num_pages: 23
description: Aside from Zorba the Greek, The Last Temptation is Kazantzakis’ best known work. It is also one of his final statements, coming near the end of an extraordinary career. Yet the novel has never been truly studied but has only been condemned or praised, in both cases usually by people who have not taken the trouble to discover what it is about. The condemnations have come from religious conservatives of various faiths. The Greek Orthodox hierarchy in Athens sought to prosecute Kazantzakis; the Roman Catholics promptly placed the book on their Index; Protestant fundamentalists in the United States campaigned to have the work removed from libraries (transforming it into a best seller). Those who condemned it seemed to assume that Kazantzakis ought to have followed the Gospel account slavishly. He did not, and the religious conservatives were scandalized by innovations such as Jesus’ desire for sex, Mary’s hope that her son would remain a simple carpenter instead of becoming the Messiah, and Judas’s role as a hero rather than a villain....Ultimately, The Last Temptation should be judged not according to its closeness or lack of closeness to the Gospels but rather according to its own subject matter, which means according to how creatively Kazantzakis uses the Biblical materials in order to make a statement responsive to his own and his culture’s contemporary needs, a statement rooted not in the first century of our era but in the twentieth. Let us try, therefore, to see what the novel is about, especially in its governing structures; then, let us ask why Kazantzakis wrote it the way he did, when he did.
language: English
title: Tempted by Happiness : Kazantzakis Post Christian Christ
titlecomplete: Tempted by Happiness : Kazantzakis Post Christian Christ
ratings_count: 3
publisher: UNKNO