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The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown
Doubleday (Random House, Inc., 1745 Broadway, New York,
NY: April, 2003, 454 pages (hardcover) (fiction/spiritual thriller). List
$24.95; amazon.com $14.97. ISBN: 0-385-50420-9.
Reviewed by:
Joseph P. Szimhart
When I purchased this book after the New Year arrived in
2004, I was aware that it was a best seller in 2003 and that millions of people
had read it. Until then, I had ignored the reviews and had little idea of the
content. Some reviewers early on had said that author Dan Brown’s research was
“impeccable.” Brown’s editor continues to stand by his man, saying that Brown
made nothing up save the fictional, contemporary story wrapped around
sensational religious controversy. Ahem! Pardon me while I clear my throat.
After I browsed through the story initially, I realized what I was in for, and
why all the ensuing critical flack from art historians, religious scholars, and
Catholic apologists. I was about to go on another
the-Catholic-Church-has-it-all-wrong, New Age ride. Once upon a time, I would
read books like this with curiosity and excitement, wondering what new arcane
knowledge the author revealed that the academy, the government, or the Church
had kept from the masses and me, the poor lumpen proletariat. As a result, I can
still identify with those who find inspiration from The Da Vinci Code,
which relates the following tale.
At night in the Louvre Museum in Paris, an albino monk
dressed in a hooded cloak shoots a curator in the stomach. The monk, Silas, is a
radical numerary member of the ultra-conservative Opus Dei sect of the
Catholic Church. He wears a cilice, a thong that cuts flesh,
around his thigh, and he flagellates himself bloody as part of a
self-purification cult, in accordance with Opus Dei guidelines. Silas works for
someone he knows only as “the Teacher,” a wealthy Briton who we later finds out
is obsessed with finding the Holy Grail of Arthurian legend. The curator
happened to be the leader of a secret sect (the Priory of Sion) that hides and
protects the Grail and a cache of ancient manuscripts that could prove Jesus
Christ had fathered a child, Sarah, with Mary Magdalene. According to a fringe
legend, Mary and her followers, as the true Christians, fled to France
and perhaps England to avoid persecution from Peter and the Apostles. Their
“secret” and the Jesus bloodline were protected through the centuries via other
sects like the Templars. In the novel, a conservative Pope (guess who) has died,
and a new, liberal leadership in the Vatican emerges, one that would rescind
Opus Dei’s significant status as a prelature. The Teacher, identified at the end
as Leigh Teabing, the wealthy Briton, finds a way to manipulate the Vatican and
Opus Dei to get his hands on the Holy Grail.
Sir (he is a Knight) "money-is-no-object’" Teabing utilizes
the latest in surveillance equipment and extensive research to pin down that the
secret about the Grail should have been unveiled, but he does not want to be
exposed as the one who forces the secret from the Priory. So he devises an
elaborate scheme. He convinces the Opus leader that the Grail secret will indeed
be revealed, thus creating a catastrophe for Roman Catholicism and wiping out
Opus Dei’s reason for being. The Opus leader, a bishop, has a secret meeting
with Vatican officials who now know about the potentially devastating Grail
revelation, and they strike a deal. The Vatican pays the Opus leader 20 million
euros in Vatican bonds to find the Grail and destroy the evidence. In return,
Opus would retain its standing, and the Church could survive. Teabing, however,
plans to get the Grail for himself in the end.
Enter Robert Langdon, a well-known Harvard professor of
religious studies who specializes in symbolism and arcane wisdom. Langdon is a
bachelor described as early middle aged with slightly graying hair, and he wears
a tweed jacket. He was in Paris and was to meet with the curator. Langdon had
written a manuscript that inadvertently revealed the secret that the curator and
only four others held. The elderly and bleeding curator somehow managed to strip
off his clothes, then arrange his body according to a famous Leonardo Da Vinci
drawing of a naked man in a circle, “the Vitruvian Man.” The curator, Sauniere,
also managed to write some symbols in visible and invisible ink and in his blood
on and around his body before he expired on the museum floor near the Mona Lisa.
