Sarantaris and Prometheus, the Idiot and the Thief

Abstract

Abstract

George Sarantaris wrote at a time when Greece, emerging from the traumas of the Great War and the Asia Minor Catastrophe, struggled to construct its national physiognomy. Joining the ranks of his better-known contemporaries, Sarantaris endeavoured through a noteworthy body of poetry and philosophy to grapple with the ambiguity of the human condition; an ambiguity that found its most tragic historical expression in the juxtaposition of the compassionate Christ-figure and the sanguinary war machine. Combining Dostoevsky’s social Christianity, Eastern Orthodox asceticism and Kierkegaard’s psychological (and proto-existentialist) orientation of faith, he created the model for a spiritual anti-polis that would address in a timely and positive manner the angst and nihilism of his age.