Archive for The Da Vinci Code
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 But the focus has turned away from Campbell’s outdated Freudian and Jungian analysis to an often less-noted aspect of his work: his celebration of feminist goddess religion and symbols, and his tirade against male-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
Many of my fellow Catholics are saying that The Da Vinci Code won’t have that great an impact on our culture. It’s a fad, it will go away, people have such short attention spans, it appeals only to the shallow. . . I think this is to misunderstand what’s going on. There are some deep issues at stake, and I’ve decided I’m going to start commenting on them over the next few posts.
To begin with, one place the book is sure to have a lasting impact is on the study of history. It has already introduced errors that have repeated so often they have become fact. If you think I’m joking, consider this: back in 1828, a popular American novelist, Washington Irving (the author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) wrote The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, in which he said that the famous seafarer had great difficulty convincing people of his day that the earth was round. He was dependent on Enlightenment views about the ignorance of people in the Middle Ages. Ever since then, it has been considered historical fact by most ordinary people and many historians; it is even included in school textbooks. In fact, it has been exaggerated even more. In one internet discussion on The Da Vinci Code movie, a young poster claimed: “Your Church deserves what it’s getting. After all, it used to burn people in the Middle Ages for saying the earth is round.”
The only problem with Irving’s little factoid is that isn’t true! It takes only a little acquaintance with medieval literature to realize that in 1492 Europe people universally used the ancient astronomer Ptolemy’s model of the solar system, with spherical planets circling a spherical earth (the idea that the sun was the center of the solar system was introduced only with Copernicus). In his Divine Comedy, almost 200 years before Columbus, the Italian poet Dante describes himself as going through the center of the earth and coming out the other side to the other hemisphere. He not only knew that the earth was spherical, but that it also had a center of gravity. Consequently no one was ever burned in the Middle Ages for believing what every Catholic believed.
Almost 200 years after Washington Irving, his error is still accepted as fact in many places. Irving was the Dan Brown of his day, depending on Catholic bashing “historians.” . . . and there are hundreds of similar errors in The Da Vinci Code. Desperate Irish Housewife even uncovered a proposal in Minnesota to teach a historical seminar at a local Continuing Education Center using the novel as a basis, until someone caught them and made them stop. The impact of all these errors is going to be greatest among young people in our culture, who are almost completely ignorant about history. Go to The Internet Movie Database and check out the statistics. The movie version of Dan Brown’s book gets its highest ratings by those under 18.
In addition to this, the book fosters the already existing ignorance about how we know what we know about the past. If you should point out to a DVC devotee that Brown has distorted the meanings of ancient manuscripts, he or she generally replies, “it was so long ago, who knows what really happened?” (so why can’t I believe what I want?) Or “those texts, particularly the Bible, have been copied so many times, getting changed each time, that the original meaning has been lost. It’s like a game of ‘telephone’. . . ” (thus excusing themselves from having to confront what the Bible actually says).
This is tremendously distressing to me as someone who is not only a historian but also a textual scholar. The people who say this have no idea of the real process we undergo to uncover manuscripts, examine variants, and determine the earliest form of the text. This is a process I’m going through right now with the medieval canonization process of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. The fact is, we do know in many cases how the text was changed and can correct it. People of ancient times themselves were well aware of how errors can creep into texts and were often able to correct them by collating their copies with earlier ones. And this was largely successful. In fact we have papyrus fragments of the Gospels that are probably not much more than 50 years away from the composition of the actual text. The earliest confirmed on is the John Rylands fragment of the Gospel of John, from about 125-130 A.D. And these earliest manuscripts offer a text of the New Testament that is very much the same as the one you can by at any bookstore today.
No one need take my word for all this. Go on over to the blog of Tim O’Neill, an expert on medieval and ancient history and literature, who is also an atheist, but who is interested solely in the truth. He’s called it History vs. The Da Vinci Code. His dissection of the errors is excellent.
