Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain

What an extraordinary book this is. What a novel. The Magic Mountain is so easy to criticise – so fun to, even. It’s a ridiculous book. Even in John Woods’ translation, which is a great improvement on Helen Lowe-Porter’s, the characters sometimes sound as if they are still getting accustomed to human flesh, especially at the beginning. Of particular note is our main character, Hans Castorp, who laughs so much at things that are manifestly not funny that it seems as if he has perhaps swallowed too much laughing gas. Beyond that, we are constantly treated to such sentences as: “there was asparagus soup, followed by stuffed tomatoes, a roast with several vegetables, an especially well done dessert, and a tray of cheese and fruit.” This is incredibly dull stuff, the kind of detail we are pleased to be rid of in our more modern novels.

And yet, and yet. The Magic Mountain deserves the name. Thomas Mann’s novel takes us into another world, a world where I can be interested in the fact that the characters are having pineapple with their five-course dinner, because in this world the rules are different from our own. I have descended from the mountain every bit an evangelist. But another could quite easily descend, fed up and exhausted from the trip. The problem is that we come down and try to explain something that is to those below quite incomprehensible – even if we are criticising it we have to speak a different language, one it itself dictates. The Magic Mountain is its own world, for better or worse. We have to enter into it in order to work out what it is about.

Here is our plot. Early in the 20th century Hans Castorp, a young man who intends to work on a shipyard as an engineer, goes up a mountain to visit his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, at a sanatorium near Davos, where the latter is attempting to fight off his tuberculosis infection. Castorp himself comes down with something and spends seven years at the sanatorium, where he meets various characters – of note the Russian Madame Chauchat, the Dutchman with an imposing personality Peeperkorn, the Italian Settembrini, the Jewish Jesuit Naphta.

This is one of those books that contain multitudes. It is a desperately intellectual book. Virginia Woolf’s comment on Middlemarch, that it is a novel written for grownups, is very much true here. I cannot think how disappointed I would have been, trying to read this when I was younger. There is no action to entertain us. The emotions we and our characters feel are all intellectual, even the love that runs through the pages has something cerebral about it. And yet, the greatest complement we can make of this book is that it makes those intellectual emotions feel every bit as valid and as important as the kind of passions that make us want to abandon our families or murder somewhat innocent people.

The Magic Mountain is a book of learning. One of the most exhilarating chapters is entitled “Research”, and in it we sit through the night with Hans Castorp as he engages deeply with that most important of questions, “what is life?”. It is a question that seems to have less impact on our existence than those more common cursed queries, like “what shall I do?”, or “who is to blame?”. And yet, in ways “lyric, medical, and technical”, Mann throws us into the world of this other question. We hurtle, as if in the presence of a great magician, from the smallest atoms to the greatest of stars, as we and Hans Castorp seek the answers. The world seems to rush past us, brilliant and bright:

“The atom was an energy-laden cosmic system, in which planets rotated frantically around a sunlike centre, while comets raced through its ether at the speed of light, held in their eccentric orbits by the gravity of the core. That was not merely a metaphor – any more than it would be a metaphor to call the body of a multicelled creature a “city of cells”. A city, a state, a social community organised around the division of labour was not merely comparable to organic life, it repeated it. And in the same way, the innermost recesses of nature were repeated, mirrored on a vast scale, in the macrocosmic world of stars, whose swarms, clusters, groupings, and constellations, pale against the moon, hovered above the valley glistening with frost and above the head of this master of muffled masquerade.”

If this is too much for you, turn away now. In “Research” alone there are pages and pages of long, dense, blocky paragraphs. In other chapters we learn of things like music or botany. The chapter “Snow” has one of the most extraordinary descriptions of snowfall you will ever read, but it does go on and on. You must commit yourself to reading The Magic Mountain, just as Hans Castorp commits himself to treatment at the sanatorium. Any haste, any desire to get on with reading something else or getting to some action, will spoil the book completely. To invert a metaphor, in the same way that a beloved food can lose all of its taste when we are ill, when we do not have the constitution for it The Magic Mountain it will appear a hill of boredom. I know there were definitely chapters I rushed and shouldn’t have.

