Protesting

 

In my teen years my denomination protested the showing of The Last Temptation of Christ in movie theaters. They simply couldn’t get over the idea of Jesus falling in love and desiring family life. In the language of the book it was very Judas of them, but we don’t live in the world offered to us by Nikos Kazantzakis.

This story is a very clear example of what happens when a great storyteller gets hold of history. The awkward shaped characters and plot points are smoothed and rounded and made to fit like puzzle pieces. Everything goes hand in hand to make a point. The real glitches and imperfect unions of history are cut off and thrown away leaving you with a fairy-tale. In this case it is a beautiful fantasy, kind of like if Disney did the book of Mark. Daubed into the book’s structure are the author’s ideas about the realities of struggle in the spiritual life, which unfortunately seem to boil down to resisting women and their charms.

Nikos Kazantzakis’ makes women beautiful, but his understanding of what a woman is leaves his beautifully sculpted depictions incomplete, a series of Venus de Milos. I am so weary of the not-quite-human approach to womankind by traditional thinkers. They force women to behave in prescribed ways and then declare that this is what women are. No, this is what you’ve made of them, poor amputated persons.

This book is powerfully and beautifully written. He struggles a bit at the very end, but who wouldn’t? I could not set aside the underlying “understanding” of what women are, but if you can this book is engaging. It is not the book I thought we were protesting rather it is a remanufacturing of the gospel and the struggle of men (specifically those with the XY configuration). I would give it a 5 out of 10.