Some people will probably use the book as a starting point for their own questioning of how Christianity became what it is today, and what has been excluded - and in that quest, they will look for what might have actually happened, rather than what they would like to have happened. But the way that I see this material being presented and discussed around me suggests that many, perhaps most, will just take the garbled pap that Brown and all the other members of the new Da Vinci code industry that's grown up around the book and now the movie and not think about questions of fiction, history, truth and imagination.
In the sense that it raises questions, there's nothing wrong with the book itself *as a work of fiction*. What disturbs me deeply, however, is the author's presentation of the book as based on "real history."
Forgive me for ranting about the state of and attitudes toward knowledge today in North America, and perhaps the entire supposedly developed world, but this is a very large pet peeve of mine.
There is such a thing as history. There are real documents, artifacts, etc. Some of these are of course open to a great deal of interpretation, and one source alone does not tell you anything, but there are real sources of information that can be looked at together, given appropriate weight and consideration, and used to develop an understanding of history.
Not all documents deserve the same weight. You cannot, for example, place the same weight on oral traditions or literary works as you can on troop manifest or grain inventories - and compiling all of those boring troop manifests will, eventually, tell you if the war that's celebrated in oral tradition actually took place.
These days, there is much blurring of history, literary tradition, oral tradition, and imagination - which is then turned around and sold as "a true story." And that's what's happened with The Da Vinci Code. It's fiction. Some of it is loosely based on history that has been rewritten to serve the plot, some of it is based on some oral and literary traditions - mostly the variants considered least reliable, by the way - and some of it is based very loosely on some true general principles. Early Chritianity did, in fact, absorb a great deal of pagan influences, from arbitrarily picking the birthday of Jesus to co-incide with the already celebrated birthday of an earlier god with similar characteristics (Mithras) to encouraging the doctrine of the intercession of the saints in a way that resembled the polytheistic worship many rural people were used to (one big skygod, some supernatural companions and a lot of smaller lares and penates). Mariolatry was a definite resurgence of the need to position a divine feminine role somewhere in the pantheon. And so on.
But while parts of what Brown wrote are based, to some degree, on things that did happen, or are similar to things that did happen, the book is being presented as if the "secret" and all of the "evidence" of its existence is fact, and the fiction part is just the narrative of how a couple modern people discover all of this.
I've been watching all of the psuedo-documentaries that have been flooding the airwaves in advance of the opening of the film, and most of them as such bad history that I sit there weeping in rage at the total distortion of what has been hard-wrung from the obscurity of the past by dedicated people who sought to find the truest possible account of how things were and how they came to be.
It is true that sometimes a work of fiction can give us a deeper truth - at a symbolic and psychological level - than any record of fact. But in the name of anything that might be holy, let us please be able to know the difference.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2006-05-09 08:16 pm (UTC)In the sense that it raises questions, there's nothing wrong with the book itself *as a work of fiction*. What disturbs me deeply, however, is the author's presentation of the book as based on "real history."
Forgive me for ranting about the state of and attitudes toward knowledge today in North America, and perhaps the entire supposedly developed world, but this is a very large pet peeve of mine.
There is such a thing as history. There are real documents, artifacts, etc. Some of these are of course open to a great deal of interpretation, and one source alone does not tell you anything, but there are real sources of information that can be looked at together, given appropriate weight and consideration, and used to develop an understanding of history.
Not all documents deserve the same weight. You cannot, for example, place the same weight on oral traditions or literary works as you can on troop manifest or grain inventories - and compiling all of those boring troop manifests will, eventually, tell you if the war that's celebrated in oral tradition actually took place.
These days, there is much blurring of history, literary tradition, oral tradition, and imagination - which is then turned around and sold as "a true story." And that's what's happened with The Da Vinci Code. It's fiction. Some of it is loosely based on history that has been rewritten to serve the plot, some of it is based on some oral and literary traditions - mostly the variants considered least reliable, by the way - and some of it is based very loosely on some true general principles. Early Chritianity did, in fact, absorb a great deal of pagan influences, from arbitrarily picking the birthday of Jesus to co-incide with the already celebrated birthday of an earlier god with similar characteristics (Mithras) to encouraging the doctrine of the intercession of the saints in a way that resembled the polytheistic worship many rural people were used to (one big skygod, some supernatural companions and a lot of smaller lares and penates). Mariolatry was a definite resurgence of the need to position a divine feminine role somewhere in the pantheon. And so on.
But while parts of what Brown wrote are based, to some degree, on things that did happen, or are similar to things that did happen, the book is being presented as if the "secret" and all of the "evidence" of its existence is fact, and the fiction part is just the narrative of how a couple modern people discover all of this.
I've been watching all of the psuedo-documentaries that have been flooding the airwaves in advance of the opening of the film, and most of them as such bad history that I sit there weeping in rage at the total distortion of what has been hard-wrung from the obscurity of the past by dedicated people who sought to find the truest possible account of how things were and how they came to be.
It is true that sometimes a work of fiction can give us a deeper truth - at a symbolic and psychological level - than any record of fact. But in the name of anything that might be holy, let us please be able to know the difference.