The danger that Dan Brown's prose style
might be contagious discouraged me from reading
The Da Vinci Code, and I decline to see the
film. In 1982, I read the same asinine story in
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail presented
as fact, and do not gladly dive twice into the
same sewer. Why this rubbish became the world's
best-selling work of fiction, though,
paradoxically confirms the strength of America's
Christian faith.
Why should an American
novel depicting Christianity as a hoax command
such a readership while Christian faith is
resurgent? Americans are migrating en masse to
evangelical denominations who preach Christ
crucified and eternal salvation, abandoning the
blancmange beliefs of mainline Protestantism.
Americans, to be
sure, also watch pornography.
One might dismiss Brown's oeuvre as ecclesiastical
pornography, but there is something more to it.
To make sense of the Christian fascination
with The Da Vinci Code, compare Christian and Muslim reactions to
fictional
assaults on the
foundation of faith. In English fiction, Salman
Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is the nearest
Muslim equivalent to Brown's book. More than 60
million copies of the latter have been printed,
and a large plurality of American Christians
either will read the book or see the film. But
very few Muslims have read Rushdie's book. Rushdie
still lives in danger of his life, but no
Christian fundamentalist has invoked violence
against Dan Brown. Inconceivable, for that
matter, is a Jewish counterpart to The Da Vinci
Code, for Judaism is short on mysteries and
long on history. Jews quibble, to be sure, about
whether Moses received the Pentateuch from God at
Mount Sinai, or whether later redactors compiled
earlier tales into the canonical version, but it
does not much matter.
If 8th century BC
scribes wrote the Torah instead, who is to say
they were less inspired than Moses? Once I asked a
Jewish child, "How do you know that God brought
you out of Egypt?" Before I could end the sentence
she countered, "If God didn't bring me out of
Egypt, than what am I doing here talking to you?"
But if Jesus did not die on the cross, but
instead married Mary Magdalene and begat a
bloodline of French aristocrats, Christianity's
promise means nothing. Precisely because
Christianity is a promise, the promise of eternal
life, it always is subject to doubt. To be
Christian means to get out of one's skin, that is,
to relinquish one's sinful, Gentile nature and to
be reborn into the People of God.
Unlike
the Jews, who consider themselves God's people,
warts and all, no Christian can see the People of
God, or be sure whether he himself belongs to it,
or whether the mystical transformation of his
flesh actually has taken place. It is not
certainty that Jesus offered - except to the few
who saw him after the Resurrection - but rather
the possibility of faith. If the Christian did not
have to wrestle with doubt, like Jacob with the
angel on the riverbank, faith would have no
redeeming power.
Doubt does not easily
find expression in traditional society, where the
life and thinking of individuals has deep roots in
established communities. But traditional religion
barely exists in the Christian world. In
modernity, all religions become religions of
personal conscience rather than communal duty.
Doubt ceases to be a private matter and must find
a public voice. By way of analogy, Victorian
husbands were no more faithful to their wives than
today's British husbands, if we consider that
prostitutes comprised a tenth of London's female
population halfway through the 19th century.
Victorians, however, rarely viewed
pornography, which was hard to obtain. The fact
that modern husbands have free access to
pornography does not necessarily make them less
faithful. Christians read The Da Vinci Code
with the same prurient interest that attracts
them to pornography; it allows them to question
the premises of faith just as hardcore material
allows them to question the premises of monogamy.
Proponents of the "Gnostic Gospels" have
taken The Da Vinci Code as an opportunity
to peddle their version of Jesus as guru rather
than Son of God. Still, I doubt that Brown's book
occasioned even a single lapse in faith on the
part of a devoted Christian. Once again same
Existential argument applies. If Jews takes their
present existence as proof of the truth of Hebrew
scripture, Christians take their prospective
existence as proof of Jesus' promise.
No
one becomes a Christian because Christian doctrine
is reasonable; few stranger claims have been made
that God so loved the world that he sacrificed his
only-begotten son to redeem it. That of course is
an extension of the equally scandalous Jewish
claim that the creator of all, who wears the
universe like a garment that he will discard when
it wears out, cannot help but be moved by the
suffering of the humblest of his creatures.
If Jesus' resurrection is a hoax, the
Christian knows, then there is no consolation
before the inevitability of death. Pop
spirituality, that is, Gnosticism, works a
different side of the street. Those who want
spiritual advice on how to feel good in this world
know where to find it; those who want to overcome
death go somewhere else.
If Christian
faith were not resurgent, no one would care much
about Brown's book. People wallow in doubt only
because they begin with the premise of faith. In
1976, at the postwar nadir of US religious
commitment, Robert Ludlum published The Gemini
Contenders, a thriller with an identical
premise: a conspiracy by the Catholic Church to
cover up disproof of Christ's divinity. It sold
well, but not like Brown's book. Brown is the
indirect beneficiary of the intensification of
American faith.
These considerations
provide an adequate explanation of why an
anti-Christian screed might achieve wildfire
success in a Christian country, but it does not
explain why this particular screed succeeded. That
is a subtler issue.
Certain events in
history lend themselves conspiracy tales. Take for
example Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers,
containing a fictional conspiracy by the real
17th-century French premier Cardinal Richelieu. In
fact, Richelieu and his intelligence chief Father
Joseph du Tremblay conspired to prolong the
religious wars in Germany into the terrible Thirty
Years' War (see The sacred heart of
darkness, Asia Times Online, February
11, 2003), destroying most of Europe's
German-speaking population to make France the
undisputed power on the continent.
