Home | Contact Us | Subscribe/Renew | Register | Search | Site Map
This paperback has 128 pages. It's available for $9.95 plus S&H. Order here»
In the spring of 2003, Doubleday released a novel called The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
Supported by an unusually intense pre-publication marketing campaign, The Da Vinci Code took off and, after a little more than a year, had sold almost six million hardback copies, and will soon be coming to a theater near you in a film directed by Ron Howard (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind).
The shelves of your local bookstore are crowded with suspense thrillers, but there seems to be something different about The Da Vinci Code — it’s got people talking in a way that novels by James Patterson or John Grisham don’t. What’s going on?
Well, to tell the absolute truth, the first thing that’s going on here is brilliant marketing. It’s important to be aware that these days, if a particular product is surrounded by a “buzz,” most of the time that’s because a company has worked hard to create that buzz, as Doubleday did with this book well before its publication.
But there’s more, of course. Once people started reading The Da Vinci Code, they couldn’t help but wonder about some of the puzzling assertions author Dan Brown makes in the novel:
What seems to intrigue readers is that the characters in The Da Vinci Code have answers to these questions, and they are expressed in the book as factually based, supported by the work and opinions of historians and other researchers. Brown even cites real books as sources within the novel. Readers are naturally wondering why they’ve not heard of these ideas before. They’re also wondering, if what Brown says is true, what the implications for their faith could be. After all, if the Gospels are false accounts, isn’t all of Christianity as we know it a lie?
This book is intended to help you unpack all of this and to explore the truth behind The Da Vinci Code.We’ll look at Brown’s sources and see if they’re trustworthy witnesses to history. We’ll ask if his characterization of early Christian writings, teaching, and disputes — events that are widely documented and have been studied for hundreds of years by intelligent, open-minded people — are accurate.We’ll look at Jesus and Mary Magdalene — the people at the center of this novel — and see if anything at all that The Da Vinci Code has to say about them is based on historical record. And along the way, we’ll find a startling number of blatant, glaring errors on matters great and small that should send up red flags to anyone reading the novel as a source of facts, rather than just pure fiction.
In The Da Vinci Code,we’re constantly reminded that things just might not really be as they seem.
Read this book with an open mind; you’ll find out how very true that is.
The Da Vinci Code incorporates elements attractive to many readers: suspense, secrets, a puzzle, a hint of romance, and the suspicion that the world is not as it seems, and the Powers That Be don’t want you to know The Truth That’s Out There.
The novel begins as Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of “religious symbology” (there is no such field, by the way), visiting Paris, is called to the scene of a crime in the Louvre. A curator, one Jacques Saunière, revered as an expert on the goddess and the “sacred feminine,” lies dead — presumably murdered — in one of the galleries.
Before his death, it seems that Saunière had time enough to arrange himself on the floor in the position of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of The Vitruvian Man — the famous image of a human figure, limbs extended, within a circle — as well as leave some other clues involving numbers, anagrams, and a pentagram, drawn on his body with his own blood.
In time, Sophie Neveu, a cryptologist who is also Saunière’s granddaughter, is dispatched to the scene. She had received a call from him earlier, begging her to come see him, be reconciled, and learn something important about her family. Sophie is able to interpret the clues her grandfather has left, have several conversations with Langdon about goddess worship, find a Very Important Key he has left her, behind another Leonardo painting, and . . . we’re off.
Who killed Saunière? What secret was he keeping? What does he want Sophie to understand? Why is an albino “monk” from Opus Dei trying to kill everyone? The rest of the novel, encompassing four hundred fifty-four pages, one hundred five chapters, but, amazingly, somehow covering a time span of a little more thana single day, takes us to various European points, along with Langdon and Sophie, seeking the answer, which is, quite simply this: (Sorry to spoil the plot, but it’s got to be done.)
Saunière was a Grand Master of a shadowy secret group called the “Priory of Sion,” which was dedicated to the cause of preserving the truth about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and, by extension, the entire human race.
Humanity, as we are told in the book, originally and for millennia, practiced a spirituality that was balanced between the masculine and the feminine, in which goddesses and the power of women were revered.
This was what Jesus was about. He lived and preached a message of peace, love, and human unity, and, to embody the message, he took Mary Magdalene as his wife and entrusted the leadership of this movement to her. She was pregnant with their child when he was crucified.
Peter, jealous of Mary’s role, led his own end of the movement gathered around Jesus, one dedicated to repressing and replacing Jesus’ real teaching with his own, and supplanting Mary Magdalene with himself as leader of this movement.
Mary was forced to flee to France, where she eventually died. Her and Jesus’ offspring were the root of the Merovingian royal line in France, and she and the “sacred feminine” that she embodies — not any material cup — are the real “Holy Grail.”
