Tag: Nietzsche

Ideas of Emancipation in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Fenitschka

Lou Andreas-Salomé is someone I had long imagined I would only encounter through the words and biographies of others. Perhaps the most important woman Nietzsche knew, and certainly the only one to whom he ever proposed – as many as three times, without success – and a lover and confidante to Rilke who taught him Russian and introduced him to Tolstoy, before finally becoming a significant figure in psychoanalysis, where she worked alongside Sigmund Freud, Andreas-Salomé found herself at the centres of German-language culture practically from the moment she was born in 1861 to her death in 1937.

A Russian, born in St Petersburg of mixed Huguenot and German ancestry, Andreas-Salomé had everything she needed to succeed as a woman in her age. Her father maintained an intellectual atmosphere at home, including letting his daughter attend her brothers’ classes. Then, when he died young, he left his daughter enough money for a certain amount of choice in how to live. The most important thing for her, however, came from within – the will to choose her own destiny, everything else be damned. She eventually married for affection rather than desire, spending her entire life in what today we might call an open relationship, passing from one rapturous affair to the next, never settling for too long or surrendering her independence to the men she adored. Deeply intellectual, deeply passionate, and finally heroic in her own choice of life, she seems a person it would be great to get to know.

What a relief it is, then, to learn she wrote some books. They aren’t easy to come by, either in the original German (Andreas-Salomé spent most of her adult life in Germany) or in any other language (though, in one of the quirks of translation, Goodreads seems to suggest she has become quite popular in Turkish). Still, I wanted to hear her words. I bought a slim and tiny Reclam edition of Fenitschka, one of her best-known novellas. I thought it would be as good a place as any to start with.

As a work of literature, Fenitschka excels in the subversion of our expectations. This stretches from the novella’s title, to its genre and characters. It appears at first glance to be a traditional bildungsroman, a story of education. We follow Max Werner, an Austrian flaneur on the streets of Paris who encounters the mysterious Russian woman, Fenia or Fenitschka, while at a bar. His destiny, from the moment he lays eyes on her, seems to be to unite himself in marriage with her. Marriage, after all, is the key moment in traditional works of the genre, as it provides a synthesis of all the education that has gone on before. And Max, who thinks of himself as something of a psychologist, appears to have undertaken all the other “education” needed – all that remains is the marriage.

Yet just as the novella places Max as the hero, ready for marriage, it undermines Max’s education. Max’s “psychology”, is really just an excuse for him to stare at women. When on an evening walk with Fenitschka, who has taken herself through a degree in Zurich, she talks about the importance of education for female emancipation, Max shows very little enthusiasm or understanding for what she’s talking about. By this point he has decided to seduce her. He abuses his right as a man to ensure a lady is taken home safely to her hotel by taking her back to his hotel, then actually locks her in his room to make sure he gets what he wants. It appears he knows the theory of seduction, but as for the reality…

Fenia tells him to get lost and leaves. Not only that, but she calls him “the first indecent man” she has ever met. Rather than happily enjoying the fruits of his manliness, Max is not just denied what he thinks is his by right, but he also finds his own sense of self and knowledge challenged by this stranger. It’s a remarkable scene insofar as the supposed hero is acting the villain, while the readers watch in increasing discomfort. The education Max has received is not proved through marriage, but undermined by showing that he is an asshole.

We wait a year for the action to continue. Max is in Russia for his sister’s marriage when he encounters Fenia again. She refers to their “love affair” (Liebesroman) with a certain mockery, born of her increased confidence from being a little older (she has finished her studies) and from being in her own country. For that is what the first section of Fenitschka is – a love story that has the wrong ending. The remaining sections of the novella are only more different to what we expect.

Max follows Fenia to St Petersburg to meet her family, as a friend, that is. (He reveals to her at the wedding that he is himself engaged, but readers smile knowing an engagement can always be broken off). We might expect that having failed at the “affair” part, Max might have a go at the “love” part of his “love affair”. For a reader, Max is still the person we follow, and we always have in mind the novella’s title – Fenitschka is the central figure, and we expect such figures to get married. Regular references to love, such as through quotes from the Russian poet Lermontov’s long poem The Demon, and a sense that Max is finding Fenitschka ever more physically attractive, make us think that he and she will soon end up together. But this is not what happens. Instead, Max discovers that Fenitschka is herself conducting a secret affair, and assumes the (traditionally female) role of confidant.

