5-22-06, 9:27 am
The Da Vinci Code has been condemned by a number of religious leaders including leading figures in the Catholic Church, and, ironically, no less a personage than ultra-right religious TV personality Jerry Falwell. I say ironic because Falwell's recent denunciation of The Da Vinci Code as blasphemous and 'an attack on all of Christianity' isn't the only time the self-appointed spokesperson of Christian fundamentalism has had anything to say about Catholicism.
In his most honest moments, Falwell has a beef with the Catholic Church. Falwell accuses Catholics of 'idolatry' for praying to non-divine figures such as saints and to the mother of Christ and believes that Catholicism is at best a phony Christianity. His feelings about Catholicism make his comments on The Da Vinci Code ironic and, at worst, politicized demagogic pandering. Who would have pegged Falwell for such a thing?
The Catholic Church has been hiding a big secret for close to 2,000 years. This conspiracy of silence lies at the heart of the quest for the Holy Grail. The true nature and location of the Grail have been guarded for all of this time by a mythical order of knights, which has been, in turn, hunted down and mercilessly slaughtered by the Church, according to the story. Among the more famous members of the secret order of persecuted guardians are Sir Isaac Newton and Leonardo Da Vinci, the latter of whom provided the world with some important clues to the secret in one of his most famous paintings, The Last Supper.
Why is the secret so dangerous? Some say that its revelation will shake the foundations on which the faith of nearly a billion people throughout the world rests. Others scoff at this notion and say that the revelation of the truth is dangerous only in that it would undermine the lies on which the power of the Church has been based. Truth would show that the formation of Church doctrine, even the decisions of which documents were included in the Bible, was little more than a cynical political gesture to prop up the declining Roman Empire. Since that time, the Church has led religious wars across Europe and the Middle East, internal purges more commonly called witch hunts, and dogmatic persecutions of scientists and other heretics to protect the secret. Witches and pagans, heretics, humanists and scientists (perhaps feminists and communists in modern times) are all bearers, either symbolically or in fact, of the truth.
It seems that the Church amended the reality of Jesus Christ's life to suit its political needs. According to myths that accept the secret history of the Grail, gospels that incorrectly characterized Mary Magdalene as a prostitute were preserved; those which properly described her as Jesus' wife and the mother of his children were rejected and destroyed. To turn Jesus into a divine being, his ties to the earth – a wife and his child, and his belief in his equality with them – had to be excised from history.
Some Christians rejected this falsification of history, however. And, as the Church's false dogma came to reign, as the story goes, they hid Mary’s body and her children from the Church, waiting for the day when they could reveal the truth to the world. The truth, the guardians of the secret say, will one day liberate human kind from doctrinal error and religious oppression.
The secret is so dangerous that in 21st century Paris, a seemingly harmless curator at the famous Louvre Museum is murdered to keep the secret. Harvard religious scholar, Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), is drawn into the mystery, along with the curator's granddaughter Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou). A Parisian police inspector (Jean Reno) with ties to a secret Catholic order hunts Langdon and Neveu as suspects for the crime. Langdon’s and Neveu’s efforts to clear their names and to discover the real killer also lead them on the quest for the Holy Grail. Along the way, they encounter an assassin in monk’s garb (Paul Bettany) and an eccentric and zealous historian (Ian McKellan), neither of whom will be stopped in their efforts to uncover the secrets of the Grail.
So if the story is baloney, its historical underpinnings little more than speculation and imagination, why is it so dangerous? Why would Christian faith, which, in the words of St. Paul, is 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,' be so vulnerable to a mere movie and a book? Church leaders and opportunistic demagogues like Falwell apparently have little faith in the people who believe in Christ. In their view, people must be rubes who will fall for any charlatan. Or perhaps they believe that faith is only genuine if adherents experience it in exactly the same way they do?
The real value of the story lies not in that it pretends to tell the truth about the Holy Grail or in its supposed blasphemy, but in its presentation of possible alternatives to the tradition of all the dead generations that weigh on the brain of the living, to paraphrase Karl Marx. Its suggestion that Christ's true message of love, spiritual healing, forgiveness, and concern for the sick, the poor and the oppressed have been carried on in an alternative gospel that rejects the patriarchy and other hierarchies of power enshrined as Church doctrine may be the true gift.
According to Brown's tale, those who kneel at the grave of Mary Magdalene as Christ's wife do so because Mary Magdalene is a figure of the true Christian gospel that defends and sides with the poor and the oppressed. In this view, Christ's message was not about purification from sin through bloodletting and rigid adherence to dogma. It was about the unity of humans in a great struggle for knowledge, love and equality. It was about the freeing of human capacity for making this world better, not the repression of that capacity through Church dominance in the name of waiting for the next life.
Dangerous ideas indeed.
