brownianism
Recently I read a very interesting article ("Pope Dan I") examining The DaVinci Code. It isn't the first article I've read examining TDC, but was certainly the most intriguing. The author, Michael Novak, makes a very clear case that the new religion that Dan Brown is attempting to replace Christianity with is eseentialy degrading and oppresive to women. Though some might debate that Brown has as his goal the establishment of a new religion, the fact remains that in attacking the founding principles of Chrisitanity, he is, in fact, substituting different ideas--a different religion. Now, don't get me wrong, I am fully aware that TDC is a work of fiction, and that what little historical speculation is "documented" was discredited long ago; but, I also know that people who are busy rejecting the Truth will latch onto whatever seems mystical and spiritual while not expecting responsibility. On the surface, Brown's paganesque "sacred fememinine" fits the mold of post modernistic spirituality. It appears to elevate and celebrate the feminine in the search for some secret knowledge--to create a mystical role for the female in the realm of the spiritual. In reality, however, it destroys the beauty of Woman. It degrades individual women in favour of teh mystical whole of the femal vessel.
According to Brown's religion, ritualistic sex is an intrinsic part of teh spiritual because only in the union with teh mysitcal cessevl can the man truly come to see God. AT first glance, it seems as though this creates an amazing role for a woman--she, through sex, becomes the path for a man to know God more intimately, to receive the secret knowledge. The problem, though, as Novak aptly points out, is that by focusing on this mystical role of vessel, the man is in actuality merely using the woman for his own ends. There is no respect for the individual woman as an object of pursuit, as a person of merit. Thus sex, under the guise of a mystical path to god, becomes merely a means to exploit women, placating their abused sense of self with a title of use--the "sacred feminine." Consider the following excerpts from Novaks article:
The trick to this gnostic form of love is to think of it as a spiritual love, not for this particular woman but for the eternal goddess within, the mystery of femaleness. But of course this gnosticism leads to the grossest, most impersonal forms of sex, and a frantic, oft-repeated search for escape, in order to keep pursuing the eternally elusive Grail. Here is Professor Langdon before a coed class at Harvard, addressing the men: “The next time you find yourself [having sex] with a woman, look in your heart and see if you cannot approach sex as a mystical, spiritual act. Challenge yourself to find that spark of divinity that man can only achieve through union with the sacred feminine.” Brown reports that “the women smiled knowingly, nodding.”
But the romantic/erotic and the gnostic do not bear up well under long experience. They rely too much on delusions. They demean real, in-the-flesh, individual women, with all their common sense, faults, particular wants and tastes, and wonderful angularity. They ignore unique persons, in all their imperfection. In all their suffering.
The popularity of these stories [tragic medieval romances] demonstrates that the age-old myth of impossible love, the idealization of woman (the sacred feminine), the longing for self-dissolution, and poignant and passionate desire — all the equipment of a new outburst of the ancient gnosis — have an unrelenting power to touch the human soul. Men do constantly seek the Grail, the chalice which is Woman (not necessarily this particular woman whom I know, but the divine woman somewhere beyond, the unearthly woman, the goddess beyond anyone who is merely flesh). This is not falling in love with an individual woman (or man), but falling in love with love.
Brown's paganesque theories are not respectful of women, yet how many modern women will be allured to the idea of the "sacred feminine" idea. Brown seems intent on plucking the most rose-coloured ideas from paganism while actively ignoring the reality of paganisms abuse of women--the use of women as batering items, the reality of the harem, etc. Despite Brown's apparent contemp for historical Judaism and Christianity, Judeo-Christianity provides the only religious basis for honoring and respecting individual women.
It was Judaism that first insisted on a strict monogamy, as Christianity would later.
It is not an accident that Judaism and Christianity, with their wise sense of limits and restraints, and their insistence upon monogamy, taught whole centuries of males to treat women with individual dignity, in the mutual choice of love for one another, forever, sacramentally, each to honor, protect, and cherish the other. In no other civilization, of any other religion or secular persuasion, in any other era, have women been treated as individual persons, made in the image of God, called to reflect, choose, and act with creativity.
