Gospel fantasy: dismantling The Da Vinci Code

Christian Century, June 1, 2004 by Mark S. Burrows

IF YOU'VE NOT read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, you're in a shrinking group. More than 7 million hardback copies of the novel are in print, and it has by the publisher's count been translated into more than 40 languages. It has remained at or near the top of most bestseller lists since its appearance a year ago. The second in a planned trilogy, the novel builds on the characters introduced in Angels and Demons.

The plot involves a quest for the holy grail that begins with a bizarre murder in the Louvre, races through the streets of Paris and the surrounding countryside, and eventually moves to the streets and churches of England. It involves the work of two sleuths: Robert Langdon, a Harvard academic who holds a chair of symbology (the author's neologism), and Sophie Neveu, a beautiful French cryptologist whose encrypted name means "venue of wisdom." Brown fills the book with such riddles.

In Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings the two discover clues to the meaning of the grail. In the end, inevitably, they fall in love. Only then does the reader discover that the grail is not a chalice, as medieval legend has it, but a tomb holding the bones of Mary Magdalene. To make matters more interesting, the grail also represents the womb of Mary Magadalene, who according to the novel bore Jesus' child and whose descendants live on in France today--Sophie being one of them. For this reason, the mutual attraction between Langdon and Sophie not only creates sexual interest but also holds theological import.

Brown's novel is a conspiracy tract set in a fictional frame. The conspiracy theory is built on an unorthodox account of Christian history advanced in the early 1980s by the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. In that pseudo-scholarly publishing sensation, Michael Baigent and colleagues argued, on the basis of documents found in the Bibliotheque de Nationale bunt later exposed as a hoax, that the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, were part of the Merovingian royal line of the early Middle Ages. The Roman church sought to expunge evidence of this hidden history and eliminate the descendants them selves for the sake of preserving church authority and exalting orthodoxy.

Resisting the power of the church and guarding the secret history of the grail over the years has been a secret society, the Priory of Sion, presided over by a committee of senechaux (grand masters). The society engages in a bizarre sex ritual Brown calls Hieros gamos (sacred marriage). Although the meaning of this act remains unclear, it apparently celebrates "the sacred feminine" and embodies the connection between the erotic and the holy expunged by Christianity. Freud would have been pleased to know all this.

The plot thickens through the violent machinations of' an albino monk who works for Opus Dei, an actual Roman Catholic organization portrayed by Brown with lightly veiled contempt. A former "British royal historian" named Sir Leigh Teabing, who has devoted his life to finding the grail, also plays a large part in the story.

The book is, of course, fiction. Brown has made it clear, however, that he regards the hook as a serious contribution to a revisionist history of early and medieval Christianity, a history that offers insights into the nature of real faith and the identity of the true church. Judging from the enthusiastic response, many readers take him at his word. They find the book fascinating not only because they consider it a good read but also because they discover in it an appealing, alternative reading of Christianity.

The book also presents the Roman Catholic Church as a devious institution marked by deception, violence and scandal. The plot plays on Christianity's patriarchal excesses and its conflicted approach to sexuality. A few allusions along the way tie this history to the current scandal of priestly sexual abuse and its cover-up. In other words, the book has something for almost everyone unhappy with the church.

The novel also trades on the spiritual hunger prevalent in our day. Brown's characters frequently excoriate the church for its various atrocities and omissions, and exalt what they see as a lost spiritual aesthetic. "It is the mystery and wonderment that serve our souls, not the Grail itself," we learn in the book's waning pages.

Brown's ambitions as a cultural commentator are not always convincing. Not every reader will warm to the suggestion voiced by one of the characters that we should embrace "orgasm as prayer" and that men's sexual climax is "a moment of clarity during which God [can] be glimpsed." In another scene, the novel scolds men for resisting this liberated view of sex, as Langdon reminisces about a lecture he'd recently given to undergraduates: "The next time you find yourself with a woman, look in your heart and see if you can approach sex as a mystical, spiritual act. Challenge yourself to find the spark of divinity that man can only achieve through the sacred feminine." To which the narrator adds: "The women smiled knowingly, nodding." Brown clearly intends this as a compliment to women. But the casting of females as sexual partners whose primary role is to help men achieve enlightenment seems an ill-conceived way of honoring "the sacred feminine." Feminists will not be impressed.