Enter Sophie Nevue, a French criminal investigator and code cracker, along with
Bezu Fache, the lead French crime investigator. Sophie happens to be the
curator’s estranged granddaughter. As a result of the curator’s codes and
mysterious anagrams created at the crime scene, Sophie and Robert are drawn in
(so to speak) to solve the murder and, later, the Grail mystery (and they fall
in love in the end).
Brown chooses character names with symbolic (hidden from
the naïve) meaning to add literary spice to his wildly intriguing narrative that
moves from Paris and France to the United Kingdom. Other reviewers have revealed
most of these, so to repeat all that would be trivial. But I will say that his
choice of Sophie Nevue is only too coy—Sophia is not only the Biblical and Greek
Wisdom, but also carries weight in Gnostic myth as the goddess who sent/birthed
the Christ to us to reveal true Gnosis. Brown’s Sophie ends up as a true
daughter of the royal line of Magdalene and Jesus, as the renewed Sophia.
I hope I’m not revealing too much in case any of my readers wants only to enjoy
this pulp-fiction thriller—a good joke works only when one does not know the
punch line.
So, if this is mere fiction, why all the fuss? The book
inspired a one-hour, ABC TV news special and rounds of debates, as well as
reviews that range from praise to vitriol. I think all the response is because
Brown appears to take his thesis seriously: History would be very different had
Constantine in 325 CE and the subsequent Roman Church not excluded certain sex
rites, equality for females, and Gnostic texts from the Christian canon. Brown’s
novel simplistically claims that, under Constantine and the Council of Nicea, at
a single stroke Jesus was made divine, and Arius, who argued for Jesus as a
human prophet, anathematized. The reality is that the divinity of Christ was
never in question among earliest Christians, despite the fringe sects that
derived new meanings and wrote contrary texts. Brown takes the premise seriously
enough to have done considerable research to bolster the facts that make it
appear that the Church really did destroy almost all evidence of the truth about
Jesus. Brown’s primary characters explain to Sophie how the Churchmen executed
more than 5 million witches (pagans) and suppressed the sacred feminine
principle purportedly valued by Leonardo and other initiates of a goddess-based
or sun-worshipping pagan cult. Brown does claim at the beginning of the book
that “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals
in this novel are accurate.” Derivative would have been more accurate
than accurate.
We do not have to search far to find some of Brown’s
sources as he mentions them within the didactic or preachy segments in the plot.
I’ll mention a few that stand out: The highly speculative Holy Blood and Holy
Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln; The Templar
Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ, by Lynn
Picknett and Clive Prince; and The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary
Magdalene and the Holy Grail, by Margaret Starbird, who publishes under Bear
& Co. That Brown would mention these sources tells me he expects to be preaching
to choirs that sing either in the superficial feminist wing of the New Age
movement or to a secular audience that might believe anything about a Church
plagued by controversy anyway. Scholars have found insurmountable flaws in all
the books mentioned above. A book not mentioned, Daughter of God, by
Lewis Perdue (2000), is close enough in plot and content that there has been
some accusation of plagiarism against Brown by Perdue: See
http://www.daughter-of-god.com/daughter-davinci.html.
The Perdue book presents a religious professor as the hero;
he has a plot that involves arts in Europe and a mysterious, ancient document
and shroud that prove there was a female messiah, Sophia, who was murdered
around 310 CE by supporters of the Church and King Constantine. Again, if the
truth leaks, the Goddess religion will be restored, and the patriarchal Catholic
Church and Western civilization as we know it would fall. Perdue documents
nearly 30 elements in The Da Vinci Code, including whole speeches that
appear to be clearly ripped off from his Daughter of God.
Sandra Miesel, a medievalist, is one of the Catholic
critics who, in her article “Dismantling The Da Vinci Code” for Crisis
Magazine, September 1, 2003, “dismantles” Brown and his hero Langdon as a
scholar. Miesel states, “So error laden is The Da Vinci Code that the
educated reader actually applauds those rare occasions where Brown stumbles
(despite himself) into the truth.” I will not list the errors she and others
have found because you can go search the Worldwide Web anytime. I’ll merely
concentrate on a few aspects, including one that intrigued me as an artist who
is familiar with Leonardo Da Vinci.
