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Peter Bien, Dartmouth College, USA
SCORSESE'S SPIRITUAL JESUS
Riparius, N.Y.
Bigotry is particularly ugly when practiced by Christians, who ought to be humble and compassionate like the founder of their religion. The campaign by fundamentalist Protestants against Martin Scorsese's film of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel The Last Temptation of Christ, conforms precisely to the dictionary definition of bigotry: Intolerant narrow mindedness in defiance of reason or argument.
Kazantzakis' book was attacked in the same unreasonable way. When it appeared in Greece in 1955, the Orthodox Church sought to prosecute its author. When translations came out in various Western European languages, the Roman Catholic Church placed the novel on its index of Forbidden Books. In the United States, fundamentalist Protestants attempted, without success, to remove the English translation of the book from libraries. That was in 1960.
Nevertheless, for the past three decades The Last Temptation of Christ has been widely admired in Europe, Greece and the United States by people eager to deepen their religious commitment. This is because Kazantzakis' version of the Gospels does not undermine Christianity but rather makes Jesus' ministry more meaningful to modern man.
Martin Scorsese is among those who understand the purpose of the novel. Yet, on July 15, Bill Bright of the Campus Crusade For Christ offered to reimburse the distributor, Universal Pictures, for its expenses if it would turn over all copies of the offending film so that he could destroy them. Universal replied eloquently in a full-page advertisement that freedom of thought is not for sale.
The film (which I have not seen) is scheduled for release tomorrow. Will it reach a wide audience despite the fundamentalists' machinations to convince theater chains to boycott it?
What a paradox that Christian ministers are opposed to a literary version of Jesus' life that is so reverential! Focusing on certain artistic liberties that Kazantzakis has taken, they accuse him of demeaning Jesus.
But the aim of his novel is to offer Jesus as a model for all of us at a time when Western civilization is declining because of its choice of happiness over spirituality.
Kazantzakis' Jesus is supremely devoted to the service of others, to reconciliation and to disinterested love. I'll put that idea in the fundamentalists' own language - language that Kazantzakis shares: Jesus is supremely devoted to God's will.
What Jesus does (and what Kazantzakis hopes all of us will do, inspired by Jesus' example) is to resist the "last temptation" - that is, the final and most serious impediment to the spiritual life.
In defining this last temptation as happiness, Kazantzakis departs from the letter - but not from the spirit - of the Gospels. Happiness in his version, which comes through materialistic well-being, is not essentially different from the Gospels' account of Jesus' temptations in the wilderness (Matthew 4:I-II, Luke 4:1-13), all of which involve materialistic power.
Kazantzakis merely relates materialism to Everyman, making Jesus resist the universal temptation to place comfort, security, reputation and progeny above the pain, loneliness and martyrdom of a life devoted to the spirit.
For an instant, Jesus imagines a different career, a happy one. He imagines that he experiences sex, begets a family and is respected as the best carpenter in Nazareth. In short, He imagines that He is happy. Then, however, He rejects this vision and reaffirms the spiritual vocation that led to His painful crucifixion.
All this, condemned as blasphemous by the fundamentalists, is Kazantzakis' way of dramatizing St. Paul's conclusions about Jesus' temptations: "For surely it is not with angels that He is concerned but with the descendants of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brethren in every respect ... For because He himself has suffered and been tempted ... For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one Who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sinning." (Hebrews, 2:16-18, 4:15)
I do not wish to claim that Kazantzakis was an orthodox Christian. He lost his faith while still a teen-ager because he could not reconcile Darwin's teachings with Christianity's promise of an afterlife. But he never lost his admiration for Jesus or his conviction that Idealistic service leading to suffering, death and resurrection remains for us today, as for the early Christians, the quintessential shape of a spiritual career.
Of course he interprets and takes liberties. But his aim, as so many readers have discovered, is to make Jesus accessible to the 20th century.
Thus, I am dismayed and perplexed by the fundamentalists' anger. Their opposition to the film, so strangely contrary to their own professed aims, derives from pharisaical literalism - precisely what Jesus himself opposed. They are horrified by interpretation. Yet the major purpose of Jesus' ministry was to prod the descendants of Abraham to seek the spirit rather than the letter of traditional doctrine, thereby making that doctrine relevant to their own condition.
If Kazantzakis were alive to witness the nature of the fundamentalists' opposition, he would no doubt reply to Bill Bright with Jesus' words during the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:3): "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"(c) Peter Bien, 1988