AN OPEN LETTER TO LOVERS OF THE DA VINCI CODE

Not one to run after trends, I purposely waited until the summer of 2007 to read Dan Brown’s monumental bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. As I had been prepared to expect from all the reviews, media coverage, and controversy, the book was as exciting and fascinating to read as it was wildly inaccurate in its understanding of the history of Christianity. Many good books have been written to counter Brown’s erroneous statements about the formation of the biblical canon and the central Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, and so I feel no great urgency to add my own refutation of Brown’s claims.
My concern, in fact, is not with Dan Brown at all. I am concerned, rather, with the vast numbers of people who, in reading The Da Vinci Code, felt deep in their hearts something akin to a longing. I felt that longing myself as I read: not just the insistent longing to unmask the villain or reach the long-awaited climax, but a more subtle longing for a kind of mystery, wonder, and joy that our modern world—and a good portion of the modern church—seems to have squeezed out of existence.
Christians who enjoyed The Da Vinci Code, whether they be nominal or committed, need not reject their enjoyment as a guilty pleasure. In the same way, non-Christians and agnostic seekers need not predicate their own enjoyment of the book on a rejection of traditional, orthodox Christianity. Although a surface reading of Brown’s novel may seem to present the reader with just such an either/or dilemma, if we allow ourselves to be drawn more deeply into the novel, we will hear there a voice crying out for something that is by no means incompatible with the apostolic faith handed down to us by Peter, Paul, and John.
Indeed, as I shall attempt to show, The Da Vinci Code appeals to three deep, inner desires that are better answered and fulfilled by Christianity than the Gnostic neo-paganism that Brown seems to advocate.

The Longing to Break a Code

No matter his religion, his age, or his cultural background, no reader of The Da Vinci Code can help but be delighted and intrigued by the circuitous trail of clues, codes, and puzzles that face the heroes—and villains—of the novel. At their best, Brown’s carefully crafted riddles hang in suspension before the mind of the reader. The answer seems so obvious, it dances teasingly on the tip of our tongue . . . and yet the exact meaning eludes us. That is, until one of Brown’s characters finds the solution and the light floods in.

Suddenly, the true meaning of the riddle (usually expressed in a tight, rhyming quatrain) is revealed and every word and phrase takes on a new and clearer significance. In a flash, everything becomes unified, connected, fused. What was only a moment before a jumble of seemingly unrelated clues becomes a single, integrated whole. We feel, just for a second, as if we have uncovered a secret that will allow us access to an even deeper mystery about God, about the universe, and about ourselves.
I must confess that I experienced that feeling several times during my reading of The Da Vinci Code. But then I know of another book—an even bigger and more international bestseller than Brown’s novel—that affords me an almost countless number of such experiences. I speak, of course, of the Bible.
Though the Old Testament is a book complete in itself, when it is read in conjunction with the New Testament, its second, hidden meaning slowly rises to the surface. More than a history of the Jewish people and a collection of their proverbial and prophetic wisdom, the Old Testament is a vast riddle-book encoded with hundreds of clues that point forward to the coming of the promised Messiah. Until the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ, most of those clues seemed impossible to decipher, understand, or reconcile. When viewed, however, from the hindsight of the New Testament, the clues assemble themselves into a rich, meaningful tapestry.
Handel’s Messiah, though it is one of the greatest works of sacred Christian music, borrows the vast majority of its libretto from the Old (rather than the New) Testament. In a similar way, the full Christian understanding of the person, ministry, and significance of Jesus Christ relies as much on the Old Testament as the New. Indeed, Christians who possess an intimate knowledge of the Old Testament can almost forgo the gospel accounts of the Crucifixion and Paul’s theological meditations on the Atonement. Psalm 22, though written hundreds of years before the event, reads like an eyewitness account of Good Friday. Isaiah 53, on the other hand, explains better than most Christian sermons how the suffering and death of the anointed one (the “messiah”) would free us from our sins and bring us back into a right relationship with God.

In comparing The Da Vinci Code to the Bible I am not making an idle analogy. Leonardo da Vinci and his supposed fellow Grand Masters of the mystical order of the Priory of Sion may have a talent for stringing out clues, but their talent fades in the light of the ultimate Grand Master, the Creator of the Universe and of the ever twisting narrative of human salvation.

God even set his chosen people a seemingly unsolvable riddle by speaking through his prophets two seemingly incompatible sets of prophecies about the Messiah: that he would be a suffering servant (Psalm 22; Isaiah 53); that he would be a second King David (Psalm 2; Isaiah 11). Only in the light of the New Testament would it become clear that the two sets of prophecies referred, in fact, to two separate comings of the Messiah: his first coming as a poor carpenter who would give his life for the world; his second—and still awaited—coming as a heavenly ruler who will destroy all earthly wickedness and set up his eternal throne.

