As I write, in late May, the film version of The
Da Vinci Code
Neither of these movies was going to be stopped by bad reviews. Both were spinoffs of the Gospels, in their different ways, and any critic who panned them risked being trampled by the crowds rushing to see them.
Sixty million copies of Dan Brown's novel are said to be in print, and last year I bought one of them myself, a deluxe illustrated edition with lavish pictures purporting to authenticate the book's surreal historical claims. I spent a weekend reading it in utter fascination. The plot was essentially conventional: an innocent man, a Harvard prof named Robert Langdon, flees the Paris police and has to solve the bizarre murder he has been accused of. But the solution leads him to the amazing discovery that the Catholic Church has been concealing the truth about Jesus for two millennia!
The closely guarded secret, which, almost miraculously, has never been spilled over all those centuries by a single drunken bishop, is that Jesus was not a supernatural figure but a rather normal sort of person, married to Mary Magdalene, with whom he had children. His royal line survives underground to this day, and one of his descendants, as it turns out, just happens to be the brilliant young woman who helps Langdon crack the case. The real murderer is a demented albino in the employ of Opus Dei, the sinister outfit popes rely on to knock off nosy people who learn too much.
All this is so flamboyantly implausible that you have to admire Brown's fine-tuned audacity. He is aiming at a huge readership of bottomless gullibility, superficially schooled but unable to spot either factual errors or glaring incoherence, people who are cowed by sheer assertiveness. When Brown, in a brief foreword, assures the reader that his research has verified the history his story presupposes, they aren't going to ask questions, let alone suspect Brown's weird fusion of plagiarism with sheer invention.
One of the book's key figures, for example, is Sir Leigh Teabing, a noted expert on Christian history who explains that the idea that Jesus was divine was first conceived and proclaimed by the Emperor Constantine in 325 A.D. We are left to wonder why people who didn't believe he was divine had been worshiping him for three hundred years by then. Why did the Church exist at all? And what held it together for three centuries? Was it a church or a fan club?
This points to a certain gap in the illustrious Teabing's vast knowledge of Christian history: namely, the New Testament. He has never read or reflected on, say, the first chapter of St. John's gospel: “And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Neither, obviously, has his creator, who shows almost total ignorance of all four gospels. Brown has managed to stir controversy about four of the most famous books in the world without even knowing their contents - quite a feat! He's like a man who has never read Hamlet, but is sure Shakespeare didn't write it; he has no interest in Jesus' teachings, only in his, well, sex life.
If Brown doesn't know the primary sources, he does have his
eccentric secondary ones, such as a popular and entirely speculative
book called Holy
Blood, Holy Grail
According to Brown (speaking through Teabing), the esoteric truth about Jesus and his main squeeze has been preserved through two millennia by a few brave heretics, such as the Gnostics. Once again Brown displays his basic ignorance. The Gnostics believed that sex, like matter itself, was evil, and they'd have been the last to cherish the idea of a carnal Jesus. Regardless, Brown includes Leonardo Da Vinci in this heretical succession, insisting that his paintings tell the truth in “code.”
Wouldn't you know, modern feminism comes into the story, albeit somewhat anachronistically. During the Middle Ages, Brown points out, the Church burned five million women as witches, less because it believed in witches than because it hated women. Five million! I'd almost forgotten that. No, wait. I don't think I'd ever heard it before, actually. Wouldn't historians have mentioned such an infamy? Wouldn't millions of men in those days have protested the roasting of their wives, daughters, and grandmothers? Or did they all say, a la Henny Youngman, “Take my wife - please”? Why did the misogynistic Church forbid men to dump their dumpy old mates and swap them for young and nubile trophy wives?
Like a strange dream, it doesn't add up. But the narrative momentum of a thriller forbids critical sifting. Stories demand that we suppose, not believe, but some people forget the difference. Brown demands that we mistake batty surmises for hard facts. And his “facts” are counterfeit.
I used to work in a mental hospital, where I learned that psychosis and stupidity are two different things. One evening a patient told me how the doctors were transplanting a monkey's brain into his skull, piece by piece; he begged me to help him escape. He'd worked out the story with such ingenuity and conviction that it was all I could do not to believe the pitiful madman, and I wished I could somehow help him. In the end I could only try to reassure him, lamely, that he'd be all right.
After reading The Da Vinci Code, I wondered whether its author was similarly psychotic or just cynical and shameless. Today the answer seems obvious. He wrote the book for a certain market. Just as Gibson's film found a huge market of believers in the gospel message that Christ is risen, Brown's book found a huge market of unbelievers for whom the “good news” is that Christ is not risen, is not divine, and therefore is no impediment to earthly happiness, especially sexual pleasure; indeed, he enjoyed it himself!
Again, though Brown purports to respect Jesus as a great (though merely human) teacher, it isn't clear why he should, since he shows no interest in, or acquaintance with, Jesus' actual teaching, especially his call for sinners to repent. In Brown's world, there is no reason for repentance; only the Church has done anything it should be sorry for, such as burdening us with the ideas that we are sinners and that women are evil.
It's all pseudo-scholarly New Age tripe, and the essence of New Age thinking is wishful, as opposed to critical, thinking. If reincarnation grabs you, well, it's true for you. You need no proof beyond your own preferences. It's a loopy twist on American pluralism (“Attend the church of your choice”).
The most perfect expression of it I've ever heard was that of a young neo-Nazi in a television interview: “Nazism is the answer for me. It may not be the answer for everyone.”
Dan Brown may not be the answer for everyone.