Unfortunately, most of the contemporary church is unequipped to combat these ideas. We have no discussion of the true, biblical role of sex. We have no discussion or understanding of the true mystique of masculine and feminine and beauty of the individual woman. Christianity is about the individual, it is about the value of one person in the eyes of God. Paganism and distorted mysticism are not. The individual is nothing in comparison to the mystical role, particularly in the case of women. She is merely a tool--a tool of spirituality, a tool of fertility. IN order to combat this error, Christians neet to know what Christ teaches about women, about sex. It seems though, that we are afraid. It is easier to attack Brown's ridiculous ideas about Christ and history than to teach congregations the Truth about the more subtler points of his work.
Perhaps this discrepancy is why we cannot combat the degreaded sexuality of our day--we don't know what the alternative is really about.
For the article...
Pope Dan I
The author of The Da Vinci Code shepherds a new religion
MICHAEL NOVAK
The Da Vinci Code, book and movie, gloats about bringing down the Christian Church. But what does the author, Dan Brown, dream of to fill its place?
The underlying code beneath The Da Vinci Code bursts to the surface from Chapter 55 on. If you didn’t grasp it there, you will find it in Brown’s extensive written testimony for his court case in London on charges of plagiarism. There he is forced to reveal how he came to each layer of his book’s code, especially the “big idea” around which his story was constructed.
The son of a math professor at Phillips Exeter Academy, Brown has always loved cryptic codes and holiday treasure hunts, and learned from a single art course in Spain to love complicated Renaissance paintings. Since he is profoundly ignorant of pre-Reformation history, there is much about the past that he encounters naïvely. He says he has always been fascinated by secret societies, out-of-the way histories, and alternative accounts of the way things are. His heart is attuned to the occult and the symbolic and the “gnostic.” By this last term is meant true knowledge attained by a secretive elite, best expressed through ritual, symbol, verse, and the language of mystery. Gnosis is a knowledge impenetrable by the uninitiated — Brown’s conspirators call them “virgins.”
So what is the point of Brown’s new religion?
SECRETS GALORE
“I’ll tell you what happens if the documents get out,” the BBC-voiced character Leigh Teabing says in the novel. “The Vatican faces a crisis of faith unprecedented in its two-millennium history.” These yet-unseen documents are believed to show that Jesus was a mortal man, who married Mary Magdalene and had a child by her. Later, Magdalene fled to France, where the descendants of Jesus gave rise to the Merovingian line of kings. Later descendants have always been in peril from the Church, hidden from sight and well protected by a highly organized, centuries-old conspiracy. Why so much protection? Mary Magdalene “carried with her a secret so powerful that, if revealed, it threatened to devastate the very foundation of Christianity. . . . This is the woman who singlehandedly could crumble the Church.”
All of which seems pretty odd. Brown says he is a Protestant, was even sent once to a Bible summer camp. But his fantasy is so contrary to the Biblical text that it does far more to undermine the Bible-based evangelical churches than the Catholic Church. Because it is contrary to all Biblical and other evidence, the yarn offends Catholic intellect, but does not really undermine Catholic theology. A Messiah, even an incarnate Son of God, who married and had children would reinforce Christian teaching about the sacrament of marriage, and the goodness, joy, fruitfulness, and holiness of sex within the sacramental bond. Of course, it would also raise complicated questions about bloodlines, etc., as the Brown yarn does. It was fortunate for the United States that George Washington had no direct heirs to sully his heritage; much more so, it is a blessing for the Christian Church that Jesus was childless.
But Brown has yet more to lay out in his book. “The quest for the Holy Grail is literally the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene. A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one, the lost sacred feminine” — to kneel as in a new religion, a pre-Jewish, pre-Christian religion. Miraculously, Brown keeps for this new religion a characteristic that no other pagan religion ever shared: It is monotheistic, and radiates a powerful unifying truth.
Brown is ambivalent about Judaism. On one hand, his novel says that the beginning of the end for women was the book of Genesis, where God is rendered as male, and Eve is taken from the rib of the male Adam, then described as the temptress of Adam into the original sin. On the other hand, he often praises Judaism over Christianity: The marriage to Magdalene would not shock Jews, because — as a young Jew — Jesus would have to have been married; it would have been offensive to custom not to be.
Brown sees in the star of David with its two intersecting triangles — blade inserted into chalice, the female symbol on top — “the perfect union of male and female . . . Solomon’s Seal . . . marking the Holy of Holies, where the male and the female deities — Yahweh and Shekinah — were thought to dwell.” Early Judaism, in his view, is a religion of the sacred feminine, honored by holy ritual intercourse behind the curtains of the Temple. (If I may be permitted an interjection: This is a lie, and an especially contemptible one.) For a long time, Brown explains, the Holy Grail was thought to be a chalice — a physical cup, even the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper — when in fact it is a code for the shape of a chalice, an upside-down triangle representing the shape of a woman’s womb.