The Da Vinci Code intrigues us with the unbelievably remote possibility that there are people alive today who are direct descendants, via the Carolingian dynasty, of a 2000-year old bloodline that began with Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The Bible presents us with a historical, 2000-year long bloodline that stretches from Abraham to David to Christ. Every kind of threat—from war to slavery to barrenness—threatens to destroy the sacred bloodline, yet it endures and persists. The bloodline is mostly royal, yet it embraces some (like Ruth) who are not Jewish, ends with two poor rustics (Mary and Joseph), and includes at least three women of suspect sexuality (Tamar, Rahab, and Bathsheba).
Yes, Brown’s novel offers some nifty riddles, but consider this sampling of three brief biblical conundrums:

—Isaiah 53 includes the following prophecy of the Messiah: “He was assigned a grave with the wicked, / and with the rich in his death, / though he had done no violence, / nor was any deceit in his mouth” (verse 9; NIV throughout). How can an innocent man of peace and truth be assigned a grave with the wicked? And how can one so assigned yet be with the rich in his death? The verse is like a double riddle that folds back on itself. And yet, that is exactly what occurred on Good Friday. A sinless man, falsely accused of evil, was crucified between two thieves; but when his body was removed from the cross, a rich man (Joseph of Arimathea) gave up his own tomb to receive the body.
—King David begins Psalm 110 with these words, “The LORD said to my Lord: / ‘Sit at my right hand / until I make your enemies / a footstool for your feet.’” Jesus himself (Luke 21:41-44) pushes the crowd to think carefully through this seemingly contradictory verse. If the Messiah is “only” the son of David, then why does King David address him as Lord? Who are these two Lords that both surpass Israel’s king? Hidden within this single verse is not only the revelation that the Messiah will be something more than the son of David, but a brief, Old Testament glimpse of the later Christian understanding of the Trinity.
—In the same Psalm, David goes on to say something even more puzzling about the Messiah: “The LORD has sworn / and will not change his mind: / ‘You are a priest forever, / in the order of Melchizedek’” (verse 4). Hebrews devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 7) to mining the full meaning of this brief verse—a verse that points both backward toward one of the most enigmatic figures of Genesis (14:18-20) and forward toward some as yet unclear qualification of the Messiah. As it turns out that qualification which both Christ and Melchizedek share is that they, unique in Jewish history, are both kings and priests. But Hebrews 7 is not content to stop merely with this connection. Melchizedek also foreshadows the Incarnate Son of God in that his shadowy presence in Genesis allows him to function as a type of one who is without beginning or ending and who mediates a covenant that surpasses, because it precedes, that of Moses.
The Old Testament is rife with such riddling verses, but these prophetic verses do not exhaust the encoded nature of the Hebrew Bible. In addition to the actual prophecies, the Old Testament offers a series of figures, events, and tales that foreshadow—in a more narrative sense—the gospel story of Christ. These include the heel bitten by the seed of the serpent (Genesis 3:15), Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22), the Exodus story, the episode of the brazen serpent (Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-15), Zechariah’s stricken shepherd (Zechariah 13), the ministry of Elisha, and the suffering and triumph of Joseph and Samson.
But my favorite of all the Old Testaments prefigurements of Christ is to be found in the well-known story of Passover. According to Exodus 11-12, God prophesied through Moses that he would send throughout Egypt the Angel of Death, who would kill the first born of all things—whether man or beast, Egyptian or Jew. For his chosen people, however, God provided a way of escape. If they would take a spotless lamb, sacrifice it, and then smear its blood over their doorpost, when the Angel of Death saw the blood, it would pass over the house and those inside would not die.
Here in this old, old tale is the very blueprint of Christian salvation. For we, like the firstborn of Egypt, are—on account of our sins—under sentence of death. But for us as well, the God of the Passover has provided a way of escape. Christ the spotless lamb—spotless because he was without sin—was sacrificed upon the altar of the Cross; if we take his shed blood and, figuratively, smear it over our sinful selves, when we come before the judgment seat of God, he will see not us or our sin, but the blood of his Son—and we shall therefore pass out of judgment. Neither we nor the Jews of the Exodus deserve to be saved from the Angel of Death; it is only on account of the blood of the lamb that we can survive the deadly ordeal.
Paul says it all in one brief sentence: “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7).
Riddles upon riddles. Clues upon clues. If what we desire is a code that needs to be broken, a hidden key that needs to be turned, then we need look no further than the family Bible on the shelf. There shall we find both prophecies and fulfillments, questions and answers aplenty: enough for a lifetime of searching.