So, the history of the past two thousand years is, underneath all of the events recorded in the history books (by the “winners,” of course), a history of the struggle between the Catholic Church (not Christianity as a whole, mind you, but the Catholic Church) and the Priory of Sion. The Church, through its establishment of the Canon of Scripture, doctrinal statements, and even treatment of women, has worked to suppress the truth about the Holy Grail and, by extension, the “sacred feminine,” while the Knights Templar and the Priory of Sion struggled to protect the Grail (Mary’s bones), her bloodline, and the devotion to the “sacred feminine.”
Saunière had guarded this knowledge, knowledge that Leonardo da Vinci, a member of the Priory himself, had embedded throughout his work. Saunière had a personal stake it in as well — he, and therefore his granddaughter Sophie, were of that Merovingian line. But Sophie, of course, knew none of this, and had even become distanced from her grandfather years ago when she stumbled into a secret room in his country home and discovered him and a woman, in the midst of a crowd of masked, chanting onlookers, having some sort of ecstatic ritual sex.
Of course, by the end, we understand that this woman was her grandmother, and all she and Gramps were doing in that room was keeping the faith alive. We also learn that the “Grail” — Mary Magdalene’s remains and documents proving the bloodline — are buried within I. M. Pei’s glittering, glass, seventy-foot pyramid that stands as a new entrance to the Louvre, where, at the end of the novel, Langdon falls to his knees in reverence, hearing, he thinks, the wisdom of ages, in a woman’s voice, coming to him from the earth.
Much of the foundation for The Da Vinci Code’s plot might seem new and intricately creative, but the harsh truth is that most of it isn’t new at all.
Quite simply, what Brown has done here is weave a number of different strands of speculation, esoteric lore, and pseudo-history published in other books, cramming them all onto the pages of his novel. If you’re at all familiar with these other books, it’s actually rather shocking how much in the novel is simply lifted from them. Brown provides a bibliography on his website, and cites a few of these books in the novel itself. His sources fall into three basic categories:
These sources should send up red flags right away. There’s not one serious work of Christian history on his bibliography — not a single work of significant New Testament scholarship, or even the standard reference volumes that any undergraduate reading up on early Christian history would be expected to use. He doesn’t even cite the New Testament itself as a source for early Christian history.
One of the points Brown often makes in interviews is that his work is partly about recovering lost history that has been suppressed. He likes to assert that history is “written by the winners.” This means that if you see historical events as a struggle between forces, the victors are the ones who will leave records, and it’s their version of history that will survive. The sources he uses purport to present this “lost history.” There is a kernel of truth to this perspective, of course. History can never be presented in a thoroughly objective way, for human beings aren’t thoroughly objective. We always see and relate events through the prism of perspective. Everyone involved in a car accident has a slightly different version of events, for example.
But that doesn’t mean the accident itself didn’t happen. While observers of an accident might be unsure as to the exact events leading up to it, and the victim might certainly have a different story than the driver at fault, there is no doubt there was an accident, nor is there any doubt that, despite the limitations of the observers, there is, indeed, an objective truth as to who caused the accident, no matter how difficult it may be to unearth.
The same is true of the historical record. It is true that up to recent times, for example, the conquest of the West was told from the European perspective, the “winners.” In recent years, scholars have tried to tell the other side of the story, that of the native peoples, whose perspective on the conquest was obviously different. There’s no doubt, then, that there is more to the picture of the European conquest of North America than the conquerors say, than the native peoples say, or that any one of us can completely understand.What’s still true, though, is that the conquest happened out of certain motives and with particular consequences which, if we have the right information, can be perceived, even as they are interpreted differently.
However, in The Da Vinci Code, Brown uses “history is written by the winners” to suggest that the whole history of Christianity, beginning with Jesus himself, is a lie, written by those who were determined to suppress Jesus’ “real” message. It’s not about differing interpretations of Jesus’ life and message. It’s about the basic data itself: that what we read in the New Testament and what records of early Christianity itself exist, aren’t accurate presentations of what really happened.
In the novel, the scholar Sir Leigh Teabing says point blank that “heretics” in early Christianity — those who are represented by the Gnostic writings Brown cites — are those who remained faithful to “the original history of Christ” (p. 234).
That’s really the bottom line here, and that’s a serious charge. We’re going to spend the rest of this book examining these assertions in more detail, but it’s still important to lay out the basic framework right up front so we see what’s at stake.
Brown claims that Jesus wanted the movement that followed him to be about a greater awareness of the “sacred feminine.” He says that this movement, under the leadership and inspiration of Mary Magdalene, thrived during the first three centuries until it was brutally suppressed by the Emperor Constantine.
There’s no evidence to suggest that this is true. It didn’t happen.
Certainly, there was diversity in early Christianity. There is no doubt there were intense discussions about who Jesus was and what he meant. There is also strong evidence that, in certain communities, women held leadership roles in Christianity — such as deaconess — that eventually died out (and were revived in later forms of Christianity, incidentally).
But you really have to understand that none of this diversity, change, or development in early Christian history occurred in the way The Da Vinci Code suggests it did.When early Christian leaders was, as we can see from their own writings, if we bother to read them, about faithfulness to what Jesus said and did.
