Kazantzakis' Making of God: A Study in Literature and Philosophy

Abstract

Odysseus, on Calypso's isle too long, suddenly found that The world then seemed a legend, life a passing dream, the soul of man a spiraling smoke that rose in air; in my clear head gods suddenly were born, blazed up, as suddenly were lost, and others rose instead like clouds and fell in rain drops on my sun-scorched mind. (Odyssey, II, 110-114) Later on Ithaca, talking to a bronzesmith whom he wanted to make into a dis ciple: One night walking along a barbarous coast alone, I mounted toward a temple perched on some high rocks and broke the door down till the walls thundered and groaned, and as 1 groped in darkness my hands fell with greed on a new god who wove this iron thrust through his belt... and I flung out my hands unfearing, ripped the belt, and thus the god's sword passed into my mortal hands. (Odyssey, II, 800-804, 809-810) At the wedding feast of Telemachus, Odysseus . . . pitied youth and felt the unspeakable deep grief of maids, and like a god spread out his hands and blessed them . . . (Odyssey, II, 1196-1197) Landing for a while on the way to Helen and Sparta, Oysseus puts on a pretty girl: The swift mind-reader felt the maiden's fear and joy: 'Yes, you've divined it, lovely lass. I'm a sea-god who saw you far off from the waves and leapt ashore so that the thighs of god and man might meet in love. (Odyssey, III, 499-502) These random quotations touch many of the ways in which the double voice of Kazantzakis and Odysseus manages to say that man is a god. Discussion of the four passages helps us to see how that double voice operates, and what kind of explicit claims it makes. The third passage is a familiar literary turn, innocent and minimally meaning ful in itself, but here fraught with context. At this point Odysseus is about to cut himself off from Ithaca, from the generation which is replacing him there, and from the system of moral, social, and economic values which dominates now on the island. His freedom, through which he finds the self-transcendence leading to