By Father John Wauck
As is to be expected, many people have protested against the way in which Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene, the Catholic Church, and Opus Dei are portrayed in Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code. He has been accused of blasphemy, dishonesty and anti-Catholicism. I suspect, however, that the real problem with his novel lies elsewhere.
Certainly, the half-baked notions tossed around in The Da Vinci Code about Jesus and Mary Magdalene should not be terribly shocking to anyone. When Dan Brown's fictional characters say that Jesus is not the immortal Son of God but merely a good man, they are only saying what most of the non-fictional people on the planet - Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Unitarians, and non-Christians of all stripes - have always believed. In short, if Dan Brown's characters are blaspheming on this point, then so is most of the world. In the end, The Da Vinci Code "charges" Jesus, on laughably flimsy grounds, with nothing more nefarious than getting married and not being God - which may be falsehoods, but they are not deliberate distortions of demonstrable historical facts.
Nor is Opus Dei the unjustly-accused party, the novel's various misrepresentations notwithstanding. The killer albino monk, who commits his crimes precisely when he ceases to take orders from Opus Dei's "president-general" Aringarosa, is clearly not meant to be a typical member, and it becomes clear that this fictional Opus Dei is not a criminal organization but merely a pawn in the hands of the novel's real villain. In truth, most of Mr. Brown's errors regarding Opus Dei seem to reflect sensationalistic tastes and simple cluelessness rather than bad will.
No, the real victim of the novel's distortions is the Roman Catholic Church. The book's numerous factual errors about Christian history all work together for a single purpose: not to defame Jesus Christ or Opus Dei, but rather to make the Roman Catholic Church - in Brown's language, "the Vatican" - appear to be an evil, misogynistic, power-hungry blight on world history.
Much has been written about Brown's inaccurate descriptions of art, architecture, organizations, and documents, but, besides embarrassing his editors, these mistakes do relatively little harm. Nor is there great harm in the hypotheses and interpretations discussed by some of Brown's fictional characters, which are firmly in the realm of conjecture - fictional conjecture at that.
The truly serious danger stems from the novel's frequent references to historical events that never happened: matters regarding the Emperor Constantine, the council of Nicea, the Gnostic "gospels," Pope Clement V, the phony "Priory of Sion," the Knights Templars, Leonardo da Vinci, devotion to Mary Magdalene, the execution of witches, and much much more. Recently, the actor Jean Reno, who plays the Paris police detective Bezu Fache, said that the novel's version of history is "not the way it was in reality." That needs to be said much more loudly. It is not sufficient to say that the book is "fiction" - because fiction frequently contains historical truths. Not every novel is a pure science-fiction fantasy. In the case of The Da Vinci Code, many things that seem to be reliable historical background are entirely imaginary.
While these cannot be accidental mistakes - they are deliberate and tendentious - this doesn't mean that Dan Brown necessarily intended to defame Catholics or the Church. Perhaps, in order for the plot to make sense, the novel simply needed a villain, and, the luck of the draw having fallen to the Church, Brown proceeded, with poetic license and in the voices of fictional characters, to paint with a very broad brush. What is certain is that, in order to make the Church the villain, he made things up, knowing that he was doing so.
And, of course, novelists and fictional characters are allowed to utter all the falsehoods they like. It makes no sense to accuse them of lying. It would be wonderful if every reader took to heart the words on the novel's copyright page: "In this work of fiction, the characters, places and events are either the product of the author's imagination or they are used entirely fictitiously." Indeed, in some ideal universe, in which every reader were well versed in ecclesiastical history, the pedantic nonsense spewed by Prof. Langdon and Sir Leigh Teabing would merely provoke amusement.
Alas, we do not live in that world, and many people have mistaken the novel's fiction for fact.
Moreover, such confusions aside, fiction itself is a powerful form of communication. When you watch a movie or read a book, your imagination is guided and shaped. Feelings are stirred, questions are raised. Impressions - perhaps false, perhaps true - are formed. Mental associations are created.
Businesses pay millions of dollars for a few seconds of advertising time during the Super Bowl. It matters little that everyone knows that these ads aren't documentaries; that they are creations designed to sell a product. The message is sent anyway. If a few seconds of screen time are so valuable, imagine the power of hours spent reading a novel or the visual impact of an entire film.
In the case in point, Mercedes-Benz is surely delighted that their Smartcar will appear in the Da Vinci Code film; they are confident that it will affect consumers' attitudes. For similar reasons, the Catholic Church has every reason to be less than delighted with its own appearance. In this case, a false and ugly picture is being transmitted to the whole world, for The Da Vinci Code gives the distinct impression that the Church is not only wrong - as I say, in some sense, most of the world believes that anyway - but wicked and mendacious, a massive criminal enterprise organized to defend a fraud: "the greatest story ever sold," in the words of Teabing. Is it unreasonable to suppose that this will affect viewers' attitudes toward the Church?
The novel's offensiveness may well be unwitting, because Dan Brown appears to be somewhat tone-deaf when it comes to things Catholic. He demonstrates no "feel" whatsoever for the way Catholics think and talk. Indeed, Brown doesn't seem to appreciate what it means to be part of the Church. For Catholics, the Church is much more than a pious association, a religious institution, or a venerable historical reality. For Catholics, the Church is precisely what The Da Vinci Code suggests that Mary Magdalene was: the Bride of Christ that becomes one flesh with Him. In the Church, Christians form part of that one mystical body of Christ. In fact, it was a woman, St. Joan of Arc, who said: "About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they're just one thing, and we shouldn't complicate the matter."
Yet Brown writes about this mysterious and holy reality as if it were the Kiwanis Club with a somewhat longer and much nastier pedigree. Given how Catholics understand the Church, it was inevitable that his painfully false portrayal - despite its being fiction - would to be taken personally, for in a very profound way, it is personal.
By way of analogy, imagine what your reaction would be if a novelist were to tell you, "I am going to write a novel about your family, in which you will be portrayed as a band of criminals and perverts. I am going to use your real name and the names of your parents and grandparents. All the information regarding your family - a fair bit of which will, in fact, be true - will be presented as if it were the product of careful historical research. But - not to worry - it's only a novel, and afterwards I'll give you a chance to respond to the falsehoods in my book."
Of course, our imaginary author has every right to publish his novel. The question to be raised here is another: would anyone with a sense of decency or responsibility write such a novel and then - when the novel is an international success that is taken far too seriously by many readers - make a movie of it? I find it hard to believe that this is the kind of thing that Sony and Dan Brown are eager to be seen doing.
John Wauck is an American priest of Opus Dei. A native of Chicago, he studied Renaissance history and literature at Harvard University and philosophy at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, where he has lived for the last ten years. He teaches a course on literature and Christian faith at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross
No comments:
Post a Comment