Because the title features this renowned genius, let us see
just what Brown claims Leonardo included, albeit secretly, in his paintings and
drawings. In Brown’s book, the Mona Lisa is far more esoteric than merely
the fine, idealized portrait of the lady La Giaconda. Brown’s character loads
androgynous symbolism derived from an interpretation of seeming inconsistencies
in the landscape behind the figure. In effect, Brown creates a mockery of
Leonardo’s intent as an experimental artist. A pentagram (or star) that appears
on the dead curator (drawn in his own blood) indicates to Langdon, the
symbolist, that Sophie’s grandfather knew a code Leonardo had used to indicate
the sacred feminine eschewed by the Roman Church. Leonardo allegedly inserted,
as a kind of subtext, subliminal signals about the “goddess” and the female
principle, about sun worship and pagan truths. In my view, Leonardo’s aesthetic
use of geometry transcended any mere reference to goddess worship—his was a
scientific as well as an aesthetic approach to beauty, not a devious one.
Leonardo may not have been the ideal Catholic (Brown’s book relates that he was
homosexual), but he certainly was not the conniving occultist described by
Brown. According to biographers Antonina Vallentin and Vasari, at the end of his
life Leonardo was reconciled with the Catholic Church, took communion, and
lamented that “he had offended against God and men by failing to practice his
art as he should have done.” In any case, the novel pivots on the pentagram as a
feminist marker, and our heroes are off on a whirlwind detective excursion while
running for their lives. The French police initially target Langdon as the prime
suspect. During their flight from Fache and the police, Langdon and Sophie meet
with Leigh Teabing, apparently an ally, at his sumptuous villa, where he shows
them a large reproduction of Leonardo’s famous mural, The Last Supper.
Wrongly, the novel wants us to believe that the mural represents the moment that
Jesus instituted the Eucharist rite, but Leonardo’s work illustrates John 13:21
when Jesus warns, “One of you will betray me.”
Teabing, the Grail expert, points to the lack of a central
chalice in the design as proof that the Grail is not a material cup. He goes on,
with Langdon’s acquiescence, to point to a “V” shape between an Apostle to
Jesus’ right, and Jesus as a symbol of the female. He identifies that apostle as
Mary Magdalene, not the Apostle John, who art historians see. Indeed, Leonardo
painted John as young and effeminate, but this was a convention that developed
before and during the Renaissance. And one has to ask, if that is Mary, where is
John? There are only thirteen figures. Teabing also claims that there is a
disembodied hand with a knife (next to Judas) while St. Peter is posed with his
left hand in a cutting gesture at the purported Mary’s throat. He says that
Leonardo wanted to indicate that the Church had cut off Mary Magdalene as
the chosen leader of Christ’s church. A transfixed Sophie can only think, “This
is the woman who singlehandedly could crumble the Church?” Mary with her
bloodline is the Holy Grail, the womb that held the seed of Jesus.
What I see is that Judas obscures Peter in Leonardo’s
composition, so that Peter’s right hand appears awkwardly with the knife, but
his left is merely resting as a caution on St. John’s shoulder as John leans an
ear toward Peter. The composition rests on two “W” shapes that contain four sets
of Apostles, with Jesus in a pivotal, central pose. If you want to find feminine
V shapes, you can find many, but you can find nary a Mary. Unfortunately, this
may be the novel’s weakest lecture, yet it contains the key to the
Magdalene/Jesus union around which the entire quest revolves. Brown interprets
the evidence in The Last Supper much like an astrologer interprets a
horoscope for a client. I once studied astrology and could cast a horoscope in
any of several systems. Astrology as a science is to a fault completely baseless
and unreliable for character analysis, but astrologers, like good salesmen, can
be very convincing, especially if you show interest in their product.
Invariably, most folks who want a reading are easily impressed because the
astrologer’s product is the client’s character and fate. We are all interested
in ourselves, and most of us will find many “hits” or accurate statements in
almost any reading (unless you happen to be an informed skeptic like me). Sophie
is very impressed with her experts, Langdon and Teabing, she is in unfamiliar
territory, and she has an emotional need to support her dead grandfather.
