Kazantzakis: Saviors of God as Post-Modern Scripture

Copyright 1994 by John R. Mabry

"Ah, this is I who stand at my own door and beg;

God stands outside my door and cries for charity!"

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Odyssey: a Modern Sequel1

If there is any writing of the twentieth century that deserves to be labeled "scripture," it is Nikos Kazantzakis' The Saviors of God. It is not the self-conscious spinning of myth, like Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, nor is it the carefully constructed, incomprehensible hallucination of James Joyce's Finnigan's Wake. In The Saviors of God, Kazantzakis, like the prophet Ezekiel and St. John before him, beheld a glimpse of divinity, and ravished by this ecstasy, endeavored to make his revelation known to the world.

Kazantzakis was born on Crete in 1883, and died in Germany in 1957, having mastered seven languages, and becoming world-famous as one of the greatest literary treasures of the twentieth century. He is probably most famous for his books Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, in which, as in all of his work--not the least of which is The Saviors of God--he exemplifies the post-modern quest for God and personal spirituality. In Report to El Greco, he writes, "All my life I struggled to stretch my mind to the breaking point, until it began to creak, in order to create a great thought which might be able to give new meaning to life, a new meaning to death, and to console mankind."2

Struggle he did. His biography reads like a four-score long wrestling match between Jacob and the angel. He found himself, at the end of the first fifth of the century to be part of a world floundering for meaning and direction. As John Fitting describes it, "He felt that his epoch, the 1920's, was an age of dissolution, lacking any moral or spiritual guidelines. With the gods dead and myths ineffectual, man was afloat--disconnected from the world. He had no faith to explain it and no ethic to direct his actions."3

A socialist at heart, Kazantzakis was deeply disturbed by the direction communism was taking, and, disillusioned, attempted to synthesize what understandings he had gleaned into a single, dense, statement of "faith" that he hoped would "transform the materialistic basis of communism into spirituality."4

According to Friar,

"He struggled, therefore, with the only tools he had, pen and paper, striving to purify his style, dreaming of a new theology, a new religion of political action in which the dogmatic, teleological God of the Christians would be dethroned to be replaced by dedication to the theory of an evolutionary and spiritual refinement of matter."5

Influences

Not all of his thoughts were new, of course; only the synthesis of previously disparate elements can really be attributed to him. His three greatest influences, as will be born out in our analysis of The Saviors of God, are Henri Bergson, Frederick Nietzsche and Gautama Buddha.

Henri Bergson was a French biologist and philosopher writing at about the turn of the century. Sahakian describes him as "undoubtedly the most influential exponent of the evolutionary school during contemporary times."6 His thought certainly belongs to the stream of philosophy which began with Hegel's Universal Organism and continued with the process theology of Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin. Bergson's philosophy is often referred to as Vitalism in which the élan vital, the vital impulse, directs the evolution of the world, struggling against the static inertia of matter to arise, to develop, to advance, climbing from plant, into animal, and from animal, "away from instinct to intelligence, and away from both of these to intuition." Bergson called the world "a machine for the making of the gods."7

The influence of Nietzsche, being more widely known than Bergson's, is more immediately evident to the casual reader. In fact, "throughout The Saviors of God," comments Friar, "will be found the tonality, the imprint, the style, and the structure of Thus Spoke Zarathustra."8 This is hardly surprising since Kazantzakis had just translated Thus Spoke Zarathustra into Greek prior to his writing of The Saviors of God. Much of the philosophy of The Saviors of God finds its origin in Nietzsche, although, as we shall see, Kazantzakis also had some profound differences of opinion. Still, as Friar writes,

From that Nietzsche who pronounced the death of the dogmatic Christian God, Kazantzakis learned, as Zarathustra said, that "only that life is worth living which develops the strength and the integrity to withstand the unavoidable sufferings and misfortunes of existence without flying into an imaginary world."9

Kazantzakis himself wrote, "Nietzsche enriched me with new agonies and taught me to transubstantiate unhappiness, sorrow, and uncertainty into pride."10

Gautama Buddha also had a great influence upon Kazantzakis. The specter of this prophet haunted the Greek for twenty years, in fact, as he agonized over an epic poem that would present the Buddha's teachings as filtered through Kazantzakis--own internal experience. He picked up and abandoned the work several times, and in fact, The Saviors of God was written just after he had given up on his Buddha poem yet again.

From the Buddha comes three main ideas. The Buddha refused to comment upon the existence of a supreme being in any conventional sense, a figure Kazantzakis himself strove to divorce himself from. The Buddha, as understood by the Mahayana schools, also preached a doctrine of dependent co-arising, which, briefly stated,

"specifies the compound nature of everything––physical objects, selves, concepts. A ‘tree' or a ‘man'...is constituted by a set of factors in temporary association. This temporary association of elements is the object, and it ‘causes' the object or being to ‘exist.' There is not substance which carries over from cause to effect, on a changing proportion of elements. Hence, objects and beings are...empty of self- reality."11

This, then brings us to the third idea, the Void, the "emptiness of self-reality," which Kazantzakis uses as the capstone of the entire work.

The Work

The Saviors of God is, according to Fitting, "Kazantzakis--essay in self-knowledge and his program for creative life, and tells of the ascension of the soul that Kazantzakis was to infuse into most of his later writings."12 In the pages following we will consider closely each section of this new "scripture," presenting poetic excerpts, and, hopefully, offering insights on Kazantzakis' influences, and the work's place in post-modern literature in our explication.

The work itself is divided into five main sections, not counting the brief Prologue. In The Preparation, Kazantzakis sums up where we have come intellectually, affirming the validity of our mind and our hearts. In The March, he takes us on an exploration, both internal and external, of the ego structure, our racial inheritance, our racial unity, and our kinship with the Cosmos. The Vision (which we will consider out of sequence because of its central importance to understanding absolutely anything that comes before it or follows), is simply a snapshot of the Universe as Kazantzakis beholds it. In The Action, Kazantzakis discusses the responsibilities incumbent upon us who now have such knowledge, and in The Silence, he ties it all together in a single statement of meaning (or lack of the same).

"The Prologue"

In his prologue, Kazantzakis sets the emotional stage of the times:

We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death!

