Report to Greco is an indestructible vision. It is the kind of book which no one has been writing because it is the kind of vision which no one has been living.

Report to Greco details the major events of Nikos Kazantzakis's life: his childhood on a farm in a Cretan village and at a school run by Franciscan monks, his years at the University of Athens, his journey to the monasteries on Mt. Athos in Macetonia. But the book concentrates on his intellectual and spiritual pilgrimages. For, as Kazantzakis emphasizes in his introduction:

My Report to Greco is not an autobiography ... Therefore, reader, in these pages you will find the red track made by drops of my blood, the track which marks my journey among men, passions, and ideas.

Kazantzakis discusses the growth of his earliest and deepest passions, the urge for freedom and the urge for sancity. He analyzes his successive commitments to the contradictory philosophies of Christ, Buddha, Lenin, and Nietzsche. And, in some of his most sonorous passages, Kazantzakis chronicles a battle of the soul that has echoes through works from the Bible to Herzog--the duel between flesh and spirit. Characteristically, Kazantzakis writes of this battle in the most expansive terms:

Every man is half God, half man; he is both spirit and flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: It is universal. The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation...God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The spirit desires to wrestle with flesh which is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear.

In dramatizing this spiritual warfare, Kazantzakis retells Biblical stories, creates dialogues between his soul and spirits, and relates the dreams and visions which influenced him as much as any events in the "real world." And he links his spiritual adventures with the day-to-day events and people which inspired them--his father's command that he kiss the bloody corpses of the heroes who died for the liberty of Crete, the Irish girl to whom in a cold stone church, he first made love.

Scaling a Vision

Kazantzakis experienced his spiritual growth in great, poetic conflicts, the same attitude with which he recollects his first childhood memory:

Now I not only looked, I actually saw the world for the very first time. And what an astonishing sight that was! Our little courtyard seemed without limits. There was buzzing from the sands of invisible bees, an intoxicating aroma, a warm sun as thick as honey. The air flashed as though armed with swords, and, between the swords, erect, angle-like incidents with colorful motionless wings advanced straight for me.

"The air flashed as though armed with swords." Kazantzakis lived a life of cosmic oppositions, of pressing and encompassing dualities. One is hardly surprised to find Kazantzakis posing problems like the battle of spirit and flesh in this way--but he extends the approach to many other battles. He explains that he views his life as a battle for spiritual ascent--and the reader of Report to Greco becomes overwhelmed by the extent to which he lived and wrote about life in these terms.

One of the commonplaces of modern sociology is that "the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity." Descriptions of spiritual battles, when written at all, often feature the melancholy field of action "where ignorant armies clash by night." And it is another commonplace that the classic hero simply does not and cannot exist any more. The above comparison with Herzog was applicable in this sense: the anti-heroes of books like Herzog and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano are characterized by their in-ability to live nobly. The armies cannot be clearly defined; the heroes achieve their peculiar grandeur by their half-futile attempts to avoid the degradation of being a member of a degraded society. They are "healthy" because they are sickened by a sick society.

How does Kazantzakis, so obviously and self-consciously a "modern man," avoid the numbing dilemma of men like Matthew Arnold and fictional figures like Herzog? For one thing, he achieves nobility by immersing himself in a noble tradition. The Consul in Under the Volcano, for example, may be one of the many examples of a man "alienated" from society but the hero of Report to Greco is a descendant of generations of proud Cretans and a son of the ancient island of Crete. It is no accident that the author begins the prologue with Cretan soil in his hand and ends it by addressing his grand-father:

...if I never turned my back to the enemy:

Give me your blessing!

On the next page he begins his first chapter, called "Ancestors," and he describes the proud warriors and gentle peasants from whom he is descended.