The Popularity of The Code

Life on this earth has much mystery about it, and the human being especially. Strange “animals” we are, who have so much in common with the beasts… and yet, also, so little, being as we are too of a spiritual, rational aspect. Thus those higher activities of man that make him different, infinitely, from his pet dog, cat or goldfish: language, logic, reading, writing, art, organized play, worship, and so on. “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” proclaimed King David as he observed himself. And yet, like David, we can do and say the dumbest things.

Given the reasonable assumption that a literate person is also intelligent, how is it then that all these readers of The Da Vinci Code are raving about it, especially about its “brilliance” and “intelligence”? ‘Tis a mystery of sorts: why is this bit of pulp fiction so popular, with its stuffy writing style, flat and smarmy characters, and laughable pretense of historicity?

Steve Kellmeyer, writing in the latest issue of the Saint Austin Review (“Why the Pagans are Correct,” May/June 2006, Vol. 6 No. 3), presents an unusual explanation. He contends that the novel has struck a chord in people’s hearts, who are weary of a low and merely animal sense of sex, that sexuality is indeed “holy.” But he builds, in my view, a very shaky case. He admits that the author, Dan Brown, goes out of his way to make the claim that the earliest Christians never thought of Christ as divine, but that such divinity was decreed by Emperor Constantine in the year 325 AD as something Christians must believe, an outlandish bit of nonsense. Nevertheless, Kellmeyer contends, most readers will glide right over such a false claim and see in Christ’s so-called relationship with Mary Magdalene a sign of divine approval of sexuality.

Most critics – Catholic, Protestant or secular – register other reasons for the novel’s success, usually claiming that Brown has simply hit upon a combination of things at the right time to secure his story’s success, things like romance, the esoteric, conspiracy theory, the perennial American distrust of Catholicism, and a movie-like pace to the plot, etc. Carl E. Olson, writing in the same issue of the StAR in answer to Kellmeyer’s article, sums up this complexity in “The Theology of Dan Brown”:

Certainly timing and the prevailing zeitgeist play a major, if elusive, role. There is also the pseudo-intellectual appeal of the novel, its revisionist mythology of history, its crude (and confused) but effective feminism, and, yes, its anti-Catholic rants, distortions, and nonsense.

Olson then, it seems to me, zeros in on the main ingredient:

But I think the Code’s ultimate appeal, which is fed by all these mentioned characteristics, flows from its relativistic attitude towards truth. This premise is captured in the emasculated “hero” Langdon’s insistence, speaking with usual arrogance to poor Sophie, that “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.” The snide professor of symbology tells the beautiful but befuddled cryptologist that “those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical,” while those who believe their religions possess literal truth are doomed to live in “that reality” – that is, trapped by superstition and falsehood…. The Code cleverly takes a variety of elements, many of them not found in Brown’s account of Langdon’s previous adventure [in Angels and Demons], and purees them into a tasty postmodern tale that hits the sweet spot of those shopping for a product that validates their (often unconscious) bias against truth and their (more serious) infatuation with themselves.

Bull’s eye! How often one reads about and hears in any number of “serious” discussions peoples’ expressed desire for a “spirituality” that is not hampered by morality or inconvenienced by claims to truth. “I am into spirituality, but I don’t follow any ‘organized religion’,” the explanation goes. Such savants “rise above” the fray of the conflicting claims of religions – and there is much confliction, no doubt – but their floating about above is most often motivated by the convenience of not having to do any painstaking investigations. That’s why our Lord’s own claims to divinity as recorded by, for example, St. John, two centuries before Emperor Constantine, don’t have to be dealt with; instead, we have the artsy-smartsy Langdons around to assure us that it’s all “metaphorical” or simply false – now, on to constructing my own comfortable, little reality and “spirituality,” whether it’s venerating the “sacred feminine” in the woman of Magdalene, cobbling together various elements of Eastern mysticism, or navel-gazing.

But whence Langdon’s “deep” insight into which he initiates poor Sophie? Welcome to the esoteric, the hidden gnosis accessible only to those with minds to receive it, the elite, the intelligent, or to those who happen to read the Code! Once so illuminated, one does not have to bother with well-evidenced claims to the contrary or with historical reality either – as in the case of Brown’s fabricated Priory of Sion, so essential to his “fact-based” tale, which he claims has been the bearer of the secret of the “sacred feminine” since early medieval times, when in fact, this “priory” was the creation in the 1950s of one Pierre Plantard, a right-wing anti-semite, who spent time in jail for making false allegations. A real source of illumination! Pass the popcorn, please.