Decoding ‘The Da Vinci Code’

During opening day of the movie The Da Vinci Code, I was at the mega mall of Bangkok, Siam Paragon, and in spite of its 13 theaters, I had to buy a ticket for the next day as all the good seats were taken. It gave me time to go over Dan Brown’s blockbuster page-turner for the nth time. And for the nth time, I was convinced that this piece of fiction, which is not at all great literature, is dangerous to the gullible mass of readers who will suck in everything as gospel truth. One has to be really discriminating and do a little research so as not to be taken in by Brown’s blindingly false view of the Bible and grossly distorted image of Jesus Christ. For the benefit of those who have not read it, here is a brief synopsis:

The Da Vinci Code opens with the grisly murder of the Louvre’s curator inside the museum. The crime enmeshes hero Robert Langdon, a tweedy professor of symbology from Harvard, and the victim’s granddaughter, burgundy-haired cryptologist Sophie Neveu. Together with crippled millionaire historian Leigh Teabing, they flee Paris for London one step ahead of the police and a mad albino Opus Dei "monk" named Silas, who will stop at nothing to prevent them from finding the Holy Grail.

The Grail, Langdon says, is "symbolic of the lost goddess. When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily. Legends of chivalric quests for the Holy Grail were in fact quests to find the lost sacred feminine. Knights who claimed to be searching for the chalice were speaking in code as a way to protect themselves from a Church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned non-believers, and forbidden the pagan reverence for the sacred feminine."

The Grail is a favorite metaphor for a desirable but difficult-to-attain goal, from the map of the human genome to Lord Stanley’s Cup. While the original Grail is the cup allegedly used at the Last Supper and which inhabits the pages of Arthurian romance, Dan Brown’s best-seller rips it away to the realm of esoteric history. In his book, Brown reinterprets the Grail legend. He inverts the insight that a woman’s body is symbolically a container and makes a container symbolically a woman’s body. And that container has a name that every Christian will recognize, for Brown claims that the Holy Grail was actually Mary Magdalene. She was the vessel that held the blood of Christ in her womb while bearing his children.

Brown’s claims that "the quest for the Holy Grail is the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene" is a conclusion that would surely have surprised Sir Galahad and the Grail Knights who thought they were searching for the Chalice of the Last Supper.

The book is laden with errors but to go through all of its falsehoods would be tantamount to writing a thesis of a thousand pages. Some easy-to-spot falsehoods are:

1. Brown incorrectly reports that the ancient Olympics were held to honor Aphrodite. In fact, they was held to honor Zeus.

2. Contrary to Brown, the Knights Templar had nothing to do with the building of cathedrals.

3. Silas in the book is identified as a "monk" of the Opus Dei. The Opus Dei has no monks.

4. Brown reports that the Pyramid of the Louvre has 666 panes of glass. It has 673.

5. He claims that the church burned five million women suspected as witches over its history. The actual number executed during the "witch craze" of Europe was between 30,000 and 60,000 and not all were women, not all were burned and not all were executed by the church.

6. Teabing claims that the divinity of Jesus was decided at Nicea by a "relatively close vote." Actually, only two out of 300 bishops at the council did not sign the resulting creedal statements affirming the full deity of Christ and it condemned any contradiction thereof.

The movie is faithful to the novel and is quite engrossing. Much of what sucks you in is watching Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and police cryptologist Sophie Neveu (played by French actress Audrey Tautou) piece together clues left for them at a murder scene at the Louvre Museum and at religious sites across Europe. Robert and Sophie proceed from one problem to the next with such speed and ease, it’s like they are high school kids on a scavenger hunt. Within seconds of finding the words "so dark the con of man," written in a painting in invisible ink, they realize it is an anagram for a work by Leonardo de Vinci which leads them to the next clue. And that mathematical sequence scrawled on the gallery floor? Of course, it is the number of a Swiss bank account containing a hugely important portion of the secret.

Robert and Sophie risk their lives to uncover this vast church cover-up to find out the long- hidden truth about the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The movie drags a bit except when Robert and Sophie are on the run and everyone is chasing them, from the police captain and Opus Dei member Bezu Fache ( a perfectly cast Jean Reno) to the opportunistic Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina) to Silas, the sadomasochistic albino assassin monk, played by Paul Bettany.

Something Robert says as the film reaches its conclusion is more significant than anything else anyone has said about the film: Langdon’s line "If given a chance, would you rather destroy faith or renew it? What matters is what you believe."

Surely this is director’s Ron Howard’s olive branch to the critics and protesters; his assurance that what he is offering is filmic fiction, and nothing blasphemous intended to undermine anyone’s faith.

Despite the controversies, the book and movie have provided an opportunity for the faith to renew itself, to debunk the myths and theories, and to generally point us to the direction and light our faith wants to show us.