Archive for Myths and Mythology
I haven’t had time to comment on the latest film from the oeuvre of Dan Brown, Angels and Demons, due to hit theaters this Friday, May 15. In fact, it hasn’t created nearly as much controversy as The Da Vinci Code. I haven’t had time to read it either (I had a hard enough time making it through the other book), but Angels, based on a Da Vinci Code prequel, has the reputation of being less anti-Catholic than his more notorious work.
That judgment is probably a somewhat relative one, since, from the Wikipedia summary, the book apparently has not only the same type of breathless, nonsensical thriller plot, but the same abundant basic errors in historical fact, literature, art, science, geography and just about everything else you can name. And the same distorted view of the Church as an institution relentlessly opposed to science and progress. A major part of the DVC was its description of the Priory of Sion, a secret organization of which Leonardo and Sir Isaac Newton were supposed to have been Grand Masters, and much was made of them as scientific freethinkers opposed to Church doctrines (no matter that this was far from the truth).
The trailer for Angels and Demons mentions the “brutal massacre” the Church carried out against another secret society, the Illuminati. The who? you might ask. According to Brown, the Illuminati were a society of scientists, founded in the 1500’s, of which Copernicus and Galileo were members. Copernicus was supposedly killed by the Church for spreading scientific truths. In 1668, the Church carried out the supposed “massacre” on the Illuminati leaders, leading the sect to vow revenge . . . As you might expect with Dan Brown, not one word of this is true. Just more distortions and lies passing themselves off as history.
What is true is that there was a society similar to the Freemasons, the Illuminati, found in Bavaria in 1776, which lasted just a few years before it was suppressed by the Carl Theodor, the ruler of Bavaria (not a heresy-hunting Churchman, by the way, but an “Enlightened despot” himself). As for Copernicus, he died of a stroke in 1543 at the age of 70.
Here are two excellent takedowns of the errors in the book and film by Steven Greydaus of Decent Films, and sci-fi author John C. Wright.
Nevertheless, L”Osservatore Romano (what is it with this paper recently?) is praising the film as “harmless entertainment”. No real mention of the above lies, however, or the fact that historical lies do harm the Church — and history itself as well — as I’ve pointed out here.
Another troubling aspect — and there is a major SPOILER ahead, so beware — the book’ plot climaxes with the unveiling of the fact that it was the cardinal Camerlengo who murdered the recently deceased Pope. Worse yet, a secret society is involved. . . This plot point, of course, has been quite overworked in the last three decades in regard to John Paul I’s death, and his Camerlengo and Secretary of state, Jean Cardinal Villot, who has been unfairly maligned for decades by being accused of his supposed murder. Without having read the book, only a summary of the plot, I can’t say how great the similarities between the plots and characters are. I certainly hate to see it brought up again, though, even in another context. Let’s hope the film doesn’t lead to another rash of conspiracy theories in John Paul I’s case. (although, according to Steven Greydanus’ just-out review, the film’s Camerlengo plot and the climax differ significantly from the book’s).
And word is that Brown’s next book, The Lost Symbol, due out this fall, has something to do with Freemasons, and what do you want to bet, the Catholic Church as well? . . .
Update (evening of May 14): I’ve just read and can highly recommend Mark Shea’s e-pamphlet Answering Angels and Demons, from Ascension Press. Go here to get a free downloaded copy for yourself. It will answer everything you want to know about Dan Brown’s errors, the Church’s relation to science, and a number of other subjects.
Answering Angels and Demons
Coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally), I also received in the mail today the 3-volume set of Shea’s Mary, Mother of the Son (San Diego: Catholic Answers, 2009). This trilogy, written by a Catholic who is a former Evangelical, is intended to reach not just Catholics, but Evangelicals and other non-Catholics. Mark Shea discusses with verve, insight and humor what what the Church really teaches about Mary. Volume 1, Modern Myth and Ancient Truth, manages to answer both Evangelical critics, who claim the Church’s worship of Mary is merely pagan goddess-worship, and Brown’s claim that the Church suppressed paganism and the Sacred Feminine (For all his blather about the Sacred Feminine, Mary is strangely, the one New Testament figure Brown utterly ignores). Instead, Shea shows the real relationship of Mary, the Church and paganism, and how the Gospel and grace actually crowned and transformed pagan beliefs. I’m nearly finished with the volume, and it’s a great treat.
Mary, Mother of the Son
You can get the book here.
Filed under: Angels and Demons, Dan Brown, Film, Myths and Mythology, Pope John Paul I, The Da Vinci Code | |No Comments
I’m finally able to begin on what I had hoped to do a month ago — discuss the deeper cultural meaning and impact of The Da Vinci Code. What led up to this book and the film, which have been such an amazing cultural phenomenon? It is based on several things that have been going on for some years — a combination of post-modern skepticism and cynicism, rejection of the notion of an ultimate reality, New Age beliefs, spiritualism and the occult, feminism, wicca and goddess worship. One of the most popular of these threads has been a fixture in our culture for the past 30 years or so — the theories on myth and religion of Joseph Campbell, the high priest of myth in our day.
