“He is the most human being, the ultimate expression of struggle, of the painful, bloody effort to reach God.” – Nikos Kazantzakis
While the Gospels depicted a historic, struggle-free, and omnipotent Christ, Greek philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis, in his The Last Temptation of Christ, tried to uphold a hybrid form of anthropological investigation into Christ’s life, implying both imagination and history. In the postmodern world, he reinvented the life of Jesus in a way that resonated with the sociocultural dilemmas of the Western world—the tragic events of World War II, the Holocaust, and the semantic nihilism that emerged when cultural relativism became a dominant condition of postwar self-definition. This Jesus is an individual in the making, in his attempt to know himself—an unfolding of a realm of subjective potentialities—to reach God, against the worldly temptations that become hurdles in his path to the Divine. In essence, he tries to depict not the Jesus of a worshipping community but an epitome of an ideal mystic personality that must be followed in this meaningless world of the self. This does not mean that Kazantzakis simply tries to humanize a religious symbol. His Jesus is an epic figure, close to what Albert Schweitzer once claimed: “The heroic element in Jesus was lost, and if we want to revive the heroic in our Christianity and in our Weltanschauung, then we have to go back to the actual historical individual and know how he created a moral world which bears his name.”
The story begins by positioning the Nazarene carpenter—making crosses for Romans—in utter chaos and confusion about the self. He hears voices trembling within himself, realizes this is not the path to be taken, and storms with emotional trauma and existential questions. Born fatherless, he is in need of a guide, though he is determined to explore himself, to know the very truth about the self. This journey transcends the conservative interpretation of Christ’s life and draws upon the humanist phase of Jesus. Kazantzakis depicts Jesus as a perfect mystic, one who represses worldly desires. His Jesus, feeling guilty about making crosses for Romans and tormented by his past, decides to leave his home and enter the desert for salvation and solitude. Here he is exposed to an internal and existential conflict between flesh and spirit. The very questions of duality are savagely debated in this journey. Jesus always tries to suppress the desires of the flesh, which can be easily manipulated. Though Kazantzakis pitied the flesh for being easily deviated, his victorious Christ was never in denial of the flesh, but rather in finding unity between both flesh and spirit. This unity wasn’t simple for Jesus. The temptations—which always disturbed his flesh—were very strong, as Christ’s emotions were vividly descriptive when confronting them. Jesus was constantly disturbed by the peaceful life under the blue sky with a good family, while he traveled through the drought-ridden desert under the scorching sun. Flesh always desired a peaceful life, while the spirit wandered in the desert seeking answers to the voice within him.
When Kazantzakis reflected on the conflict between flesh and spirit within Jesus, he was truly reflecting on everyone’s journey of self-exploration. This conflict and repression can be seen in the great works of the famous 12th-century Islamic theologian, Imam Al-Ghazali. On self-exploration, Al-Ghazali paved a long path for believers that is similar to Kazantzakis’s Jesus. Ghazali claims that to reach God, one has to commence the very journey from within himself. Both were aware of the importance of self-realization in knowing the Creator.
The conflict between spirit and flesh is identical in the writings of both Al-Ghazali and Kazantzakis. Al-Ghazali warned that worldly desires are obstacles on the path to God. Each believer must suppress them in remembrance of the Divine. When Kazantzakis wrote in his prologue, “within me are the luminous forces and dark evils,” he introduced the duality of flesh and spirit. Ghazali was also aware of that duality as he described the human as a corporeal being—spirit and body. Both thinkers led the way forward in repressing desires and taming the flesh, aiming to find the unity between spirit and body. When Al-Ghazali warned, “The first step in the journey to God is to tame the lower self, for it is the greatest enemy,” he was speaking of the potential evils rooted in the flesh. To conquer it was to repress its desires.
Once the flesh was tamed, both warned about the devil’s temptations. Jesus dreamed of a good life even when he was placed on the cross—he dreamed of marrying Mary Magdalene and raising sons—yet he remained on the cross, sacrificing himself for salvation. In his seminal work, Minhaj al-Abidin, Ghazali also warned about the powerful and hard-to-resist temptations from Shaytan (the devil). He advised believers to be strong enough to confront these temptations by reconciling body and soul; the unity of both was crucial. When both wrote about the suppression of desires, for Kazantzakis, his Jesus had to be reincarnated as Christ in order to bring back the historical Christ. The Christ before reincarnation was a mystic on his journey—on self-realization, on the exploration of God—the Creator. The importance of knowing the self was evident in both Ihya Ulum al-Din and The Last Temptation of Christ. The reconciliation of body and soul, finding unity, was described as essential for being victorious in life. When Al-Ghazali wrote about self-exploration, he guided the believers onto the right path, warning about potential temptations and the promised reward from God. Nikos Kazantzakis depicted Jesus Christ as an epitome of a Sufi saint, guiding the lost in the postmodern world. Kazantzakis depicts a hero who discovers who he is, and together with his readers, becomes self-reflective.
Both thinkers, in their pursuit of the self, portrayed the fragility and weakness of the corporeal being. Both set out on a journey of self-exploration, filled with struggles, temptations, and uncountable challenges. Yet both authors reflect on the reward of success: of being a true human in a nihilistic world. Al-Ghazali and Kazantzakis were deeply aware of the dangers born from negligence toward the self, the wrath of the Creator, and the meaninglessness of human life.
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Nihal Ibrahim
He is a student of Civilizational Studies and Classical English Literature in Kerala, India. He is also pursuing traditional Islamic learning alongside his academic studies. His interests include Literature, Philosophy, Theology, and exploring the intersection of literature and theology, with a focus on articulating Islam through fiction and poetry even more beautifully.
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