URING THE EARLY PART of August 1922, Kazantzakis wrote from Vienna to his first wife, Galateia, he was rushing to finish whatever he was writing, that I may give myself completely to new work, clearly my theology.' Toward the end of December, five months later in Berlin, he started writing The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises which was completed in April 1923 and published in Greece in the July-August 1927 issue of the Athenian periodical Renaissance (p. 6). Before attempting to refer to the possible theological and philosophical influences on this work, it is worth while to consider the activities of Kazantzakis before he embarked on its composition. In May 1922 Kazantzakis, then living in Vienna, had concentrated intensely on understanding Buddha and on writing verse drama about him, and he experienced such an unusual ascetic and mystical struggle rare psychosomatic condition developed. Upon the advice of the famous psychopathologist, Dr. Wilhelm Stekel, he left Vienna for Berlin, where a month and half later he had torn up all the three thousand verses he had written on Buddha.2 He began, however, to rework the same theme, abandoning the imitation of the Great Negator of the senses and to write his Spiritual Exercises. In 1956, year before his death, he was finally able to publish his play Buddha in its complete form-a project had obsessed him most of his life on philosophy haunted him from early youth and on teacher whom he admired and mentioned in many of his works. In the Report to