|
Review of the Da Vinci Code
by Andrew Pollack /
August 2006 issue of Socialist Action
Dan Brown’s novel, “The Da Vinci Code,” and the movie
based on it, have come in for their share of artistic criticism. The book
often reads like a supermarket potboiler, and the movie crams in too many
of the book’s “facts” to flow smoothly.
But what are we to make of a book selling over 50
million copies while claiming Jesus wasn’t divine, got married, and had
kids with Mary Magdalene—and that a secretive, murderous plot by the
Catholic Church hides these “truths”?
With a Bible-thumping U.S.
president, Hillary Clinton pandering to born-again anti-choice fanatics, a
new pontiff spewing the usual misogynist and homophobic garbage, and Hollywood
churning out ever more movies with Christian themes, how could Brown have
made such a splash?
Perhaps the attacks on women’s rights have created
fertile ground for his message. The media say he’s sparked much discussion
among women, and the Catholic Church’s veracity has been sorely challenged
by news of cover-ups of sex abuse by priests.
But welcome as Brown’s pro-feminist slant is on the
surface, a much closer look is required. (Hereafter both book and movie are
referred to as “The Code” unless distinctions are made).
The early Christians
By solving a succession of puzzles, Brown’s characters
come ever closer to the Holy Grail, which is not Jesus’ cup but rather a
symbol of the “divine feminine,” of Jesus’ descendants, and of a set of
documents (that’s a lot of work for one symbol!). Brown draws on a melange
of cult histories, heretical gospels, astrology, etc., in an incoherent
manner typical of conspiracy theories.
He writes: “Jesus was the original feminist“ who
wanted “His Church to be in the hands of Mary Magdalene,” an
intention subverted by a male Church hierarchy coming to power in the 4th
century. Most of what Brown writes about pre-Judaeo-Christian and early
Christian attitudes toward women is not new, and draws in a garbled way on
research of the last two centuries, including Bible criticism since the
Enlightenment, as well as more recently found alternative gospels such as
those unearthed in Egypt in 1945.
Drawing on these sources and inspired by the women’s
liberation movement, feminist theologians have been busy reinterpreting the
“truths” about Christianity. And all the while anthropologists have been
accumulating evidence of societies with gender and class arrangements and
corresponding beliefs vastly different from our own.
Perhaps the best known of these theologians is Elaine
Pagels, who in her 1979 “The Gnostic Gospels” quotes their criticism of
such ideas as the virgin birth and bodily resurrection “as the faith of
fools.” Such myths, says Pagels, served “an essential political function,”
i.e., male dominance of the Church. These gospels spoke of a more central
role for Mary Magdalene in the early Church, and upheld the “sanctity of
the feminine,” believing God was not male in nature.
Pagels says Jesus violated convention by including women
among his closest companions, a claim echoed, “based
on the traditional gospels,” by Uta Ranke-Heinemann in her 1988 “Eunuchs
for the Kingdom
of Heaven.” She says
Jesus was “the first and practically the last friend women had in the
Church.”
While espousing a reactionary belief in a nonmaterial
world, the Gnostic Gospels had a more democratic approach toward knowledge,
urging believers to seek truth in themselves, not
in an outside deity, and arguing that “the purpose of accepting authority
is to learn to outgrow it.”
Some Gnostics even portrayed the Serpent in Eden
as justifiably bringing knowledge to humanity with Eve’s aid in defiance of
a malicious God. And Pagels explains how the Judaeo-Christian God, unlike
many contemporary deities in the Near East,
“shared his power with no female divinity.” Some of the cultures believing
in such female deities are also described by Riane Eisler in her “The
Chalice and the Blade” (the symbols for male and female in her title are
used repeatedly by Brown in the book).
Anyone familiar with Eisler, Pagels, or similar writers
has already heard most of Brown’s “revelations.” If these writers’ findings
are little known, it’s not because of some secret Church plot, but rather
because of the open dominance of established religious and other
institutions.
But Eisler and Pagels are no more able than Brown to
explain how society evolved as it did and thus why Christianity looks as it
does. In contrast, Marxists such as Evelyn Reed and Eleanor Leacock,
building on Friedrich Engels’ “Origin of the Family, Private Property and
the State,” have connected the evolution of religion to that of class
society and corresponding forms of women’s oppression.
Karl Kautsky used this method in his 1908 “The
Foundations of Christianity,” telling how early Christian communities
practiced a primitive form of communism, renounced traditional family
forms, and defied taboos on male-female interaction. Citing Christian
writers of the time, he shows that the “community of women” was as
important to them as the “community of goods.”
Communal family forms also meant more of a role for
early Christian women in the broader community, allowing them to develop “a
concern for the freeing of the human race from all misery.”
Kautsky also demonstrates the class struggle and
anti-imperial politics of the early Church, and exposes later revisions of
the accepted gospels to cover this up.
