Brou’ha ha on “The Da Vinci Code”

The Da Vinci Code is a novel written by an American author, Dan Brown. He was born and raised in a small town of Exeter, New England. He is the son of a school teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy where Dan also taught for some time after his graduation. It was here that he found inspiration for his first novel, Digital Fortress. One of his students had a “light-hearted political debate via e-mail with one of his friends and had made the comment that he was so mad at the current (1995) political situation that he was ready to kill President Clinton.” Immediately afterwards, he was picked and questioned by the Secret Service to determine what his true intentions were. They let him off because it was just a silly prank. But Brown’s interest was sparked by the alacrity with which the NSA (National security Agency) agents got to the silly offender. He delved into the means and methods that NSA uses to track down the terrorists and used his knowledge to create detective plots in his novels.

Brown is a successful writer and several of his novels have become number one on the best sellers’ lists, including Digital Fortress, Angels and Demons, Deception Point, etc. Now his latest novel, The Da Vinci Code, has become one of the most widely read books in the world. This novel is characterized by the mystery of Agatha Christy’s novels, the contentious religious history of Christianity and its traditions, secret societies, and the intrigues and romance of fictional novels. It was first published in 2003 by Random House and a new “Special Illustrated Edition” was released in November 2004.

The novel tells a romantic and intricate detective story, which takes its core material from the religious history and traditional stories about Christianity and secret societies. That is how the novel has become highly polemical and has drawn criticism from the very high and elite echelons of Roman Catholic Church. On March 15, 2005, Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone, archbishop of Genoa, and former second-in-command of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, condemned the book and its sellers because of its anti-Catholic bias. Another Cardinal, Claudio Hummes, archbishop of Sao Paulo who oversees the largest catholic congregation and is also a leading candidate to succeed Pope John Paul II, however played it down. He said, “Cardinal Bertone thought it was correct, with relation to his archdiocese, to warn against the book. It’s a right he has. But the index of prohibited books does not exist any more (the index started in 1559 and was abolished in 1966, Gill).”

Many others have criticized the book for its inconsistencies, so much so, that numerous books have been published about this novel. Some of them include Cracking the Da Vinci Code by Simon Cox, Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code by Bert D. Ehrman, Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code by Sharan Newman, Da Vinci Code Decoded by Martin Lunn, and Breaking the Da Vinci Code by Darrel L. Block.

The story begins with the murder of the renowned curator, Jacques Sauniere, of the Louvre Museum in Paris. The dead body is found inside the Louvre naked and sprawled in the same posture as depicted by Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing, the Vitruvian Man, with a cryptic message written on the parquet floor beside the body and a Pentacle (see note 1) drawn across his stomach and centered on his navel, in his own blood. Also, the“interpretation of hidden messages inside Da Vinci’s famous works, including Mona Lisa (see note 2) and the Last Supper, figure prominently in the solution of the mystery,” (The Da Vinci Code, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_vinci_code).

The book is replete with anagrams, and references to Da Vinci and his works permeate from every where in the book. The story includes several hidden messages and secret codes, which are decoded in due course by the cryptologist Sophie Neveu (the heroine) and Robert Langdon (hero), professor of symbology at Harvard university, who is in Paris for a lecture.

Some of these facts are really amusing. For example, according to Wikipedia, “The keystone cryptex actually contains a second smaller cryptex with a second riddle that reveals its combination. The riddle, which says to seek the orb above a tomb of “a knight a pope”, refers not to a medieval knight, but rather to the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton, who was buried in West Minster Abbey, and was eulogized by Alexander Pope (A. Pope). The orb refers to the apple observed by Newton which led to the discovery of the Law of universal gravitation, and thus the combination to the second cryptex is “A-P-P-L-E”. Interesting!

Although there are numerous facts in the book, which are disputed and criticized by the critics, the focus of much of the criticism is on the story of Mary Magdalene. According to the novel, The Holy Grail is not a physical chalice as is commonly believed; it is a woman named Mary Magdalene who was Christ’s wife. She was a descendent of royal family (see Note 3) through the Jewish House of Benjamin. At the time of crucifixion, she was pregnant with Christ’s baby daughter. After the crucifixion, she fled to Gaul where she was sheltered by the Jews of Marseilles. Her daughter, after birth, was named Sarah. The bloodline of Christ and Mary Magdalene became the Merovingian dynasty of France. This was a real shocker because according to the traditional belief, Jesus Christ never married.

Allegedly, the church tarnished Mary Magdalene as a whore pointing to a correlation to the Biblical story in which Jesus saved a whore from being stoned to death (story of casting the first stone, Gill). According to Wikipedia, “This common misunderstanding is initiated by Pope Gregory I, who proclaimed this based on a false analysis of Luke 7 and 8. He integrated three different women into one.”