This is the primary existential dilemma, life apparently void of meaning. This is the place in which we have found ourselves. We cannot trust science, we cannot trust ourselves, we cannot trust any spiritual authority. We are left with a sense of existential vertigo. It is the edge of this abyss upon which Kazantzakis is poised. We begin with the void of meaninglessness. Kazantzakis will now present a paradigm for meaning, and end with void again, but hopefully this time, it will be a void of meaning.

Almost immediately, Kazantzakis presents the Bergsonian foundations of the work, when he says:

In the temporary living organism these two streams collide: (a) the ascent toward composition, toward life, toward immortality; (b) the descent toward decomposition, toward matter, toward death. Both opposing forces are holy.

Bergson's concept is essentially unitive: our intellects make it possible for us to see things as distinct from one another, but that distinction is an illusion. The reality is that there are no separate things, just an "endless stream of becoming." But, as Bertrand Russell explains, "Becoming may be a movement up or a movement down: when it is a movement up it is called life, when it is a movement down it is...called matter...."13

In Bergson's view, the universe is at war with itself. The two opposing forces, life and matter struggle eternally. Kazantzakis uses many analogies to describe their relationship, a war, a dance, a marriage. Life, in Kazantzakis' mythos, is Spirit, intellect, mind, that which ascends toward integration; life, light, masculine, phallus, contingent, fighting, good, evolving, asymmetrical and creative. Matter, conversely, is flesh, feminine, intuitive, the heart, that which descends toward disintegrations; death, dark, womb, necessary, tranquil, evil, devolving, symmetrical and destructive, desiring to be at rest. (Fitting, 15) In a later section, The Relationship between Man and Nature, Kazantzakis describes it thus:

One power descends and wants to scatter, to come to a standstill, to die. The other power ascends and strives for freedom, for immortality. These two armies, the dark and the light, the armies of life and death, collide eternally. The visible signs of this collisions are, for us, plants, animals, men. Two violent contrary winds, one masculine and the other feminine, met and clashed at a crossroads. For a moment they counterbalanced each other, thickened, and became visible. This crossroads is the Universe. This crossroads is my heart. This dance of the gigantic erotic collision is transmitted from the darkest particle of matter to the most spacious thought. The wife of my God is matter; they wrestle with each other, they laugh and weep, they cry out in the nuptial bed of flesh. They spawn and are dismembered. They fill sea, land, and air with species of plants, animals, men and spirits. This primordial pair embraces, is dismembered, and multiplies in every living creature.

In the section which we will consider next, Kazantzakis begins the epic of the ascent of the warrior hero, Life.

"The Vision"

In this section, Kazantzakis presents his most comprehensive view of Bergson's vitalism. Bergson writes,

All organized beings, from the humblest to the highest, form the first orgies of life to the time in which we are, and in all places as in all time, do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and to clear many obstacles, perhaps even death.14

Kazantzakis anthropomorphizes this "push," this vital force. In the passage below he sums up Bergson's quote above, and at the same time gives the vital force a face and a character:

How can I besiege this dread vision with words? I stoop over chaos and listen. Someone is groaning and climbing up a secret, dangerous slope. He tramples on inorganic matter, he shapes the plant and fills it. He encamps in it with his whole being....with the longing and the power to escape. He emerges a little, breathes with difficulty, chokes. He abandons to the plants as much heaviness, as much stupor and immobility as he can and, thus disburdened, leaps, with his whole being again, farther and higher still, creating the animals and encamping in their loins. He purifies himself slowly by struggling amid their bodies, and abandons to the animals as much passion, as much slavishness, as much impotence and darkness as he can. Then once more he rises slightly, a bit lighter, and rushes to escape. It is this drive toward freedom, this strife with matter, which slowly creates the head of man. And now we feel with terror that he is again struggling to escape beyond us, to cast us off with the plants and animals, and to leap farther. The moment has come–O great joy and bitterness!–when we, the vanquished, must also be cast away among the reserve troops. Behind the stream of my mind and body, behind the stream of my race and all mankind, behind the stream of plants and animals, I watch with trembling the Invisible, treading on tall visible things and ascending.

In Kazantzakis, there is the sense that this Someone is in someway conscious, self-impelled, self directed. The shock comes when one realizes that this vital urge itself is what Kazantzakis calls God:

Behind his heavy and blood-splattered feet I hear all living things being trampled on and crushed. His face is without laughter, dark and silent, beyond joy and sorrow, beyond hope. I tremble. Are YOU my God? Lord, my Lord, you growl like a wild beast! Your feet are covered with blood and mire, your hands are covered with blood and mire, your jaws are heavy millstones that grind slowly. You clutch at trees and animals, you tread on man, you shout. You climb up the endless black precipice of death, and you tremble. Where are you going? Pain increases, the light and the darkness increase. You weep, you hook onto me, you feed on my blood, you grow huge and strong, and then you kick at my heart.

Kazantzakis cleverly echoes the prologue of the Gospel of John when he says:

You pitched your camp on your race, you brimmed with hands and hearts as with your blood you first revived the dread ancestors and then set forth with the dead, the living, and the unborn to give battle.

This is Kazantzakis' version of the Incarnation of the Word, where St. John writes, "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." The Greek word commonly rendered "dwelt among us" is eskhnwsen, which literally means "pitched a tent in our midst," or, as Kazantzakis renders it above, the Word "pitched your camp on your race."

Kazantzakis is quite aware of God's dilemma, not only as the One ascending through time, but as one whom the post-modern world, via Nietzsche has begun to write off as dead:

It is as though we had buried Someone we thought dead, and now hear him calling in the night: "Help me!" Heaving and panting, he raises the gravestone of our soul and body higher and still higher, breathing more freely at every moment. Every word, every deed, every thought is the heavy gravestone he is forever trying to lift. And my own body and all the visible world, all heaven and earth, are the gravestone which God is struggling to heave upward.

Kazantzakis seeks to save God, not only from entropy, the clutches of matter, but from being dismissed by post-modern humanity as irrelevant. For, in Kazantzakis' view, God is inseparable from all that is, saying in Report to El Greco, "...a great explosive élan exists in life's every molecule, as though each such molecule had compressed into it the impetus of life in its entirety, ready to explode at every collision."15 Kazantzakis describes it more poetically in The Saviors of God when he says,

With his knees doubled up under his chin, with his hands spread toward the light, with the soles of his feet turned toward his back, God huddles in a knot in every cell of flesh.