Campbell rejected traditional religion in favor of myth and metaphor. Jesus is only one of many heroes of myth. His historical existence is not important. The message of his myth, like that of all other myths, can be reduced on the psychological side to the need for individuation and separation from one’s parents, and on the spiritual side, to contact with some vague, nebulous “god” who is little more than a projection of the self. For him, the metaphysical realm is equivalent to the unconcious. Campbell’s theory, based on Freudian and Jungian analysis, was one basis for the Star Wars series. George Lucas has described himself as a follower of Campbell, and Lucas’ films followed Campbell’s Hero’s Journey pattern of rejection of and final reconciliation with the father.
Much of Dan Brown’s thought (if it can be called that) is based on Campbell’s theories. But the focus has turned away from Campbell’s outdated Freudian and Jungian analysis to an often less-noted aspect of his work: his celebration of feminist goddess religion and symbols, and his tirade against male- dominated religion. The book’s author, Dan Brown, says that Campell was a great influence on him. Brown’s hero, Robert Langdon, is a” symbologist.” There is actually no such discipline. It is Brown’s popularization of the idea of the Campbellian expert on myth interpreting its symbols for us. This theory leads us away from any idea that historical and factual reality is in any way important. Toward the end of the novel, Langdon says:
Every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith — acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory and exaggeration, from the early Egyptians through modern Sunday school. Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors . . . Those who truly understand their faiths understand that the stories are metaphorical. (DVC, pp. 341-42).
This is almost unadulterated Campbell. This view is specifically identified with the female. At the end of book Sophie’s grandmother says, with an air of amusement: “Why is it that men simply cannot let the Grail rest?” She says that the mystery of the Grail is more important than the object itself, implying that only men with their logical and factual views want to know what really happened. (If this is Brown’s actual view of women, most of the women I know would laugh at it).
In Brown’s work then, an alternative history is presented, which makes readers feel they are pursuing the truth (and the movie’s poster says “Seek the truth”), yet what has traditionally been thought to be the ultimate goal of seeking the truth — certainty about the truth — is declared to be unimportant, if not outright denied. All trace of a belief in objective historical reality behind religion, much less a transcendent God, disappears. Which makes it all the more amazing that Brown himself goes around saying that the theories about Jesus, the Grail, Mary Magdalene, etc are true and really happened. Evidently he doesn’t understand his own book very well — that is, he completely misunderstood Campbell, even while parroting his theories.
Why has this laughably incoherent book been so popular? Many people still feel a nostalgia for Christianity and desire to be close to the person of Jesus, but they want to do it without having to buy into a Church or a specific doctrine, much less having to believe a divine being who wants them to obey moral rules. Some would say this is because the Church is authoritarian, and that its morality is preached only by the hypocritical. Perhaps, but I would guess that the deepest reason is a simple dislike in our narcissistic culture for the idea of heroism and sacrifice, true death and rebirth. Campbell’s hero not very heroic in this sense: he is still trying to become an individual and break away from his parents. He does not appear to be someone who could give his life for the world in any real sense.
In The Da Vinci Code, modern “goddess religion” attempts to mix with Christianity - but it is a Christianity watered down and stripped of meaning, because it has no use for the divinity of Jesus; it misunderstands or more often completely denies the meaning of Christ’s sacrificial death. As a result, it renders the search for overcoming evil in the world meaningless — not that secularism is doing any better.
Instead, Campbell and his latest fictional incarnation encourage us to find God within us. We simply choose the metaphor that comforts us most. We are navel-gazing gods, while war, terrorism and genocide wash over us.
This is why I’ve been very disatisfied with some of the books that attempt to debunk The Da Vinci Code. Most of them are good at supplying the facts that are obscured by Brown’s fantasies, but don’t get to the root of the actual dissatisfactions with the Church that his readers experience, or the actual world view that the book appeals to. But then, the answers are often hidden from the debunkers themselves, because Christians know so little about their own heritage about myth and metaphor in relation to God.
For instance, Ben Witherington’s The Gospel Code attempts to deal with Brown’s appeal to a longing for a feminine aspect to God. He does this by showing how the New Testament’s idea of God the Father is necessary. Many people with this kind of question will tune him out instantly. He might have done better by pointing out that well before “Sophia” or Holy Wisdom, the feminine aspect of God, was taken over by the Gnostics, she was the daughter and emanation of God in the Old Testament. Both Eastern and Western orthodox Christianity retained memories of Sophia (or, in Latin, Sapientia). In the Middle Ages, spiritual writer Henry Suso spoke of his mystical marriage with Christ as wedding Lady Sapientia. Much of his language was echoed by English anchoress Julian of Norwich, who also spoke of Jesus as our mother. Most Christians themselves are ignorant of this heritage. But it clearly serves to show that “the sacred feminine” has existed in Christianity since the beginning. Our Christian culture needs to recover something of this — but it doesn’t need to buy the bilge Dan Brown is offering to do so.