Naturally, she comes up with an affirmative response. Brown’s novel wants us to
believe that Leonardo played occult tricks such as this on the Church through
his many, many lucrative Church commissions, when he had only one, which was not
even completed.
The novel claims that Leonardo Da Vinci was a Grand Master
of the secretive Priory of Sion, as were Victor Hugo and the twentieth-century
French artist Jean Cocteau. There is no evidence that they or Leonardo were
members. The Priory of Sion is essentially a new religious movement that
appeared after World War II, having announced its existence in 1962 after
formally establishing itself in 1956. This new Priory has no connection to the
Order or Abbey of Sion of the Middle Ages, as the book claims as “Fact” on the
opening page. The Abbey group was dissolved by King Louis XIII of France by
1619, with the premises turned over to the Jesuits. According to a TimeWatch BBC
(1996) program, “The History of a Mystery,” the Order of Sion disappeared from
history. Brown states that the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris “discovered
parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of
the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo and
Leonardo….” as one of his “Facts.” A fact Brown does not mention is that the new
Priory sect leader (Plantard), along with an accomplice, deposited the
Dossiers Secrets into the Bibliotheque. As exposed on the same BBC program
mentioned above, the parchments were fakes all along.
As for Jean Cocteau, I have a translation of an interesting
autobiographical book by him called Opium, the Diary of a Cure. Cocteau
wrote the journal account, liberally illustrated in his surrealistic style, in
1929 while in treatment for “opium poisoning” at an asylum in France. In the
text, page 125, Cocteau, at the end of his “cure” at the clinic, says, “And I
was wondering, shall I take opium or not? It is useless to put on a carefree
air, dear poet. I will take it if my work wants me to … And if Opium wants me
to.” He was a brilliant if radical writer and filmmaker who had a creative and
highly productive life (1889 to 1963). He rubbed shoulders with the likes of
Picasso and Diaghilev. I recall seeing two of his most famous films, Beauty
and the Beast and Orpheé. There is no evidence that I could find that
he was a grandmaster of any group, but, if he were one, one can only wonder what
kind of cult this opium-addicted surrealist might have created. In any case,
The Da Vinci Code states on page 327 that Jean Cocteau was Grand Master of
the Priory of Sion from 1918 to 1963. The Brown book also claims that Victor
Hugo was Grand Master from 1844 to 1885. Cocteau in Opium says, “Victor
Hugo was a madman who believed himself to be Victor Hugo.” Awkward for Dan
Brown, is all I can say.
A few final words about mistakes: Opus Dei has no official
monks who wear monk’s robes. Brown’s albino, Silas, apparently sees very well
without lenses—highly unusual for someone with albinism. Brown’s hero, Langdon,
states, “Originally, Tarot had been devised as a secret means to pass along
ideologies banned by the Church” (p. 92). Tarot playing cards (and they were
playing cards, not magical texts used by initiates) arrived in Europe from the
Middle East in the fifteenth century. Many varieties developed, but the occult
Tarot, the progenitor of the Tarot decks found in today’s New Age/occult
sections of bookstores, appeared and developed singularly in France during the
hundred years between 1780 and 1880. There is nothing ancient about the occult
Tarot, and they hid nothing from the churchmen who understood very well what
they were about (see A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot,
by R. Decker, T. DePaulis, and M. Dummett, 1996).
The number of poor souls condemned and executed by the
Catholic Inquisitors is not 5 million, as Brown’s book claims. Scholars today
set the number between 30 thousand and 90 thousand, with most splitting the
difference. And to drive one last stake into Brown’s grail myth, the Baigent,
Leigh, and Lincoln claim that “holy blood” means “holy grail” originates with
Sir Thomas Mallory’s misspelling in his fifteenth-century Le Morte D’Arthur.
Holy Grail should have been le saint graal and not Sang real.
Unfortunately, Brown has his “Teacher” proclaim on page 250, “The word
Sangreal derives from San Greal—or Holy Grail.” And “Sang Real
literally meant Royal Blood.”