The Longing for the Sacred Feminine

        Appearing in the midst of a modern scientific age that privileges simple, concrete solutions over mystery and ambiguity, the riddle-filled Da Vinci Code offers a much needed antidote to the dangers of excessive rationalism. Though Brown’s characters use the masculine virtues of reason and logic to help solve the riddles, they rely just as strongly on the more feminine virtues of emotion, intuition, and faith. Indeed, part of Brown’s project—and a good and worthwhile project it is—is to reclaim the feminine as a positive and healing force.
        At the core of The Da Vinci Code is a loud and insistent call for the return of what Brown calls the “sacred feminine.” Of course, in issuing this call, Brown does contradict himself in an unusual way. He rejects the divinity of Christ as an ecclesiastical fabrication, but lifts up Mary Magdalene as a goddess beside whose supposed relics his hero kneels and worships. Still, despite this contradiction, I do believe that both Dan Brown and his fans are sincere in their desire to rehabilitate and restore the central role that femininity should play in our culture.
        The trouble is that Brown misidentifies the true enemies of the sacred feminine.
        The real suppression of the feminine virtues does not occur during the early church or the Catholic Middle Ages—both of which held masculinity and femininity in a tense but creative balance—but during the secular—or at least deistic—Enlightenment. It was the architects of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason who privileged reason and logic over emotion, intuition, and revelation: that is to say, masculinity over femininity. Yes, much of the Protestant Church absorbed—mostly unconsciously—this Enlightenment dismissal of the feminine perspective, but the origin of the dismissal was secular rather than ecclesiastical. In fact, during this time period, it was the Catholic Church—whom Brown unfairly pillories throughout his novel—that mounted perhaps the strongest resistance to the tyranny of rationalism.
         Brown, like many moderns, too often confuses “women’s rights” with whether or not a given age respects and honors the feminine. It is true that in the Middle Ages, women as a class had far less political, occupational, and educational rights than they do today, but that does not mean that the Medievals therefore looked down on the feminine. To the contrary, medieval works like The Canterbury Tales, The Divine Comedy, and The Romance of the Rose offer a much more exalted view of femininity and the feminine virtues than do the major works of our own age. The Victorian Age in England is often criticized for “oppressing” women, and yet I can think of few periods that have ascribed a higher status to the feminine domestic sphere, with its emphasis on the central role of nurture, child-rearing, aesthetic beauty, and the preservation of tradition.
        Although marriage, like all human institutions, is subject to abuses of all kinds, biblical marriage as it has been practiced by faithful Jews and Christians for millennia remains the single best protector of the claims and virtues of femininity. In The Da Vinci Code we witness, in flashback, a ritual that Brown calls the “hieros gamos” (or “sacred marriage”). While masked revelers look on, a man and a woman have sex on an altar-like table. Though Brown hints that the two lovers may actually be husband and wife, the ritual itself exalts an anonymous form of sexual intercourse in which the man and woman represent the ideal poles of masculinity and femininity.
        I can think of nothing more “anti-feminine” than anonymous sex. If we put aside for a moment any biblical understanding of sexual morality, it is simply a fact that it is more difficult, emotionally and psychologically, for a woman to “sleep around” than it is for a man. Women experience sexuality differently than men. Whereas men can compartmentalize their sexual experiences and keep them isolated from the other parts of their psyche, women experience sexuality in a far more holistic manner. Sexual intimacy engages all parts and levels of a woman’s psyche, and so anonymous sex is particularly destructive to her sense of herself as a full person. What women truly need and desire is not “free love” or ritualistic sex but a safe, nurturing, and intimate environment in which to fully express themselves sexually.