Du
Tremblay, the "Gray Eminence", walked barefoot
about Europe in his Capuchin gown to manipulate
and deceive the leaders of Europe. A
self-abnegating mystic, he was the most successful
intelligence operator of whom history is aware,
and we still do not know all his exploits. Men
like this transcend the popular imagination, for
they are gifted with an uncanny perception of
human weakness that few people wish to
contemplate. Even Friedrich Schiller, in his
Wallenstein trilogy of the Thirty Years'
War, could not fathom the extent of French
manipulation behind the tragic events he
dramatized.
The popular mind of 1840s
France sensed something sinister (the German term
unheimlich expresses it better) in the
emergence of La France in the 17th century.
Dumas pere obliged with a silly
swashbuckler of a conspiracy tale. This flattered
the mock-heroic pretensions of the tattered French
ego. The truth was too lurid for France to
consider, namely that Richelieu had invented a
French state on the premise of a narcissistic
nationalism that only could lead to national ruin.
Frenchmen did not want to know the true Richelieu,
for they could do so only at the terrible price of
knowing themselves. La France went on to
defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and
Pyrrhic victory in World War I, followed by a
century of humiliation. I summarized the facts in
the 2003 essay linked above.
To compare
Brown's bit of humbug to Alexandre Dumas is too
charitable to the former, but there is something
of a parallel. The history of the Roman Catholic
Church is tragic, in the fullest sense of the
word, namely that inherent flaws lead to terrible
consequences. It is the tragedy of Europe, for, as
Hilaire Belloc said, "Europe is the faith, the
faith is Europe." Europe is a construct, built out
of the Germans, Vikings, Slavs, Magyars and other
peoples who invaded the denuded lands of the old
Roman Empire over 800 years. Christianity offered
them a fateful compromise: Hebrew hopes, and a
pagan life. The pagan side won, with awful
consequences.
The peoples of Europe cannot
easily distinguish their Catholicism from their
bittersweet love for their own ethnicity. Despite
John Paul II's papacy, Poland remains a
battleground between neo-pagan nationalism
metastasized throughout the Polish Church and the
late pontiff's vision of Catholic universality.
Benedict XVI's visit this Sunday to the site of
the Auschwitz concentration camp was marred by a
street assault on Poland's chief rabbi, whom the
pope had invited to pray at the ceremony. The
Vatican has not been able to suppress the
nationalist Radio Maryja, a platform for
anti-Semitic propaganda. It cannot cure the cancer
without the risk of killing the patient, Poland's
national-Catholic identity.
Paganism is
self-worship. The crypto-pagan Catholic stands
like Narcissus before images of Jesus, Mary and
the saints, praying to his own image. To redirect
the gaze of heathen converts away from their
earthly ethnicity, and toward the Kingdom of God
above, the Church enlisted the efforts of the
great artists. As I wrote in Why the beautiful is not the
good (May 17, 2005):
Pearls grow in oysters to soothe
irritation; the high art of the West grew
pearl-like in Christendom around an abrasion it
could not heal: the refusal of mere humans to
place all their hopes upon the promise of life
after death. Christianity made Europe by
offering the kingdom of heaven to barbarian
invaders, while allowing them to keep their
tribal culture. The high art of the West gave
these rude men a presentiment of the kingdom of
heaven and formed an authentic Christian culture
opposed to pagan holdovers.
But the
cure turned into another disease. The Church gave
its artists free rein over the popular
imagination, but the artists exploited this
authority to project their own narcissism. That is
a long and sad story, which I have told to the
best of my ability on another occasion. [1] The
mutual betrayal of the Church and its artists
during the 19th century explains much of Europe's
decline and fall at the outset of the 20th.
Even if the broad public is estranged from
the Christian high culture of the past, the
conflict between Christian purpose and pagan
narcissism is evident to the uninformed observer.
The Greek form of Renaissance art warred against
its Christian content, and it is the
classical-pagan rather than the Christian side
that came to the fore. The public may not know the
details, but it does not take a doctorate in art
history to see that the great Christian painters
of the Renaissance put their own talents before
the service of God.
That is why the
Renaissance offered such a short burst of creative
output before the Counter-Reformation put the
artists in their place and brought forth an era of
religious orthodoxy and artistic mediocrity. The
crown and scepter in plastic arts passed from
Italy to Holland, where Protestant painters such
as Rembrandt created a different concept of
beauty.
In this most fascinating and most
conflicted epoch of culture, Leonardo towers above
his contemporaries as the exemplar of its
brilliance as well as its contradictions. He was
both the consummate Christian and the consummate
pagan. The painter of the best-known image of
Christian art, The Last Supper, was in some
respects the least Christian in character. The
extent of Leonardo's own narcissism is a matter of
lively debate. Computer scientists, for example,
have produced credible evidence that his
best-known painting, Mona Lisa, is a
self-portrait. [2]
Brown may be a dismal
writer, but he struck a nerve by linking the
epitome of Western genius to doubts about the
authenticity of Christian revelation. The effect
of his book will pass, like a mild case of food
poisoning. Christianity's inner struggle will
remain.
assaults on the
foundation of faith. In English fiction, Salman
Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is the nearest
Muslim equivalent to Brown's book. More than 60
million copies of the latter have been printed,
and a large plurality of American Christians
either will read the book or see the film. But
very few Muslims have read Rushdie's book. Rushdie
still lives in danger of his life, but no
Christian fundamentalist has invoked violence
against Dan Brown. 