The Magic Mountain is a bildungsroman – it is about education, yes, but also about cultivation, that other idea of Bildung. It is about Hans Castorp growing from a relatively simple young man who is unable to participate in philosophical debates except as a witness to a man of respectable complexity, well-read, passionate about music, and willing and able to hold his own in any discussion. Just as the novel does not hide its engagement with learning, so too does it not conceal its engagement with teaching. “Pedagogy” is one of its watchwords.

Two characters are above all concerned with this – Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta. These two, who literally live next to each other, are the most obvious teachers for Hans Castorp in the novel. Their debates and discourses go on for pages, often without any kind of interruption or riposte. In any other work of fiction this would be horribly bad form, but again, The Magic Mountain is no normal work of fiction. It dazzles us with its ideas, so why should it be obliged to conceal them from us by chopping them up into manageable little phrases or numbing them with retorts before they have first demonstrated their full power? Put another way, if we are to take the ideas seriously, they must be expressed properly. And since, unlike a Russian novel, the characters here do not act their ideas out (with a few exceptions), we must make do with characters speaking their ideas out.

And what are those ideas? Well, we might say that Settembrini is a humanist. He is buoyed by a beautiful hope for a better world, a cosmopolitan world of peace and fairness. Even stricken by illness, he is a member of all sorts of international committees and organisations that aim to improve the world. To give an example of the sort of work he does, he is engaged with creating a volume for The Sociology of Suffering, a series of books that aims to categorise every sort of suffering in the world that it may then be eliminated through the power of reason. Settembrini is the bright light of the Enlightenment, the heroic intellectual that we never have enough of. “Order and classification are the beginning of mastery, whereas the truly dreadful enemy is the unknown,” he tells us. A hero he is, but also limited. There are only so many international organisations that seem to be doing very little other than convening which we can handle.

Leo Naphta is a Jew who became a Jesuit. It was he whom I was most excited to meet, opening The Magic Mountain for the first time. Described quite often as a proto-fascist, I wanted to make the acquaintance of this man who seemed to smell of forbidden knowledge. Naphta is every bit as incendiary as his name, with its similarity to naphtha, suggests. He is a nihilist, but as always that term is not hugely useful. What I can say is that he is in many ways the antithesis of Settembrini, even down to the ways that they decorate their respective rooms. Where Settembrini envisions are future world of progress, Naphta’s visions are all of blood and violence. The medieval church with its crude punishments dealt “to save souls from eternal damnation”, are far more valid to him than the punishments of the modern nation state, which thinks it is legitimate but is anything but. He is a destructive thinker, who at times reminded me of Nietzsche with his disregard for what we take to be “true”. “What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is – terror.” This is scary stuff, scary in particular because Mann articulates it so well. And Hans Castorp is taken in by Naphta, with his dark world and his hatred of everything bourgeois. So, at times, are we.

And there are other characters, each of whom, in their own way, has something to say – either by themselves, or through themselves. One of the most memorable is Mynheer Peeperkorn, an extraordinarily funny fellow introduced late in the novel. He is unable to express anything at all, his language comes in stops and starts and terrible bluster, but through his person he commands the attention of everyone – he has that thing every politician wishes they had: presence. In contrast to the two pedagogues his inability to fit together a sentence is all the more pronounced. (“What did he say? Nothing very intelligible, and even less so the more he drank”). But again, he has presence. Against the world of ideas, he seems to offer an alternative – drinking, eating, existing.

A Russian friend who has recently left their country told me recently that The Magic Mountain was their favourite book. Perhaps I should just leave this sentence here, hanging.

This is not a book for lovers of action, but for those who love contemplation. We need to be idle, even – possibly – sick to appreciate it properly. Were I stuck in bed for a month or a year, this is all I would want. It is all I would need. The Magic Mountain is the answer you want to give if you are asked what one book you would take to a desert island when you love Western culture but don’t want to look as basic as those who name the complete works of William Shakespeare. We may find it overly intellectual, but life is full of intellectual engagement for many of us, and if not intellectual then at least populated with ideas. Compared to reading a dry work about the history of ideas, we can read about Settembrini and Naphta who, even if they go on for page and page, at least feel autonomous, real, and serious in their views. They are excited in a way that a writer reporting on the views of the dead-and-buried never can be.

