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eye_of_a_catOkay, you've got me. The reason I don't like The Da Vinci Code is because I'm religious. And naturally, being religious, the very idea of a story where Jesus is portrayed as human sends the icy chill of insecurity down my spine. The kind of story I want would feature a vague, mystical Jesus, whose messages were too cool to be spread around the common masses, whose bloodline would be so important that people would kill over it, and whose descendants would all be royalty because of his magical DNA!
No, wait. That is The Da Vinci Code.
All right, then. The real reason is because I'm religious and therefore very conservative about the appropriate role of women, and I can't stand stories about Mary Magdalene being an important apostle. No, indeed! The kind of story I'm after is one where she's merely a receptacle for sperm and babies, defined entirely by her reproductive capacity and included among the apostles just because she was somebody's boyfriend.
No, wait...
Okay, here's why: because it's really, really bad. The writing's awful, the characters are two-dimensional, the research makes 'superficial' seem like praise and the exposition doesn't so much weave itself into the fabric of the prose as land on your toe like a dropped anvil. God only knows how all this added up to an incredibly popular novel, but God also knows why Christian pop exists and still won't explain it to the rest of us, so I'm not holding my breath. Some things are just beyond human understanding.
And, yeah, it annoys me on religious grounds. Just not the ones it thinks it's annoying me on.
So, forget the incredibly bad research, the lunatic conspiracy theories, the little pieces of what-the-hell? trivia that come straight out of those Charlie Brown strips where Lucy tells Linus some 'little-known facts' about the world around them ("and up there are clouds, which make the wind blow!"). Pause, for a while, on the mechanics that produce them. The Da Vinci Code is probably the smuggest book in existence that wasn't written by a literary theorist, preceding all its revelations with "Little did people realise..." or "It always made Robert smile to think...". Robert Langdon, internationally renowned professor of symbology ("we gotta go to the crappy little discipline where I'm the professor!") even teaches this way: all his interactions with students take the form of an amazing fact presented to awed crowds of kids who gasp in surprise. (Indiana Jones also portrays academia more accurately. Robert Langdon has crowds of enthralled fans hanging on his every word, Indy comes back to his office to find himself surrounded by crowds of furious students waving papers and demanding grades, and escapes by climbing out of a window. It works on so many levels. But we'll get to this.)
I don't know whether the annoying smugness is a hallmark of Dan Brown's style or not, but it works on a grand scale in this novel. The extracanonical gospels that contain The Truth about Jesus (and that's big-T Truth, the kind that comes with eight conspiracies and a Vatican cover-up) work on much the same principle. They're Gnostic texts, and the Gnostic sects of the first few centuries AD were very big on the idea of secret knowledge; while salvation and understanding might come from within, the only way to get there is via the teachings you'll only learn at this level, from these people, at this stage in your initiate. Secret, see. Not for just anybody.
In that sense, The Da Vinci Code portrays the world in a very Gnostic way. Think you're a fan of Leonardo's art, do you? Well, think again, because what you (and all the other suckers in the Louvre) don't realise is what it really means, and you'll never find that out until someone whispers it in your ear. There's Hidden, Secret Messages in The Last Supper, in The Madonna of the Rocks, in American military lapels, in iambic pentameter, in everything. The whole world's in code, and we poor, deluded masses don't even know it's there.
(This isn't to say that symbolism has no place in art. Symbolism, however, is there to enlighten. There's a code, but it's not a hidden code, not one that's designed to be obscure to everyone but the chosen few. The difference between symbolism and secret messages is the difference between illustrating your book and writing it in invisible ink.)
Back to the Gnostic gospels, then, which the novel claims portray a fully human Jesus (with all this 'divine' stuff invented later by Constantine, who apparently comes second only to King James VI and I in singlehandedly micro-managing Bible decisions for the generations to come). This isn't exactly true, and by 'not exactly' there I mean 'not even a teensy little bit', but technicalities of divinity don't much matter. The Gnostic Jesus isn't very human in the same way that badly-written characters in books aren't very human, or the way that your scary teacher wasn't very human when you were five and truly believed she had magic powers. He says a lot of weird stuff, and a lot of stuff that might be profound if you looked at it sideways, and a lot of stuff that would probably make a lot of sense to you if only you, too, had the secret knowledge needed to crack the code, but not much that suggests he's 'human' in the sense we otherwise understand it. Flesh and blood, maybe - if you really, really stretch it, and you only read parts of the thing - but a person?
