Decoding The DaVinci Code

I'm a latecomer to Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, so it wasn't until I hit Chapter 55 at roughly 1:30 a.m. Monday that the reason for all the fuss finally struck me.

For all the controversy, I found neither the novel's dramatic premises (that Mary Magdalene was Jesus's wife; that she bore his child; that an elaborate series of secret societies arose to protect that royal lineage) nor its elaborate claims to proof particularly explosive. To me these were just plot devices, the backstory to a clever thriller.

Instead, in a stroke of supreme irony, the true threat to orthodox authority contained within The DaVinci Code is hidden in plain sight -- and it really has nothing to do with the Divine Feminine.

When we look back on The DaVinci Code thirty years from now -- and we will, by the way -- we will remember both the book and the movie as significant cultural artifacts, important indicators of a rapidly emerging worldview. For what is really exposed in the novel isn't proof of Jesus Christ's humanity, but the shoddy foundation beneath centuries of received church authority.

None of this is new to historians or Bible scholars. But practically all of it is new to average Christians.

In other words, it's not the plotline that's important to the culture. It's the exposition.

Right in the middle
Chapter 55 begins on page 230, smack in the middle of the 454-page, 106-chapter novel. It's the scene where Holy Grail historian Sir Leigh Teabing teams up with protagonist Robert Langdon to bring "Grail virgin" Sophie Neveu up-to-speed on 2,000 years of church history.

In the process, Teabing and Langdon lay out a series of inconvenient historical facts. As Brown states via Teabing:

"The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book."

Well this is hardly news, is it? Not after the Dead Sea Scrolls, the purported gospels of Thomas, Magdelene and Judas and all the various expositions on gnostic Christianity and the early church. The Jesus Seminar, which shook Christianity with its scholarly picture of a historic Jesus in a carefully detailed social context, plowed this ground more than 15 years ago. And you don't have to go poking around the history of the early church for very long before you bump up against 325 and the Council of Nicea.

There are many modern interpretations of what occurred in that first ecumenical council, and I remember one in particular that I found within a piece titled "The Cruelty of Heresy." In these church-favoring accounts, Nicea was the moment at which the heretics were forced to chose between acknowledging the true divinity of Christ and apostasy. To these writers, Nicea was a high-noon showdown, and the good guys won.  Offered as proof: With its heretics  disciplined, the Church entered a period of stunning growth, became the state religion of the Roman Empire, and began the traditions that we recognize today. 

But here's a more credible overview of the event: After three centuries of secretive development all across the Mediterranean world, the early church was decentralized, unruly and contentious.  With little centralized authority, individual sects had scant reason to rethink the faith they had practiced for generations.  But Rome's interest would change all of that.

Nicea was the event that turned chaos into order and a complex set of conflicting beliefs into a compact creed. The Nicean Creed made Christianity exportable -- an important consideration for an Empire that was struggling to hold everyone from Egyptian animists to Norse Odinists under one banner. Whatever one believes about paganism, it makes a lousy export.

Christianity offered Rome a far better solution. Rather than proposing a new round of "my local god can beat up your local god," the religion of Christ was based on universal concepts. Rather than endorsing clan or sect, it proposed a unified brotherhood of man. Pagan mystery cults promised the whole truth only to an elect few; Christianity promised grace and salvation to anyone, no matter their origin. What mattered wasn't lineage or geography, but love and faith.

Nicean Christianity, with its divine Christ, ethnic neutrality and agreed-upon dogmas, was the perfect religious technology for a far-flung empire in dire need of some self-organizing principles. For all its beauty and profound spirituality, it was also a religion edited for the purposes of power, by powerful men, at a time when the exercise of power was often brutal.

Some people -- history buffs, religious seekers, various flavors of fanatics -- will seek out such information. But most Christians will never follow that difficult, controversial path.  For the few who do so with open minds and hearts, the results are predictable, even if the conclusions are open-ended. For the majority, who will never make such a mental trek, the church's authority goes unchallenged. So it has been since the beginning, and so it was well into the 20th century.

And now here is that history, in Chapter 55, right in the middle of the worldwide bestseller The DaVinci Code. Not a dense scholarly text. Not a wild conspiracy pamphlet. Here lies the unflattering truth about the origins of modern Christianity contained in what is nothing more than a pleasant entertainment. You don't even have to work for the knowledge.