But by emphasizing what was “possible at the time” for these
primitive communists Kautsky shows why the early
Christian community couldn’t survive: not because of a secret Church plot,
but because of the limits set by class relations. The early Christians couldn’t
go beyond communism in consumption, given the economy’s agricultural base
and its dependence on slave labor (and free labor only in individual or
small workshops). There was no working class capable of founding a
communism based on production.
Meanwhile, the Church grew increasingly bureaucratic as
its ranks were swelled by the rich who demanded the suppression of the
older radical beliefs. While primitive communism could not pose a
successful alternative to a Roman Empire
resting on a declining slave mode of production, a newly institutionalized
Catholic Church did prove a welcome ally to an Empire seeking to overcome
its crisis.
Royal bloodlines and bloody knights
The other historical period on which “The Code” dwells
is the Middle Ages. Here too, we can contrast the conspiratorial and
materialist methods.
Brown’s heroes in this period are the Knights Templar
and their supposed offshoot, the Priory of Sion, alleged protectors of the
Holy Grail. “The Priory,” writes Brown,
“believes that Constantine
and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal
paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda
that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess.”
The Templars did play an important historical role—not
as protectors of women or truth, but as bankers, financing fellow nobles’
Crusades. By the early 14th century they had been suppressed, supposedly
for heresy, in reality so the king of France
could seize their wealth. Drawing on charlatans’ histories, Brown claims
the Priory lived on through such figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Victor Hugo,
Isaac Newton—even Walt Disney!
In the Socialist Worker newspaper in May, Elaine Graham-Leigh
explains how Templar and Priory legends have been the preoccupation of
monarchist cranks and figures in Vichy
France and Nazi Germany. As Umberto Eco wrote, a sure sign of a lunatic is
that “sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”
In her own history of medieval France,
Graham-Leigh shows that the real defenders of truth and justice in this
period were heretic peasants revolting against their feudal masters. In
this she follows Engels, who in “The Peasant War in Germany”
explained why medieval class revolts were veiled in religious trappings.
Peasant leaders like John Ball, Wat Tyler, and Thomas
Muenzer, who proposed a “return of the church to its origins,” did so as
religious justification for their goals of ending class differences and the
state, for which the church was an essential prop.
The Church’s plot, says “The Code,” included the witch
hunts that murdered millions of women. In contrast, radical historians
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, in their 1972 “Witches, Midwives, and
Nurses,” showed that the witch hunts were “associated with periods of great
social upheaval shaking feudalism at its roots—mass peasant uprising, the
beginnings of capitalism, and the rise of Protestantism.”
They suggest that “witches’ sabbaths” might have been
meetings to organize self-defense, overlapping with peasant organizing.
The women and peasants of the Middle Ages could no more
overcome the class forces of their period than could the early Christians.
But they left a precious legacy for our time when the final overcoming of
class and gender oppression is materially realistic. Brown’s fictional
noble heroes, in contrast, are no help in figuring out how to get our
masters off our backs.
Hedging on Heresy
Even the Code’s supposedly heretical views are hedged in
the end. In his earlier “Angels and Demons,” Brown also relies on a
conspiracy theory, this time about the Illuminati. (His next book will be
about the Freemasons, another favorite of cranks.) In one book the heroes
for most of the plot are mainstream believers, and the villains are
heretics; in the other he reverses the roles. In both books by the end the
supposed hero turns out to be the villain.
So it seems Brown doesn’t really care what we believe,
and anyway, “history is always written by the winners ... which side of the
story you believe becomes a matter of faith.”
In the “Code” book, Langdon tells his fellow
truthseeker, Sophie, that it’s OK to keep the “facts” about Jesus hidden,
as “every faith is based on fabrication,” and the Bible is a “guidepost for
millions of people.” “Religious allegory has become a part of the fabric of
reality. Living in that reality helps millions of people cope.”
The movie goes even further: Langdon tells of calling on
Jesus for help as a child, and asks Sophie, who’s considering revealing the
secret of the Grail, “Will you destroy faith or renew it?
As for defining the truth, “what matters is what
you [Sophie] believe.” Langdon himself at end of both book and movie kneels
in prayer at the Grail’s site. Publishers and Hollywood
movie moguls obviously prefer such ambiguity in their pursuit of profits
from benighted audiences.
Instead of having his characters tell the world the
truth, they settle for knowing that “the story of Mary Magdalene is all
around us,” ready to be discovered by the culturally informed. Those elites
will awaken to our “destructive paths” and “the need to restore the sacred
feminine.” Cold comfort for a world whose elite won’t even admit the planet-endangering
truths of global warming!
Finally, for more enjoyable and genuinely radical
fictional treatment of these issues: On the Middle Ages, try Hugo’s “The
Hunchback of Notre Dame” or William Morris’s “A Dream of John Ball.” And
for a genuinely heretical view of religion, try Phillip Pullman’s beautiful
series, “His Dark Materials.”
|
