Given the renewed interest in Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code (just released in paperback editions), this commentary and review of the book is republished by request. It was originally published July 29, 2003.
The summer publishing season seems always to include a thriller that leaps to the top of the best-seller charts and stays there until the fall--when readers get serious and return to school and work. The Da Vinci Code is this year's winner, sitting at the top of the Amazon.com ratings this week and listed at second place in the New York Times hardcover fiction list. The book was on the top of that list last week, and it has made the list for 18 straight weeks. Not bad for a book with a seemingly unmanageable mix of plot structure, conspiracy theories, and mountains of detail about Catholic orders, renaissance art, theological heresy, and theoretical mathematics. Hooked yet?
I was forewarned about the heresy in the book, and so I started reading with a determination to force my way through an unpleasant read. It wasn't hard. As a matter of fact, the plot was so engaging, and the content of the book was so rich, that I had a hard time putting it down. Dan Brown may or may not actually believe what he writes, but he writes so well in this genre that the average reader will not even care. That is the problem.
Devotees of suspense novels read for the sheer pleasure of the intellectual engagement--not so much with big ideas, but with the conspiratorial mind. Brown took a big risk in this novel, betting his narrative on a conspiracy involving virtually everyone even remotely connected with Christianity throughout the last 2,000 years. The forces arrayed in this conspiracy include the Knights Templar, the Masons, the Roman Catholic Church, Interpol, and a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, which is claimed to have included as Grand Masters no less than Sandro Boticelli, Isaac Newton, and,of course, Leonardo Da Vinci.
Sorting all this out for the reader are characters ranging from Robert Langdon, a Harvard art historian, to an albino monk/assassin, who is sent by Opus Dei, a Catholic order close to the papacy. The murdered director of the Louvre has a mostly silent part, speaking primarily through secret codes and ciphers left written in his own blood as he died. A cast of other characters is necessary for the narrative to work and the plot to unfold.
But the human characters take a back seat to the grand conspiracy that gives the book its plot, and in that conspiracy is the heresy. The Da Vinci Code's driving claim is nothing less than that Christianity is based upon a Big Lie (the deity of Christ) used by patriarchal oppressors to deny the true worship of the Divine Feminine. Still hanging in there? If you thought The Last Temptation of Christ was explosive, The Da Vinci Code is thermonuclear. The book claims that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene, that a child was born of this marriage, and that Mary and her child fled after the crucifixion to Gaul, where they established the Merovingian line of European royalty.
Art historians may quibble with Dan Brown's details, and mathematicians may take issue with his summary of the Fibonacci Sequence, but as a theologian, my problem is the author's toying with such an easily dismissed heresy. Brown has crossed the line between a suspense novel and a book promoting a barely hidden agenda, to attack the Christian church and the Gospel.
In order to deliver on his conspiratorial plot, Brown has to lay the groundwork by having his main characters deny the inspiration and authority of the biblical text and replace Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John with the gnostic gospels found just after World War II at Nag Hammadi. The gnostic texts are called the "unaltered gospels," and the New Testament texts are dismissed as propaganda for the goddess-bashers. One character (hint--watch him carefully) explains that all this is "the greatest cover-up in human history." Jesus ("the original feminist") had intended for Mary Magdalene to lead the church after His death, but "Peter had a problem with that." So, Mary Magdalene hit the apostolic "glass ceiling" and was sent off to Gaul, taking with her, not only her child, but--you guessed it--the Holy Grail.
