Breaking the Da Vinci Code: a necessary antidote

Catholic New Times, Oct 10, 2004 by Ted Schmidt

The phrase is "mind candy."

Generally it refers to a work of fiction which is a divertimiento, a piece of fluff, mildly interesting but hardly worthy of serious reflection or deep intellectual engagement. There's nothing wrong with that. We've all grabbed books at the airport or the local library on a whim. A good story, is an end in itself and if it deepens our curiosity, so much the better. The book du jour doing all of this while riding the best sellers' list is The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown.

The problem with The DaVinci Code is not that the author really believes his far-flung tale is hung on pure historical kernels of truth. The problem is that in a postmodern age fuelled by skepticism and distrust of religious institutions.(particularly the Roman Catholic Church), many people are ready to absorb Brown's version of the truth. What then is the author saying in the format of a novel?

Only the reclusive crippled millionaire, descendant of Britain's first Duke of Lancaster and former British royal Historian, Leigh Teabing, can tell us. And Teabing lays the whole thing out for one of the novel's central characters, the French cryptologist Sophie Nevue (Wisdom New Eve?).

She has been brought to Teabing's chateau by a smug Harvard symbologist, Robert Langdon, who is aware of the explosive secret shared by Teabing. Langdon is a fitting Brown protagonist. All of the author's novels are based on breaking codes, unpacking symbols and solving riddles. This novel is similarrly full of cute wordplay.

"The marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part of the historical record,"(p.245) Teabing tells Sophie. At this point many readers will say, 'Wow, I never knew that.' The "historical record" gets even more bizarre. It's all in the Gospel of Philip. I never heard of that gospel either. It is not in the canon of the New Testament, but in the collection of early Christian witings called thegnostic gospels.

For the novelist, Jesus gave directions not to Peter but to Mary Magdalene, as he was "the original feminist."

Pastors now are getting thousands of calls about the historical accuracy of the book. With eight million copies being passed around, there must be a lot of consternation about this work of fiction. The On page 147 a cartoon-like Opus Dei Cardinal Aringarosa (ring around the rosy?) "had watched with grave concern as the new pope settled into his first year in office. An unprecedented liberal ... drawing on an unsettling tide of liberal support within the College of Cardinals, the pope was now declaring his papal mission to be "rejuvenation of Vatican doctrine and updating Catholicism into the third millennium." This is the imagination of thw writer at work.

There is no doubt that the author tells a good story. It is fast paced but quite formulaic in style. Short chapters tell parallel stories about reed-thin characters. All chapters give the reader a quick hit. It is a page turner.

However, serious theological issues (read The Passion) get a popular cultural rendering with a much greater and certainly more superficial impact than they do in the academy or the churches. Good films, paintings and novels have been doing this ever since Homer picked up his stylus, and Goya and Picasso their paint brushes.

Brown's timing is of course shrewd, and as he says twice in his novel, "Everybody loves a conspiracy." We have a huge one here.

The Catholic Church, according to Brown, has hidden the secret of the royal blood line of Jesus and Magdalene for centuries. She is the Holy Grail. She is the chalice holding the royal blood (sang real) of Jesus. The Holy Grail is not in this work, the chalice from the Last Supper.

The book is riddled with howlers. One of my favourites is the depiction of the albino Opus Dei assassin being told by his scheming bishop that he resembles Noah, also an albino.

The other one is that the Catholic church burned over five million women as witches. There are several others. These are aptly refuted in a book rushed into print to assuage the fears of the faithful, called Breaking the Da Vinci Code.

Asked to review this book by Vision TV, I was prepared for the worst as it was written by a professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary. I was wrong. Some good things do come out of Texas. Darrell Bock, as the blurb on the cover screams, "answers the questions everyone's asking." Professor Bock does a fine job helping the biblically illiterate process Brown's flawed history. In particular he does well debunking the Gnostic gospels as the earliest witnesses to Jesus, ("a few generations removed from the foundations of the Christian faith"), the role of celibacy in first century Judaism, how the canon was formulated and the lack of real evidence for constructing Mary Magdalene's life. Complete with a helpful glossary, Breaking the Da Vinci Code is a nice companion to Brown's good read. Next year, Ron Howard will be directing the movie. Undoubtedly it will be more interesting than Gibson's Passion of the Christ, but don't be looking for anything more than a good evening out.