The Da Vinci Code Book Pages

[Mariam Obregon]

Besiegedby requests for my reaction to The Da Vinci Code, I finally decided to sit down and read it over the weekend. It was a quick romp, largely fun to read, if rather predictable and preachy. This is a good airplane book, a novelistic thriller that presents a rummage sale of accurate historical nuggets alongside falsehoods and misleading statements. The bottom line: the book should come coded for "black light," like the pen used by the character Sauniere to record his dying words, so that readers could scan pages to see which "facts" are trustworthy and which patently not, and (if a black light could do this!) highlight the gray areas where complex issues are misrepresented and distorted.

"The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable" (p.232), but that does not mean "Nothing in Christianity is original." The relationship between early Christianity and the world around it, the ways in which it was culturally embedded in that world, sometimes unreflectively, sometimes reflexively, sometimes in deliberate accommodation, sometimes in deliberate cooptation, is far more complicated than the simplistic myth of Constantine's Stalinesque program of cultural totalitarianism. Further, Constantine's religious life -- whether, when, how and by what definition he was Christian and/or "pagan" -- is a much debated issue because the literary and non-literary sources (such as coins) are not consistent. That Constantine the emperor had "political" motives (p.234) is hardly news to anyone! The question is how religion and politics (which cannot be separated in the ancient world) were interrelated in him. He is as hard to figure out on this score as Henry VIII, Osama Bin Laden, Tammy Fay Baker and George W. Bush. Brown has turned one of history's most fascinating figures into a cartoon-ish villain.

"Paganism" is treated throughout The Da Vinci Code as though it were a unified phenomenon, which it was not ("pagan" just being the Christian term for "non-Christian"). The religions of the Mediterranean world were multiple and diverse, and cannot all be boiled down to "sun-worshippers" (232). Nor did all "pagans" frequently, eagerly, and with mystical intent participate in the hieros gamos (ritual sex acts). "The Church" is also used throughout the book as though it had a clear, uniform and unitary referent. For early Christian history this is precisely what we do not have, but a much more complex, varied and localized phenomenon. Brown presumes "the Church" is "the Holy Roman Catholic Church" which he thinks had tremendous power always and everywhere, but ecclesiastical history is a lot messier.

Brown propagates the full-dress conspiracy theory for Vatican suppression of women. Feminist scholars and others have been debating different models of the "patriarchalization" of Christianity for decades. Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza's landmark work, In Memory of Her (1983), argued that while Jesus and Paul (on his better days) were actually pretty much pro-women, it was the next generations (the authors of letters in Paul's name like 1 and 2 Timothy and others) who betrayed their feminist agenda and sold out to the Aristotelian, patriarchal vision of Greco-Roman society. Others (unfortunately) sought to blame the misogyny on the Jewish roots of Christianity. More recently it has been argued that the picture is more mixed, even for Jesus and Paul. That is, they may have been more liberal than many of their contemporaries about women, but they were not all-out radicals, though they had ideas (such as Gal 3:28) that were even more revolutionary than they realized (in both senses of the term). Alas, no simple story here. And while obsessing over Mary Magdalene, The Da Vinci Code ignores completely the rise and incredible durability and power of the other Mary, the mother of Jesus, and devotion to her which follows many patterns of "goddess" veneration (she even gets the Athena's Parthenon dedicated to her in the sixth century).

This list is just a sample. A "black light" edition of The Da Vinci Code would, however, be unnecessary if readers would simply take the book as fiction. But there is an obstacle: the first page of the book reads, under the bold print headline "Fact": "all descriptions of ...documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate."

Author, Margaret M. Mitchell, is Associate Professor of New Testament at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Chair of the Department of New Testament and Early Christian Literature. Her latest book is The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation (Westminster/John Knox, 2002).

Regrettably, neither Barbara nor I are ableto claim that the third non-reader is one of us. What can I say byway of excuse for this? I found the book was on sale really cheap in CostCo when we were about to leave on a trip to Europe. I bought it for the long, long flights that lay ahead of us, without knowing much about it except that it was supposed to be an intellectual mystery with cryptography and symbology and stuffand the blurbs said it was great. I didn't open it, I just grabbed oneoff a pallet of about 500 copies.Barbara was between mysteries at the time, so she grabbed it from meand rapidly read it over the next couple of daysbefore we even left for the airport. I asked hopefully what it was like. She scowled and said something about the Hardy Boys.My heart sank; I understood her to mean it was pathetic butpossibly of interest to the 11-year-old market. By the time we wereon our plane she had made sure thather flight bag contained a new novel byMenking Hannell, and over southern Oregon she told me it was great asusual. Unfortunately I had no better idea of what to do with my time,so I opened The Da Vinci Code.

I am still trying to come up with a fully convincing account of justwhat it was about his very first sentence, indeed the very first word,that told me instantly that I was in for a very bad time stylistically.

The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever writtenthat begins with the word renowned. Here is the paragraphwith which the book opens. The scene (says a dateline under thechapter heading, 'Prologue') is the Louvre, late at night:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunire staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-oldman heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunire collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spenda number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in thehistory of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalisticstories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonabletext for the opening of a newspaper report the next day:

But Brown packs such details into the first two words of anaction sequence — details of not only his protagonist's profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn't work here.It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunire isfleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarmsystem and the security gates). We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that he wascurating at the Louvre.

The writing goes on in similar vein, committing style and wordchoice blunders in almost every paragraph (sometimes every line). Look at the phrase "the seventy-six-year-old man".It's a complete let-down: we knew he was a man — the anaphoric pronoun "he" had just been used to refer to him. (This is perhaps where "curator" could have been slipped in for thefirst time, without "renowned", if the passage were rewritten.)Look at "heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunire collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas." We don't need to know it's a masterpiece (it's a Caravaggio hanging in the Louvre, that should be enough in the way of credentials, for heaven's sake). Surely "toward him" feels better than "toward himself" (though I guess both are grammatical here). Surely "tore from the wall" shouldbe "tore away from the wall". Surely a single man can't fall into aheap (there's only him, that's not a heap). And why repeat the name"Saunire" here instead of the pronoun "he"? Who else is around? (Caravaggio hasn't been mentioned; "aCaravaggio" uses the name as an attributive modifier with conventionallyelided head noun "painting". That isn't a mention of the man.)

Well, actually, there is someone else around, but we only learn thatthree paragraphs down, after "a thundering iron gate" has fallen (by theway, it's the fall that makes a thundering noise: there's no such thingas a thundering gate)."The curator" (his profession is now named a second time in case you missed it) "...crawled out from under the canvas and scanned the cavernous spacefor someplace to hide" (the colloquial American "someplace" seems very odd here as compared with standard "somewhere"). Then:

Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

Just count the infelicities here.A voice doesn't speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with."Chillingly close" would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to betold his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if hehas frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarilyceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouettedoes not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunire can see the man'spale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet),the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.

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