Nikos Kazantzakis, Nietzsche, and the Myth of the Hero

In practicality the same circumstances under which Christ was born, his dark brother, the Antichrist, would be born, and he would work very much the same miracles but in order to seduce mankind. (1) C. G. Jung's statement, given during his five-year-long seminar on Zarathustra, may be extended to express the parodic structure of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Out of a travesty of the Gospels Nietzsche's Antichrist is born to "seduce" mankind away from the paleontological Christian eschatology and into the new vision of the Overman. Jung called the tendency of any concept to give birth to its opposite enandiodromia. (2) The same enandiodromic relationship exists between Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ (3) and the story of Jesus Christ as it is revealed in the New Testament. Both Nietzsche and Kazantzakis employ a return to the historical moral arena in which the counter value-system was born. "As a historical being," writes Mircea Eliade, "man killed God, and after this assassination--this 'deicide'--he is forced to live exclusively in history." (4) In myth, time is reversible: "a primordial mythical time made present." (5) In other words, mythological time attempts a return back to the indeterminable epoch in which things 'originated.' The neo-historical modern era, however, is independent of the sacred mythological time, and thus a return to the moment when hierophany (6) gains its meaning constitutes both a "deconstruction" and a "fixing." The death of God poses an enormous threat to life and its capacity for transcendence: The Last Man--a modern nihilist. Both The Last Temptation's and Zarathustra's return to the arena of Christian morals aims to shudder its moral foundations as well as to provide a process that overcomes the nihilist attitude of the Last Man. (7) In essence, both The Last Temptation of Christ and Thus Spoke Zarathustra are statements of what we may call "historic mythologization." To clarify this point we first need to understand the relationship between myth and history as well as Nietzsche's perception of history. Similar to Nietzsche, Mircea Eliade places history before myth. "The historical event in itself," he writes, "however important, does not remain in the popular memory, nor does its recollection kindle the poetic imagination save insofar as the particular historical event closely approaches the mythical model." (8) One should note at this point the importance of what Nietzsche termed "mnemotechnics" in the process of mythologization. In the second essay of his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche discusses in detail the importance of memory in the emergence of a particular morality. "If something is to stay in the memory," he writes, "it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory." (9) As an intricate part of collective memory, mythology is indicative of a certain morality that reflects the value system of a particular society. However, it only "hurts" when this value system is of the strict "good vs. evil" morality. (10) Nevertheless, Eliade perceives "the memory of the collective" as unhistorical: "the memory of historical events is modified, after two or three centuries, in such a way that it can enter into a mold of the archaic mentality, which cannot accept what is individual and preserves only what is exemplary. This reduction of events to categories and of individuals to archetypes, carried out by the consciousness of the popular strata in Europe almost down to our day, is performed in conformity with archaic ontology. We might say that popular memory restores to the historical personage of modern times its meaning as imitator of the archetype and reproducer of archetypal gestures...." (11) The tendency to perceive history and mythology as opposites is apparent. History is irreversible and new; Mythology is primordial and "archaic." The collective memory does not preserve history--myth does. Is mythology then possible in the modern unhistorical era? …