The Claws of God

ST. FRANCIS (379 pp.)--Nikos Kazantzakis--Simon & Schuster ($5.95).

When the Victorians "discovered" St. Francis in the last century, they were charmed by his gentleness, fashioned an image of an almost sickly sweet saint who slipped effortlessly through life. In his last novel, Greece's late great Nikos Kazantzakis has restored agony of soul to the story of St. Francis. Like Jesus in Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ and Ulysses in his epic poem, The Odyssey, Francis struggles to shed earthly desires for a harder, truer life of the spirit.

Sweat & Lust. "We, as human beings, are all miserable persons, heartless, small, insignificant," wrote Kazantzakis in his personal credo, The Saviors of God. "But within us a superior essence drives us ruthlessly upward. From within this human mire divine songs have welled up, great ideas, violent loves, an unsleeping assault full of mystery."

In Kazantzakis' imaginative reconstruction, St. Francis searches for God in these commonly human terms. His Francis sweats with lust for the lovely Clare, dreams of wrestling with a naked woman and other demons, and wakes "beating his hands against the floor, bellowing, his hair sodden and dripping." About to kiss a leper, he blanches at the putrescent nose, the fingerless hands; spits and is nauseated. Clothed always in rags, he smells. "What pigsty did you come from?" the Pope sardonically asks on meeting Francis. "I suppose you think you're duplicating the aroma of Paradise?'' God gives Francis no rest or comfort.

"You know how a lion seizes a hare and bangs him playfully against the ground?" he tells one of his Brothers. "Well, God has seized me in the same way. I am writhing in God's claws and cannot escape." Making the "terrible" discovery that God is never satisfied, he takes on one task after another--building a church, founding an order, risking his life in the Crusades, fasting for almost a year on a bitter cold mountaintop. On Mt. Alvernia, he receives the Stigmata in a vision that is pure Kazantzakis. Seeing the crucified Christ wrapped in flames, Francis cries in anguish: "I want more, more! The Resurrection!'' But Christ, echoing Kazantzakis' own belief, stonily replies: 'Crucifixion. Resurrection, and Paradise are identical.'' But Francis' charm is as richly portrayed as his torments. He preaches by ringing a bell, dancing in the streets, clapping and singing. His sermon to the swallows, his conversion of his friends are as beautifully rendered as they are in The Little Flowers of St. Francis. ''God forgive me," Francis tells his Sisters, "I feel sorry even for Satan. There is no creature more unfortunate, more wretched than he, because he was once with God, but now he has left Him, denied Him and he roams the air inconsolable." Brother Mouse. Kazantzakis' prose moves with the stateliness of a funeral dirge as Francis, bleeding from the Stigmata and nearly blind, moves to his death with childlike dignity. When a mouse gnaws at his toes one night, Francis whispers softly, "as though he had been speaking to a child, 'Brother Mouse, I am suffering! For the love of God, go away! I am suffering!' "

Kazantzakis knew something of suffering himself. By stifling his own physical desires, he contracted a savage skin disease of the same type that used to rack medieval ascetics. Neither its origin nor its cure is known, and it is commonly called "The Saint's Disease." "My dear sir," Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel once scolded him, "you are trying to live out of your century. Your body is suffering from remorse of spirit." It was Kazantzakis' belief that only through soul-searing struggle could man approach God. To his eye, the Francis of legend was too mild to be a saint. In his retelling, he endows the saint with a human vulnerability that gives Francis a new universality.

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