Dan Brown’s fast-paced, intricately
plotted second novel, deserves to be on the New York Times best seller list. It is a
skillfully written summer time read (which I consider to be praise), complete with secret
codes, anagrams, elaborate technology, pagan sex orgies, sudden reversals of fortune,
age-old conspiracies, pre-Christian fertility cults, the Knights Templar, Gnostic Gospels,
corrupt cops, brutal murders, feminist “theory” and frantic midnight rides
through Paris The battle over control of the Holy Grail in which the two protagonists (a
Harvard Professor and a French police cryptologist) are caught up, is between the
“Priory of Sion” and the Opus Dei. The former has been given charge of the Holy
Grail which might reveal secrets that will severely damage Christianity. The latter has
been charged by the Vatican with destroying the Priory and the secrets of the Grail.
The Priory struggles to keep alive a religion
of balance between male and female (celebrated in ritual intercourse) which Constantine
crushed out of Christianity to strengthen male power. The Holy Grail is not a chalice but the memory of Mary Magdalene who was the
consort of Jesus and the mother of his daughter Sarah whose descendents are still alive.
Opus has assigned one of its supernumeraries to
kill the leaders of the Priory and he does so with a holy zeal, after he has scourged himself according to the customs of Opus. In a
secret meeting at Castelgondolfo The Vatican has given the Opus prelate twenty million
euros in bearer bonds to finance the killings. It also promised that a planned suppression
of Opus will be cancelled. The hit man kills the four top officials in the Priory and a
nun who tries to prevent him from opening a secret compartment in the Church of San
Sulpice. A Captain of the Judiciary Police and certain other folks seem to be involved on
the side of Opus.
All of this is very rich material, guaranteed
to keep one on the beach till the story is finished. Still the reader must wonder how much
of it is fantasy. The answer, I would argue, that practically all of it is fantasy. Every
couple of years a book comes along which promises to tell you who Jesus really was and/or
how the Church has hidden the “real” Jesus for nineteen centuries. Somehow they
do not stand up to serious historical examination.
I am hardly a defender of Opus, but I cannot
imagine them setting a killer loose in a struggle against a group it considers dangerous.
Nor can I imagine the Vatican picking up the tab for serial killings. As usual in such
stories, the Curia Romana are pictured as smooth,
sophisticated schemers who will stop at nothing to preserve the power of the Church.
The Curia is hardly all that deft and devious,
save in its internal plots and conniving
– like getting rid of a colleague or undoing an ecumenical council. It is in fact a
fractionalized bureaucracy whose heavy handed personnel would have a hard time conspiring
themselves out of a wet paper bag. Poison and daggers were abandoned long ago.
Is all this stuff anti-Catholic? In a sense it
is and I am waiting for the voice of the ineffable Bill Donahue of the Catholic League to
cry boycott. However, the worst the book will
do is upset some dedicated Catholics who won’t leave the Church anyhow and feed the
bigotry of some hard line anti-Catholics.
For the record the book is filled with
historical inaccuracies. Bruce Boucher of Chicago’s Art Institute in an article in
the New York Times on August 3 tore apart Dan Brown’s knowledge of Leonardo. Moreover, Brown’s use of the term “Vatican”
is woefully inaccurate. He depicts the “Vatican”as conspiring with Constantine
to suppress the Gnostic Gospels in the early 4th century. However, the Vatican
Hill was a disorderly cemetery at that time. The “Vatican” is also involved in
the suppression of the Templars, though the headquarters
of the Pope at that time was the Lateran Palace (and the Pope was in Avingnon anyway). He also refers to an individual
he calls the Secretariat Vaticana who has charge of Papal finances. Presumably he means
the Secretary of State, though that official does not in fact control Vatican finances. Brown knows little about Leonardo, little about the
Catholic Church, and little about history.
Yet something must be said about the Grail
Legend whose origins are not Christian and whose ambience is more heretical than Catholic.
Back in the dim pre-history of Ireland there was a spring fertility ritual (enacted on
Beltane, May 1, perhaps) in which (animal) blood was poured into a concave stone altar to
represent the union of the male and female in the process of generating life. Later tales
grew up to explain the rite, the best known of which is the story of Art MacConn. Memories
of the ritual and the story floated around in the collective pre-conscious of the Celtic
lands in company with folk tales, myths, bits of history, and cycles of legends about such
folk as Arthur, Merilin, Parsifal and Tirstan. Later writers like Geoffrey of Monmouth,
Christian de Troyes, Thomas Mallory, and Wolfram von Eschenbach combined this bricolage of
images and myths into more systematic stories with an overlay of Christianity. However, these
story tellers (excepting von Eschenbach) were tainted by the perspectives of Catherist
heresy and the result were dreamy, flesh-denying, life-denying legends which violated the
older, if pagan, Irish tales. The Grail is always to be sought and never found. This
version persists in the work of such disparate artists as Richard Wagner, Alfred Tennyson,
Fritz Lowe, and Robert Bresson. In the Irish story, Art gets the magic cup and the magic
princess, though, more realistically she, being an Irish woman, gets him – a happy ending! The Grail and the
Woman are cognate, but the woman becomes the wife and mother, which is what fertility is
about.(Cf Jean Markale Women of the Celts).
Finally, Brown and his Harvard “symbologist”
(semioticist?) are apparently unaware of the most powerful religious symbol of the mother
love of God in the last fifteen hundred years of history, one with a profound impact on
painting, music, sculpture, architecture, and poetry. It is with some risk that one
mentions in this journal Mary the Mother of Jesus, though surveys tell us she is one of
the four key elements of Catholic religious identity among young people in the United
States(along with concern for the poor, the action of God in the sacraments, and the
presence of Jesus in the Eucharist). Some feminist theologians reject the Mary
symbol on the grounds that it was patriarchal in its origin. Granted that
like all symbols, the Mary symbol can be and has been misused, the efforts of some writers
to cancel out a millennium and a half of rich religious imagery with the shibboleth “patriarchal”
(instead of purifying it) can most charitably be described as heroic. How many medieval
cathedrals to they propose to destroy? One wonders nevertheless what Dan Brown’s
reasons were for ignoring the Mary symbol.
Andrew Greeley
