Saint Francis
By Nikos Kazantzakis

624 Pages • $13.95

Saint Francis
By Nikos Kazantzakis

About the Author  •  Links about the Author

Francis of Assisi is the most beloved of saints. The “little poor man” is acclaimed as the apostle of peace, natural living, the environment, ecumenism, and social justice. He is universally admired for his generosity and radical courage to live the gospel to the fullest. Popular Catholic tradition applauds him as the alter Christus—the human being who most closely resembles Jesus himself.

Yet Francis (like Jesus) is a deeply paradoxical figure. He is a model for holiness, yet most Christians cannot—and should not—imitate him. Francis gave up everything and took to the road with a band of vagabond followers who did odd jobs and begged for their food and lodging. The vast majority of Christians are called to work in the world, marry and raise families, and be good neighbors and friends.

The tendency, then, is to sentimentalize Francis. Or so thought the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis. He believed we forget about Francis’s fierce, uncompromising radicalism and remember him as a meek and gentle wanderer who loved children and animals and preached universal love. The saint who thunders through the pages of Kazantzakis’s novel Saint Francis is drunk with the love of God. “I want more, more,” he prays. God answers by calling Francis to a life of radical poverty and deprivation. “You know how a lion seizes a hare and bangs him playfully against the ground, don’t you?” Francis asks a friend. “Well, God has seized me in the same way. . . . I am writhing in God’s claws and cannot escape.”

The novel depicts a restless saint. Kazantzakis’s Francis is not the calm and undisturbed saint of legend, preaching to the animals, but a man tempted and weary, searching for spiritual peace in a world of evil and war. Kazantzakis depicts Francis’s spiritual battle as the endless strife between the flesh and the spirit. He recounts Francis’s bitter wanderings over Europe and the Holy Land and his struggle against complacent and entrenched men in the church that finally led to the founding of the Franciscan order.

We see Francis through the eyes of his companion, Brother Leo—a cheerful monk, happy with wine and good food, who faithfully follows the saint whom he cannot fully understand. The “faithful friend” is a literary device, employed by writers from Cervantes to Tolkien, that enables the author to convincingly depict an extraordinary figure caught up in a transcendent quest. Kazantzakis’s Francis goes beyond the normal categories. A bandit says of him, “This fellow isn’t a lunatic, he’s a saint.” Another replies, “It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

Kazantzakis’s portrait of Francis is deeply personal. The author thought that human beings were mired in insignificance but could grow spiritually through great struggle. “From within this human mire, divine songs have welled up, great ideas, violent loves, an unsleeping assault full of mystery,” he wrote in his personal credo. No wonder Francis of Assisi appealed to him.

At one point in the novel, Francis tells Brother Leo of witnessing a Passion play in Assisi, and the dissonance he experienced as a child discovering that the actor playing Christ was indeed only an actor and had not been crucified at all: “Now I’ve grown older, Brother Leo, I’ve grown older, and I do understand. Instead of being crucified, I simply think about crucifixion. Is it possible, Brother Leo, that we too are actors?

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About the Author

The words prolific and peripatetic describe Nikos Kazantzakis, a tireless traveler whose adventures and wide intellectual interests influenced his tremendous body of work, as did his Cretan and Greek heritage.

Kazantzakis was born in 1883 on the island of Crete, which was then still a part of the Ottoman Empire. His father was a dealer of agricultural products and a farmer. As a boy, Kazantzakis was educated by French Franciscans. After completing his secondary education, he moved to Athens to study law, a period of time in which he also wrote and published his first novel and his first play, the latter of which was produced in Athens in 1907.

Kazantzakis moved to Paris in 1908, where he began to study under Henri Bergson, a philosopher whose work emphasized intuition and experience rather than logic. Under Bergson, Kazantzakis studied Nietzsche, from whom he absorbed ideas about the struggle inherent in life, a theme that would inform his own work for the rest of his life.

In 1909, he returned to Crete, where he remained for some years, writing several plays, disseminating the thought of his teacher Bergson, and serving in various capacities during the First World War. With a poet friend, Kazantzakis also spent forty days touring Mount Athos, the home of scores of Greek Orthodox monasteries.

During the early 1920s, Kazantzakis, financially supported by a contract to write school textbooks, spent time in Germany and Austria. He studied Freud and Buddhism and began writing a play about Buddha. He also developed a sympathetic interest in communism during this time, an interest that lasted until he had an opportunity to travel to the Soviet Union in the latter part of the decade.

Throughout this period, and through the 1930s, Kazantzakis worked on his epic poem, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, writing eight drafts until it was finally published in 1938. At the same time, he was also producing a variety of other works: textbooks, a history of Russian literature, a French-Greek dictionary, a translation of Dante’sDivine Comedy into Greek, and novels written in French (in an attempt to make a name for himself outside of Greece). He also traveled to Spain, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and China.

The shadows of war did nothing to discourage Kazantzakis’s work. He visited England in 1939 and wrote a travel book about it. Returning to Greece—the island of Aegina—he began to contemplate a work that he was at the time calling Christ’s Memoirs, which would become The Last Temptation of Christ, and he also started to write Alexis Zorba, which in English would be titled Zorba the Greek.

During and after the Second World War, Kazantzakis served in various political and governmental roles. In 1945, he traveled to Crete for the Greek government in order to investigate German atrocities, and he worked for UNESCO after the war.

In 1946, Kazantzakis left Greece and never returned. His home base was Antibes, France, where he wrote more plays, saw the publication of Zorba the Greek (1946), and wrote several other novels: Christ Recrucified (or The Greek Passion; 1948), about the impact of a Passion play on a Greek village; The Fratricides, about the Greek civil war; The Last Temptation of Christ (1951); and Saint Francis (1953), among others.

Throughout his later life, Kazantzakis was plagued by frequent bouts of facial eczema. A resulting infection led him to lose his right eye. The underlying sickness was eventually diagnosed, in 1954, as lymphatic leukemia. In 1957, after several years of overseeing collections and translations of his works and writing his spiritual autobiography, Report to Greco, he experienced a severe reaction to a vaccine required for a trip to Japan. He died on October 26, 1957, of the Asiatic flu.

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Links for Nikos Kazantzakis

“The Claws of God” (book review of St. Francis)

“Kazantzakis: Prophet of Non-Hope,” by Carnegie Samuel Calian

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