Kazantzakis tries to re-mythologize God in The Saviors of God, as the new Immanuel, "God with us" or perhaps "God within us," yet set him free from the chains of dogma and uncritical acceptance that have imperilled him as a viable concept for us. He revolts against the traditional orthodoxy by decrying body-denying asceticism––as did Nietzsche––in favor of body-affirming discipline, replacing the exaltation of pain with the more useful exaltation of persistence whose ultimate goal is joy:

Pain is not the only essence of our God, nor is hope in a future life or a life on this earth, neither joy nor victory. Every religion that holds up to worship one of these primordial aspects of God narrows our hears and our minds. The essence of our God is STRUGGLE. Pain, joy, and hope unfold and labor within this struggle, world without end. It is ascension, the battle with the descending countercurrent, which gives birth to pain. But pain is not the absolute monarch. Every victory, every momentary balance on the ascent fills with joy every living thing that breathes, grows, loves, and gives birth. But from every joy and pain a hope leaps out eternally to escape this pain and to widen joy. And again the ascent begins–which is pain–and joy is reborn and new hope springs up once more. The circle never closes. It is not a circle, but a spiral which ascends eternally, ever widening, enfolding and unfolding the triune struggle.

Through this vision, Kazantzakis endeavors to give God back to humankind, by bestowing upon us a revelation of God's purpose and struggle, and then, as we shall see in the rest of the work, revealing that humankind's purpose is to consciously join in God's struggle. As Fitting says,

Religious liberation is to be found in seeking for the source of universal life and the justification of individual endeavors. In a sense, the person cannot escape this challenge to liberation, and Kazantzakis felt that everything serves a transpersonal end superior to itself. If the individual can successfully subdue opposing impulses, he can then approach the essence of divinity, an in so doing become aligned with a personal rhythm––an integral purpose.16

I am a weak, ephemeral creature made of mud and dream. But I feel all the powers of the universe whirling within me. Before they crush me, I want to open my eyes for a moment and to see them. I set my life no other purpose. I want to find a single justification that I may live and bear this dreadful daily spectacle of disease, of ugliness, of injustice, of death. And I strive to discover how to signal my companions before I die, how to give them a hand, how to spell out for them in time one complete word at least, to tell them what I think this procession is, and toward what we go. And how necessary it is for all of us together to put our steps and hearts in harmony. It is our duty...to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless,and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our actions.

As Kazantzakis wrote in his Symposium, "...only if you live it will you be liberated, because in living it you make the integral purpose yours."17 In the chapters which follow, Kazantzakis attempts to change our perceptions about Who we are, gradually allowing us to see ourselves as one with the Supreme Identity.

"The Preparation"

Kazantzakis' goal in "The Preparation" is not to disparage those philosophical leaps which have brought us to the brink of post-modern despair, but to affirm the truths these insights have brought to us, and to forge ahead in a Hegelian manner to the new plateau that synthesis brings to us.

Our First Duty is to affirm the truth of modernist rationalism, to honor its insights as an important stride of the vital impulse towards its goal. Our first duty is, as Friar says, "to the mind which imposes order on disorder, formulates laws, builds bridges over the unfathomable abyss, and sets up rational boundaries beyond which man does not dare to go."18

We hear the voice of Berkeley, and his brand of solipsism, when Kazantzakis says,

With clarity and quiet, I look upon the world and say: All that I see, hear, taste, smell, and touch are the creations of my mind. The sun comes up and the sun goes down in my skull... My brain blots out, and all, the heavens and the earth, vanish. The mind shouts: "Only I exist! Deep in my subterranean cells my five senses labor; they weave and unweave space and time, joy and sorrow, matter and spirit. All swirl about me like a river, dancing and whirling; faces tumble like water, and chaos howls. But I, the Mind, continue to ascend patiently, manfully, sober in the vertigo. That I may not stumble and fall, I erect landmarks over this vertigo; I sling bridges, open roads, and build over the abyss. "Struggling slowly, I move among the phenomena which I create, I distinguish between them for my convenience, I untie them with laws and yoke them to my heavy practical needs.

We hear the voice of Kant, and his breakthrough of the mind as the patterner, the orderer of a world unknowable as it is in itself:

I impose order on disorder and give a face–my face–to chaos. I do not know whether behind appearances there lives and moves a secret essence superior to me. (a)the mind of man can perceive appearances only, and never the essence of things; (b) and not all appearances but only the appearances of matter; (c) and more narrowly still: not even these appearances of matter, but only relationships between them; (d) and these relationships are not real and independent of man, for even these are his creations; (e) and they are not the only ones humanly possible, but simply the most convenient for his practical and perceptive needs.

This is the summary of our intellectual knowledge, our epistemology, what we can know. This is the contribution of the mind to our journey. Kazantzakis admits, that this contribution doesn't exactly amount to a whole lot, and that realization causes him a moment of vertigo:

Within these limitations the mind is the legal and absolute monarch. No other power reigns within its kingdom. I recognize these limitations, I accept them with resignation, bravery, and love, and I struggle at ease in their enclosure, as though I were free. In sudden dreadful moments a thought flashes through me: "This is all a cruel and futile game, without beginning, without end, without end, without meaning." But again I yoke myself swiftly to the wheels of necessity, and all the universe begins to revolve around me once more.

Fortunately, the mind is not our only tool, we are bigger than our minds. We also have our hearts. Our Second Duty is to honor the heart.

I will not accept boundaries; appearances cannot contain me; I choke! To bleed in this agony, and to live it profoundly, is the second duty.