"Hold on. You're saying Jesus' divinity was the result of a vote?"

"A relatively close vote at that," Teabing added. "Nonetheless, establishing Christ's divinity was critical to the further unification of the Roman empire and to the new Vatican power base. By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world, an entity whose power was uncallengeable. This not only precluded further pagan challenges to Christianity, but now the followers of Christ were able to redeem theselves only via the established sacred channel -- the Roman Catholic Church."

Lights, camera, heresy...
When Brown's novel appeared in 2003, defenders of the Christian faith raced to their word processors. They churned out more than a dozen anti-DaVinci Code books within the first year, arguing against its central heresies. Even though I hadn't read the novel, I skimmed several of these responses. Most seemed to do a good (if often outrageously biased) job of poking holes in the theories and evidence presented in the novel and its nonfiction antecedent, 1981's Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

My interest in the argument was abstract -- having left the Church years ago, I didn't consider myself to have a dog in the DaVinci fight. I found neither side particularly convincing in their overwrought details, but I found myself more than willing to believe that our received dogmas might be based on distorted facts. I put the novel on my reading list, but there was always something ahead of it.

But then came The DaVinci Code movie, which we went to see tonight, and now the issue is clear to me. What historians could not spread, a novel popularized. What the novel could not accomplish, given the limited pool of those who who still read for pleasure, a movie would complete.

Whether or not one is inclined to believe in goddess mythology or indulge in alternate history, one cannot sit through this movie without being introduced to pagan connections and historical interpretations that many adults have never been forced to confront.  And this is what must really have church leaders in a foul mood.

Because at its heart, the Magdalene/Holy Grail story is just a ruse. The DaVinci Code is, instead, a popular polemic on the virtues of free thought, a herald of a coming era of enlightenment.

"In terms of prophecy," Teabing said, "we are currently in an epoch of enormous change. The millennium has recently passed, and with it has ended the two-thousand-year-long astrological Age of Pisces -- the fish, which is also the sign of Jesus. As any astrological symbologist will tell you, the Piscean ideal believes that man must be told what to do by higher powers because man is incapable of thinking for himself. Hence it has been a time of fervent religion. Now, however, we are entering the Age of Aquarius -- the water bearer -- whose ideals claim that man will learn the truth and be able to think for himself. The ideological shift is enormous, and it is occurring right now."

Which is why, when we say (as I have said), "What's the big deal? It's just a made-up story," we are not being completely honest. Yes, there is a made-up story in The DaVinci Code, but that story is the sugar coating on the bitter pill of early Christianity. The story, by delivering a dose of history in its rush toward climax, plants a seed of possibility. What if? What if the holy text on which I've based my life is less than divinely inerrant?

Such seeds grow slowly. As a preacher's son and avid reader, my first encounters with this history came in the 1980s -- and I immediately turned away from it. I feared anything that seemed shadowed by the occult, because I had been taught that Satan is a deceiver. A decade passed before I was able to look at the evidence without fear. For my wife, the journey took almost 30 years.

So when we look for the effect of The DaVinci Code, we must look to the future. Don't look at polls or surveys, don't look at the $77 million opening week box office, or the uniformly scathing critical reviews. Check back with me in 2026, and let's see how attitudes have changed -- not toward Jesus Christ, but toward authoritarianism.

No, The DaVinci Code isn't great literature, and yes, it's a muddled mess of a movie. It isn't original scholarship. It didn't introduce these ideas and themes. But the story will have a place in history as a unique cultural artifact. It will stand as the thriller that introduced audiences to a more realistic picture of Christianity in the 4th century. And as we examine that history more critically, more of us will experience the awakening of reason.

Where will this lead? Does the act of separating Jesus from the bureaucracies of Christianity (Catholic and otherwise) destroy him? Or does it revive him?

As the movie asks, What do you believe? What do you believe now?

Comments

[Janet Edens]

One of the important things, I think, is that we are gaining the ability to separate Christ from orchestrated Christianity. Christ said nothing about burning witches or torturing heretics or taking the Holy Land. Applied to more modern times, he wasn't big on being superior (Luke 9:48), judging others (Matthew 19:23-24), or punishing the wicked. (Matthew 18:20-22)

In fact, his message was quite the contrary: Do good to those who hate you. (Matthew 7:7-12) Love one another as I have loved you.

