A review of Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit
Peter Bien
1989
Princeton University Press
$39.00
Peter Bien's Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit is certainly a major
and definitive study of Nikos Kazantzakis by a literary scholar whose involvement
in the life and art of modern Greece's most widely known and controversial
author -- as translator and critic -- has been extensive.
Bien argues that Kazantzakis (1883-1957) was involved in politics because
of a basic concern that "reached beyond politics." Like Dante,
one of his many mentors, Kazantzakis was concerned with that which made
man eternal, and his political engagement was the means by which "he
actualized his own non-political potential."
To many he "appeared" to be essentially political, and yet because
of a personality that saw the complexity in any political position, he often
earned the support and hatred of a variety of contradictory elements. The
Greek communists saw him as a decadent mystic, the Holy Synod in Athens
tried to persecute him as an atheist and a communist, the monarchists viewed
him as a Bolshevik rabble-rouser, and the Chinese communists called him
"an apostle of peace" even though he often advocated violence
as the way that humankind moved forward in its evolutionary development.
And Kazantzakis did not remain silent when attacked. He courageously expressed
his views, at one time suggesting to the consternation of the left and the
right that fascism and communism might be "involuntarily and unknowingly
faithful collaborators" who would delay the forthcoming conflict between
capitalism and the left. He was also harsh on the concept of a liberal democracy,
particularly as he saw it at work in Greece, with its inability to rise
above mediocrity and factionalism. As he once said, "There is not a
regime that can tolerate me -- and very rightly so, since there is no regime
that I can tolerate."
Bien feels that Kazantzakis' seemingly chronological allegiances to "nationalism,
communism, socialism, metacommunism, aestheticism, Buddhism" were temporary
manifestations of an essential core in Kazantzakis, an obsession with a
freedom whose basic nature was often expressed in his favorite concept:
the transubstantiation of the flesh into spirit.
This freedom was actualized by his heroes -- Odysseas, Manolios, Capetan
Mihalis, Christ -- who chose death as an antidote to despair and bourgeois
inertia, and whose lives were marked by a "passion that was a good
in itself and not just a duty." Kazantzakis' advocacy of a passionate
virility led him during his nationalistic phase to an admiration for others
-- Napoleon, Mussolini, Kipling, Cellini -- but his view was eventually
tempered by a respect and love for those (and perhaps Alexis Zorba is his
most widely known prototype) who express a "deep hardihood" and
a "purposeless heroism."
What in fact attracted Kazantzakis to the Soviet Union during its revolution
was not its political theory, which he considered naive, but its "inexplicable
passion ," a miracle of the ascending spirit. "What moves me in
Russia is not the reality they have reached, but the reality they desire
and do not know that they cannot reach." But what dismayed him
was his prophetic view that the communist experiment would atrophy because
it really was not anything new but merely a final attribute of capitalism's
materialism. The Soviet Union, like America, would make productivity its
major goal. It would become conservative and reactionary. When one thinks
of the enormous cost of waging the Cold War to fight an economic view that
as long as sixty years ago contained the seeds of its own demise, Kazantzakis'
analysis is a Cassandra-like pronouncement that again went unheeded.
In Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit, Bien takes time to give the
reader the major figures that played upon Kazantzakis' thinking: William
James' antirationalism and denial of the intellect's power to solve ultimate
questions ("the most important truths are those that are felt and lived
before being thought"); Nietzsche's advocacy of the destruction of
old dogmas in a transitional age; and Bergson's arguing that the fundamental
law in the universe was not the will to power, but the annihilation of materiality,
a concept that sees the "physical world as a creative action that unmakes
itself."
Bien then devotes a major section in his study to Kazantzakis's Odyssey
(1957) in which the hero moves from the carnal to the aesthetic (his devotion
to feeling), to the ethical (his concern with commitment to a code), and
to the religious (his relationship to the Absolute), something outside of
time that provides a happiness that the momentary world cannot give him,
a kind of circular quest in which Odysseas discovers that god (sic) is "not
encountered at the end of life's journey, but . . . indeed is the
journey."
Bien takes issue with those critics who feel the Odyssey is nihilistic
and argues that Kazantzakis' Buddhism is subsumed by Bergson's dynamic and
positive elan vital. One might argue that Buddha's concept of nothingness
(the absence of self or ego in any object) is also not a denial of meaning,
and one thinks of Meister Eckhart's concept of the universe as a blessing
where, in a kind of Zen awareness, the person who lets go of all things
is indeed the most in touch with things as they are. Kazantzakis' Odysseas
reaches this kind of epiphany.
A massive work of scholarship, Bien's Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit
will also be a kind of blessing for an often misunderstood writer who believed
that the person who creates is truly free, particularly the one devoted
to the search for the cry of a spiritualized future. Kazantzakis might not
have been a great artist, but he made an enormous impact on many lives,
and, as the Greeks say, led them sto kalo (to the good). In a forthcoming,
second volume, Bien will focus his analysis on Kazantzakis' novels.
Michael Antonakes, who remains active in the classroom despite his recent
retirement after many years service as a professor in the English Department
of Salem State College, is the translator of Nikos Kazantzakis' Russia:
A Chronicle of Three Journeys in the Aftermath of the Revolution.