Thoughts on "The Da Vinci Code"

I finally got around to seeing "The Da Vinci Code".

The story is rather silly. It reminded me of one of those so-bad-it's-good serials from the thirties where a character gets stabbed and only lives long enough to mutter some mysterious clue as to who the killer was, but not his name, and the hero gets into a life-threatening situation every ten minutes on the dot from which he can only be rescued by the most unlikely of coincidences. I mean, a guy gets shot in the head, but lives long enough to strip naked paint cryptic clues all over the room in his own blood and then get into the position of a figure from a Da Vinci drawing? The hero just happens to know an expert on the Holy Grail, who just happens to live about an hours drive away and who just happens to be the particular expert who is the leader of the conspiracy? And he just happens to have his own plane so they can get to England in half an hour? If the actors weren't so professional this would be considered a camp classic. And even as it is, parts of it are unintentionally funny, because of how crudely the plot has been hammered together.

But I can see why the Catholic Church and some others are upset about it. The existence of the gnostic gospels. The killing of, apparently, some nine million women accused of witchcraft. These things have always been major embarrassments to the Catholic Church, and, though they are no secret to the educated, they may be new knowledge to many of the millions who have read the book or will see the movie. And most Christian churches feel threatened by those who say that Jesus was a great guy but he wasn't God. I've been told repeatedly by Christians that I have to believe that Jesus was God or that he was a hopeless lunatic, that there is no other possible belief. Personally, I believe that neither of those beliefs is rational and that there is a perfectly rational third way to interpret his life.

To me the idea that anyone can rise physically from the dead (leaving aside the wonders of medical science in the case of short term shutdown of bodily functions) is ludicrous. And similarly to believe that our ego (for in what else lies our individuality as a separate psychological entity) persists in some ethereal form when the brain structure which gives it that identity has rotted. Jesus was clearly a wise, compassionate and virtuous individual. We can tell that from the things he said which have been passed down to us. And wisdom and the effects of compassionate and virtuous behaviour do live on after the individual dies. Surely that is the only kind of immortality we can have and the only kind he promised. In that sense Jesus is more alive now than when he was walking around in Jerusalem or wherever. But that view is threatening both to the church and to those whose lives are so wretched that only the hope of something after death makes them bearable.

The interesting thing though is that, while "the big secret" of "The Da Vinci Code" purports to challenge the irrational belief that Jesus was God, it replaces this with an equally irrational belief in the magical powers of genes. Virtue, wisdom, compassion - these things are not passed on in someone's DNA. Just as they transcend the physical and the individual, they also transcend genetic inheritance. Someone can teach me to understand or can show me the kind of love that heals bitterness in my heart without them being my parents. The beauty of these things is that they aren't contained. They can spread like a virus, as they should. (And the idea of holy bloodlines is what led to that other instrument of irrational tyranny - the monarchy.)

And I find it funny that Ian McKellen's character believes that the knowledge that Jesus was only a man will end the church's tyranny over women and the poor. Women and the poor were being tyrannised long before the time of Jesus and continue to be today in many non-Christian societies. Some pagans may have worshipped feminine gods, as well as or instead of male gods, but peaceful hippy-like tree-hugging woman-honoring pagans, if they existed, were no more representative than other pagans like the human-sacrifice-obsessed Aztecs or the Vikings, Huns and Mongols who raped and murdered and pillaged their way around half the world. The Christian churches perverted Christ's message and used it to whitewash the same kinds of brutal oppression that had been going on since the year dot, but they didn't invent the oppression of women or the exploitation of the poor.

The real heart of the church's power doesn't lie in the idea that Jesus was God, but in people's belief in Heaven and Hell. The promise of reward and the threat of punishment are at the heart of any form of power that one person has over others. Life after death doesn't seem to me to be a rational thing in which to believe. But would the world be a better place if someone could prove that, as John Lennon put it, there's "no Hell below us, above us only sky"? I don't think so. Think how many people are only restrained from doing destructive things by the fear they will go to Hell (or not go to Heaven) if they do them.

I don't think Mary Magdalene was the Holy Grail. The real Holy Grail is full understanding of the human psyche. All religions are concerned with the problem of evil. Evil is a problem of human behaviour. Human behaviour has its origin in human psychology. And psychological problems can only be cured by understanding what experiences generated them and how a misunderstanding of those experiences has led to unhelpful adaptations of behaviour. If Jesus was no more than a relatively unscarred example of human nature, then imagine what the world will be like when we learn to effectively heal the psychological scars that keep us from being like that.