It’s going to take years to undo the harm The Da Vinci Code has already done. And it’s not over yet. It seems that Danny Boy is already writing another novel featuring his hero Robert Langdon. And the film version of his DVC prequel, Angels and Demons, has just been greenlighted.
Stay tuned. . .
Filed under: The Da Vinci Code, Writing | |2 Comments
So here’s what happened. My friend from work and I were walking towards the AMC Empire Theater in Times Square around 4:15 p.m., plenty of time, we hoped, to scope out what was happening with the lines in front of the respective screens for Over the Hedge and The Da Vinci Code before our film’s 4:50 showing. We had to make our way through the usual huge Saturday afternoon crowds of tourists, and were so deep in conversation that we didn’t notice the man distributing leaflets in front of the theater until we were past him. My friend hurried back to take one. It was put out by St. Michael’s World Apostolate, and read on top,”Why Protest the Da Vinci Code?” and had a headline from a newspaper on the bottom,”Poll: Book turns Christians into ‘Code’ clods.” The report was about a Reuters poll stating that 60 percent of Code readers believed after reading the book that Jesus and Mary Magdalen had children together. (The report didn’t say how many had changed their minds about the divinity of Jesus - the media often don’t get that this is the part that upsets us most).
After we got our tickets for OTH and went upstairs, we saw that our film was playing just a couple of doors down from the DVC. There was a huge line waiting for DVC. We went to our theater, where there was a long bench in front of the entrance, and only 2 or 3 families with kids sitting there. Then they suddenly left , and my heart sank. There went my plan of finding out how many in line were “Othercotting” - there was no line! No one else came, and after a while I want to look at the DVC line again. I found out that they were waiting for the 1:55 showing to end. Probably they had been certain the show would sell out if they didn’t get there early.
I went back to our bench, and my friend and I began discussing the actual date of composition of the Gospels. . . then a couple with kids came out of our theater and headed toward the restroom, and it finally dawned on me where all our audience was - already inside! Evidently parents just want to corral their kids in their seats as early as possible - and maybe keep them from running up and down the escalators. So we went in, and the theater was more than half full, but still not crowded. But by the time the previews were over, most of the seats had been filled.
The film? Not a timeless classic, but cute and enjoyable. We giggled throughout and had a great time, though I don’t think we two adult professional women were anywhere near the target audience for the film. The family crowd especially the kids, loved it. We both agreed we’d gladly see it again - for Steve Carrell’s hyperactive squirrel alone!
My friend unfortunately had another appointment, so I was going to have dinner alone. When we got down to the sidewalk, we stopped so I could take her picture with my new Palm Treo (the coolest cell phone/handheld computer /digital camera on the planet). We walked on and said goodbye some distance from the theater, and I decided to turn back and see whether the man was still distributing leaflets, so I could get a picture of him.
When I arrived back in front of the theater, the lone man had been replaced by a group who had set up posters saying “The Da Vinci Code is Hate Crime.” They were earnestly praying the rosary. A writer - someone from a newspaper, I think — was interviewing one of them, whose name was Jeffrey Smith.
When the writer left, I told Mr. Smith (on the left in the picture) about my support and our participation in the “Othercott.” He looked happy about that, but was still weary and upset. “We are a whole nation of robots who will line up automatically for anything Hollywood puts out,” he said. “They wouldn’t dare do this to Islamics, they wouldn’t dare do this to Jews — why do they think they can do it to us?”
Was our protest a better way to answer this madness and injustice, or was his? All the Christians there today spoke out in some way or another — that’s what really counts.
Filed under: Film, The Da Vinci Code | |No Comments
. . . for The Da Vinci Code. The consensus: too long, laughably pretentious and boring. Even critcics who made no secret of their disdain for Christianity and the Catholic Church in particular didn’t like the film (Check out Richard Corliss’ review in Time, or Owen Gleiberman’s review for Entertainment Weekly here). And audiences are no happier — a 6.2 rating on imdb.com. Keep in mind that open-night audiences are usually the ones most eager to see a film: in this case, that would be all the fans of the book. Happily, while we can probably still expect a huge opening weekend, the movie won’t be around long. The influence of the book, unfortunately, may go on and on.
