Gnostic Nonsense
Carl E. Olson on the Cure for the Common Code
Readers with advanced degrees in comparative religion, European history, symbology, art, and cryptology will have a grand old time” reading The Da Vinci Code, gushed the Louisville Voice Tribune. Never mind that symbology is a fictitious academic discipline and no advanced degrees are currently available. The Chicago Tribune earnestly remarked that the book “transmits several doctorates’ worth of fascinating history and learned speculation.” ABC television featured the novel in a primetime special, National Geographic also plumbed its depths on the tube, and a sea of ink has been spilled examining, critiquing, and mulling over the fiction of a reclusive novelist from New Hampshire.
Why? What is the appeal? Some of it seems obvious. The novel has an intellectual appeal: Fans come away believing they now know things of value. It benefits from the historical illiteracy of many readers, an illiteracy often combined with a measure of gullibility and literary deafness. Unsuspecting readers are exposed for the first time to an attractively revisionist take on church history, a crude but effective feminism, and bracing anti-Catholic lectures. It entertains, surprises, and shocks, to the tune of 18 million copies sold worldwide.
But something deeper than intellectual games and shock value explains the Code’s success: the novel’s insistence that the author and readers not only know better—they are better. It is the confident claim that both history and truth, once tightly controlled by the Church, have finally broken their bonds and are free to serve each individual as he chooses. History is artificial, truth is relative, and religion—Christianity, to be exact—is finished.
Gnostic Centers
Put simply, it doesn’t matter what you believe as much as that you choose to believe it. You, after all, are not only the center of reality, you can create it.
It is a form of gnosticism, that resilient heresy that preys on vanity, promises a painless salvation, and puts down the simple, mindless Christian. Which is one reason I’ve been fascinated by the Coded Craziness—I’ve been bumping into various types of gnosticism throughout my life. As a teenage Christian attending art school, I was verbally accosted by a professor who railed about the “hidden Gospels” and the “murderous work” of the Church. Puzzled, I began to immerse myself in books by C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, and eventually attended a Bible college.
Later, I read Irenaeus, Augustine, and others who fought the dualisms of their day. In graduate school I read some of the so-called gnostic gospels and kept an eye on the many fresh books that proclaimed they had discovered the “real Jesus,” the “hidden Gospels,” and “authentic Christianity.” Since co-authoring The Da Vinci Hoax, I have had dozens of conversations, written and face-to-face, with people proclaiming the same thing—all because they read The Da Vinci Code.
In each enigmatic form, including the clumsy Coded variety, gnosticism is arrogant, irrational, and angry. It is a perfect fit for our troubled, postmodern times. Most of the dozens of readers who have sent me negative e-mails in response to my criticisms of the Code inevitably get around to making one point: They are open-minded (even brilliant); I am not. Anyone critical of the novel is “close-minded,” “stupid,” and even “fundamentalist.” This is often accompanied by the sarcastic reminder that the novel is “just a novel”—so stop taking it so seriously— and that the novel does actually reveal the truth—so start taking it seriously. Arrogant, irrational, and angry.
The sort of conflicting statements made by fans of the Code are free of the faintest hint of irony. One correspondent, a graduate student, mocked my criticisms of Brown’s erroneous statements about established historical facts by stating, “You also seem to miss the fact that the book is indeed fiction.” Yet one paragraph later he confidently asserts, “Kid yourself all you want, but Brown’s work in The Da Vinci Code holds more truth than you would like to think.”
Another wrote, without a trace of humor: “Is The Da Vinci Code real? NO, it’s a fictional piece.” And then spent several paragraphs explaining how the novel uncovers the “truth” about Jesus and Christianity.
Carl E. Olson is the author of Will Catholics Be ?Left Behind?? (Ignatius), and co-author, with Sandra Miesel, of The Da Vinci Hoax (Ignatius).
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