The Magic Mountain is a modern book. Although the “Forward” declares that a vast gulf divides it from the present (1924), it is not so. The arguments here about life and ways of looking at the world only became more relevant after the First World War. What happened, though, was that they were translated into actions – horrific, terrible actions, whose consequences we continue to feel to this day. Perhaps we can say this – The Magic Mountain reflects the last time when a bunch of Europeans could gather together on a frozen hillside to debate the nature of the world, before all of the innocence of such intellectual tomfoolery was lost.

The novel reminds me of one day, years and years ago, when together with two friends, while playing croquet on a well-maintained lawn by a trickling stream, hidden from the world by a stone wall, I debated the consequences of the People’s Budget of 1909. Thinking back on it now, there’s something sickly about the isolation that allows us to go so deeply into intellectual things. But there is something equally sickly about the attitude that never engages with any kind of ideas at all. The novel is a balancing act, well aware of itself and what it says, and the criticisms we might make of it from afar – about its lack of engagement with action and so on – are all answered within its pages. It is an encyclopaedia. It is a world. If we are able to enter it without losing our sense of the world around us, we will be rewarded with one of the most vital, the most intelligent, the most thoughtful books that we will ever read.

I just want to read it over and over again.

The Birth of Romanticism – Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels

I always love these books that try to recreate the world out of which an idea arose. No matter how significant I am told a thought is, it seems unimportant until I can see the people who came up with it, how it affected them and why they needed it in their lives. Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers or The Women Are Up to Something by Benjamin Lipscomb, which I read last year, or Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, are all such books. Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels, which deals with the thinkers surrounding the University of Jena in Germany around the beginning of the 19th century, is yet another. What distinguishes Wulf’s contribution is that it also has a lot in common with the works of Richard Holmes, whose “Glorious” naturally adorns the dustjacket. By this, I mean that Wulf’s book is as much a story as it is an engagement with the ideas. Yet Wulf’s attempt to craft all this into a story is both Magnificent Rebels’ strength and its weakness.

The story takes us from 1794 to 1806, with a prologue and an epilogue to tidy things up. A short time period, but veritable anni mirabiles for the arts, philosophy, and world. In the tiny town of Jena, almost everyone worth knowing in German culture was gathered together, at a time when the German people were about to make earth-shattering contributions to the world after so many centuries of doing very little (the exception being Immanuel Kant in Königsberg, who helped set the stage). Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and Tieck represented poetry and prose, then there were the Schlegel brothers and Fichte and Schelling and finally Hegel for philosophy and theory. Wulf also draws our attention to the women – in particular, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel and Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling. They were every bit as important in theorising – and writing – as their husbands, and Magnificent Rebels helps put them back in the intellectual arena.

These names listed above are the foundational figures in Romanticism. Yes, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, but here we have the heavy stuff, the theory and the ideas that gave German – and later European Romanticism – its intellectual heft. (Coleridge, we learn, never made it to Jena, but he still stole verbatim an awful lot of Schelling and was instrumental, alongside Carlyle, in popularising German thought in the Anglophone world). We have the idealisation of love, the obsession with the infinite, nature, experience and the importance of the self which all came ultimately to characterise Romanticism, such as any of us may be able to put our fingers on what it actually means.

Wulf’s primary intellectual contention is that these guys helped place the individual at the centre of the world for the first time. The philosopher Fichte, in particular, declared that you must “attend to yourself; turn your eye away from all that surrounds you and in towards your own inner self. Such is the first demand that Philosophy imposes upon the student. We speak of nothing that is outside you, but solely of yourself.” Wulf uses the historical context to explain how revolutionary this was. At the time, in the German states one needed permission from the ruler to divorce, and often to travel too. Not just women, but even men were heavily restricted in their individual autonomy. The philosophers of Magnificent Rebels, so we learn, set off a chain reaction of self-centredness (in good ways and bad) whose ramifications are still being felt to this day.