I’m off very shortly to join the “Othercott” brigade with a friend, at the AMC theater in Times Square. We’re going to see the very well-reviewed Over the Hedge. (Saturday afternoon and a family film? Bound to be huge crowds). It will be interesting to find out how many other people are there for the same purpose we are. Whatever happens, we’ll probably have a much better time than the people suffering through the DVC.
Check back here to get the story.
Filed under: Film, The Da Vinci Code | |No Comments
I’ve had a very long and busy week, so anything I’m now posting is already old news . . . but I’m going ahead anyway.
Last Tuesday afternoon, May 2, I went to a special event at the Tribeca Film Festival — a panel discussion called “What would Jesus . . . Direct?” All the people on the panel were Christians involved in the film industry. They discussed how Hollywood is waking up to the fact that there is a huge Christian audience out there, but they really don’t know how to reach us.
The talk soon turned to the upcoming Da Vinci Code movie. Cuba Gooding Jr. seemed to get the most microphone time — but then he is an Academy-award -winning actor (and does ever know it!) He made some good points. Among them, that the Christian audience does have a good sense about movies that would be worthwhile from their viewpoint. Back in 1981, when Chariots of Fire came out, Christians and others turned out for a film no one had heard of and made it a hit. Now with the Da Vinci Code, he said “they will have it on their radar — and if they sense it isn’t something they want, they won’t come, and the film will flop” (or words to that effect).
This made things a bit difficult for another panel member, Jonathan Bock, president of Grace Hill Media, who was working with Sony on the marketing campain for The Da Vinci Code. He declined to say much about his work on it, but insisted the film was a great opportunity to “engage the culture” and get “dialogue” going. “After all,” he said, “when was the last anyone cared about what happened at the Council of Nicaea?”
It’s hard to blame him for defending his work — which is one of trying to minimize the damage that the book and movie are causing, engaging in dialogue and debating the very real issues involved. But forgive me for being a little dubious. Of course, any of us who are able to and who have read the book, should by all means engage in dialogue with those who want to. I’ve done so myself. Just the other day, a young colleague at work, who had just recently returned to the Catholic Church, asked me about the truth of the “historical” claims in it. She had not read it, but was certainly curious. I gave her the straight dope, and she seemed satisfied.
But there is a whole other group of people, the Da Vinci Code “true believers,” who cannot be brought to engage in dialogue. When they listen to our explanations of the truth, they tend to reply “Oh, you Catholics are brainwashed — you’ll believe anything your Church tells you,” or “the Church is afraid — anything they say is just more lies to maintain power.” Most of them are led not by belief in Dan Brown so much as anger against the Church. Many don’t care about truth, but cling to the book because it’s what they want to believe. It’s very hard to debate when one side is interested in truth, and the other is wandering in a crackpot fantasyland. The claims in the DVC are, to borrow one of my favorite phrases from C. S. Lewis, nonsense that has not even risen to the dignity of error. Discussion here is not going to do much good — and the movie is going to fuel the fire.
Certainly there are issues that need to be cleared up - the reasons for believing in the divinity of Jesus, the truth of the Gospels, the too-negative attitude of some Christians toward sex, the Church’s treatment of women — but if you are going to seriously tackle these things, it would be best to leave The Da Vinci Code out of the discussion altogether, since it only spreads error and confusion.
Above all, the main reason not to go see the film continues to be the fact that we would be putting money into the pockets of people who are defaming Christ and insulting the Church. Let’s not let Sony sucker us in to get our money to support blasphemy. If you want to read the book in order to be prepared for questions, please do — but borrow it from the library, or, as I did, from a friend.
And the “Othercott” is gaining steam — more than 16,000 hits on Google as of today! Also an article in the New York times on Thursday.
See you at Over the Hedge on May 19!
Filed under: Film, The Da Vinci Code, Writing | |No Comments
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