Brown’s hero, Professor Langdon, says: “It was man, not God, who created the concept of ‘original sin,’ whereby Eve tasted of the apple and caused the downfall of the human race. Woman, once the sacred giver of life, was now the enemy.” Teabing, the self-proclaimed atheist, chimes in: “This concept of woman as life-bringer was the foundation of ancient religion. Childbirth was mystical and powerful. . . . Genesis tells us that Eve was created from Adam’s rib. Woman became an offshoot of man. And a sinful one at that. Genesis was the beginning of the end for the goddess.”
“What I mean,” Teabing summarizes, “is that almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false.”
The new replacement for Christianity is this “sacred feminine,” which points back to a time before the Church turned sex into “a disgusting and sinful act,” and indeed back to the pagan era, in which human nature was supposedly better respected, the sacred feminine honored, and sex uninhibited and natural. Nothing is said about the subjection of women in the warrior cultures of pre-Jewish times; Brown’s vision is pure Rousseau.
DIVINE MADNESS
While Brown was writing his book, his father observed that its readers would most likely be women. The book, after all, exalts women, shows them to be sacred, goddesses. At this point, Brown’s new religion blends with a far older stream of Western gnosticism, called the myth of romantic love.
It was Judaism that first insisted on a strict monogamy, as Christianity would later. Monogamy imposes restraints upon sexuality, female as well as male; and the human being ever since has rebelled at these restraints, imagining a better world in which sexual consortium is free, natural, spontaneous, as ungoverned as the wind. The myth of romantic love emerged in this spirit. Two major books — Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont and The Allegory of Love by C. S. Lewis — make the point that, compared in significance with the oceanic romantic-love movement, the Protestant Reformation was but a ripple.
For almost three centuries, from 990 to 1250, most of the kings and noblemen of Europe were off to war, in battle after battle against the Muslims, from which many did not return. Most of the nations and landed estates of Europe were governed by Christian women. (As Henry Adams has written, those were the most feminist ages in history, under the sign of the Virgin and Mother, Maria, Mother of God.) To entertain these lonely women, the troubadours of Spain and France circulated from castle to castle, singing songs of a new type of love: romantic love. This was a “spiritual,” almost gnostic love, full of longing but (in song at least) cut short of consummation, often by tragic death. It was a love full of poignancy and heartbreak. It usually involved a threesome: a lonely woman, a husband far away, a handsome man singing or telling of love. In no other literature of the world does an individual look into the eyes of another in quite this way. For lady and troubadour to fulfill their sexual desires would be illicit. Naturally, as was sung of Paolo and Francesca, it sometimes did happen that “that day they read no more.”
Audrey Tautou as Sophie Neveu in The Da Vinci Code
Sony Pictures/Gamma
Stories of romantic love became the dominant theme of Western song, poetry, and story. On one side, woman was celebrated as very nearly a goddess, noble and pure in her chastity, remote but ardently desired. On the other side was her solemn vow of fidelity, and the ironclad fact that her womb was the single path through which her husband might have an heir and descendants and lineage. Thus, matrimony built around her a wall, as around a lovely garden of roses. Leaping over the wall (sang the poets) nearly always brought tragedy, and also meant the cheapening of all three parties. The one way out of this bind — of marriage vow chafing against romantic desire — is death: preferably before consummation, when passion is at its most intense, a death for love’s sake. This is the meaning of that ambivalent maxim Amor vincit omnia: Love conquers all. The great passionate tales, from Tristan and Isolde on, are normally tragic tales.
The popularity of these stories demonstrates that the age-old myth of impossible love, the idealization of woman (the sacred feminine), the longing for self-dissolution, and poignant and passionate desire — all the equipment of a new outburst of the ancient gnosis — have an unrelenting power to touch the human soul. Men do constantly seek the Grail, the chalice which is Woman (not necessarily this particular woman whom I know, but the divine woman somewhere beyond, the unearthly woman, the goddess beyond anyone who is merely flesh). This is not falling in love with an individual woman (or man), but falling in love with love. That is why high risk and death seem so much more attractive than the routine of everyday married life. In this myth, marriage is usually described in an evasive sentence, “And they lived happily ever after,” which avoids the daily routine that follows. Judaism and Christianity, in the realism they pose against romantic love, in their “everydayness,” in their restraints and disciplines, have become the enemy of the gnostic imagination.
