Of the The Da Vinci Code puzzles, the biggest enigma by far is its popularity. How does one explain the tremendous success of such a badly written, incoherent, and just plain silly book? It’s kind of scary really, to consider how many people have bought into what Dan Brown is selling, and are naïve enough to swallow it.
For all the indignant dismissals of Brown’s critics because “it’s just fiction; get over it,” there are an awful lot of people who apparently don’t know what in the story is fact and what is fiction. And it’s clear from the “fact” page preceding the story that Dan Brown intended it that way. But ignorance by itself doesn’t explain the fascination for The Da Vinci Code, and even those that know it’s just fiction don’t necessarily want to “get over it.” The Da Vinci Code itself is not half as interesting as the cultural reaction to it and the sociological question of why this story resonates so strongly with so many. Here are a few of the more obvious pieces of the puzzle.
One of the potent forces The Da Vinci Code taps into is anti-Catholicism, a hybrid of evangelical Protestant and secular liberal Church-bashing. Part Jesus Seminar, part Jack Chick tract, Brown’s Catholic-bashing draws inspiration from the evangelical charge that Catholicism began with the Emperor Constantine, and the typical secular notion that the divinity of Christ was an invention. It’s hard to gauge just how much of the The Da Vinci Code's popularity is due to animosity against Catholics, but the more our culture turns its back on Christianity, the more hatred there is directed toward it. The popularity of The Da Vinci Code could be the spilling over of a sort of cultural hatred of Catholicism into popular entertainment. The Da Vinci Code’s mockery of believing Catholics is part of a persecution that will continue to grow as society grows more hostile to traditional Christianity.
“Everyone loves a conspiracy” says Brown’s character Robert Langdon, anticipating The Da Vinci Code’s own success and illustrating another aspect of The Da Vinci Code's appeal. This is the spirit of secret societies and esoteric organizations, promising secret truths to the initiated. Brown makes it painfully obvious (it would be interesting to count how many times the word “secret” is used in The Da Vinci Code) that life is full of secrets, always lurking — both literally and figuratively — beneath the surface. Robert Langdon is a “symbologist”; his life's work is to find the hidden meaning of things. Besides pushing our conspiracy buttons, this theme may also tap into the dissatisfaction of the secular mentality that always looks at things as brute facts, and ignores the fact that things also appear as signs, not hiding secrets but pointing towards a deeper reality. The conspiracy frenzy leads Brown’s fans to dismiss our objections to the book because we’re just “brainwashed Catholics.”
Finally, the tremendous interest in The Da Vinci Code could very well be generated by what Dan Brown called pagan human sexuality. This is really what all the business about the “sacred feminine” in the story is about. According to Brown, sex is the bridge connecting earth to heaven; men require sexual union with women (the sacred feminine) to be spiritually whole and to experience God. Brown proposes that in those pagan glory days, sex was “spiritual.” Brown writes appreciatively about orgiastic sex rituals and the “sacred” prostitution of the pagan temples. In a society where the once-confident sexual revolution is disturbed by an undercurrent of tired cynicism, the invitation to consider sex as something spiritual must be appealing. But the pagan sexuality glorified by Brown is not likely to deliver the goods. Pope Benedict gave us the real story of the cult of eros in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est:
[T]his counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it. Indeed, the prostitutes in the temple, who had to bestow this divine intoxication, were not treated as human beings and persons, but simply used as a means of arousing “divine madness”: far from being goddesses, they were human persons being exploited. An intoxicated and undisciplined eros, then, is not an ascent in “ecstasy” towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man.
To put it more bluntly, this “intoxication” is just lust. Brown’s apparent praising of women as goddesses is just another pretext for men using women. (“Sure, baby, I will worship you as a goddess.”) Brown manipulates his readers by throwing a veneer of sacredness over modern indulgence and sin. He even gives the patina of divine approval to homosexuality. When a student raises the question of Leonardo Da Vinci being a homosexual, Brown’s character Robert Langdon explains that “actually Da Vinci was in tune with the balance between male and female.” It’s unfortunate that so few Catholic clergy teach well and regularly on the Christian approach to human sexuality, for if Christians heard from the Church why sexuality really is sacred, they wouldn’t be deceived by Dan Brown. Instead, decades of mushy catechesis has created a hole which is being filled by this kind of cheap consumer-driven pulp religion. Perhaps St. Paul points to the solution of the Dan Brown enigma when he warns of false teachers who tickle our ears. Brown offers our society what it wants to hear served up in an aura of the sacred which is nothing but smoke.
Brian Killian is a freelance writer and a columnist for the Atlantic Catholic. He writes from Nova Scotia and enjoys receiving feedback at numena1@gmail.com.
Used by permission of the author. A version of this article previously appeared in the Atlantic Catholic.