While Max has his moments when it seems he realises his worldview is limited, he is still very much that voice of tradition which lurks behind apparent liberal outlooks. When Fenitschka’s lover insists they get married, he encourages her to go ahead with it. But this is precisely what she does not want, as it would constrain her. The novella ends with her rejecting the lover, but with gratitude for their time together – a very modern moment.

We think that this is Max’s story. He is referred to always as “Max Werner”, as if to highlight his solidity and manly importance in contrast with the fragile female Fenitschka. The novella’s title, Fenitschka, is itself a diminutive, turning the independent woman into a cutesy figure. Her real name is Fenia, and the narrative shifts between the two to emphasise that she has two identities – one imposed from outside, and the other that she is crafting for herself. We see a similar situation in Nadezhda Kvoshchinskaya’s The Boarding School Girl, where “Lelenka” becomes “Elena” once she has achieved independence.

The comparison with Kvoshchinskaya’s work is worth exploring. One key similarity is in their narrative structures. In both works we have stories that are seemingly about men – the exiled revolutionary Veretitsyn and the flaneur Max Werner – who we expect to marry the titular female figures, but who are soon revealed to be far less impressive than their female counterparts, who instead move beyond them. Veretitsyn is supposedly a progressively-minded revolutionary, but is shocked when Lelenka becomes an artist and lives independently in St Petersburg. Werner claims to be up to date in psychology and has long discussions with Fenia about women’s rights, only to try to persuade her to marry her lover after all. Like Lelenka, Fenia instead prefers to be alone – in her case as a professor.

Where these works differ is in their treatment of the obstacles facing women in the 19th century. The Boarding School Girl paints a miserable picture of Lelenka’s home life, where she is essentially sold into a marriage she does not want. The enemies are mainly her family – father and mother – and the way out is self-education. Fenitschka instead focuses on the shortcomings of male figures who are not even aware of what they do. While certainly the novella makes the typical stabs at the empty “faultless mechanism of coming and speaking and moving on” of society evenings, and Fenia has an uncle who is something of a toady, freedom through education is still available to Fenia to ignore all of that. Instead, the real enemy is Max, precisely because he has no idea that he is one, believing himself liberal and sensible. Whether trying to seduce her or marry her, he continues to “demonise or idealise” her, rather than viewing her as a human being, and force her into traditional roles.

Of course, we smile at the thought that the so-called psychologist is unable to view his subject properly. But in Fenitschka we see the more subtle pressures placed upon women, compared to parents telling them what to do. Calling the incident in Paris a “love affair” gives it a recognisable narrative shape, and thus pressures both of their existences to follow this same shape. When they encounter the Lermontov (“All on this earth I give to you. / Just love me, you have to love me!”), Fenia notes that the quotes are hanging in near-enough every house in the city, ready for impressionable girls and boys to learn their roles: the one to love, the other to submit to its force. In this way, the novella shows that our traditional understandings of narrative, shaped by culture, are also a subtle barrier to emancipation.

In both Khvoshchinskaya’s novella and Andreas-Salomé’s, the women choose independence, but in both works there remains a certain ambiguity – the loneliness that comes with the rejection of ties. Max hears Fenia reject her lover, but never sees her again, just as Veretitsyn ends his story descending from Lelenka’s apartment, not sure what to do with himself. Yet in the almost fifty years between the novellas, (The Boarding School Girl is from 1861, while Fenitschka was published in 1898) there is a sense that the victories of the women are quite different. Lelenka has fought off the suitor her parents provided and is now an independent artist, but it has come at a cost – she is now rational and cold, as if she has had to adopt qualities from the men who aimed to control her in order to control her own freedom. Fenia, however, retains both her emotional side and her intellectual side when she achieves her freedom: “I thank you! I thank you!” These are emotional words, but they are also the words of someone choosing to be a professor – an eminently rational pursuit. To put it another way, Fenia appears to be achieving a more complete existence as a free person compared to Lelenka.

When we see this synthesis, we realise that Fenitschka was indeed a kind of bildungsroman after all. It was not Max who needed to grow, develop, and get married. He only learned, and probably not well enough, of his own mistakes and limitations. But Fenia grew, finally demonstrated her independence, and achieved a kind of synthesis in her own life – one that required no marriage at all. Here we have a model for growth without shortcuts. There may be challenges ahead for the Russian, but she is now well-set to face them. Of all the many heroes and heroines we know who end their books married instead, of how many can we really say their marriage will last?