So why Jena? Jena was a small town, but its university became famous in this brief period because it was perhaps the best place in Germany for freethinkers. The reason for this was that it was a prime example of the dysfunctional governance that characterised much of “Voltaire’s Nightmare” – the Holy Roman Empire. Jena’s university was governed, at the same time, by the rulers of the four Saxon states – Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and Saxe-Meiningen. As you can imagine, this meant that nobody could agree on the rules and those that were agreed upon were practically impossible to enforce. This was one factor.

The second factor was friendship. Magnificent Rebels is to a large extent a paean to the power of friendship to achieve massive leaps forward in any area where friends strive together. Everyone invited their friends and relatives so that even if someone did not have a teaching position at the university at Jena, they still had plenty of good reasons to be there. In the evenings all these clever people got together and drank and thought and read – what Novalis called “symphilosophising” because, like a symphony, it was a group activity. Everyone built atop the other. Fichte built atop Kant’s philosophy, then Schelling atop Fichte, and Hegel atop them both, so that by the time the book ends it is no longer possible for any of the philosophy described to be comprehended by a normal human being such as your humble reviewer.

Friendship builds a wonderful thing, and then the ideal begins to fall apart for the same reason. Where we could perhaps have had twenty or thirty years of greatness, personalities get in the way. Fichte gets himself kicked out of the university for not knowing when to shut up, Schiller gets offended the entire time and loses all his friends but Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel is unable to do anything that would make him money and is far too combative for his own good. Novalis and then Schiller are killed by disease, and August Wilhelm Schlegel and Caroline divorce. Everything and everyone break up, and then the French invade and ransack the town and that really puts the nail in Jena’s coffin.

Wulf’s story takes us through all of these characters’ lives, although with so many of them to meet, we cannot get too close to them. We get a rough idea of what they were each about, but not as much as I would have liked. I got the impression that Wulf was herself defeated by some of Schelling and Fichte’s notorious twaddle, which is fair enough. I learned that Goethe was fat and Schiller was always ill. The main thing that Wulf does in Magnificent Rebels is deal with their interconnections. How their relationships with one another changed over the years, through feuds and fights. We feel ourselves caught up in this whirlwind of creativity, and that’s probably the book’s best quality.

More than the reorientation towards the individual, Magnificent Rebels details the ideas that the early Romantics threw down that taken together hint towards what Romanticism as a whole might mean. We get Fichte’s self-centredness, “My will alone… shall float audaciously and boldly over the wreckage of the universe”, Friedrich Schlegel’s emphasis on the importance of words, “the letter is the true magic word”, and Novalis’s legendary definition: “By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticise”.

Nowadays we tend to think of Romanticism as slightly dangerous in its irrational tendencies. This isn’t entirely borne out in the book. It is holistic rather than anti-rational, though often its thinkers’ desire to make everything pulsing and interconnected went up against what the scientists were telling them. It was only growing old and the French armies that turned many of these theorists from dreamy, passionate believers in a new world into much darker figures of reaction and nationalism. If Wulf’s book has a message for us today, it is that the Romantics of Jena changed our world, but their gifts are ours to use or misuse. They liberated us by freeing our sense of self from being the exclusive possession of a monarch. But they also made possible the terrible self-centeredness and materialism that are destroying this liberated world. Reflection, the turn inwards, is a thing that needs to be learned again and again, by successive generations, and Magnificent Rebels is of clear value beyond teaching us history because it helps us do just that.

For me, the main thing I got out of the book was this sense of collaboration and its power. This year I held a little gathering of my own at my family’s home in Switzerland. For just over a week, I and several friends were treated, under the watchful eyes and extremely talented housekeeping of my girlfriend, to brilliant food and equally sparkling conversation. Each day we walked upon the forested mountains, or bathed in mountain lakes, or reached the foot of the glaciers. It was, in a word, divine. One evening I stood outside with a friend and discussed the intricacies of interpreting ancient biblical texts – he is studying Ancient Hebrew in Israel – on another day, we discussed the development of atonal music in a mountain restaurant. I can think of nothing better.

