A Conversation Between the Ascetic Father Makarios and Nikos Kazantzakis

In his autobiography Report to Greco, Nikos Kazantzakis describes his forty day sojourn on Mount Athos in 1914 with the poet Angelos Sikelianos. There he met Father Makarios, an ascetic, with whom he engaged in discussions about faith and doubt. Kazantzakis, who was heavily influenced by Darwin, Nietzsche and Bergson, would rail against the established Church, especially what he called its life-denying morality. Though he rejected the asceticism of Father Makarios, he respected his rejection of spiritual mediocrity. One conversation in particular went as follows:

Movie: "He Who Must Die" (1957)

He Who Must Die (French: Celui qui doit mourir) is a 1957 French film directed by Jules Dassin. It is based on the novel Christ Recrucified (also published as The Greek Passion) by Nikos Kazantzakis. It was entered into the 1957 Cannes Film Festival.

In a Turkish-occupied Greek village shortly after World War I, villagers put on a Passion Play, with ordinary people taking the roles of Jesus, Peter, Judas, etc. Staging the play leads to them rebelling against their Turkish rulers in a way that mirrors Jesus's story.

Photios Kontoglou on Goethe, Kazantzakis and Venezis

Nikos Kazantzakis

By Dr. Constantine Cavarnos

Next we spoke briefly about Goethe, Kazantzakis and Venezis. I was interested in knowing his opinion regarding them. Goethe's name was mentioned as we were talking about Kazantzakis. It became clear that Kontoglou did not share the enthusiasm of many contemporary Greek intellectuals for the famous German writer. The philosopher-theologian Nikolaos Louvaris, for example, refers to Goethe repeatedly, and in fact more often than to any other writer, always approvingly, in his two-volume work Symposion Hosion (Symposium of Holy Men). Kontoglou, on the other hand, refers to him only once in his books, in the Preface of his first book, Pedro Cazas. For Kazantzakis, as I noted in an earlier chapter, he had no use. Photios remarked that both Goethe and Kazantzakis are writers with pompous expression, ostentatious, ever endeavoring to impress others with their assumed wisdom. The excessive admiration of Goethe was, according to Photios, another example of xenomania of contemporary Greeks.

The Myth of the Excommunication of Nikos Kazantzakis

There is a persistent myth that Nikos Kazantzakis was excommunicated by the Greek Orthodox Church. This is not true. Despite the very controversial topics he wrote about, it was eventually seen that he was a novelist and artist and not a theologian, and that what he wrote about was not doctrine but about his own personal struggles, no matter how vividly and shockingly it was portrayed. There was indeed a campaign for his excommunication, but it never fell through. Neither the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece signed it, nor did the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Upon his death, his body was viewed in the Cathedral Church of Saint Menas in Heraklion. Much can be written on this topic, but I think a good summary is given in the book Dialogic Openness in Nikos Kazantzakis by Charitini Christodoulou (the first 20 pages can be read online here, with citations that I did not include), so I am offering a few excerpts below that deal with this issue specifically. Below that are a few articles that delve a bit deeper into the issue.