The critics reject this story. They claim that the assertion that Mary Magdalene was of the tribe of Benjamin is not supported by credible historical evidence. Magdala was located in northern Israel while the tribe of Benjamin resided in the south. The linkage of the two is suspect. The source of the Magdalene story in the novel is the Gnostic scriptures. Historically, Gnosticism and Christianity were hostile to each other with Christianity gaining the upper hand. Interest in Gnosticism revived in the twentieth century, (see Note 4).

Another contentious issue in the book is the (im)mortality of Jesus Christ. Many believe that prior to AD 325, Jesus Christ was considered only a mortal prophet. His immortality was a consequence of the efforts of Emperor Constantine to raise Christ to the level of God. It was decided by a narrow vote at the First Council at Nicaea in AD 325.

In the novel, the character Leigh Teabing, explains to the cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, that at the Council of Nicaea “many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon, including the divinity of Jesus. Until that moment, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet… a great and powerful man, but a man nevertheless.”

“Not the Son of God?” a shocked Neveu asked.

“Jesus’ establishment as the “Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea,” explained Teabing. “..establishing Christ’s divinity was crucial 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 sope of the human world,,,” Teabing continued.

This claim is disputed by the traditional Christians like all matters divine. The supporters of Jesus’ immortality claim, the vote at Nicaea decided if Christ and God were indeed one or whether Christ “was the first created being”, inferior to the Father but still superior to all other creatures. The immortality of Christ was not in question. Even if it is true, it is still ridiculous to decide such issues by vote.

Karen Armstrong (A History of God, pp. 107-132) has described the outcome of the vote of the Council of Nicaea. According to her, “The Creator and Redeemer were one.” Particularly, the subject (motion) of the vote was as follows:

“We believe in one God,
the Father Almighty,
maker of all things,
visible and invisible,
and in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the Son of God,
the only begotten of the Father,
that is, of the substance of the Father,
God from God,
light from light,
true God from true God,
begotten not made,
of one substance with the Father,
through whom all things were made,
those things that are in heaven and
those thing that are on earth,
who for us men, and for our salvation
came down and was made man,
suffered,
rose again on the third day,
ascended into the heavens
and will come
to judge the living and the dead.
And we believe in the Holy Spirit.

Armstrong continued, “The show of agreement pleased Constantine, who had no understanding of the theological issues, but in fact there was no unanimity at Nicaea. After the council, the bishops went on teaching as they had before, and the … crisis continued for another sixty years.”

“And we believe in the Holy Spirit” was a kind of afterthought and an appendage to the main motion.

The entire proceedings of the council were farcical. How can the divine issues be settled by a vote, by a show of hands?

A lot of Christian mythology was created long after the time of Jesus Christ. The inter-faith rivalry of Christianity and Judaism in addition to the politics within Christianity was also a factor for the elevation of Jesus Christ.

The information about the actual biological father of Jesus Christ was not known. This eventually led to the creation of myths of Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, and the Sonship of God. The concept of trinity, three in one and one in three, is a metaphysical conundrum. People believe in such myths because of religious rivalry. They have to defend their faith at all costs.

The Da Vinci Code is scheduled for adaptation into a movie by Soni’s Columbia Pictures. Filming will begin in May 2006. The Louvre has accorded the permission for filming on its premises. The lead roles will be played by Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon and Audrey Tautou as Sophis Neveu.

There are many more interesting and controversial issues in the novel. All of them are knit together adroitly in the story, which has a happy ending with the marriage of Sophie Neveu and the hero, Robert Langdon.

Notes

1.The novel describes Pentacle as follows:
“Formally known as a pentagram – or pentacle, as the ancients called it – this symbol is considered both divine and magical by many cultures…. the five pointed star has always been the symbol of beauty and perfection associated with the goddess and the sacred feminine.”
2.Elaborating Mona Lisa, the novel describes, “So we have
the male (Egyptian) god, Amon .. and the female goddess, Isis, whose ancient pictogram was once called L’isa.”

The combination Amon and L’isa is the anagram of Mona Lisa. “…not only does the face of Mona Lisa look androgynous but the name is an anagram of the divine union of male and female.”
3.According to Wikipedia, “The old French expression for the Holy Grail, San greal, actually is a play on Sang real, which literally means ‘royal blood’. The Grail relics consist of the documents that testify to the bloodline, as well as the actual bones of Mary Magdalene.
4.Ben Witherington wrote, “why the ‘Lost Gospels’ Lost out,” at ChristianityToday (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/006/7.26html), “The novel expresses in popular form what some scholars have been arguing or implying for years. Twenty years ago, Elaine Pagels wrote, “The Gnostic Gospels,” a book that introduced the larger public to the other “Christian” writings that arose in the early centuries of the church. Regarding the books of the New Testament, Pagels asked, ‘who made that selection, and for what reasons? Why were these other writings excluded and banned as heresy’?”