da vinci code and dan brown and secrecy and gnostic gospels

The second reason for the popularity of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code at this moment is that it makes the Catholic Church look like a power-hungry body which will stop at nothing, murder included, to make sure that its official (and sanitized) version of the history of the Church remains triumphant. Big religious bodies make inviting targets, especially if they are well-funded, have been around for a long time and make claims that they possess the TRUTH. The message in our culture from the last few years is that big religion not only gives many people a hope to which to cling but that it often abuses and betrays its people in the process. That is, one of the reasons the sexual abuse of children by Catholic Priests has become such a consuming issue in the last decade is that it symbolizes the betrayal that many Catholics feel they have experienced at the hands of their church, and it fuels the long-standing prejudice that many non-Catholics have regarding authoritarian religion. In The Da Vinci Code it is not actually the Catholic church hierarchy which is condoning and carrying out murders; that task falls to the highly ascetic, fanatic Opus Dei, which believes in everything from doctrinal purity to corporal mortification in pursuit of its service to God. But the message is clear. Religious hierarchies have something to hide, and they will stop at nothing to make sure their opponents are discredited or even killed.

I thought that the days of anti-Catholicism were over in our culture, but apparently not so. When Senator (later President) John Kennedy appeared before a group of Baptist pastors in TX in 1960 to say that he ought not to have been excluded from the Presidency on the day of his baptism (Catholics, of course, are pedobaptists), I thought that we were getting somewhere. I thought that when Evangelicals and Catholics began to team up together on a moral agenda in the 1980s that the acids of modernity had worn away some of the inter-religious animus that had characterized these two groups. But apparently that is not the case. Anti-Catholicism lives. And, I will say this. The two religions that will receive the most scrutiny and media trashing in the next 50 years will be Islam and Mormonism. The former already has been subject to caricature and misreprestation in the past decade in America, while the latter is just beginning to attract media attention. Just as sex sells (though there is almost none of it in The Da Vinci Code), so does anti-religious sentiment sell.

The Theme of Secrecy

The most engaging theme for our culture today that runs through The Da Vinci Code, however, is that of secrecy. Instead of the Holy Grail being the chalice which held the wine at the Last Supper, which it has been since time immemorial, the Holy Grail for The Da Vinci Code are documents that purport to tell the secret story of Jesus' marriage to Mary Magdalene and their parenting the Merovingian Kings of France. But, as luck would have it, these documents have been suppressed and hidden. The point that was never clear to me from the book, however, is that why these documents, which had been in the hands of the opponents of the Church for hundreds of years and which purport to be able to destroy the very foundations of the Church, were not released to the public long ago. The action of the story depends on secrecy,and on quests to find the MS by the crazed Opus Dei albino priest, but it simply isn't credible, even for a thriller, why no one in all these hundreds of years had made the documents public. The Catholic Church can only threaten to wipe out so many people to keep them silent; sooner or later someone of conscience is going to reveal the "truth," regardless of the consequences.

But this theme of secrecy fits perfectly into our age, an age where scholars have rather recently begun publishing texts, translations and commentaries of documents found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in the late 3rd century CE. Many of these documents speak about secret worlds and secret teaching of Jesus, teaching that he hid from all the disciples except a favored one (like Judas) or that he delivered in cryptic language. The publication and reflection on these texts will take at least another generation before scholars can come up with another narrative that explains the way that early Christianity emerged. The "model" explanation in the 1970s and before was that an original orthodoxy was "corrupted" by a later, secret, gnosticism. A model popular in the 1980s-1990s was that various trajectories of early Christianity (geographically based) were in competition with one another. Now the post-modernists have taken over, and all we can say about the plethora of Nag Hammadi and other 'secret' (non-canonical) gospels and other texts is that they represent religious "options" in a complex world whose contours are not yet emerging.

Conclusion

You don't study The Da Vinci Code to learn about early Christianity (or any kind of Christianity for that matter) or scholarship on Leonardo Da Vinci. You read it to be entertained and "thrilled." My thrill was marred, I confess, because of the unlikeliness of the plot and the flimsy intellectual underpinnings of the book (i.e., I found it hard to get "into" a book about a quest for secret documents which would bring down Catholic Christianity when I knew that the basis for asserting the existence of these documents was infirm). Yet the book touched a nerve in our culture, for the reasons I tried to suggest. I can't help but think, however, that by 2008 no one will be talking about the Da Vinci Code phenomenon. We will probably be engaged then in a broad debate on something else...maybe impeachment.

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