What do You think about The Last Temptation Of Christ (1998)?
THE POWER OF SUFFERINGAs the wheel of life turns, sometimes one finds oneself at the very bottom. These are moments in one's life when emptiness engulfs it. As it devours the flesh, it plunges one's existence into an abysmal darkness, weakening the already wounded BODY thereby propelling the SPIRIT to awaken from its deep slumber...Usually prompted by such inevitable events in life like an incurable disease, an excruciating physical or emotional pain, an utter loneliness or a self-imposed isolation, it immerses the BODY in a deeply rooted SUFFERING, tingling the SPIRIT and enabling its possibility to flap its wings. As the BODY succumbs, the SPIRIT struggles to come out, as it seeks the LIGHT and yearns to unify itself to the SOURCE thereby placing one's existence on the precipice of either death or immortality. The outcome depends on the strength of the BODY to persevere and the ability of the SPIRIT to inspire. The successful union of the BODY and the SPIRIT was the union Jesus Christ achieved in His life as a man, as He conquered bodily PAIN, FEAR and DEATH through His unwavering SPIRIT, strengthened by SUFFERINGS provided by GOD.This was what Nikos Kazantzakis captured in his fictional account of Jesus Christ as he portrayed Him as a MAN, trying to tap His "INNER GOD" by transubstantiating the FLESH into SPIRIT, evidently contrary to the institutionalized church's version of His divinity, which was SPIRIT into FLESH---GOD becoming MAN. The church intentionally opted to obliterate His humanness, to emphasize His divinity as a GOD for their own benefit. Without considering that the struggle of the BODY and the SPIRIT within Jesus Christ as a MAN is the same struggle all humans go through, the same PAIN and the same FEAR, the same SPIRIT trying to unify itself to the spitting IMAGE of its SOURCE.Therefore, Jesus Christ is the epitome of MAN who overcomes His bodily weakness by purposely detaching Himself from worldly happiness and embracing SUFFERING as a means to forge His SPIRIT to become one with GOD.This makes SUFFERING as God's holy call to the SPIRIT, His way of touching one's life, to awaken the true self, the SPIRIT that dwells in the BODY---the very "image of GOD" within us all. LOVE IS THE NAME OF THE TRUE GODTo know the true meaning of LOVE, is to see the face of GOD. To believe in GOD, is to be capable of LOVE that is unconditional. To LOVE like GOD, is unleashing "the GOD" that lurks inside us.GOD is already a pure SPIRIT, the fitting image of TRUE LOVE that can encompass all, a pure intelligence that knows and understands all, unlike MEN who are still both FLESH and SPIRIT, still incapable of grasping the full intelligence within himself without the aid of LOVE. If SUFFERING forges the SPIRIT to conquer the FLESH, LOVE is the basic ingredient of the SPIRIT to fathom SUFFERING, as LOVE enables the SPIRIT to understand all, to be able to understand all means to forgive all and to be able to forgive all, is to embrace all WITHOUT ANY EXEMPTIONS, thus LOVE completes the process of transmutation of MAN into GOD.That is the reason why Jesus Christ centers His teachings on LOVE, not as a GOD, but most especially as a MAN.The path that Jesus Christ chose as a MAN showed the perfect unification of SUFFERING and LOVE to make the SPIRIT indestructible, as it detaches itself from the FLESH, which all MEN can identify and emulate.月亮 луна
—☽ Moon Rose ☯
I loved this book! It puzzles me deeply why some Christians didn't like it. Perhaps a statement such as "Christ is both fully divine and fully human" can sometimes sound fine to people as an idea, but we don't want to think through what that means in actuality. We still want to think of Christ as 100% divine and maybe 10, maybe 20% human. Heaven forbid that he be actually, you know, human!I was raised Catholic, but was in my high school religious exploration phase, and was actually Buddhist at the time I encountered this book and Kazantzakis' other masterpiece Zorba the Greek. This book had the effect of pulling me back towards Christianity, a pull I still feel today, because it opened up to me a deep connection with the character of Christ. And because Kazantzakis' struggles with Buddhism resonated with me, his theme of being torn between a life of contemplation and renunciation on the one hand, and one of action, usefulness, and industry on the other. This is also the central choice Jesus makes in the book. Should he be a man or should he become the Christ? Is life's meaning in the doing, in daily accomplishments, politics, struggles, successes? Or is it to be found in ideas, pure thought and ideals, spiritual contemplation, and renunciation? This question of Kazantzakis which runs throughout his work, came to him in the context of the Greek civil war, to which some of dearest friends were giving their lives at the time he wrote. I can see the young man he was then, someone not much older than I at the time of my high school searchings, and torn between choices for his own life.Paradoxically Jesus' ultimate choice, though an act of renunciation on the surface, caused the profoundest transformation of the universe possible, became the most important action anyone ever did. So thought and action through Christ become one choice.I have a friend, Katharina, who feels that if she were Mary, if she were Jesus' mother, she would have wanted him to grow up to be a happy, normal, married, steady carpenter. That would be her wish for her son and for the whole universe. That worries me, and I can't get it out of my mind. You mean, you'd rather there have been no Christ in the history of the universe? So your son could have a normal life? Isn't his surpassing joy now in triumph not worth the cost? All of our joy and our salvation? No. Marriage, kids, mastery of his craft, daily bread, plain happiness, is what she would wish for her son. And I mean, who can look at The Pieta and not understand in some way that wish? What heartbreak could ever surpass that of this lone woman cradling the torn body of her first and favorite son? So the dichotomy resonated with me in high school. At the time Buddhism seemed to call me into a life of contemplation and renunciation, and Christianity into full engagement with an active life. That may simply have been my misunderstanding of Buddhism, since Matthieu Ricard seems to feel empowered by his religion to establish clinics and schools all over the Himilayas. In fact, I'm just realizing this instant that both religions actually call us to both halves of the central question, both to the truest ideals and the most active of actual lives. At the time, though, it seemed very different.To finish the story, in high school I eventually settled on Science and Atheism as my religion. It remained so until the latter half of my third decade, in which I was called back to Christianity, specifically this time to the Mormons (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). Mormons don't have any great literature to their credit yet, at least not that I've found, I may be slandering someone by this statement. But the restored gospel itself has all the greatness required, and Kazantzakis' view matches the real and living person of Christ I find in it more closely than any other depiction of the paradoxical divine and human man. It may just be that my fundamental way of understanding the world is through literature, and this novel speaks to me of the living Christ more clearly than sutras or scriptures can.
—Tatiana
Beautiful book. I grew up Catholic and Jesus is always hitting me in the back of the head, but this book is good for all non-religious types (of which I definitely am despite the upbringing). I'm not sure how many translations into English are out there of this, or which one I read, but this book reads a lot of the time like prose poetry. Seriously beautiful. I remember wishing the Jesus in this book was the Jesus I was brought up with. That sort of response is why he got booted from the Orthodox. The best always get exiled. FIVE STARS!!!
—Logan
