Books: Son of Man

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (506 pp.)—Nlkos Kazantzakis—Simon & Schuster ($6).

When Nikos Kazantzakis was buried in Crete three years ago, a tall, unknown peasant stepped suddenly from the crowd, seized the coffin and lowered it single-handed into the grave. It was a giant's gesture which the dead man himself might have planned. For the author who wrote a brilliant modern sequel to The Odyssey and stirred the world with Zorba the Greek believed that man's destiny is determined by his own acts in the face of life, death and God.

Nietzsche's superman was one of his first ideals; Henri Bergson's matter-mastering Life Force was his first philosophy, followed by bouts with Buddhism and Leninism. Though he sometimes sounded like an atheist and proclaimed that man creates God in his own image, Kazantzakis was agonized by the struggle for faith and haunted by the figure of Christ. His 1948 novel, The Greek Passion—in which a group of villagers with roles in a passion play are forced to act out their roles in real life—movingly restated the old idea that if Christ returned to earth he would be crucified again. But Kazantzakis' real struggle with the Son of Man came in his final book, The Last Temptation of Christ, a searing, soaring, shocking novel in the form of a "biography" of Jesus.

The skeleton of his story, which earned Kazantzakis the censure of the Greek Or thodox Church, contains such orthodox dogma as Jesus' virgin birth, miracles, divinity and (in forecast) resurrection. But Kazantzakis' Christ is far more man than God—a man torn, like Kazantzakis himself, between flesh and spirit, dark and light. "Within me," he wrote, "are the dark immemorial forces of the Evil One, human and prehuman; within me too are the luminous forces, human and prehuman, of God—and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met. The anguish has been intense."

Promenade on Saturday. Intense is a mild word for the anguish of every single character in The Last Temptation of Christ.

Joseph is a hopeless paraplegic. On the day of his betrothal to Mary he was struck by a bolt of lightning, and ever since he has lain paralyzed, sweating and gasping with the effort to say one word, syllable by agonized syllable: "Adonai"—the prophet's word for God. "And when he had finished this entire word he would re main tranquil for an hour or two until the struggle again gripped him and he began once more to open and close his mouth."