The actions of Odysseus in Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey are repeated in a variety of ways by the heroes of his novels and plays.

Odysseus, of course, knows who created the image, and he lives with the knowledge that this “god” is merely representative of his own imagination yet he acts as if God is real, and this God is both friend and antagonist to the hero as he struggles to assert his identity and stake his claim to fame. For example, in The Odyssey, Kazantzakis’s Odysseus carves a harsh-looking mask that serves as the image of God, which the people who follow Odysseus revere. Rather than being overwhelmed by such knowledge, however, the hero simply posits the existence of God-one created more in his own image than in the traditional Judeo-Christian image. Hence Kazantzakis’s heroes are often dramatizations of existential people trying to face up to the fact that God, as he has traditionally been conceived, does not exist. The search for God becomes one of the ways in which existential people seek to create meaning for their lives. For Kazantzakis, God is not dead, as Nietzsche proclaimed rather, God is waiting to be created by people who think they need him. In this short philosophical expostulation, Kazantzakis expresses succinctly his strange mixture of Nietzschean nihilism and Bergsonian optimism. The reader interested in understanding any of the works of Nikos Kazantzakis would do well to begin by reading Salvatores Dei: Asketike (1927 The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, 1960).

The last temptation kazantzakis