Like the Romantics, to whom this chapter is really dedicated, Kazantzakis refuses to accept that rationality is all that we can know. For there is another, equally valid way of knowing, one that does not seek to know by means of conquering, but by beholding and contemplating, one that "yearns to pierce beyond phenomena and to merge with something beyond mind and matter."19 Thus,

What is the value of subduing the earth, the waters, the air, of conquering space and time, of understanding what laws govern the mirages that rise from the burning deserts of the mind, their appearance and reappearance? I have one longing only: to grasp what is hidden behind appearances, to ferret out that mystery which brings me to birth and then kills me, to discover if behind the visible and unceasing stream of the world an invisible and immutable presence is hiding. If the mind cannot, if it was not made to attempt the heroic and desperate breach beyond frontiers, then if only the heart could! Beyond! Beyond! Beyond! Beyond man I seek the invisible whip which strikes him and drives him into the struggle. I lie in ambush to find out what primordial face struggles beyond animals to imprint itself on the fleeting flesh by creating, smashing, and remolding innumerable masks. I struggle to make out beyond plants the first stumbling steps of the Invisible in the mud.

Kazantzakis' anti-rational side was certain that personal experience and individual truth at least, if not more important than rational knowledge. He yearned for universal justice, wrestled profoundly with the problems of existence.20 Perhaps, as Friar comments, "his ideal image of himself was as a Hebrew prophet out of the Old Testament...who roamed the countryside from village to village, inflamed with the Word of God, and who combined thus in one entity both the poet and the doer,"21 uniting in his person and his vision, the practical and the visionary, the rational and the emotional, the eternal and the ephemeral.

Likewise, Bergson's Vitalism maintains, in Sahakian's words,

that the laws of physics and chemistry will never adequately explain life, for the reason that life is not material. Furthermore, reason itself is unable to explain life processes because its rational activity cannot go beyond the mechanistic explanations based on physico-chemical laws, whereas life and consciousness, being independent of physico-chemical laws, cannot be understood completely by means of logical, scientific, or mathematical analyses.22

Kazantzakis closes this section thusly:

Let us unite, let us hold each other tightly, let us merge our hearts, let us create...for Earth a brain and a heart, let us give a human meaning to the superhuman struggle. This anguish is our second duty.

The Third Duty that Kazantzakis wishes to impress upon us, is that we must refrain from hope. This might seem at first to be nihilistic, but that is a paradox which we are asked to sit astride. The Third Duty, as Friar describes it, is that we must free ourselves "from both mind and heart, from the great temptation of the hope which both offer of subduing phenomena or of finding the essence of things."23

Free yourself from the simple complacency of the mind that thinks to put all things in order and hopes to subdue phenomena. Free yourself from the terror of the heart that seeks and hopes to find the essence of things. My heart streams on. I do not seek the beginning and the end of the world. I follow my heart's dread rhythm and plod on!

For Kazantzakis, any teleological goal was as much a phantom as any transcendent Supreme Being. Humankind must free itself of its outrageous fantasies about there being any kind of ultimate goal towards which the universe is headed. For Kazantzakis, it is not the Grail that is important, but the quest itself. In this way, he is like Whitehead, whose universe is open-ended and in which there is always an element of danger and surprise, even for God, and quite unlike Tielhard, for whom the universe is heading inerrantly towards the Omega, or end point. As Russell describes it in his analysis of Bergson, "there is no town, no definite goal, at the end of the road along which evolution travels."24

What Kazantzakis really wishes to throw off here is the tyranny of certainty, which keeps humankind enslaved, whether it is to a philosophy, a religious dogma, or to a scientific paradigm. As Fitting says, "The individual must risk encounter and personal expression and throw himself into a matrix of uncertainty."25

Kazantzakis, in the throes of this dilemma, wrote his wife saying, "Ah, if only one could die suddenly as he is serving a Purpose!" The purpose then, is the fight, the surge ahead, in itself. And in this absence of hope, he sought his hope. "A man must then embrace the annihilating abyss without any hope," comments Friar, "he must say that nothing exists, neither life nor death and must accept this necessity bravely, with exultation and song. He may then build the affirmative structure of his life over this abyss in an ecstasy of tragic joy."26

Like Nietzsche, Kazantzakis described himself as a "tragic optimist," one who "looks straight into the forces of destruction, and although despising such powers, accepts them unfearingly, for he partakes of an understanding that all destruction is but the preparatory stage to new creation."27 Thus, even if there is no objectively verifiable purpose, man must live as if there were one. Kazantzakis takes his cue from Nietzsche in believing that if no meaning is to be found, one must create one in order to live. The Saviors of God is Kazantzakis' attempt to do just that.

"The March"

Having undergone this mental preparation, we are ready to begin The March, the journey itself. This journey is one of identity. It is a journey out of our "skin encapsulated egos" (to borrow a term from Alan Watts) to a realization of our true Selves. It is the journey to knowing who we are. In the post-modern world, Freud shattered our illusions of internal control. Kazantzakis says,

I am not, I am not innocent, I am not serene. My happiness and unhappiness are both unbearable; I am full of inarticulate voices and darknesses; I wallow, all blood and tears, in this warm trough of my flesh.

We have become aware that there is more to us than the voices of our conscious egos, we are "full of inarticulate voices and darknesses," we are not even the masters of our internal worlds, let alone our external reality. Our First Step is to hear The Ego, not our tiny, individual egos, but the transpersonal voice that echoes through the souls of all of us:

But suddenly a convulsive cry tears through me: "Help me!" Who calls? Gather your strength and listen; the whole heart of man is a single outcry. Lean against your breast to hear it; someone is struggling and shouting within you.

We must discover that within us is the endangered, frantic spirit of God, crying out for liberation. Our own liberation is bound up with his. Only when we can hear his voice, and submit our own purposes to his, can we gain any sort of hope. Like Nietzsche's Superman, its will is superior to those below it, and those below it must serve it.

The Cry within me is a call to arms. It shouts: "I, the Cry, am the Lord your God! I am not an asylum. I am not hope and a home. I am not the Father nor the Son nor the Holy Ghost. I am your General! "Learn to obey. Only he who obeys a rhythm superior to his own is free.

When we realize that our true identity is God, then our only valid purpose is his purpose, our only true hope is his struggle. In confessing this, we can begin to assist God, rather than oppose him. We must, Kazantzakis says, recognize this as our greatest responsibility. "Each man," writes Friar, "must consider himself solely responsible for the salvation of the world, because when a man dies, that aspect of the universe which is his own particular vision and the unique play of his mind also crashes in ruins forever."28

Say: ‘It is my duty, and mine alone, to save the earth. If it is not saved, then I alone am to blame'."

This realization alone grants us purpose and hope. It is the surrender of the individual ego to the transpersonal Self of the universe. We are God, we are the Earth, we are the Universe.