As literature, Fenitschka has certain issues – it’s a little weak in terms of language, and I find the idea that a young woman would forgive so readily the man who locked her in his room to try to seduce her a little unbelievable – but it’s quite an exciting look at the challenges and opportunities for self-discovery available to women (or anyone) in the late 19th century. And with its emphasis on the idea that marriage and conformity are less important than being true to yourself and your ideals, it’s a work with a message that is as fresh now as it was then. It’s especially worth seeking out if you want to experience for yourself the voice of the “free spirit” Nietzsche once truly loved, and see how she imagined emancipation for herself.

Ecce Homo and the Eternal Recurrence in Practice

I have spent the past two months reading Nietzsche. I had already read many of his works when at university, where I was lucky enough to have a teacher who seemed, with his dashing good looks and masterful command of the lecture hall, to embody Nietzsche’s idea of the superman himself. This time, however, I was reading them not for an essay, but for myself.

Nietzsche as self-improvement, as self-knowledge, is of course a dangerous path to follow. But I reasoned to myself that as I am no longer a teenager, I must be immune, or at least somewhat resistant, to the worst excesses of misinterpretation that people tend to employ as they let a cursory acquaintance with the philosopher allow them to be a complete asshole to everyone around them. Reading through Walter Kaufmann’s biography of Nietzsche also helped.

The last of Nietzsche’s works that I have made it to is his autobiography, Ecce Homo: How one Becomes What one is. I didn’t write about Nietzsche’s other books because I didn’t feel sufficiently confident in my grasp of them to write usefully about them. Check back in a few years, and maybe we’ll be there. Karl Jaspers used to tell people never to be satisfied with a passage of Nietzsche’s until they had found a passage elsewhere saying the exact opposite; this approach does not make for a decent blog post, but nor does resorting to rather weather-beaten interpretations that add nothing new. I would want to be able to go through Nietzsche with a knife (one of his favourite images is that of a vivisectionist), finding nuances in what at first seems absurd. This will take both time and living. And so, you are spared, for now.

Ecce Homo is not just an insane attempt at writing about oneself, it is also a fascinating attempt, I think, at putting into practice one of Nietzsche’s key ideas from his mature period – that of the eternal recurrence. That is the lens through which I will interpret the book in this piece, as a wilful struggle with his own history to say of every moment of it not just that it was worth it, but even that it was good. To affirm, where others would be resigned or even negative.

We begin with aphorism 341 of The Gay Science, also known as The Joyous Science. Here Nietzsche first suggests (“What if…”) the idea that things may run back on themselves in a loop. Here it is a mere thought experiment, but later on, Nietzsche even had plans of proving it scientifically and aimed to study seriously the natural sciences to find the necessary evidence. (Kaufmann notes that commentators seem unsure whether Nietzsche actually believed he had stumbled upon a secret truth of the universe, or whether it was and remained just an experiment. As far as I am concerned, it’s not important.)

Here is the aphorism in full:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?

If life is repeated, over and over, exactly as it was, then that makes every action have unlimited significance. It also means that every action that we take out of cowardice, that we regret, will haunt us for the rest of time. But Nietzsche does not ask us to act differently, per se. He asks instead “how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?” to withstand such a thought. The problem of cowardly actions is not as great as the problem posed by every minor, meaningless action, the ones that day by day cover our lives in sticky meaninglessness. The eternal recurrence is a demand primarily for a change in attitude. We must say to ourselves that everything that happens is just as we wanted it, and vest our actions with significance, affirming them for their essential value in making us who we are.

Growth, in modern-day parlance “personal development”, is everything to Nietzsche. And an attitude of affirmation (“the highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained”, so he informs us of the eternal recurrence), where we desire everything that happens to us, joyous or sad, awesome, or awful, is most likely to lead to the achievement of our most full potential.

The Gay Science is, of course, not the only work of the eternal recurrence. Thus Spoke Zarathustra treats the theme in greater detail, and it returns, briefly, in some other of his later works, such as Beyond Good and Evil, and in his notes. Here is an extract from Zarathustra which gives some indication of the creative process of reformulating one’s life into something one can affirm:

               I walk among men as among fragments of the future: of that future which I scan.

And it is all my art and aim to compose into one and bring together what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance.

               And how could I endure to be a man, if man were not also poet and reader of riddles and the redeemer of chance!

               To redeem the past and to transform every “it was” into an “I wanted it thus!” – that alone I would call redemption.