He hung around the misfits, the outcasts, the pariahs. (Mark 2: 15-17) He shunned wealth (Matthew 19:23-24), and dogma (Mark 7:6-10).

Trust me, I understand that one can pick and choose the Bible passages one needs to make a point. I'm fully aware of passages that show a harsher view. But at the very least, those quoted here must be reconciled with the I'm-saved-and-you're-not flavor of self-righteous Christianity.

Perhaps, by being able to talk about the humanity of ourselves and our systems, we will move closer to an understanding of the Divine. Perhaps we can concentrate less on religion and more on spirituality. As one of his followers put it: "Now we can really serve God, not in the old way by obeying the letter of the law, but in the new way, by the Spirit." (Romans 7:6)

[Jason]

See, that is exactly why I hesitate to jump into conversations about the history of the Bible or Christian Origins.

A vast number of texts were written by individuals representing various sects of the early church. A few were chosen to be canonical by... those who were in power at the time (surprise, surprise). Historical documents exist that describe very well who argued for or against what views, who wanted what book included in - or thrown out of - the canonical Bible and, often, what their political motive was for this.

You can say all this until you are blue in the face, though, because inevitably someone will wander up and ask, "Yeah, but which ones did GOD WANT?"

I have no answer to that.

[Ben]

I'm trying to find time for a real response tonight. This ramble will have to suffice for now.

Jason is mostly right, though I suspect coming from the other side of the religious fence. Dan's largely political interpretation of the council's does quietly assume (or at least suggest) that a human process would exclude the hand of God.

I also think that the fact that the Bible - and basic doctrine - did not drop from the sky would upset the fundamentalists and the inerrantists.

I take what, for me, has been a harder road of faith: That the Christian faith has the fingerprints of humanity all over it, but that God may work though human processes.

Where I majorly part differences with Dan is over his interpretation of the issues raised by church history, canon formation, etc. Dan seems to believe (at least in other posts) that all these problems point to the bankruptcy of religious institutions, that the only way to go is as an individual seeker unburdened by orthodoxy. Of course, you can CHOOSE orthodoxy, but the individual choice is what matters.

I think individual seeking is critical, but that, unaided and undisciplined, it can be solipsisitic and self-serving. I believe the church functions best as a body of believers that is cognizant of the church's fallability but reverent of the force that animates it.

Such a body stakes out what it believes and respects tradition. When individuals stray far from what has been understood, it will be leery of idiosyncratic misinterpretation, self-serving egotism, delusional "enthusiasm," and simple madness. Bluntly put, we want a way to say the David Koresh's -- or even the Pat Robertson's -- of the faith are wrong.

But because this body also recognizes its own fallibility, it will have to consider that some radical individuals may be "of God." In a sense, we must be willing to accept that "new prophets" could arise in our midst. I would put MLK into this category, as well as some proponents of liberation theology.

What the early church did is quite what I'm describing -- it was hashing out doctrine, not just defending it. Still, it was a human gathering to discern God will as revealed by a shocking, and confusing, new event (Jesus). That discussion was needed to understand the events of the gospels (leaving aside their historicity) is not surprising. I'm hoping to make time to argue with your characterization of the council's in a later email. I find it right in the basics but a bit unfair in the characterization.

One small note: given our great faith in democracy, I find it odd that the idea of voting on doctrine seems so shocking. The Cardinals vote. Most denominations vote in annual conferences. If anything, the formation of this "authoritarian" structure was oddly democratic (more on the history later). And this bothers us? Did we really expect that a whole set of beliefs miraculously appeared, unbidden, from the sky? Would it have been better of Constantine had just decreed what the bishops would think?

All this discussion points to an irony: the critics of Christianity tend to understand "true Christianity" in the fundamentalists' terms. If there was a human hand involved, it must be false! Human fingerprints preclude the hand of God! Inerrancy must be total, or God isn't involved!

Nonsense. A minority of Christians who have wrestled with these facts have come to a hard-fought faith. A faith that is humble enough to resist idiosyncratic, egotistical self-seeking but firm enough to recognize that not every spirit of the modern world comes from God. And that not everything they theorize about the divine must be true.