Yes, yes, I am NOT nothing! A vaporous phosphorescence on a damp meadow, a miserable worm that crawls and loves, that shouts and talks about wings for an hour or two until his mouth is blocked with earth. For whether I want to or not, I am also, without a doubt, a part of the visible and the invisible Universe. We are one. The powers which labor within me, the powers which goad me on to live, the powers which goad me on to die are without doubt, its own powers also. I am not a suspended, rootless thing in the world. I am the earth of its earth and breath of its breath. I am not alone in my fear, nor alone in my hope, nor alone in my shouting.

But there is more. We are also the bridge of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is over us, poised like the tightrope walker, that the impish Vital Urge will leap, sending us to our deaths:29

I am an improvised bridge, and when Someone passes over me, I crumble away behind Him. A Combatant passes through me, eats my flesh and brain to open up roads, to free himself from me at last. It is not I but He who shouts.

The Second Step of the Journey is the identification of the self with the myriad descendents that have gone before it, the whole of humanity, The Race:

Your dead do no lie in the ground. They have become ideas and passions, they determine your will and your actions. Future generations live, desire, and act in your loins and your heart. Myriad invisible hands hold your hands and direct them. When you rise in anger, a great-grandfather froths at your mouth; when you make love, an ancestral caveman growls with lust; when you sleep, tombs open in your memory till your skull brims with ghosts. Your skull is a pit of blood round which the shades of the dead gather in myriad flocks to drink of you and be revived.

Kazantzakis seldom neglects an opportunity to invoke the grisly to drive his point home. But his point is an important one, we are just a small part, a point in time in the long body of God through time. And it is up to us now, having arisen to self-consciousness, to assume responsibility for God's ascent, and help him by consciously and responsibly guiding our evolution, his ascent:

But you must choose with care whom to hurl down again into the chasms of your blood, and whom you shall permit to mount once more into the light and the earth. Do not pity them. Keep vigil over the bottomless gulf of your heart, and choose. You shall say: "This shade is humble, dark, like a beast: send him away! This one is silent and flaming, more living than I: let him drink all my blood!" Enlighten the dark blood of your ancestors, shape their cries into speech, purify their will, widen their narrow, unmerciful brows. This is your second duty. You have a great responsibility. You do not govern now only your own small, insignificant existence. You are a throw of the dice on which, for a moment, the entire fate of your race is gambled.

This smacks of Nietzschean aristocratic cruelty, yet Kazantzakis does not entirely abandon compassion, and in fact sees the movement of the heart in compassion as evidence of the Ego's progress:

Only he has been freed from the inferno of his ego who feels deep pangs of hunger when a child of his race has nothing to eat, who feels his heart throbbing with joy when a man and a woman of his race embrace and kiss one another. All these are limbs of your larger, visible body. You suffer and rejoice, scattered to the ends of the earth in a thousand bodies, blood of your blood. Fight on behalf of your larger body just as you fight on behalf of your smaller body... How can you become strong, enlightened, manly, if all these virtues do not storm throughout your entire larger body?

The Second duty is summed up neatly by Kazantzakis himself in the close of this chapter:

Your first duty, in completing your service to your race, is to feel within you all your ancestors. Your second duty is to throw light on their onrush and to continue their work. Your third duty is to pass on to your son the great mandate to surpass you. Agony within you! Someone is fighting to escape you, to tear himself away from your flesh, to be freed of you. A seed in your loins, a seed in your brains, does not want to remain with you any more. It cannot be contained in your entrails any longer; it fights for freedom. "Father, I cannot be contained in your heart! I want to smash it and pass through!..."

In the Third Step, we identify not only with our direct lineage, but with the whole body of humankind in every nation, of every race. In the Third step Mankind itself sees itself as the Body of God, striving to surpass its skin:

...Fight to live through the whole struggle of man. From all these generations, from all these joys and sorrows, from this lovemaking, these battles, these ideas, a single voice rings out, pure and serene. Pure and serene because, though it contains all the sins and disquietudes of struggling man, it yet flies beyond them all and mounts higher still. Amidst all this human material Someone clambers up on his hands and knees, drowned in tears and blood, struggling to save himself. To save himself from whom? From the body which entwines him, from the people who support him, from the flesh, from the heart and the brains of man.

In the Fourth Step, our identity expands beyond humankind to encompass The Earth and beyond. In some of the most beautiful passages in the entire book, Kazantzakis describes our true Self, our true nature, our true calling.

It is not you who call. It is not your voice calling from within your ephemeral breast. It is not only the white, yellow, and black generations of man calling in your heart. The entire Earth, with her trees and her waters, with her animals, with her men and her gods, calls from within your breast. Earth rises up in your brains and sees her entire body for the first time. She shudders; she is a beast that eats, begets, moves, remembers. She hungers, she devours her children–plants, animals, men, thoughts–she grinds them in her dark jaws, passes them through her body once more, then casts them again into the soil. It is not the heart which leaps and throbs in the blood. It is the entire Earth. She turns her gaze backward and relives her dread ascent through chaos.

Thus, Kazantzakis describes the self-reflexive leap of humankind as the advent of the self-knowing of the Universe. In a biography of her husband, Kazantzakis' wife wrote, "In opposition to Goethe's verdict that life has no purpose and that we ought not even to ask any questions, Kazantzakis believed that human impulse was by no means individual. He saw it as the will of the Cosmos manifesting itself for the first time in man."30 But he does not forget that humankind, the summit of God's ascent is but a momentary container, which God longs to smash free of:

I created man, and now I struggle to be rid of him. "I am cramped and crushed! I want to escape!" This cry destroys and fructifies the bowels of the earth eternally. It leaps from body to body, from generation to generation, from species to species, becoming always stronger and more carnivorous. All parents shout: " I want to give birth to a son greater than I!" This is an onslaught! A Spirit rushes, storms through matter and fructifies it, passes beyond the animals, creates man, digs its claws into his head like a vulture, and shrieks. It is our turn now. It molds us, pummels matter within us and turns it into spirit, tramples on our brains, mounts astride our sperm, kicks our bodies behind it, and struggles to escape.

