Readings: of (R)evolution and Lemonade

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From the Introduction of translator, Kimon Friar, to The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises by Nikos Kazantzakis:

…[Kazantzakis] never accepted the Soviet’s materialistic bias but looked on the Russian experiment primarily as the violent and cyclical upheaval of matter from the fires of which the refined spirit springs: “Not that I have any new illusions about Russia, but because, on the whole its soul is the deepest, darkest and most luminous, the most god-bearing soul of the world today.” He saw in Soviet Russia those barbaric yet necessary forces which periodically disrupt the world, seemingly sudden mutations in the surge of evolutionary progress which either destroy previous softened and decadent civilizations or challenge them toward resurrection. Thus the Dorians descended on the Minoan and Mycenaean civilization, the Romans on the Greek, the Goths on the Roman, inundation after inundation in the cyclical, barbaric, and implacable progress of the world.

Perhaps the way in which Kazantzakis chose to regard Russia’s struggle to infuse the West with a Soviet-style system, suggests that we might do well today to try to make conceptual lemonade out of the corrosively sour fruits of the Islamic neo-Jihad.
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