              

The eternal recurrence is a creative act, where life is treated as an artwork. If everything experienced can be transformed successfully into a masterpiece, then that is enough – we do not ask questions about the experiences, we have eyes only for the work. Thus should we live, building a being of ourselves that makes use of everything that has ever happened to us, so that we could discard nothing, and everything – when experienced again – would appear to us joyfully, as a piece of the grand puzzle that is our developed self. 

Where, then, does Ecce Homo fit in? Written in a final burst of creativity, alongside The Twilight of the Idols, The Wagner Case, and The Antichrist, it was finished only a few weeks before Nietzsche went mad on the streets of Turin, allegedly after seeing a horse being beaten. It was almost as if he foresaw the end of his life and wanted to wrap it up nicely. Thus does it seem with hindsight, but it is more likely that he saw the end of a particular period of his authorship, and wanted to bookend it before carrying on. It is interesting to note in connection with this, for example, that The Antichrist is not given a chapter here, while all his other major books are. This is because itwas supposed to be the first volume of the epic Revaluation of all Values – it belongs to the new Nietzsche.

Ecce Homo is an autobiography, it is “one of the most intriguing yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written,” as Michael Tanner notes in my volume’s introduction. It ranges from “manic self-celebrations” to “parodistic orgies”, “high spirits”, and even “a tone of elegy”. Not only does it have a remarkable tonal range, but it is also full of outright lies about Nietzsche’s past which anyone can check up on with little difficulty. As a book, then, we oughtn’t go to it to work out what Nietzsche lived or even felt – we should go to it to see him crafting his life into something he can affirm. This is where its particular curiosity lies. After reading all of his other books, Ecce Homo is like seeing the practice of what had hitherto been simply theory.

The more we understand of his actual autobiography, the more challenging his interpretations of his life seem. The key moments – his friendship and break with the composer Richard Wagner, his unhappy three-way relationship with Lou Salomé and Paul Rée that cost him the friendship of both, his general ill-health, and his awful sister – are here transformed or disguised, so that saying anything negative about his life seems impossible.

Of Wagner, a man against whom he had written a book (The Wagner Case), whose Human, All too Human, was written after the crisis of their break, Nietzsche has only positive things to say. “Richard Wagner was by far the most closely related man to me… The rest is silence.” The reference to silence seems to suggest some resentment repressed, but Nietzsche does not stop here. Later on, he writes “I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life”. Why, how? Here he comes closest to expressing explicitly the project of Ecce Homo: “as I am strong enough to turn even the most questionable and most perilous things to my own advantage and thus to become stronger”, he can do this. The praise of Wagner as a man contrasts with Nietzsche’s savagery about his work. But the friendship was what was lived, and it is the friendship that needs affirming. 

Wagner is that big dark spot in Nietzsche’s life without which he may never have become himself: thus, Wagner was necessary. Other things were too. “It is my sagacity to have been many things and in many places so as to be able to become one person – so as to be able to attain one thing. For a time I had to be a scholar”, he says of his work as a university professor. He thanks his own sickness for allowing an easy, natural break with Wagner: “it permitted, it commanded forgetting”. He even thanks “Fräulein Lou von Salomé”, a woman of “astonishing inspiration”. The reality of their friendship was much less fun, but Nietzsche, without giving details (in the case of Salomé, he definitely seems to prefer silence), does at least allow himself to mention one of his characteristic views: “Pain does not count as an objection to life”.

In the chapter “Why I am so Clever”, Nietzsche decides to really embrace his role as a life coach. He tells us in great detail all the important “little things” we need to thrive: “nutriment, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness”. We get a detailed description of what to drink and eat, of the importance of knowing “the size of one’s stomach”, and how to relax (walking). This may seem ridiculous to us in the era of self-help, but to his readers, this emphasis would have been scandalous, for the alternative sources of personal growth and development – “all the concepts “God”, “Soul”, “Virtue”, “Sin,” “the Beyond”, “truth”, “eternal life” – are chucked out as only getting in our way. Now, in exploring those things that made him healthy – in his sense of affirmatively-minded, rather than physically fit – Nietzsche is giving a formula for living so life can be affirmed.

To turn everything into a blessing, to respond creatively to absolutely every stimulus – that is how I understand the command of the eternal recurrence. The creative response, however, is not merely individual pieces of art, but a holistic picture of the entire self. Life as art – as one long unbroken masterpiece of affirmation and reformulation. Within Ecce Homo, we see both the attempt to make a life-picture, and we also see the individual works of art that burst out of Nietzsche’s receptivity, such as this poem he wrote about Venice after the experience of hearing lovely music:

Lately I stood at the bridge

in the brown night.