"The Action"

Having established our true identity, our place in the universe, Kazantzakis now asks us "what are you going to do about it?" This section is primarily about responsibility, our responsibility towards the ever-ascending Life-force, towards each other, and towards the Earth.

The ultimate most holy form of theory is action. Not to look on passively while the spark leaps form generation to generation, but to leap and to burn with it! ...No, it does not "find"–it creates its way, hewing to right and left through resistances of logic and matter. Our profound human duty is not to interpret or to cast light on the rhythm of God's march, but to adjust, as much as we can, the rhythm of our small and fleeting life to his. Only thus may we mortals succeed in achieving something immortal, because then we collaborate with One who is Deathless.

The first sub-section, titled The Relationship Between God and Man is an exploration of the nature of God as Kazantzakis sees him, and of course, what that means for us. In this chapter, Kazantzakis seeks to banish any of our previously held conceptions of God, to reveal them as outdated, unnecessary, counterproductive, in fact, to the post-modern world in which we find ourselves:

We have seen the highest circle of spiraling powers. We have named this circle God. We might have given it any other name we wished: Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence. But we have named it God because only this name, for primordial reasons, can stir our hearts profoundly. I do not care what face other ages and other people have given to the enormous, faceless essence. They have crammed it with human virtues, with rewards and punishments, with certainties. They have given a face to their hopes and fears, they have submitted their anarchy to a rhythm, they have found a higher justification by which to live and labor. They have fulfilled their duty. But today we have gone beyond these needs; we have shattered this particular mask of the Abyss; our God no longer fits under the old features. Our hearts have overbrimmed with new agonies, with new luster and silence. The mystery has grown savage and God has grown greater. The dark powers ascend, for they have also grown greater, and the entire human island quakes. Let us stoop down to our hearts and confront the Abyss valiantly. Let us try to mold once more, with our flesh and blood, the new, contemporary face of God.

Kazantzakis even echoes Marx, when he says,

[God] is not the upright head of a family; he does not portion out either bread or brains equally to his children. Injustice, Cruelty, Longing, and Hunger are the four steeds that drive his chariot on this rough-hewn earth of ours. God never created out of happiness or comfort or glory, but out of shame and hunger and tears.

Kazantzakis' God is, like Bergson's, the persistence of Life itself. But Life is not omnipotent, it is in danger of being smothered at any moment! Life is not infinite, our bodies, the stuff of the universe is the only reality it knows, not omniscient, but scrambling towards the light of consciousness like a madman, trampling over any and all who get in the way. Almost systematically, Kazantzakis throws out long held notions about the nature of divinity:

My God is not All-holy. He is full of cruelty and savage justice, and he chooses the best mercilessly. He is without compassion....

My God is not All-knowing. His brain is a tangled skein of light and darkness which he strives to unravel in the labyrinth of the flesh.

[My God] clings to warm bodies; he has not other bulwark. He shouts for help; he proclaims a mobilization throughout the Universe.

As Friar says, "This unceasing creativity of life, casting up and discarding individuals and species as experiments on its way toward more and more liberation, is what Bergson and Kazantzakis both meant by God."31 God is not looking out for us, God is scrambling blindly forward over our bodies. It is not his responsibility to protect us or save us--it is our responsibility to protect and to save him. And here is the meaning of the title of this book: We are the Saviors of God. He has no stewards, no helpers, no angels, no nursemaids, no prophets, no saviors but us, and we must not let him fail:

It is our duty, on hearing his Cry, to run under his flag, to fight by his side, to be lost or to be saved with him. God is imperiled. He is not almighty, that we may cross our hands, waiting for certain victory. He is not all-holy, that we may wait trustingly for him to pity and to save us. Within the province of our ephemeral flesh all of God is imperiled. He cannot be saved unless we save him with our own struggles; nor can we be saved unless he is saved.

As in Whitehead's process thought, we do not know the outcome of this struggle. Anything can happen. The great experiment of Life could fail, and then, most assuredly, God would indeed be dead. Our life and God's are inseparably intertwined. Our fate is his, our struggle is his, our future is his. Kazantzakis writes,

We are one. From the blind worm in the depths of the ocean to the endless arena of the Galaxy, only one person struggles and is imperiled: YOU. And within your small and earthen breast only one thing struggles and is imperiled: the Universe.

The next sub-section, titled The Relationship Between Man and Man could just as well have been titled "the Nietzsche chapter," for this chapter is pervaded by Nietzsche's influence, however filtered through Kazantzakis' conscience. Nietzsche's belief that "Good is that which survives, which wins; bad is that which gives way and fails,"32 finds its echo in Kazantzakis' statement that

Whatever rushes upward and helps God to ascend is good. Whatever drags downward and impedes God from ascending is evil.

And of Nietzsche's praise of the body, and his assertion that "And he who has to be a creator in good and evil, truly, has first to be a destroyer and break values. Thus the greatest evil belongs with the greatest good: this however, is the creative good,"33 finds expression in the following passage,

Eros? What other name may we give that impetus which becomes enchanted as soon as it casts its glance on matter and then longs to impress its features upon it? It confronts the body and longs to pass beyond it, to merge with the other erotic cry hidden in that body, to become one till both may vanish and become deathless by begetting sons. It approaches the soul and wishes to merge with it inseparably so that "you" and "I" may no longer exist; it blows on the mass of mankind and wishes, by smashing the resistances of mind and body, to merge all breaths into one violent gale that may lift the earth! In moments of crisis this Erotic Love swoops down on men and joins them together by force--friends and foes, good and evil. It is a breath superior to all of them, independent of their desires and deeds. It is the spirit, the breathing of God on earth.

Kazantzakis' God is, in fact, very similar to Nietzsche's Superman, albeit a Superman which exists on a transpersonal scale which Nietzsche could never approve of. But Kazantzakis' and Nietzsche's attitudes about the common man's responsibility are not at variance. To quote Will Durant on Nietzsche (but which could just as well apply to Kazantzakis),

Only by seeing such a man as the goal and reward of our labors can we love life and live upward. "We must have an aim for whose sake we are all dear to one another." Let us be great, or servants and instruments to the great; what a fine sight it was when millions of Europeans offered themselves as means to the ends of Bonaparte, and died for him gladly, singing his name as they fell! Perhaps those of us who understand can become the prophets of him whom we cannot be, and can straighten the way for his coming; we, indifferent of lands, indifferent of times,can work together, however separated, for this end. Zarathustra will sing, even in his suffering, if he can but hear the voices of these hidden helpers, these lovers of the higher man."34

As Zarathustra rallies to those around him, "Ye lonely ones of today, ye who stand apart, ye shall one day be a people; from you who have chosen yourselves, a chosen people shall arise; and from it the superman."35 To enlist in the campaign of God is our highest calling, our eventual hope, our "discovered" purpose in life.