What is obvious to me is just how much I grow when I am surrounded by good company. However much I am grateful to books like this, and the voices of the dead that they contain, the real world is all that much more rewarding. There is no passion that fully withstands the cooling of its ink upon the page. Yet where could I find another Jena? I was at Cambridge, of course. There are quite a lot of clever people there. But now I am no longer there; the world has swallowed me up. Still, one mustn’t lose heart. Many of the figures who flit through Magnificent Rebels spent only a few years in Jena before having to leave, and still they left their mark upon their friends and the world. Life is long, making friends is hard, but one day, we may hope, we shall each of us have our Jena. 

Nikos Kazantzakis – The Last Temptation

Why rewrite the Gospels? Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation is the second attempt at it that I’ve met this year, after Tolstoy’s The Life of Jesus: The Gospel in Brief. Christians have four official versions of Jesus, and as many apocryphal ones as they like – why ask for more!? As Dustin Condren notes in the introduction to his translation of the Tolstoy, in Tolstoy’s case he wanted “to find the practical, pure teaching of Jesus Christ, to free it from the linguistic patina of ritual and scripture, removing both the dogmatic and the supernatural”. Tolstoy sought to reshape Christianity into a practical guide, removing it from the clutches of the orthodox (he uses the same exact term for the Bible’s pharisees, just to make it clear to his readers who the enemy is and always has been).

Tolstoy’s goal was noble enough – a better Christianity to make a better people. His tortuous life indicates how serious he was about finding this truth. The problem was that he went so far from the original text in places that even allies of the aging sage thought he had gone overboard. But taken as a whole, his project is interesting. In creating a synthesis of the four gospels into one narrative written in a more earthy idiom, Tolstoy makes us reflect on what the gospels and Jesus actually say. In reflection, we might turn back to the originals, or we might stick with Tolstoy. But either way, he makes us think. Another miserable soul with a deep distrust of organised Christianity was Soren Kierkegaard, and he too tried to make readers and listeners go back to the texts themselves by pressure washing them of the encrusted dogmatism, as he did in The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air.

I got the impression that Nikos Kazantzakis was less interested in all that. As P.A. Bien notes in his translator’s note, Kazantzakis spent his whole life shifting from idol to idol, experimenting with heroes ranging from Christ to Nietzsche, to Buddha and then Lenin, before finally reaching Odysseus and then going back to where he started. His Christianity was not like either Kierkegaard or Tolstoy’s in that it does not seek to proselytise. Instead, in recounting a new version of Christ’s life what he really does is try to combine elements from many of his intellectual experiences into a new synthesis, one very much influenced by Nietzsche in particular. Here were have, to go by Kazantzakis’s own prologue, a model, “a supreme model to the man who struggles”, because “every moment of Christ’s life is a conflict and a victory”.

This, then, is the Christ we meet in The Last Temptation: a man in conflict with himself. The Last Temptation contains an awful lot of temptations. When we first meet Jesus he is the carpenter who makes crosses for others’ crucifixions, and he is engaged in a battle with God to avoid answering His call. “Till I die!” he shouts, in answer to the question of how long he will continue resisting God. Jesus here goes in attitude from a stroppy teenager, to a love-preaching ingenue, to a fire-breathing prophet, over the course of the book, as key moments from his life – his stay in the wilderness and John the Baptist’s death, a visit to a desert monastery – come to affect him. We meet Mary Magdalene, Mary his mother, and many other characters from the Bible.

But Jesus and Judas are the most interesting. They always are. Even to a non-Christian, Jesus has to be a most curious god, because he is at least part-human. In his struggles and confusions and his like-us-ness he serves as an entry point into the world of Christianity. To those who are Christians, he becomes a human companion within one’s soul, who is more understanding of our pains and sufferings than the immaterial being he also is, might be. Judas, meanwhile, is fascinating as a betrayer. He and his fate are the yardstick for measuring God’s kindness and forgiveness – does He allow Judas to go to Hell, given Judas was predetermined to betray his master? Kazantzakis avoids all this by having Judas betray Jesus at Jesus’s own instigation. There is no other way, Jesus says, for the Kingdom of Heaven to come.