But isn't human politics an equally dubious source of doctrine? Construed in secular terms, yes. But Christianity's great stories are human stories in which God is involved. Politics is at the heart of the Exodus, and at the heart of Jesus's trial and crucifixion. That debate and politics were involved in hashing out doctrine is really nothing new.

A humble yet faithful group is the best option we have for hashing out belief.

All the Gospel of Judas/da Vinci Code stuff provides the rationalists with intellectual ammo against the fundamentalists. Still, such debate is over only a shallow faith -- which, to be honest, is all either of those sides is really interested in.

Sorry this was rambling. I'll try to do better later.

[Daniel]

Let me clarify: I don't wish to argue over what rules the divine may use in working its will. May "the hand of God" be present in councils? Of course. May one choose to believe that all is as it should be, no matter how messy, because the divine spirit willed it that way? Absolutely.

Rather, I am arguing that for most people, the assumptions we make about authority (and history) have never been seriously challenged. Once a more complete picture is presented, we must choose what believe from a larger pool of possibilities. My father the preacher is a Biblical scholar: he looked at all of this and still chose the church. So you cannot shake his faith by saying "the council of Nicea was a political event." I believe it is quite literally true that that which does not kill our faiths makes it stronger.

One of the great ironies that I learned as I spent my year studying neopaganism with the local pagan community was that these spiritual seekers -- overwhelmingly free-thinkers and unorthodox personalities -- were already bumping up against the limitations of freedom. And it made them very uncomfortable. How do you have an open pagan circle and talk about anything when, from time to time, someone wants to introduce ideas that have NOTHING TO DO with the core beliefs of the group? And the answer is, practically, that you have to start mentioning "The D Word": dogma.

So I don't begrudge ANY group its dogmas. To survive as a system of thought, some definition of belief is necessary.

My observation regards authoritarian claims to proof. One may claim authority based on the majesty and tradition of the church, but this winds up being a rather limited claim, one easily shaken when people start to hear alternative interpretations of that traditional history.

I think the future of Christianity -- indeed, the future of human spirituality -- will include forms in which statements of belief are routinely examined and appeals to authority are rare. And I think this story is part of that movement.

It's really unfair to expect the Catholic Church to be able to handle this transition easily. It was formed at a time when the vast majority of its believers were illiterate. Its traditions and institutions were forged within that context, and they were products of that world. Such traditions may not operate as gracefully in a world of instant media, Wikipedia, and universal public education.

To me, the goal is not declare one route to faith "good" and another "bad." Ben uses the word "humble," and I think he's exactly right. To step away from authoritarian claims is to step TOWARD humility. It's a very healthy process, and one that I think will ultimately do the church a great good.

[Ben]

Mostly agreed.

I would separate the ideas of "authority," "tradition," and "proof" a bit more, though.

Attempts to "prove" any religious claim are missing the point, I think, though there's a long tradition of trying to do that.

But I don't think you need "proof" for authority. In the Christian realm, I think you need a belief in the church and its believers as the mystical body of Christ. In short, you need a commitment to a messy mystical union that will, ultimately and haltingly, head in the right direction.

It's a version of what MLK once said: The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice (I may be slightly misquoting here). I think that the arc of the church is long, but it bends toward God. From where we stand, though, it can be hard to see.

Also, in an empirical sense, I think you may be wrong about openness and questioning being the future of belief. That is sort of, but not quite, what sociologists of religion predicted in the 60s (they predicted a rational secularization; what you seem to be talking about is a rigorously examined faith).

In any case, the opposite happened: Islam and Christianity in particular turned to fundamentalism. Some explain this as a reaction to the "acids of modernity," the fraying of social bonds, etc. Whatever the case, enlightenment rationalism has not led us to faith that's more open to questioning -- at least in faith's most dynamic incarnations.

Finally, on "humble" and "authoritarian." I think this is our fundamental disagreement. I find it LESS humble to believe in your own, naturally idiosyncratic, version of ultimate truth than to submit to "authoritarian" dogma. To say, "I'm right but 2000 years of tradition (in the Christian world) are wrong" seems a strong exercise in ego. Note that here I'm not making a claim for which is better -- I'm just saying that our current, individualistic "seeking" model of faith is the one of the most prideful of all possible models. It also imports America's hyper-individualism ino the religious realm.