TRUE LOVE?
The trick to this gnostic form of love is to think of it as a spiritual love, not for this particular woman but for the eternal goddess within, the mystery of femaleness. But of course this gnosticism leads to the grossest, most impersonal forms of sex, and a frantic, oft-repeated search for escape, in order to keep pursuing the eternally elusive Grail. Here is Professor Langdon before a coed class at Harvard, addressing the men: “The next time you find yourself [having sex] with a woman, look in your heart and see if you cannot approach sex as a mystical, spiritual act. Challenge yourself to find that spark of divinity that man can only achieve through union with the sacred feminine.” Brown reports that “the women smiled knowingly, nodding.”
Langdon’s sidekick, French policewoman Sophie Neveu, turns out to be the granddaughter of one of the Four Guardians of the secret of the Grail. When she was only eleven, a horrified Sophie witnessed him taking part in the central rite of the ancient/new religion that Brown proposes to put in place of Christian worship. In this rite, twelve men dressed in black and twelve women in white gossamer gowns with golden shoes and golden orbs in their hands, each wearing an androgynous mask (white for the women, black for the men), began a slow, then faster, ritual dance. At the end, one man, naked, lay upon a low couch, on his back — Sophie recognized her grandfather in this position — while one of the women strode across him, and began gyrating, ever so slowly bringing him toward climax. The swaying and the noise grew faster and faster, and at the climactic moment came a reverberating shout.
Professor Langdon, ever the cool symbologist, explains this ritual to Sophie.
Although what she saw probably looked like a sex ritual, [it] had nothing to do with eroticism. It was a spiritual act. Historically, intercourse was the act through which male and female experienced God. . . . Physical union with the female remained the sole means through which man could become spiritually complete and ultimately achieve gnosis — knowledge of the divine. . . . By communing with woman, man could achieve a climactic instant, when his mind went totally blank and he could see God. . . . It’s important to remember that the ancients’ view of sex was entirely opposite from ours today. . . . The ability of the woman to produce life from her womb made her sacred. A god. Intercourse was the revered union of the two halves of the human spirit — male and female — through which the male could find spiritual wholeness and communion with God. What you saw was not about sex, it was about spirituality.
Brown does not tell us why this arrangement should be satisfying to a woman. And it is quite surprising that Sophie, supposedly a sophisticated detective in Paris, does not ask herself: Why is it that the only women in France today who seem to be having enough children to replace themselves are Muslims, and those few Catholics who are still devout churchgoers? The new pagans do not seem to have much regard for the sacredness of fertility. Do secular women actually cherish the sacred feminine, or not?
And, contrary to Brown’s fantasy, Christianity is now the fastest growing community in the world. Islam is growing, too. It is secularism that appears to be shrinking.
Of course, Brown is writing fiction, not philosophy. Still, he has tapped into something ancient and deep. In heavily secular, utilitarian societies, it may be that Brown’s book will open eyes to powers that are not easily subjected to bureaucratic ordering. It may awaken deep hungers, at first merely romantic/erotic and gnostic, and then for an endless cycle of questions about who we are, under these stars, with the wind upon our faces. But the romantic/erotic and the gnostic do not bear up well under long experience. They rely too much on delusions. They demean real, in-the-flesh, individual women, with all their common sense, faults, particular wants and tastes, and wonderful angularity. They ignore unique persons, in all their imperfection. In all their suffering.
It is not an accident that Judaism and Christianity, with their wise sense of limits and restraints, and their insistence upon monogamy, taught whole centuries of males to treat women with individual dignity, in the mutual choice of love for one another, forever, sacramentally, each to honor, protect, and cherish the other. In no other civilization, of any other religion or secular persuasion, in any other era, have women been treated as individual persons, made in the image of God, called to reflect, choose, and act with creativity.
One of the most sophomoric parts of The Da Vinci Code is Brown’s patronizing advice to Christians: Well, if that’s what you believe, that’s true for you; if that’s the sort of dependency you need, go right on leaning on it. And get over the idea that Jesus is God.
In other words: Learn from me, ye Christians, that your faith is in vain. The religion of the Sacred Feminine is the coming attraction.
Good luck with your new religion, Mr. Brown.
Mr. Novak holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book, with his daughter Jana, is Washington’s God.
National Review July 3, 2006.