Skip to main content

The Paradise of Kazantzakis


It is difficult to choose one favourite writer because there are quite a few whom I admire.  However, for the sake of the latest Indispire theme, I pick Nikos Kazantzakis because of his particular relevance in today’s India which is being torn apart into fragments by certain political forces which pretend to have religious motives.

Though the Greek Orthodox Church considered excommunicating Kazantzakis for writing the novel The Last Temptation of Christ, the idea was rejected because even his bitter enemies could easily see that Kazantzakis was more spiritual than the religious leaders.  When the clergy was campaigning ferociously for his excommunication, Kazantzakis’s reply was: “You gave me a curse, Holy fathers, I give you a blessing: may your conscience be as clear as mine and may you be as moral and religious as I.”

He was not exaggerating.  The tragedy with most religious people is that they don’t explore their religion as deeply as people like Kazantzakis.  Deep exploration is what makes the religion genuine.  Those who pursue such exploration experience both the agonies and ecstasies of spiritual quests.  Kazantzakis experienced them and transferred them into his fictional characters. 

Jesus is a dominant character in many of his works.  The Jesus in The Last Temptation is torn between his divine mission and his human passions.  While Christian theology admits the dual nature of Jesus as both man and god, it is not willing to give the human side its due.  Kazantzakis’s Jesus goes through the agonies of a normal human being with his need to love and be loved, to enjoy the delights of human relationships including sexuality.  The spiritual side wins in the end, after much doubt, fear and guilt.

It is necessary for any spiritual seeker to go through those doubts, fears and guilt in order to confront the divinity within.  Most people take the short cut of accepting the truths given by the scriptures and the religious authorities.  Most such people just go on through life doing their jobs and fulfilling their duties including the religious rituals.  God is a kind of panacea for them, a shelter in times of trouble and a psychological buffer in other times.  If such people face problems of identity, they are likely to wield their religion as a weapon against the people belonging to other creeds.  Those with some criminal inclination are sure to exploit the negative potential of religion as a socially divisive force. 


What I admire most about Kazantzakis is the genuine agonising spiritual quest undertaken by his protagonists.  Zorba the Greek is arguably the best novel of his.  The narrator of this novel is in search of the Buddha while Zorba, the protagonist, is an anti-Buddha with his intense passion for life and its sensuality.  When the Buddha teaches us that human desires are the cause of our suffering, Zorba teaches us how to live happily with those desires.

Zorba teaches us that happiness can be as simple as a glass of wine and some roasted chestnuts.  Zorba has learnt to have no ambition and yet to work like a horse as if he had every ambition.  He lives far from men, has not need of them and yet he loves them.  Life, for him, is as beautiful as a fairy tale.

A little madness is essential to be happy, Zorba teaches us.  Those who seek to be perfectly sane, those who calculate their profits and losses accurately, those who live by the rule book are not worthy of the paradise that Zorba reveals to the narrator. 

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 171: #FavoriteAuthor


Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniMay 26, 2017 at 7:28 AM

    I have kept aside a few rupeee to buy Zorba the Greek the next month (seems the hard copy is not readily available) . It was only you from whom I got the author's reference.

    The issue of Jesus as a human was taken up in Dostoevsky's novel as well. I wrote a post about it a year ago.

    http://thepuppetofaloser.blogspot.in/2014/12/dostoyevsky-divinity-and-devil-three.html

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 26, 2017 at 7:57 PM

      I just read your post on Dostoevky, a writer whom I admire as much as Kazantzakis. Nobody understood evil as much as Dostovesky. He was another man who grappled with the theme of evil just like Kazantzakis though in a more agonised way. Dostoevsky's Jesus, especially in the Grand Inquisitor episode, has inspired many of my stories and poems. I think people like Dostoevsky and Kazantzakis as well as Camus and Sartre lived life on their own terms, challenging the gods, challenging systems, challenging themselves...

      You are a rare specimen, I think. You make me write so much in response which I rarely do.

      Delete
  2. parwatisingariMay 26, 2017 at 9:14 AM

    Now on my to read list

    ReplyDelete
  3. Purba chakrabortyMay 27, 2017 at 11:29 AM

    I want to read Zorba the Greek. Thanks for this wonderful post. The quote is beautiful :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 28, 2017 at 6:05 AM

      My pleasure, Purba. Best wishes on your journey with Zorba.

      Delete
  4. UnknownMay 27, 2017 at 4:06 PM

    Are you zorba the buddha in the making ?

    ReplyDelete
  5. UnknownMay 27, 2017 at 4:12 PM

    Osho's idea of 'zorba the buddha' is similar but deeper than kazantzakis 'zorba the Greek'.. This piece somehow seems to reflect your personal quest. - Which is Why the question. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 28, 2017 at 6:07 AM

      I'm familiar with Osho's Zorba. Osho was a scholar unlike today's godmen.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
11 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

Egregious

·       Donald Trump terminated all trade negotiations with Canada “based on their egregious behaviour.” ·       Pakistan has an egregious record of assassinations among its leaders. ·       Benjamin Netanyahu’s egregious disregard for civilian suffering has drawn widespread international condemnation. Now, look at the following sentences. ·       Archias is an egregious and most excellent man. [Cicero’s speech in 62 BCE] ·       “An egregious captain and most valiant soldier.” [Roger Ascham in 1545] U p to about 16 th century, the word egregious had a positive meaning: excellent or outstanding . Cicero was defending Greek poet Aulus Licinius Archias’s request for Roman citizenship. Archias had left his country out of disgust for the corruption of its Seleucid rulers. Ascham was speaking about the qualities of valiant soldiers when he used the ...
6 comments
Read more