From afar there came a song:

a golden drop, it swelled

across the trembling surface.

Gondolas, lights, music –

drunken it swam out into the gloom…

My soul, a stringed instrument,

touched by invisible hands

sang to itself in reply a gondola song,

and trembled with gaudy happiness.

– Was anyone listening?

Is Ecce Homo successful as the practice of some concept of affirmation, of laying the groundwork for life to eternally recur? We must ask late Herr Nietzsche, hurtling repeatedly back through his own life, to see what he thinks. As for us, there is enough here to see the book as a struggle to affirm that does not always work. Nietzsche successfully praises the friends who left him or whom he himself left. He finds such joy in certain moments that we can almost taste it – take, for example, the moment he completes the forward to The Antichrist: “The forward was written on 3 September 1888: when in the morning after this writing I stepped outside I found awaiting me the loveliest day the Ober-Engadin had ever shown me – transparent, glowing in its colours, containing in itself every antithesis, every mediant between ice and south”.

And yet, there is a lot of dissatisfaction here too. My book’s introduction by Michael Tanner notes the book’s parodistic elements, almost to excuse this. Any autobiography is self-centred and a little egotistical, so isn’t Nietzsche merely parodying that when he gives himself chapter titles like “Why I am So Wise”, “Why I Write Such Good Books”, and “Why I am a Destiny”? Yes and no. I don’t read this as a sign of his oncoming madness either. What we have here, however, is a struggle to justify himself against a world that just doesn’t seem to care about the way that he has completely overturned it. Yes, he says that some people are born “posthumously”, and he does praise Georg Brandes, the Danish academic who first started popularising him. But as for the Germans? All he heard were crickets, and it hurt him.

And so, he became more strident, his voice reaching a pitch that hurts to listen to, as if his assurances that he is perhaps the greatest human being ever to have lived is what was missing, the final push needed to convince people that they should take him seriously. “I come from heights no bird has ever soared to, I know abysses into which no foot has ever yet strayed, I have been told it is impossible to put a book of mine down”. “I am not a man, I am dynamite”. “I was the first to discover the truth, in that I was the first to sense – smell – the lie as lie … My genius is in my nostrils”. Of course, I write my “ha!” in the margin at such things. And there’s no denying that these are fun, brilliant descriptions. But it’s also sad. This is the desperate yelling of a lonely man into the void.

Or, perhaps, not even a void, but something still worse. Because the other sign of Nietzsche’s dissatisfaction in Ecce Homo comes from his feeling that he is already being misunderstood, that he is about to be misunderstood in terrible ways. (As indeed he was, after his scummy fascist sister started controlling his memory and his works, peddling them to the Nazis as the supreme justification of their hate). The closer we approach the end of Nietzsche’s oeuvre, the more he begins his aphorisms with the question “Have I been understood?” And less, because of his increased desperation and extremity of imagery, can we say “yes” to him.

Let’s take one example from the final chapter, “Why I am a Destiny”:

“I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful – of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against  everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified… There will be wars such as there have never yet been on earth. Only after me will there be grand politics on earth.”

Here’s what Kaufmann, whose book saved Nietzsche from the Nazis for new generations, writes: “He speaks of “war” even when he is evidently thinking of strife, of “power” rather than “self-perfection”. This approach generally works with Nietzsche’s other books, like The Gay Science, but by the time we look at his later works, it really is impossible. In Ecce Homo, he seems to want violence, not just of the spirit to “overcome” itself, but also between individuals, countries, men and women. Is that what he really means here? He hated nationalism, especially German nationalism, he really seemed to think that only weaker people would seek power over others as a substitute for power over themselves. But that’s not obvious at all here.

Nietzsche’s ambiguity about violence coming from his outrageous language, (“I am a nuance”, from the chapter on Wagner, I can imagine him yelling at me), just demonstrates the degree that he felt frustrated with his work’s reception, no matter how much the rest of the book is an attempt to tell us that his life was great. As an attempt to write eternal recurrence, “the unconditional and endlessly repeated circular course of all things”, is still the way I would read Ecce Homo. That the attempt is not wholly successful should not distract us from the sheer weight of affirmation that we do come across in the book: “supreme affirmation born out of fullness, of superfluity, an affirmation without reservation even of suffering, even of guilt, even of all that is strange and questionable in existence.”

This is a positive message, and if we do end up reading Nietzsche looking for some suggestions on how to improve our lives, it is one of the best things to take away. That he failed is of no matter to us. He thought he still had time… Let’s hope we do.  

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.