This identification of ourselves with the Universe begets the two superior virtues of our ethics: responsibility and sacrifice. It is our duty to help liberate that God who is stifling in us, in mankind, in masses of people living in darkness. We are all one, we are all an imperiled essence. If at the far end of the world a spirit degenerates, it drags down our spirit into its own degradation. If one mind at the far end of the world sinks into idiocy, our own temples overbrim with darkness. For it is only One who struggles at the far end of earth and sky. One. And if He goes lost, it is we who must bear the responsibility. If He goes lost, then we go lost. This is why the salvation of the Universe is also our salvation, why solidarity among men is no longer a tenderhearted luxury but a deep necessity and self-preservation, as much a necessity as, in an army under fire, the salvation of your comrade-in-arms.

Kazantzakis calls us to arms, to action, to, in Nietzsche's words, "Live dangerously. Erect your cities beside Vesuvius. Send out your ships to unexplored seas. Live in a state of war."36 He impels us to cast aside anything which might impede God's progress, ideas, dogmas, or, most especially--and contrary to Nietzsche--the "unbelievers," those who are comfortable, those in power.

God shouts: "Burn your houses! I am coming! Whoever has a house cannot receive me! Burn your ideas, smash your thoughts! Whoever has found the solution cannot find me." War against the unbelievers! The unbelievers are the satisfied, the satiated, the sterile.

But, again, like Nietzsche, Kazantzakis' "formula for greatness is amor fati...not only to bear up under every necessity, but to love it,"37 when he writes,

Let us accept Necessity courageously. War is the lawful sovereign of our age. Today the only complete and virtuous man is the warrior. For only he, faithful to the great pulse of our time, smashing, hating, desiring, follows the present command of our God. If the road leading you to your liberation is that of disease, of lies, of dishonor, it is then your duty to plunge into disease, into lies, into dishonor, that you may conquer them. You may not otherwise be saved.

Kazantzakis' Superman is like Nietzsche's in many ways, yet, Kazantzakis' would never have agreed with Nietzsche. Kazantzakis had an intense love and devotion to the common man, and was devoted to the socialism that Nietzsche found so distasteful, wanting to ease the strife of daily life, to alleviate poverty and pain as much as possible. For Kazantzakis' Superman tramples over the masses not inscrupulously, but unconsciously. Kazantzakis' Superman isn't a single human being who seeks to establish power and prestige to fortify an engorged and fragile ego, but a transpersonal force who tramples over the masses figuratively throughout time, on the sidereal scale, whose ego is not that of a single human being, but the emerging consciousness of the universe itself.

In the final sub-section, The Relationship Between Man and Nature, Kazantzakis reaffirms our connection with the primal world. He begins with what is almost a litany against the modernist view of nature. We think of the empiricists when he says,

All this world, all this rich, endless flow of appearances is not a deception, a multicolored phantasmagoria of our mirroring mind. Nor is it absolute reality which lives and evolves freely, independent of our mind's power.

And yet, a few lines later, he says,

Lie in ambush behind appearances, patiently, and strive to subject them to laws. Thus may you open up roads through chaos and help the spirit on its course.

He also invokes Kant when he says,

Impose order, the order of your brain, on the flowing anarchy of the world. Incise your plan of battle on the face of the abyss.

And Hegel,

It is not the resplendent robe which arrays the mystic body of God. Nor the obscurely translucent partition between man and mystery.

Ultimately, though, Kazantzakis believes that the salvation of the natural world lies, not as the Taoist would imagine, with Nature as it is "in-itself," but only insofar as we use it, fashion it, make it conform to our will. For left to itself, according to Kazantzakis, it is "lost." In so doing, we not only direct the flow of evolution, but determine the direction in which God will grow.

Contend with the powers of nature, force them to the yoke of superior purpose. Free that spirit which struggles within them and longs to mingle with that spirit which struggles within you. We do not only free God by battling and subduing the visible world about us; we also create God. A stone is saved if we lift it from the mire and build it into a house, or if we chisel the spirit upon it. The seed is saved--what do we mean by "saved"? It frees the God within it by blossoming, by bearing fruit, by returning to earth once more. Let us help the seed to save itself.

As in Nietzsche, the ultimate ethic is biological, not extraterrestrial. Zarathustra declares "I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not."38 Accordingly, as Durant says, "we must judge things according to their value for life; we need a physiological transvaluation of all values.' The real test of a man, or a group, or a species, is energy, capacity, power."39

God, through humankind, is struggling towards biological perfectibility. "If such value-judgements are purposeless for Nature," writes Friar, "they are nevertheless purposeful for man himself, who is a portion of Nature, and in Nature. If man and his powers are not necessarily the highest perfectible reach of Nature for Nature, man can nevertheless rise beyond the limits of his heritage and environment to intervene and redirect the very forces which created him and which push him onward."40 Only through humankind, not through Nature, does God have a chance to be saved. It is each man's sacred responsibility so to do, for,

his own soul is scattered and enslaved in these things about him, in trees, in animals, in men, in ideas, and it is his own soul he saves by completing these labors.

Thus the Vision comes home to us. It is our home, our history:

All the concentrated agony of the Universe bursts out in every living thing. God is imperiled in the sweet ecstasy and bitterness of flesh. But he shakes himself free, he leaps out of brains and loins, then clings to new brains and new loins until the struggle for liberation again breaks out from the beginning. For the first time on this earth, from within our hearts and our minds, God gazes on his own struggle.

And in the midst of such pain, the knowledge that he, like his ancestors before him, and his children after him, will be trampled underfoot in the bloodied mire of the ages in the Dread Ascent, Kazantzakis finds joy. I believe he finds joy simply because he finds meaning. The ambiguity is eased, somewhat, the angst is given direction, the dread is given a face.