Familiar stories and parables are also played out in The Last Temptation. Like Tolstoy, Kazantzakis takes a slightly sceptical stance towards miracles, relegating many of them to dreams (such as the walking on water). Nevertheless, perhaps the most egregious (to traditionalists) thing he does is “fix” certain parables. We may remember the Parable of the Ten Virgins, in which the virgins are asked to remain awake for the coming bridegroom. Some have brought enough oil, while others have not. Those who have are present when the bridegroom comes, while the others have had to run off to get more. Upon their return, they find the doorway locked and are refused entry. Here’s Matthew’s version of the ending: “Lord, Lord, open to us.” But he answered, “Most certainly I tell you, I don’t know you.”

Here is Kazantzakis’s addition to the ending: ““This is a wedding,” [the bridegroom] cried. “Let everyone eat, drink and be merry. Open the door for the foolish virgins and wash and refresh their feet, for they have run much.””

Where the Bible is at times exclusionary and absolutist in its demands, Kazantzakis’s Jesus is a big fan of forgiveness. His alterations to what we know not only make Jesus more human, but also make his teaching more humanly possible as well. Nobody ends up in hell, nobody goes without forgiveness who truly desires it. It is even more a religion for the small and lowly than Christianity already is.

The problem with writing about Jesus is we all know what happens to him at the end of his time on earth. Many of us also know a good deal about what he gets up to, while on earth. The Last Temptation, therefore, needs to engage us emotionally, rather than grip us through its plot. This it generally achieves on the back of Kazantzakis’s language, which is earthy and often beautiful. We learn that Andrew “made friends with laughter and food”. Jesus’s early blessing by God is described thus: “he had felt a light, prolonged tingling on the top of his head, very tender, like a caress”. We find a lovely comment on the relationship between body and soul: “the body is the camel on which the soul mounts in order to traverse the desert”. Finally, souls are described as “sparks of God.” Nice stuff.

Yet there is a certain tension in this novel as well. The more serious Jesus and his message is within its pages, the more tragically ridiculous he becomes to us. All the talk of a new temple and a new world lose their power when we look around ourselves and see only signs of Jesus’s failure to achieve his stated goals. Alas, it’s hard for us to remove the ironic glasses we all wear, but we must do so to enjoy The Last Temptation to its fullest. Although, this is a charge we could level at any religious work these days…

The temptations that Jesus encounters sometimes work, and sometimes don’t. Jesus is a cowardly, fearful man who is uncertain of his destiny, at least in Kazantzakis’s rendering of him. But when, for example, he tries to convince us that this Jesus might be tempted by worldly power, it simply does not chime with the Jesus we have accompanied thus far. At least in the Bible there is sufficient economy of expression that we might, with extreme imaginative effort, allow ourselves the thought that Jesus might be tempted by such things – here, at six hundred pages of him, we cannot see it.

Still, the clue is in the title. We are here for the last temptation, the big one. For Kazantzakis, this is when Jesus has successfully made his way to the cross and been crucified. At this point he falls into a dream state, and in this state he dreams an alternate life. This life has two components. First, it has erotic fulfilment, as Jesus and Mary Magdalene finally consummate their affection for one another; then, it has domestic happiness, as Jesus lives and has a lot of children with the sisters Mary and Martha, while Magdalene disappears from view. In all this, Jesus is accompanied by a green-winged angel, who we can tell quite quickly is not all he seems.

After all of his struggles, now Jesus finds a kind of peace. “Harmony between the earth and the heart, Jesus of Nazareth: that is the kingdom of heaven,” says his new friend. Rather than his duty as Messiah, Jesus finds his paradise in the accumulation of small, day-to-day joys: food, wine, labour, sex. And through his many offspring he finds he has conquered death.

Readers at this point may be somewhat confused. Presuming none of us is a Messiah ourselves, isn’t all this not happiness? Little joys and gratitudes, a dampening of one’s anxieties about death? Yes, it is. But we also have to answer the question of whether this is enough, because if this isn’t enough, then we need something else, and that something else inevitably ends up being God or some other higher purpose. When Jesus realises that this is all he’ll get, he doesn’t renounce his new domestic life, but he does begin to doubt it.

