The Religious Phenomenon in Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ

Abstract

Nikos Kazantzakis’s work is characterised by a personal engagement with religion and the divine, and his literature thus allows us to draw a connection between philosophy and religious experience. This paper proposes an interpretative analysis of The Last Temptation (1952), a novel rejected by the Orthodox Church, based on the categorisation of symbols and signs developed by Paul Ricoeur in Finitude and Guilt (1960) and Manfred Lurker in The Message of Symbols: Myths, Cultures and Religions (2000). Signs and symbols breathe secretly within the atmosphere of this novel. They are not presented explicitly, but their recognition makes the religious phenomenon evident. The figure of Jesus Christ, the struggle between flesh and spirit, the consecrated food, and the desert as a space for prayer and revelation, demonstrate that human interactions are symbolic, which means that they confer meaning. The worship of God is a cross that wounds. His son bears it, and upon it he suffers the final temptation. Finally, the distinction between polytheism and monotheism is raised, the latter being something engendered by Christianity.