The Da Vinci Code in the Academy The Da Vinci Code in the Academy Edited by Bradley Bowers CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING The Da Vinci Code in the Academy, edited by Bradley Bowers This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Bradley Bowers and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-129-5; ISBN 13: 9781847181299 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction.............................................................................................................vi Chapter One The Works of the Female: Mary Magdalene and the Return of the Goddess..........1 Chapter Two Jesus Loved Her More Than the Rest: Mary Magdalene,The Sacred Feminine, and What’s Really Been Covered Up....................................................................21 Chapter Three The “Scholar’s Code”: Biblical Interpretation, Postmodernism, and The Da Vinci Code..........................................................................................31 Chapter Four Experiencing is Believing: The Feminine Divine Exposed...................................48 Chapter Five The Da Vinci Code and Women in the Alchemic Tradition..................................58 Chapter Six The Da Vinci Code, Medieval Grail Stories, and the Sacred Feminine.................69 Chapter Seven The Not So Sacred Feminine: Female Representation and Generic Constraints in The Da Vinci Code..........................................................................82 Contributors...........................................................................................................97 Index......................................................................................................................99 INTRODUCTION The question is obvious: Why The Da Vinci Code? Why has one novel among many recent and similar novels, one fictional work among many speculative works over the last fifty years, one presentation of “facts” as “fiction” captured the imaginations and the interest of both the common reader and the critical academic? The answer is both obvious and obscure, like The Da Vinci Code’s sources and secrets. To find an answer, or perhaps several answers, I have asked a number of scholars—religious, literary, cultural—to examine the cultural phenomenon which has become The Da Vinci Code controversy. Specifically, these critics go beyond the continuing debate over the validity of sources and stories, of histories and alternative histories. They look at this text in terms of the controversy which it has caused, and why it has caused such controversy. It is easy to observe that The Da Vinci Code has been a powerful catalyst. The intriguing question for academics and other cultural observers: a catalyst in what mixture of forces, ideas, values? One book has functioned to trigger a cultural explosion, but what were the ingredients, waiting to react? What made The Da Vinci Code, if I may borrow a current cultural analogy, into The Perfect Storm? One thing is clear: the answer always manifests itself at the intersection of fact and fiction. Every scholarly debate, in one way or another, returns to these fundamental questions: What is fact? What is fiction? This phenomenon has been our first date, culturally speaking, with postmodernism. This rising chorus of voices is the first popular awareness of the unraveling of authority proposed by the postmodern dilemma. A Code To Live By Regardless of what one thinks of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, a couple of facts are indisputable. Individually, tens of millions of people worldwide have read the novel. Publicly, it has gotten a lot of attention. That’s a bit of an understatement. This one contemporary novel has generated at least fifty other books which claim to explain, to debunk, to criticize, or to capitalize on the attention. Likewise, universities have created courses to do the same. Conferences have been held worldwide, including in Leonardo’s hometown of Vinci, Italy, mostly to debate the factual errors, the historical inaccuracies, the The Da Vinci Code in the Academy: Resisting the Goddess vii flawed theories—contained in this fiction. Even the Vatican itself has joined the debate, one which will surely continue for years. We, however, are not concerned only with alleged errors or inaccuracies, at least not those that may or may not be contained in this novel. We are concerned with the perhaps unprecedented reaction to a popular novel by otherwise sober academics and their institutions, by religious leaders and organizations more often concerned with people’s souls rather than a book’s sales, by the common readers who seem so impassioned by a retelling of the passion of the Christ which previously had become for so many passé. The Da Vinci Code, like it or not, has entered the academy. And so we begin to look—not at the book’s veracity—but at our collective reaction to what is now a debate beyond one book, but a debate about all of our stories. Be they scholarly or popular, religious or radical, sacred or profane, these are the codes we live by. Postmodernism Meets the Masses At a conference, we were talking about The Da Vinci Code controversy, about why this novel has become more than a novel. That was the key, we agreed. It’s not about Brown, the novel, or Leonardo da Vinci. It is the rekindling of desire, desire to reconnect with the divine in a world which has been robbed of divine secrets and stripped of divine codes, a world which continues to erase the wisdom of the ancients, and which denies that our stories can contain truth, even a glimpse of it. It’s the postmodern dilemma. Everything is a text. But . . . what do we need to survive? We need a text. We need a story. We need our stories. We have always had stories, and for most of human history, stories were true. Stories were, and are, where we keep the truth, or at least something close to it. The novel’s speculations about history and religion do not so much suggest lies as they suggest that truth, and true stories, still exist. Leonardo knew it, as did many, many writers, artists, and everyday folks throughout our existence on this planet. People throughout history have solved problems and dilemmas large and small, by recognizing the underlying divinity of human existence. That is, until the twentieth century. “Where is now thy God?” (Catholic Prayer Book, 1662) The Da Vinci Code phenomenon is a reaction to a century-long process: access to the divine realm of human existence has been lost, severed by the rise of, first, modernism, and then, postmodernism, which have reduced all of our stories to texts, including our most sacred mythologies. Brown’s novel has viii Introduction touched a nerve by suggesting that we could perhaps reconnect to our stories, that our mythologies once again could be true. For most of our collective history, our stories revealed the real connection between human experience and that which is beyond human experience, that is, beyond rational human understanding. Through our participation in these stories, in our mythologies, we could experience, intuit, feel, and know something of what is beyond. Now all of our stories—myth, legend, religion, history, opinion, news, novels, films--are only texts, devoid of the authority they once had. Why? A text is written by a human being. A text can be changed. A text does not reveal fundamental truth, divine truth, by providing a story that can be understood by a human being. A text is simply a manipulation of words. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, whose preface claims that all “descriptions of . . . documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate,” has achieved tremendous success and notoriety. Why? The novel has introduced millions of people to the postmodern paradox: if everything’s a text these days, where do we find truth? Over the last century, we have accepted that all of the codes we live by are really just stories, just texts, and texts are not truths. Now, Brown’s novel has confronted millions with that dilemma by suggesting that alternative texts may exist and may have as much, or even greater, authority than the standard versions. The Contributors Robert Davis examines the underlying issue of the sacred feminine, and his is a masterful description of the origins and resurgence of the goddess figure today in the discussion of this novel and in a number of other forums. He offers an intriguing explanation for The Da Vinci Code’s incredible popularity based on a re-manifestation of the sacred feminine, especially in American culture, fostered by the feminist and post-feminist re-visioning of religion and history over the last fifty years. Also, he offers a meticulous explication of why this popular novel forced its way into academic debates. His analysis, as many of the other analyses, touches on the rise of feminism, the weakening of the traditional church, the loss of textual authority in a globally connected world, and the continuing need for divine authority in a globally confused world. Ultimately, the nexus of the debate falls into the inevitable postmodern gap. Its most recent return, popularized by a novel, began almost a century ago. It blossomed as we approached the twenty-first century, only to explode in recent years, a phenomenon of a culture, he writes, “obscurely dissatisfied with its moral and spiritual inheritance.” The Da Vinci Code in the Academy: Resisting the Goddess ix Deanna Thompson takes a revealing look at the controversy, and she concludes that the debate itself is not actually centered on feminism, not specifically fueled by the idea of sacred feminine. The focus of the controversy is on sex, and she leads us on a field trip back in time to meet some early Christians. Rachel Wagner looks carefully at the bases of the debates, and she reveals a set of Chinese boxes, each text revealing a previous text as its basis. Her analysis of the controversies goes beyond the written texts under discussion as sources. The texts being called into question by all sides are the texts of credentials, experience, study—our life texts which give authority to those who inhabit them—whether academic or clergy, professor or priest, scholar or saint. The reason for The Da Vinci Code debate is made clear: postmodernism is the new Gnosticism; relativism, the enemy of Christian faith. Arlette Poland, likewise, takes us back to visit early Christianity. Poland’s approach suggests that the solution lies not in the truth or fiction of the texts (whether ancient or modern) but in experience itself. She does, however, recognize the immense importance of texts in shaping our experience of the divine, especially the divine feminine. Rosa Maria Stoops presents another unique perspective on the controversy. As both an academic and a Catholic, she explores the ironies of Brown’s novel and its subsequent debaters, so ready to question the authority of traditional texts and teachings, while so eager to accept the authority of alternative texts and theories. She places the charge of systemic discrimination against women into the context of Catholic Church history, up to and including the positions taken by Pope John Paul II. Like many of the other critics here included, her analysis reveals that the popular polemic debates often oversimplify and misrepresent the issues at hand. Harry Brown examines the novel as a new Grail quest, which it purports to be. While he agrees that the phenomenon of the novel’s popularity has parallels with the tremendous popularity of the Grail legends of centuries past, he enumerates the differences among The Da Vinci Code’s version and the various manifestations of the divine feminine as part of the Grail quest stories. His conclusion points to a specific but elusive underlying reason for the book’s twenty-first century impact. Our last essayist points out that The Da Vinci Code is not the heretical treatise it has been made out to be. If we read carefully, we may actually come to the opposite conclusion. Jennifer Brandt writes about the detective genre, and she reveals that the popular debate often misses the point. She argues that the novel is not a model for feminism, inside or outside of the Church. She suggests that this detective thriller is truly just that, conforming to almost every expectation and stereotype. x Introduction Her analysis challenges the premises of those who suggest that Brown’s novel presents anything new, different, or contrary to the patriarchal standards for gendered behaviors. The Awakening This exploration of the reaction to a novel has paralleled an experience I have every spring. I have the pleasure of seeing a mind’s awakening, expanding, comprehending, seeing in a way not yet imagined. It seems profound, and in some way it is, but it is also a quite normal process of intellectual growth. Let me explain. Every spring for the last ten years, I have taught a first-year course which I created for the Honors program at my university. It replaces the standard Introduction to Literature course required of almost all students, because most students in the Honors program have already been introduced quite thoroughly to literature. Titled Twentieth Century Literature and Culture, it is designed not only to enhance their appreciation of literature but also to provide an introduction to literary theory and its linguistic underpinnings. The students are always from diverse disciplines and diverse cultures, which I have found provides the perfect cauldron for preparing this potion. In short, these bright first-year students, most recently out of high school, are introduced first to the premises of Modernism, as distinguished from Romanticism, broadly defined. By spring break, we are moving into Postmodernism, and they are thoroughly uncomfortable with the breakdown of certainty and stability. However, by the time we reach the final weeks, they are not only comfortable with the postmodern dilemma, they also feel extremely empowered by this heretofore secret knowledge. They are further comforted by their understanding that this knowledge is reserved only for the initiate. Only those who have endured the process (in this case, Honors English) will know the code. The initiates have been given a power to understand how a text is created and maintained, but more importantly, how they themselves can alter, indeed create, new texts to serve their needs. Why have scholars worldwide reacted with such vehemence to a detective novel? The postmodern dilemma is not necessarily new to intellectual understanding. However, it has recently been magnified by our proliferation of texts and global communication. It has been said that the Internet makes every person on the planet an author and publisher, and with this change, the conditions that grant a text authority are being lost. An accepted text, an authoritative text, must have readers who accept that authority. And we are in the process of losing millions and millions of readers, who are being replaced