirit has no value apart
from the flesh.

Whereas Homer’s Odysseus voyaged in search of his native land, Kazantzakis’ Odysseus left the security of his
home in search of the evolutionary Eros that runs through the heart of the world, and his heart, which he called
“God.” Home is the last temptation. Ithaca is the voyage itself, and the human heart is a restless heart.
Anything or anyone – any ideology or philosophy or art, any religion or god that resolves that restlessness, no
matter how beautiful or seductive, is nothing more than an illusion, an opiate that sedates the ever-ascending,
ever-struggling human spirit. This is why Kazantzakis calls his Odysseus “a god-slayer in search of God.”

THE CRETAN GLANCE


From the ruins of the palace of Knossos in Crete, and now in
the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, a mosaic was found
dating from c.1500 BCE. In it a bull charges violently, young
athletes in loincloths, male and female both, rush, leap toward
its sharp horns, vault over its back, and land safely behind it.

Kazantzakis’ sees this ancient Minoan fresco as symbolic of


his life. The bull, symbolic of the dark shadow that Death
casts over a life – bittersweet tears, unrequited love, the
suffering of the innocent, the tragedy of death – is an ever-
present reality. For most people, we either turn and run, or
deny its presence.

But how shall the courageous human being face the power of this darkness?
Kazantzakis writes:
You triumph without killing the terrible bull because you think of it
not as an enemy but as a collaborator; without the bull you could not
become so strong or graceful or your spirit so courageous. This is a
dangerous game and to play it you need great physical and spiritual
discipline. The heroic and playful eyes, without hope yet without fear,
which so confront the Bull, the Darkness, this I call “the Cretan Glance.”
If you are able to dance with the tragic elements of life in both ecstasy
and joy and to laugh in the face of this darkness – this is the highest calling
of humanity, and this is where joy can be found.

CHRIST AS ODYSSEUS
And so, finally, we come to Kazantzakis’ figure of Christ, but not the Christ of the Bible or the Christian
tradition. And even though he uses traditional Christian language, for Kazantzakis, “God” represents the
evolutionary Rhythm, the Cry at the heart of Being Itself, and his Christ is recast, an Odysseus figure, eager to
embrace the flesh, eager to embrace this world, so as to also, through it, embrace the deepest part of the flesh,
the spirit. This is a Christ, Kazantzakis says in the Prologue to The Last Temptation of Christ, who:
“The dual substance of Christ – the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of humanity to attain God, …
to return to God, has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. This nostalgia for God, has opened in
me large wounds and also large flowing springs. I was so moved that my eyes filled with tears…. I had
never felt the blood of Christ fall drop by drop into my heart with so much sweetness, with so much pain….
“My anguish has been intense. I loved my body and did not want it to perish. I loved my soul and did
not want it to decay. This struggle breaks out in everyone, but most often it is unconscious and short-lived,
because a weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. That is why the mystery of
Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed or particular culture or particular people. It is universal.”

He continues:
“The stronger the soul and the flesh, the more fruitful the struggle and the richer the final harmony.
God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The Spirit wants to have to wrestle with flesh which is
strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and
assimilates it. The supreme purpose of the struggle? Union with God…. (Last Temptation of Christ)
I keep my heart flaming, courageous, restless. I feel in my heart all commotions and contradictions, the
joys and sorrows of all life. But I struggle to subdue them to a Rhythm superior to that of the mind, harsher
than that of the heart, the ascending Rhythm of the universe. The Cry within me is a call to arms. It shouts:
‘I, the Cry, am the Lord your God! I am not a refuge. I am not a home. I am not heaven. I am not the
Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Ghost. I am your General. And you, you are not my servant, nor a
plaything in my hands. You are not my friend. You are not my child. You are my comrade-in-arms.’”
(Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises)

And so, this ascent to which every human being is called, is not for the faint of heart. “What is most difficult?”
he asks.” “That is what I want! Which road should I follow? The most craggy ascent! Follow me!”

So in the end, all you’re left with is three souls, three prayers, three stages of the spiritual journey:
“I am a bow in your hands, O Lord. Bend me lest I rot.
Do not bend me too much, lest I break.
Lord, bend me and who cares if I break.”

At which stage are you?

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