There may be a lot about early Christianity we don’t know or aren’t sure of. These are issues that have been freely and openly debated by serious scholars for years, and sometimes, even two thousand years after the events, new evidence comes to light that expands the picture we have.
However, nowhere in any of that serious scholarly work do you find anyone taking seriously the suggestion that Jesus’ mission was all about sending forth Mary Magdalene to carry his message of the “sacred feminine.”
Credible sources simply don’t even hint at such a thing. Credible scholarly sources also suggest that much of Brown’s other assertions — about everything from the nature of the Grail myth to the Priory of Sion to the role of goddess worship in the ancient world — just aren’t supported by the evidence that’s out there.
And, as we’ll see as we plow through this novel, there are many other bizarre, outlandish, and error-filled claims. From statements made about the geography of Paris to those on the life of Leonardo da Vinci himself, there’s no reason to view this book as a halfway reliable source on any field of study except, perhaps, cryptography.
The Da Vinci Code has created quite a stir, and along with the stir are calls to just relax and let the whole thing blow over. I hear it all the time.
“It’s only a novel,” some folks say. “Everyone knows it’s fiction. So why not just enjoy it on that level?”
Well, there are several reasons why we can’t do that. First, there is no such thing as “only a novel.” Culture matters. Culture communicates. We should always be interested in the content of culture and its impact on us, no matter if we’re talking about art, film, music, or writing.
But, even more specifically, the author of this particular book suggests that there really is more at work here than just imagination, and he encourages his readers to accept certain problematic assertions about history as factual.
There is, of course, a long history — dating back to the earliest days of Christianity — of interweaving the known facts about Jesus with imaginative stories, comparable to the Jewish tradition of “midrash.” Legends about the Holy Family, for example, abound, like that which says that the rosemary plant received its sweet smell as a reward after Mary spread out her cloak to dry on a rosemary bush during the flight to Egypt.
Christian art through the ages is filled with interesting and often illuminating details that have no basis in the words of Scripture or early Christian tradition. And, in more recent decades, fiction writers have done their fair share of using the story of Jesus as a basis for novels: The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas, and The Silver Chalice by Thomas Costain, are just two very popular examples among many, the latter dealing, incidentally, with the Holy Grail.
Historical fiction is a very popular genre, but in writing historical fiction, the author makes an implicit deal with the reader. He or she promises that, while the novel concerns fictional characters engaged in imagined activities, the basic historical framework is correct. In fact, many people enjoy reading historical fiction because it’s an entertaining, painless way to learn history. They trust that the author is telling the truth about history.
The Da Vinci Code is different. In all of these other examples, everyone from the artist to the viewer or reader understands the difference between known facts and imaginative details, and buys into a basic responsibility to and expectation of historical reliability, when it applies. In The Da Vinci Code, imaginative detail and false historical assertions are presented as facts and the fruit of serious historical research, which they simply are not.
As we noted in the last chapter, Brown presents a lengthy bibliography of works he used in the writing of the novel, all of which have a historical veneer to them, even if most of them are not real history.
In the front of the book, Brown presents a list of facts contained in his novel. He states that the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei are both real organizations. He ends his declaration by saying:
“All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”
He does not explicitly include “declarations about Christian origins” in his list, but it is implicit in his inclusion of “documents.” More importantly, all of Brown’s assertions about Christian origins are put in the mouths of his scholar characters — Langdon and Teabing, in particular, who often quote from real contemporary works and frame their statements in phrases such as, “Historians marvel that . . .” and “Fortunately for historians . . .” and “Many scholars claim. . . .”
These discussions function as a device for communicating the ideas from Holy Blood,Holy Grail, Margaret Starbird, or who knows where else, to the reader, and communicating them in a way that implies they are factual, accepted by “historians” and “scholars” worldwide.
Moreover, Brown has been rather up front in interviews about his method and purpose. He has repeatedly stated that he is delighted to be sharing these findings with readers because he wants to participate in the telling of this “lost history.” In other words, in his interviews, Brown suggests that part of what he’s trying to do in The Da Vinci Code is teach a little history:
“Two thousand years ago, we lived in a world of Gods and Goddesses. Today we live in a world solely of Gods. Women in most cultures have been stripped of their spiritual power. The novel touches on questions of how and why this shift occurred . . . and on what lessons we might learn from it regarding our future” (www.danbrown.com).
And, to a startling extent, readers are accepting these theories as facts. One need only read reader reviews of the book on Amazon. com, or peruse the many newspaper stories about the impact of the book, to see how true this is. Perhaps you have even encountered reactions like this among your own family and friends, which is why you started reading this book in the first place.
So no, it’s not “just a novel.” The Da Vinci Code purports to teach history within the framework of fiction. Let’s take a look at the lesson plan.
Page
Catholic Resources | For Catholic Parishes | Order OSV ProductsSearch | Catalog | Books | Periodicals | Parish Resources | Offering Envelopes | About Us | Contact UsSend comments or questions to webmaster@osv.com Click here for our site map.Copyright © 2009, Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. All rights reserved.