Christian tradition, and particularly Catholic tradition, is highly communal. Catholics really do believe that believers are truly, if mystically, bound into the mystical body of Christ. And that is a communal, not individualistic, arrangement.

The Catholic Church has its flaws - one of them is being too closed to the sort of "prophetic" challenge I mentioned in my earlier comment. Authoritarianism is always a temptation, and the institutional church does need a constant infusion of humility. I might call it a sense of human fallenness and the corresponding fallibility of human institutions.

But a flaw of our own society is an often alienating emphasis on the individual, a viewpoint that tends to deny how linked and dependent we actually are. I think the church can serve as a bulwark against that cultural current, and that, overall, that's not an altogether bad thing. To reframe this politically, this is also why I find libertarianism appalling from a moral and religious (and practical, though that's not the issue) standpoint.

[Dewey]

I think the issue may be the humility of the belief, not of the believer.

If I decide to reject 2000 years of teaching in favor of my own belief I'm personally not that humble. However, if my belief structure doesn't decide that heretics are infidels should be killed to save them then perhaps the belief structure itself is more humble.

I do find it interesting that we are assuming humility is a desired trait and I'd like to explore it a bit.

Since we define God to be something larger than ourselves by definition we cannot fully conceive God. Everything we conceive must be some approximation of God. Humility helps us in not believing our approximation is reality and perhaps in not killing someone because their approximation doesn't quite match our approximation.

This humility will also contribute to the search for a better approximation by not getting too caught up in the existing approximation.

On the other hand, someone can get so carried away with humility that they abdicate responsibility by just believing what everyone else does or what some specific authority does. I don't see that as a positive thing.

Ultimately I see but three ways we will "bend towards God":

1) We push
2) Someone else pushes
3) God pulls

#3 is a theory of relevation: We don't do anything but practice what we've been taught. When it's time for us to know more God will show it. I'm not sure of the theology behind this but it doesn't seem to be commonly accepted -- even those who say *we* should do it don't seem to do it themselves, thus leading to...

#2: "Someone Else Pushes" Well, the natural question is "how do I identify this 'someone else' so I can listen to them", from which it follows "what are they that I am not?" Unfortunately it also follows "can I become such?"

And last, #1: We can move ourselves towards God. This seems to require some ego.

Ultimately, if we want to make progress towards greater understanding then *someone* has to be arrogant enough to assume a) that something in their current belief structure is wrong, and b) that they are able to improve on it with some work.

If we don't dare to believe we have errors in the first place we can never be a driving force towards truth.

Assuming #1 (we drive towards the truth) I have two possible problems: one ephemeral and one structural.

The easy one first: If the church is tending towards God then that also means that at any point in time something in church dogma is wrong. So, someone who is "smarter than average", or has better training or some other advantage could detect some of these mistakes and therefore find a "better" truth. Of course, the Roman Catholic church has been putting a great deal of energy into this for years so whether I personally will be "smarter" compared to an average Bishop is at the very least highly questionable. However anyone who is trying to make some progress must thoroughly examine the existing base of beliefs to discover what's either missing or wrong.

The structural problem: If by "the church" we mean the whole congregation there is some set of beliefs that "the church" as a whole just isn't ready for and can't accept. Jesus was pretty radical with his "love everybody" message and the better part of 2000 years show that we still have problems accepting it. Most Americans still don't seem to get the anti-materialism thing. The problem is that, unless we allow some "inner circle" type secrets, what "the church" believes will be inherently biased towards what it is capable of believing.

I see in modern Christianity (though these days mostly from the outside) very strong currents of fear and conformity. It seems that the model of the afterlife is that you show up and will be judged based on how closely you've managed to live to the Answer.

I sometimes wonder how different we would be if instead of giving us the Answer and telling us to live by it God had asked us a Question and judged us on how well we tried to answer it.

Both Daniel and I were influenced by Quakerism growing up (at least by attending a school professing Quaker beliefs.) I learned there (perhaps mistakenly) that one of the fundamental tenants of Quakers is the individual relationship with and knowledge of God. From this point of view perhaps we imported American individualism from religion rather than the other way around.