Dan Brown's not a third-century Gnostic, though, and his novel doesn't portray a hugely detailed understanding of any Gnostic texts, so it's sort of unfair to accuse him of writing about a Jesus he didn't even know he was rubbing shoulders with. So, back to his book for a moment. The main reason the novel doesn't quite make it onto the Profound and Controversial plane it's aiming for is because, sign-waving protestors and smug fans aside, its central revelation is not all that ground-shaking. Jesus had sex and babies? Well... so? Jesus being fully human is rather a central part of Christianity; the 'fully divine' part is an addition to that, not a replacement. Jesus being human isn't a glitch in Church revisionism, something not fully erased by Constantine seventeen hundred years ago, but a central part of Christian theology. Jesus was human, humans have sex. It's not a big thing.
But sex in The Da Vinci Code isn't sex, exactly. It's a mystical connection with the sacred feminine. And Jesus's humanity in The Da Vinci Code is defined by an absence of resurrection, not by all the messy and emotional and stupid and wonderful and complicated things we use to define humanity in ourselves. So, although Jesus isn't divine here, he's Important in a vaguely waffly spiritual way, and that importance is defined by the wrong things. Important because he was the keeper of the secret knowledge. Important because his descendants were royalty. Important because the most famous people in the world joined a secret society to protect his secrets after death. There's a preoccupation with the famous here, with the top and the best and the superior; the novel begins with the words "Renowned curator, Jacques Sauniere..."
(And yes, Christians do this too. And no, Aslan probably shouldn't have been a lion. But I digress.)
On another Grail quest, Indiana Jones, who's just been beaten to the prize, watches as an interchangeable villain searches for the Holy Grail among a row of shining gold chalices. He lifts the biggest, brightest, most jewel-studded one we can see, says "This certainly is the cup of a king", drinks - and dies. Indy picks up a small, dusty, wooden goblet, almost hidden in all that gold, and says "This is the cup of a carpenter." And so it is.
The Grail in The Da Vinci Code isn't a jewelled chalice, but in locating it elsewhere the book makes the same mistake as the man before Indy. The problem with focusing on kings rather than carpenters lies in elevating what's special and secret and royal and shiny and bright above what's just plain human, and the Da Vinci Code does that in spades. Finding the Grail, here, means recognising why Mary Magdalene is important enough to be an apostle - not because she was human, but because all the mystical, spiritual, royalness of her transcended her humanity.
My own theology doesn't have much room for treating the sacred as something outside the human, and equating what's spiritually good with what's terrestrially superior. Still, independent of my or anyone's views on Jesus's divinity, I find it difficult to see how having babies and enabling men to reach spiritual enlightenment through having sex with me is supposed to make me sacred. I'm going with a world I can see, wisdom I can gain by myself, and the cup of a carpenter, every time. And if the cup's going to fall into a crevasse, while the John Williams score thunders around you - then let it go, and reach for what's human.
No, wait. That is The Da Vinci Code.
All right, then. The real reason is because I'm religious and therefore very conservative about the appropriate role of women, and I can't stand stories about Mary Magdalene being an important apostle. No, indeed! The kind of story I'm after is one where she's merely a receptacle for sperm and babies, defined entirely by her reproductive capacity and included among the apostles just because she was somebody's boyfriend.
No, wait...
Okay, here's why: because it's really, really bad. The writing's awful, the characters are two-dimensional, the research makes 'superficial' seem like praise and the exposition doesn't so much weave itself into the fabric of the prose as land on your toe like a dropped anvil. God only knows how all this added up to an incredibly popular novel, but God also knows why Christian pop exists and still won't explain it to the rest of us, so I'm not holding my breath. Some things are just beyond human understanding.
And, yeah, it annoys me on religious grounds. Just not the ones it thinks it's annoying me on.
So, forget the incredibly bad research, the lunatic conspiracy theories, the little pieces of what-the-hell? trivia that come straight out of those Charlie Brown strips where Lucy tells Linus some 'little-known facts' about the world around them ("and up there are clouds, which make the wind blow!"). Pause, for a while, on the mechanics that produce them. The Da Vinci Code is probably the smuggest book in existence that wasn't written by a literary theorist, preceding all its revelations with "Little did people realise..." or "It always made Robert smile to think...". Robert Langdon, internationally renowned professor of symbology ("we gotta go to the crappy little discipline where I'm the professor!") even teaches this way: all his interactions with students take the form of an amazing fact presented to awed crowds of kids who gasp in surprise. (Indiana Jones also portrays academia more accurately. Robert Langdon has crowds of enthralled fans hanging on his every word, Indy comes back to his office to find himself surrounded by crowds of furious students waving papers and demanding grades, and escapes by climbing out of a window. It works on so many levels. But we'll get to this.)
I don't know whether the annoying smugness is a hallmark of Dan Brown's style or not, but it works on a grand scale in this novel. The extracanonical gospels that contain The Truth about Jesus (and that's big-T Truth, the kind that comes with eight conspiracies and a Vatican cover-up) work on much the same principle. They're Gnostic texts, and the Gnostic sects of the first few centuries AD were very big on the idea of secret knowledge; while salvation and understanding might come from within, the only way to get there is via the teachings you'll only learn at this level, from these people, at this stage in your initiate. Secret, see. Not for just anybody.