The Da Vinci Code is a decent thriller if the reader
is either unaware of or manages to suspend the reality that undermines the
story. In the spiritual-thriller genre, Brown’s book mimics its earlier
Catholic-bashing, New Age cousin, The Celestine Prophecy, but it has
similar flaws in fact and character development. In that regard, Brown does not
come close to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Speaking of Eco, his
raucous ride through the occult in the 500-plus pages Foucault’s Pendulum
(1988) takes the wind out of most other books with occult themes as he covers
just about everything imaginable in that murky, mysterious world. Almost all of
Brown’s themes, including Magdalene as Grail, conspiracies to protect hidden
scriptures, and Disney cartoons that hide occult wisdom, are woven into Eco’s
book already in 1988.
And like Eco's book, Brown’s novel also has this quest
theme, but, just as with Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, the
implication is that there is some literal thing (a manuscript, a lineage, a
casket of bones) that reveals the secret. Brown, like Redfield, titillates the
reader with purported facts about the Church, government, established
science—whatever is in power—that prove that some conspiracy abounds to keep the
masses in ignorance and under control. This belies a quality of paranoia in the
authors, and they also butcher history and fact to arrive at a conclusion. As a
result, even though The Da Vinci Code is fiction, it fails. Brown’s
Langdon criticizes those poor, brainwashed Catholics and Christians who would
take things “literally” (the virgin birth, the resurrection and ascension of
Jesus). Yet, in the end, we find Langdon kneeling in awe at the Louvre at the
entry pyramid. He finally “knows” where the bones of Mary Magdalene are
buried—and, perhaps, with the cache of secret manuscripts that would crumble the
Christian Church. Talk about literal.
Langdon lectures Sophie (and the reader) that “Every faith
in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith—acceptance
of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion
describes God through metaphor, allegory, and exaggeration…. Metaphors are a way
to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to
believe literally in our own metaphors.” Langdon argues that he would not “wave
the flag” of evidence in the faces of the millions of deluded souls who believe
that Buddha was born of a lotus blossom, or Jesus of a literal virgin. “Those
who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.” He
would not expose the truth because “Religious allegory has become a part
of the fabric of reality. And living in that reality helps millions of people
cope and be better people.” There’s more to his argument, but the gist of it is
that we should let sleeping dogs lie—and I mean that as a pun, too—and not throw
them any Magdalene bones.
So here we have a noble man who would spare the common
believer the angst of revelation. As condescending as that might sound to the
common believer, Brown also attempts to not offend Opus Dei, despite his
exposure of some of its more radical practices. “Many call Opus Dei a
brainwashing cult,” reporters often challenged. “Others call you an
ultraconservative Christian secret society. Which are you?”
“Opus Dei is neither,” the bishop (Aringarosa in the novel)
would patiently reply. “We are a Catholic Church. We are a congregation of
Catholics who have chosen as our priority to follow Catholic doctrine as
rigorously as we can in our own daily lives.”
“Does God’s Work (Opus Dei, translated) necessarily include
vows of chastity, tithing, and atonement for sins through self-flagellation and
the cilice?”
“You are describing only a small portion of the Opus Dei
population,” Aringarosa said. “These choices are personal, but everyone in Opus
Dei shares the goal of bettering the world by doing the Work of God.” The book
does mention ODAN [Opus Dei Awareness Network] and its popular website—www.odan.org—in
keeping with Brown’s effort to make the story as real as possible. I doubt that
Opus Dei or its critics are happy about Brown’s book because he sensationalizes
the cult aspect while minimizing any real activity the group promotes. What he
did get right is that Opus Dei remains controversial, but that is another story
that will continue to have repercussions within the Holy See, especially if a
more “liberal” regime enters the Papacy.
I’ll end with a quote that Eco used in Foucault’s
Pendulum as a comment on the occult quest, no matter what technique, magic,
doctrine, theosophy or bones you might have: “Our cause is a secret within a
secret, a secret that only another secret can explain; it is a secret about a
secret that is veiled by a secret.” Ja ‘far as-Sadiq, sixth Imam.
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