Joy! Joy! I did not know that all this world is so much part of me, that we are all one army, that windflowers and stars struggle to right and left of me and do not know me; but I turn to them and hail them. The Universe is warm, beloved, familiar, and it smells like my own body. It is Love and War both, a raging restlessness, persistence and uncertainty.

"The Silence"

The final section, Silence, is perhaps the most enigmatic and most difficult to understand of the entire book. It is also the most Buddhist. Not included in the first printing, Kazantzakis added it later, selecting it mostly from passages found elsewhere in the first addition, and arranging them with some new material at the end.

The Void which this chapter speaks of comes from the Buddhist concept sunya, emptiness, openness, transcendence, the indeterminate or undifferentiated aesthetic continuum. It is usually employed as meaning that "phenomenon are sunya, they are relative and lack substantiality or independent reality; they are conditioned and hence are unreal.41 The Void refers in Kazantzakis, as in Hegel, to the all-embracing whole, "Only the Whole is real."42 As Fitting says, "It is to be realized from within when a person has eliminated all sensing and sensed differentiations."43

It also refers to life without expectations, empty of desire or attachment, "the existential acceptance of the unknown and the living in harmony with the happenings of rhythm in all its unexpected indwelling and incomprehensible presence."44

Kazantzakis looks forward in The Saviors of God, to the day when our consciousness becomes the singular self-consciousness of God. At that point, all the struggle becomes joy, all that was endured becomes understood:

The soul is a flaming tongue that licks and struggles to set the black bulk of the world on fire. One day the entire Universe will become a single conflagration. Then all at once the rhythm of the earth becomes a vertigo, time disappears, the moment whirls, becomes eternity, and every point in space--insect or star or idea--turns into dance. It was a jail, and the jail was smashed, the dreadful powers within it were freed, and that point of space no longer exists!

This ultimate stage of our spiritual exercise is called Silence. Silence means: every person, after completing his service in all labors, reaches finally the highest summit of endeavor, beyond every labor, where he no longer struggles or shouts, where he ripens fully in silence, indestructible, eternally, with the entire Universe.

Kazantzakis closes with an enigmatic cluster of beatitudes which apply to his Gospel:

BLESSED BE ALL THOSE WHO HEAR AND RUSH TO FREE YOU, LORD, AND WHO SAY: "ONLY YOU AND I EXIST"

BLESSED BE ALL THOSE WHO FREE YOU AND BECOME UNITED WITH YOU, LORD, AND WHO SAY: "YOU AND I ARE ONE."

AND THRICE BLESSED BE THOSE WHO BEAR ON THEIR SHOULDERS AND DO NOT BUCKLE UNDER THIS GREAT, SUBLIME, AND TERRIFYING SECRET: THAT EVEN THIS ONE DOES NOT EXIST!

As John Fitting writes, "Kazantzakis'...closing remark was not just an idea, but for him was expressive of the very nature of realty; it has the avowed purpose of being a means to ultimate transformation. As a means to knowledge it denied that a person can 'know' the absolute nature of things, for there is not such absolute knowledge from the highest perspective."45 This, then, is a koan, a verbal message that defies rational understanding, and the intent of which is to break us out of our rational prisons to comprehend intuitively a greater reality. In The Saviors of God, Kazantzakis endeavored to stretch us as far as we can be stretched. Our ego is the ego of the race, the planet, the cosmos. Our life is the life of the being which mounts upon us and strives toward perfection. Our responsibility is not to live for our own comfort, or even ultimately for the comfort of our fellow man, but for the progress of Life in Universe. And with these final beatitudes, he seeks to break the barrier between understanding and experience of this infinity.

The Saviors of God is singular amongst the writings of the twentieth century. It is like the writings of Bergson, Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin, but it is not philosophy in an academic sense, but in an aesthetic sense, it is, as is the greatest of sacred literature, poetry. And like the best of sacred literature, it grapples with the great questions, and it does not pretend to answer them all, but instead to point to the greater mystery that lies beyond both rationality and emotion. Perhaps the greatest measure of Kazantzakis' vision was whether his quest for meaning was successful for himself. His tomb in Herakleion, Crete, betrays the answer, for upon it is inscribed, "I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything. I am free."46

NOTES

1. Kazantzakis, Nikos; Kimon Friar, trans. The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1958), p. 662.

2. Kazantzakis, Nikos; Kimon Friar, trans. The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), p. 12.

3. Fitting, John Jeffrey The Taoist Individuation of Nikos Kazantzakis (Ph.D. dissertation, CIIS, 1976), p. 49.

4. Saviors, p. 21-2.

5. Ibid., p. 16.

6. Sahakian, William S. History of Philosphy (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), p. 233.

7. Sahakian, p. 234.

8. Saviors, p. 37.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., p. 38.

11. Crim, Keith, ed. The Perennial Dictionary of World Religions (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 37.

12. Fitting, p. 44.

13. Russell, Bertrand A History of Western Philosphy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), p.794.

14. Ibid., p. 800.

15. Fitting, p. 208.

16. Ibid., p. 43-4.

17. Ibid.

18. Odyssey, p. xiii.

19. Ibid.

20. Fitting, 46.

21. Saviors, 16-7.

22. Sahakian, 233.

23. Odyssey, xiii.

24. Russell, 793.

25. Fitting, 43.

26. Odyssey, xiii.

27. Fitting, 14.

28. Odyssey, xiii.

29. Nietzsche, Frederick, Hollingdale, R.J., trans. Thus Spake Zarathustra (New York: Penguin, 1961), p. 47-48.

30. Fitting, 62.

31. Odyssey, xvii.

32. Durant, Will The Story of Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961), p. 301.

33. Nietzsche, p. 139.

34. Durant, p. 321.

35. Ibid., p. 321.

36. Nietzsche, p. 18.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., p. 42.

39. Durant, p. 318.

40. Odyssey, p. xxii.

41. Murti, T.R.V. The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (London: George Allen and Unwin Letd., 1955), p. 349. Quoted in Fitting, p. 194-5.

42. Russell, p. 733.

43. Fitting, p. 209.

44. Ibid., p. 16.

45. Ibid., p. 219.

46. Saviors, p. 36.