In that sense, The Da Vinci Code portrays the world in a very Gnostic way. Think you're a fan of Leonardo's art, do you? Well, think again, because what you (and all the other suckers in the Louvre) don't realise is what it really means, and you'll never find that out until someone whispers it in your ear. There's Hidden, Secret Messages in The Last Supper, in The Madonna of the Rocks, in American military lapels, in iambic pentameter, in everything. The whole world's in code, and we poor, deluded masses don't even know it's there.
(This isn't to say that symbolism has no place in art. Symbolism, however, is there to enlighten. There's a code, but it's not a hidden code, not one that's designed to be obscure to everyone but the chosen few. The difference between symbolism and secret messages is the difference between illustrating your book and writing it in invisible ink.)
Back to the Gnostic gospels, then, which the novel claims portray a fully human Jesus (with all this 'divine' stuff invented later by Constantine, who apparently comes second only to King James VI and I in singlehandedly micro-managing Bible decisions for the generations to come). This isn't exactly true, and by 'not exactly' there I mean 'not even a teensy little bit', but technicalities of divinity don't much matter. The Gnostic Jesus isn't very human in the same way that badly-written characters in books aren't very human, or the way that your scary teacher wasn't very human when you were five and truly believed she had magic powers. He says a lot of weird stuff, and a lot of stuff that might be profound if you looked at it sideways, and a lot of stuff that would probably make a lot of sense to you if only you, too, had the secret knowledge needed to crack the code, but not much that suggests he's 'human' in the sense we otherwise understand it. Flesh and blood, maybe - if you really, really stretch it, and you only read parts of the thing - but a person?
Dan Brown's not a third-century Gnostic, though, and his novel doesn't portray a hugely detailed understanding of any Gnostic texts, so it's sort of unfair to accuse him of writing about a Jesus he didn't even know he was rubbing shoulders with. So, back to his book for a moment. The main reason the novel doesn't quite make it onto the Profound and Controversial plane it's aiming for is because, sign-waving protestors and smug fans aside, its central revelation is not all that ground-shaking. Jesus had sex and babies? Well... so? Jesus being fully human is rather a central part of Christianity; the 'fully divine' part is an addition to that, not a replacement. Jesus being human isn't a glitch in Church revisionism, something not fully erased by Constantine seventeen hundred years ago, but a central part of Christian theology. Jesus was human, humans have sex. It's not a big thing.
But sex in The Da Vinci Code isn't sex, exactly. It's a mystical connection with the sacred feminine. And Jesus's humanity in The Da Vinci Code is defined by an absence of resurrection, not by all the messy and emotional and stupid and wonderful and complicated things we use to define humanity in ourselves. So, although Jesus isn't divine here, he's Important in a vaguely waffly spiritual way, and that importance is defined by the wrong things. Important because he was the keeper of the secret knowledge. Important because his descendants were royalty. Important because the most famous people in the world joined a secret society to protect his secrets after death. There's a preoccupation with the famous here, with the top and the best and the superior; the novel begins with the words "Renowned curator, Jacques Sauniere..."
(And yes, Christians do this too. And no, Aslan probably shouldn't have been a lion. But I digress.)
On another Grail quest, Indiana Jones, who's just been beaten to the prize, watches as an interchangeable villain searches for the Holy Grail among a row of shining gold chalices. He lifts the biggest, brightest, most jewel-studded one we can see, says "This certainly is the cup of a king", drinks - and dies. Indy picks up a small, dusty, wooden goblet, almost hidden in all that gold, and says "This is the cup of a carpenter." And so it is.
The Grail in The Da Vinci Code isn't a jewelled chalice, but in locating it elsewhere the book makes the same mistake as the man before Indy. The problem with focusing on kings rather than carpenters lies in elevating what's special and secret and royal and shiny and bright above what's just plain human, and the Da Vinci Code does that in spades. Finding the Grail, here, means recognising why Mary Magdalene is important enough to be an apostle - not because she was human, but because all the mystical, spiritual, royalness of her transcended her humanity.
My own theology doesn't have much room for treating the sacred as something outside the human, and equating what's spiritually good with what's terrestrially superior. Still, independent of my or anyone's views on Jesus's divinity, I find it difficult to see how having babies and enabling men to reach spiritual enlightenment through having sex with me is supposed to make me sacred. I'm going with a world I can see, wisdom I can gain by myself, and the cup of a carpenter, every time. And if the cup's going to fall into a crevasse, while the John Williams score thunders around you - then let it go, and reach for what's human.