And no environment does that so well as marriage, particularly the kind of sacramental marriage that the church (especially the Catholic Church) has overseen for two thousand years. Though the sexual revolution—a testosterone-driven, anti-feminine male fantasy if there ever was one—has encouraged the last few generations of women to divorce completely their sexual drive from their maternal instinct, it has done so in violation of—rather than in support of—femininity. The traditional Christian privileging of marriage and family, despite its abuses, has helped keep alive a safe and supportive sphere for the expression and preservation of femininity.
Dan Brown calls for the sacred feminine, but what our age really needs—and what I believe readers of The Da Vinci Code truly yearn for—is the return of a strong and integral human femininity that can complement, rather than compete with, masculinity and that can express its unique perspective and values both within the family and in the public square. Alas, whereas modernism too quickly dismissed the feminine as anti-rational, our postmodern age has simply dismissed it as illusory, a product of social expectations that are unnaturally foisted upon girls and women.
The real upshot of the Gnostic ideas that Brown advocates in his book is not the preservation and exaltation of the feminine, but the collapsing of masculinity and femininity into a bland, sexless androgyny. As with the Enlightenment, many in the church have jumped on the androgyny bandwagon, but they do so despite—not in keeping with—the traditional teachings of Christianity. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus promises to do the following for Mary Magdalene: "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."
Hardly a text to promote the integrity and value of the sacred feminine! It is the true Church, and not the promoters of the Gnostic gospels, who are best poised to protect and foster femininity in an age that would collapse the sexes and render the domestic sphere obsolete.
Please remember: it was the Gnostics, not the Catholic Church, that dismissed the physical body as evil and inherently fallen. Yes, there were many in the Catholic Church who, at times, embraced the Gnostic’s low view of the body (Augustine, a convert from the Gnostic Manicheans, often fell prey to this temptation), but when they did so, they were moving away from—not toward—Christian orthodoxy. The Bible and the Church have always denied that our bodies are inherently evil: if they were, God could not have become incarnate in Jesus and the belief that we will be clothed in Resurrection bodies in heaven would be considered heretical rather than centrally orthodox.
It is the Church that has long championed the inherent worth and value of the body, a fact that is vital to anyone who would call for a return of the feminine. Those, like the Gnostics, who hate the flesh inevitably end up by hating women as well, for it is the females of the species who have kept the human race most tied to the physical, the practical, and the real. The holistic vision of the feminine has always made more space for the concerns and claims of the body.
I heartily agree with Dan Brown: it is time that our modern—and now postmodern—world acknowledges and celebrates the vital role that femininity has played and should continue to play in all areas of society. He just needs to get his friends and foes in order!

The Longing for Incarnational Magic

        Though Dan Brown doesn’t seem to realize it, and though he might not admit it if he did, what The Da Vinci Code most calls out for is a kind of incarnational magic that would bring together masculine and feminine, even as it brings together heaven and earth. In its longing for the return of the sacred feminine and in its passion to uncover clues and solve mysteries, Brown’s novel produces in its reader a yearning to bridge the gap between the known and the unknown, the physical and the metaphysical, the human and the divine.
        Though Brown’s devil-may-care debunking of Christian theology, ecclesiastical history, and church politics is sure to put a smug grin on the face of most readers, what really lingers in the heart and mind after one puts down the novel is not Brown’s irreverence or even his conspiracy theories. What lingers is a sense of greater possibilities, a sense that our world is not a closed book. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our small and narrow philosophies,” the novel seems to be telling us. Nature may be a wall, but there are chinks in the wall, and through those chinks the light streams in.
        Is not the yearning for the sacred feminine another way of expressing a deeper yearning for a voice out of the darkness that is warm and intimate and real? In the last, haunting sentence of the novel, our hero, Robert Langdon, who has assumed a posture of prayer and reverence before the supposed bones of Mary Magdalene, thinks that he hears a “woman’s voice . . . the wisdom of the ages . . . whispering up from the chasms of the earth.” It is a moving moment indeed, but is it really a voice from the earth that we desire to hear? Must not the voice we so desperately wish to hear come from above, from outside the confines of our earth?
        Every day, millions of devout Catholics around the world attend a sacred ritual during which they yearn to hear the voice and sense the presence of One who said that he would give his very body and blood that man might be reconciled to God. During the Mass, a truly sacred marriage (“hieros gamos”) occurs, as bread and wine are taken up and participate in the eternal life of the Passover Lamb. Wheat harvested from the earth and the fruit of the vine, the very staples of human, bodily existence, are transformed into the body and blood of Christ; and yet—and here is the great mystery—they continue, even so, to persist as bread and wine. Physical is affirmed, even as it loses itself in the divine.
        There is no greater magic than the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, a doctrine that Brown too quickly dismisses in favor of the Gnostic gospels he finds so intriguing. That Christ could be, simultaneously, fully God and fully man gives the lie to the Gnostic denial of the flesh and exalts the physical as a potential container for divine glory and presence. The Incarnation is so great and glorious a teaching that the Catholic Church fenced it round with seven sacraments (two of which are the Eucharist and marriage) that bear perpetual witness to the bridging of heaven and earth effected by the God-Man, Jesus Christ.
        The Da Vinci Code promises us something wonderful: a truth that mingles masculine logic and reason with feminine intuition and revelation, the spiritual and the metaphysical with the physical and tangible, the ageless with the here and now.

Praise God that the Christian church has, for 2000 years, made that truth available to all those who have ears to hear.

Louis Markos (http://fc.hbu.edu/~lmarkos) is a Professor in English at Houston Baptist University; he is the author of From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics (IVP) and Pressing Forward: Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the Victorian Age (Sapientia).