Salvatores Dei was the work that sealed the literary course of Nikos Kazantzakis. The Asceticism, as the work was titled in its definitive edition in 1945, served as the gospel and the ideological credo of the Cretan thinker.

Written with an eye on the Odyssey, it captures Kazantzakis's cry to humanity and his anxiety for the future man, the new Odysseus. The work was characterized by him as mystique; even today, it remains particularly enigmatic both for readers and for scholars, who have attempted to approach it based on political, philosophical, and theological criteria, though psychoanalytic approaches have not been absent.

These four axes formed the basis for the composition of the interpretative comments of the present study, which arose from the need for a commented edition of this magnificent work that summarizes the Kazantzakian worldview.

However, the Bergsonian philosophy, as it relates to the creative evolution of language, influenced not only his thought but also his linguistic and expressive orientations, as evidenced by the critical examination of the manuscript and the editions of Asceticism from 1927 and 1945.