Things fall apart when he meets his disciples and Paul. Paul, we remember, was once Saul, but a conversion on the road to Damascus led him to a new life and a new name in fulfilling God’s wishes. He arrives at Jesus’s home only to find the Messiah is not the one he had gone about praising to others. But Paul is mighty, and not to be dissuaded by Jesus’s failure to correspond to his own youthful teachings: “Whatever gives wings to men, whatever produces great works and great souls and lifts us a man’s height above the earth – that is true. Whatever clips off man’s wings – that is false.” Paul creates a new Jesus, ignoring the one before him, because he acknowledges that people need Jesus. Not domestic dandy Jesus, but a comforter and hopebringer. The reality, ultimately, is not altogether important.

Then the disciples arrive, old and broken. They find Jesus after their own efforts in life have failed, and he tries to justify himself to them: “In my youth I set out, like a youth, to save the world. Afterward, when my mind had matured, I stepped into line—the line of men. I went to work: ploughed the land, dug wells, planted vines and olives. I took the body of woman into my arms and created men—I conquered death. Isn’t that what I always said I would do? Well, I kept my word: I conquered death!” Jesus’s family happiness in the dream does not come from nowhere. Characters from his own mother all the way to the earthy, rich, Zebedee, say repeatedly that happiness comes from losing one’s illusions and settling down with a wife. This is exactly what dream-Jesus has done.

But the disciples do not accept his betrayal. In fact, the book reaches the peak of its emotional power as they reject him, crying “Coward! Deserter! Traitor!” again and again. He has not conquered death, only hidden it from himself. He has certainly not honoured God either.

The Last Temptation ends as Jesus awakes, still on the cross. Seeing this, he realises that he made the right choice after all, and has nothing to regret. In discovering the alternative path through the dream, we and he see what the good path means by comparison. Like Jesus, we can feel relieved in the knowledge that “everything has begun.”

But what on earth are we to do with a novel like this? It takes our understanding of what a good life is and tramples it into the ground, instead favouring a life of constant struggle with temptation and doubt. What a pain, to find the world more complicated than we might wish… Here, in this love of struggle, is Nietzsche’s influence most clearly felt. Here too is Kazantzakis’s own life. His father helped the Cretan people revolt against their Ottoman rulers, providing one example of heroism; later the boy was sent to be taught by monks, providing a much more spiritual set of heroic ideals. The Last Temptation is in some way a dramatization of these conflicting images of goodness. One that sees harmonising the spirit with God as the greatest good, and the other that sees harmonising the body with earth as it.

The problem is that struggling is not the key to happiness; it is the key to growth. And providing we can keep ourselves from struggling too much, or in the pursuit of unattainable goals, we can find in a bit of struggle a source of joy. Jesus’s struggle is not “a bit of a struggle”. It is a merciless, exhausting, brutal conflict, a war against his own body and his own soul. But Jesus was the Son of God, so he was supposed to struggle like this. When we choose to live our lives in small joys and kindnesses, it’s much less clear what greater journey and duty we are missing out on. But if we look inside ourselves, perhaps we can find it. And then, and only then, Kazantzakis’s Jesus might be closer to a model worthy of emulation.

It is always a bit funny to take Jesus and rework him. But unlike the Koran, we can say that the Bible was written by people who may have been fallible. Given this interpretative layer, which The Last Temptation acknowledges by having Jesus get angry at Matthew (“I say one thing, you write another, and those who read you understand still something else!”), there is more leeway to reinvent Christ. Tolstoy wanted a Christ who would be happy toiling on the fields alongside him, while Kazantzakis wanted a Christ who could be a paradigm for spiritual growth for us in the modern age, no matter how much we may find the directions of his growth somewhat strange or irrelevant to our own lives.

Ultimately, what seems certain is that Jesus will continue to provide fascination for people in the years to come, even as Christianity falls further and further out of view. This man who combines God and human, when we add his doubts and anxieties (and even the Bible dramatizes these), comes to be remarkably close to us humans now, living in a world where people throw around words like “transhumanism” and “posthuman”, “cyborg” and all the rest with reckless abandon. As our command of the world becomes more godlike, our command over ourselves and our destinies remains riven with the old uncertainties. It makes sense to see Jesus as someone who might have some kind of answers. This Jesus, Kazantzakis’s Jesus, may do.

For more Kazantzakis, I’ve read and reviewed Zorba the Greek and his biography, Report to Greco. For more Last Temptation, I’ve heard Scorsese made a film.