Most of all, however, it’s Brown’s (and Campbell’s) misuse of the ideas of myth and metaphor that I think needs correcting. If may take a whole book to do so — one I would love to write. At present, there definitely doesn’t seem to be time for that. But perhaps in a few more posts over the next few weeks, I can outline some of the answers to Campbell’s theories of myth. One excellent way to do so is through the works of C. S. Lewis, who wrote extensively on both myth and metaphor. It will be interesting to see who has the better concept of myth in the end.
Filed under: C. S. Lewis, Joseph Campbell, Myths and Mythology, The Da Vinci Code, Writing | |2 Comments
Though I’ve blogged about The Da Vinci Code, I haven’t yet described the strange experience of actually reading it. It’s so hard to give the 2 or 3 people left in the world who haven’t experienced this wonder of a book a proper idea of the superior cheesiness of its dumb thriller plot, the sublime wackiness of its bug-eyed “secrets” and “revelations,” the . . . well you get the idea.
Above all, they have missed the fever of its author’s enthusiasm for the “sacred feminine” — though this is certainly very widespread in culture today. But nowhere will you find it as you do in DVC. We not only learn, as everyone knows by now, that Jesus was really just the hanger-on, that Mary Magdalen is the real divine figure, the religious link to the goddess in every woman - the feminine principle the male-dominated church has been oppressing for centuries. We also learn that the hero, Robert Langdon, wears a Mickey Mouse wrist watch — in honor of the divine Disney figure of Sleeping Beauty, made so drowsy by patriarchial oppression — or maybe just by the droning nature of the prose. This particular revelation is where I finally lost it, and gave in to the giggles.
I don’t want to give the impression that I think that patriarchal oppression is a laughing matter. Particularly when it comes to the very real sins of the Church towards women in the past - part and parcel of what society has done to them, and the Church, holy though she may be in her essence, is always part of a sinful society (Hey, did the author even realize that the Church he sees as so oppressive of women is actually always described as feminine?).
But surely inquiring minds (at least 2 or 3 of them) want to know: what does the religion of the goddess and the “sacred feminine” offer that is so much better than what the Church has given women? What exactly does The Da Vinci Code’s goddess stand for? What does she do? Darned if I know, and, as I’ve said, I’ve read the book. The closest I can come to an actual answer is that she stands for the principles of tantric sex. Yep, that’s it. The divine earth mother sexuality in every woman is the means for the male partner, as the moment of greatest pleasure, to experience the divine - what women get out of it isn’t mentioned. Oh, I forgot, they’re already divine. Is this all the revelation we’re going to get? That’s what a goddess woman is for? To give men pleasure? Well, they certainly have for centuries, but what’s so liberating for women in it?
Now I believe, and the best writers in the Church, starting with St. Paul, have always believed that the physical love of man and wife should be a divine mystery of self-giving, like the relationship between Christ and the Church. But it’s not likely to come about through tantric techniques, or we women imagining that we’re already divine. It comes about through the effort to overcome the self, through mutual self-sacrificing love, which isn’t very popular with Da Vinci Code devotees searching for an easy fix religion. Nor will such a religion give any cure for the real source of oppression, one which Langdon and crew don’t seem too eager to search for — inside the human heart and its sinfulness.
Most of all, this feeble and impoverished conception of women conceals from them their real greatness. Some of the greatest women in history have a divine aura of a quite different kind about them — the saints, not imagined “goddesses” pasted over the image of saints like Mary Magdalen.
This brings me to the reason I haven’t blogged for almost a month. I’ve been given an assignment by Minister General and Vicar General of the Franciscan Third Order in Rome, to revise my doctoral dissertation on St. Elizabeth of Hungary and to translate some of the earliest sources on her life in time for the eighth centenary of her birth in 2007. This is going to keep me very busy for some months, but for me, it’s a glorious and longed-for opportunity to let people know more about one of the strongest and most compelling women in history.
Elizabeth, the daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary, was brought up in Germany and married to Landgraf Ludwig IV of Thuringia. At one of the most glittering courts in Europe, with a husband and children she was devoted to, she became aware of the suffering and misery outside the walls of her castle. She founded a hospital, cared for the poor, and comforted lepers in person. When she became aware that much of the suffering was due to unjust taxation, she refused to eat any food taken from the poor peasants in this fashion — perhaps history’s first boycott. Though her husband supported her, she became a scandal among many at the court. When her Ludwig died, Elizabeth was cast out with her children. She gladly accepted suffering with the poor as one of them. Devoting herself to God, she donned the habit of the Franciscans and worked for the rest of her short life in a hospital for the destitute. She went from being her country’s Princess Diana to its Mother Teresa. She is still loved and remembered and celebrated 800 years after her death as an example of courage, love and selfless dedication.
.jpg "St. Elizaberth of Hungary by Hans Holbein the Elder")
If an “oppressive” Church can produce a woman like that, what kind of woman would a truly liberated society produce?
Forgive me, though, for thinking that real liberation is going to come from somewhere besides the teachings in the Da Vinci Code.
Filed under: Dan Brown, Myths and Mythology, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, The Da Vinci Code | |No Comments
||
