The Da Vinci Code
«When people stop believing in God, it’s not that they believe in nothing — it’s that they’ll believe in anything.» — Chesterton.
The film’s central argument is that Jesus Christ was not God (Shocker), merely a good man (Poor lamb) who married Mary Magdalene (Bless her) and founded a bloodline of royal descent that has survived to the present day in anonymity (Astonishing! Over 2,000 years and none of us heard a word about it). The Church, throughout history, would have tried to conceal these facts (How wicked) in order to oppress and dominate ordinary people, and especially women. (Oh, how terrible and cruel the Catholic Church is toward those poor defenseless women.) But (Da-dum… da-dum…) a chosen group known as “The Priory of Sion” has safeguarded the secret through the centuries.
The film (here comes the best part) tells us what happens when a prelate of “Opus Dei” named Aringarosa (who looks absolutely like Dracula) is aided by a psychopathic friar-costumed figure who is nothing more than a hired killer named “Silas,” with eyes practically glowing (remarkable), who looks like a new version of “Alien,” or better yet, a blend of “Gollum” (The Lord of the Rings) and “Norman Bates” (Psycho) — together they decide to destroy forever that terrible secret threatening the moral power of the Church (Take that!!).
Let’s see: the film takes for granted that there is no way to prove the divinity of Christ, neither now nor ever — it dismisses the testimonial authority of the canonical Gospels while accepting the apocryphal texts without a hint of criticism (charming). It also offers an anti-historical reading of the Council of Nicea and the figure of Constantine. It proposes a Marxist reading of Catholic tradition and teaching as an ideological superstructure driven by a will to power and oppression, using fear of death as an instrument to manage God’s will in the world (How delightful).
What are these people really saying, at the end of the day? No more and no less than this: the Church has manipulated pagan traditions. Which, they claim, is the proper framework for understanding Christianity (what a simplification). They propose reversing the course of history — going back to square one (as if nothing had happened) and declaring pagan religion, which worships fertility and sex with an almost cosmic dimension, to be the true faith. Against that, Christianity is the religion of the crucified, of death, of the repression of women, and of the self-flagellation of blood… which is precisely what the character of “Silas” is there to represent.
I’ll take advantage of my current irritation to say that the final minutes of the film are revolting to the point of nausea, and they confirm what I said earlier about the Marxist reading — pure, undiluted relativism. I’m referring to the final dialogue between Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu, where he says: “It is irrelevant whether Christ was God or not — what matters is what you believe, each person is defined by what they stand for.” What filth, good Lord. This is radical relativism, loaded to the brim with subjectivism, turned into the decisive criterion for the meaning of life. Or rather, it denies the meaning of life entirely: I mean, if life has no meaning, what does it matter who Jesus of Nazareth was? The film’s thesis is nihilism of a genuinely dangerous kind.
In fact the film’s intention is to leave you with more doubts than certainties — that, and nothing else, is the intention of the socialist left in the world: first make you doubt, then colonize your mind all the more easily.
The progressives — or rather, progressive thinking, a hybrid of yesterday’s Marxism and today’s foolishness — have constructed a full-blown dictatorship. A dictatorship that is, moreover, nearly impossible to escape. It dominates everything with its sentimentality, its affected manner, and its relentless insistence on what is permissible. What meets the canon of progressive sainthood and what constitutes unforgivable heresy. I, for example, am a heretic, and since they cannot burn me at the stake, they insult me by calling me a “fascist” or a “reactionary.”
Let’s get to the point. At its core the film conveys the following absurdity: “Jesus is not God” (well, well) — until (who’d have thought it) along comes Emperor Constantine, who convenes the Council of Nicea on his own authority, and declares: From now on, Jesus is God. Full stop.
The actual history, try as the clever know-it-alls might to wish otherwise, is rather different. Emperor Constantine did indeed convene the Council of Nicea — not to cause mischief, but to promote unity and eliminate heresy. He never aspired to usurp the bishops, largely because they would never have allowed it. But of course the wicked Catholic Church, “invented” by Constantine at said Council, persecuted the tolerant and peaceful worshippers of the feminine — ecologists included — killing “millions of witches, i.e., free-thinkers,” in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Let’s not forget that the malevolent Constantine was above all a worshipper of the “masculine solar cult” (in other words, a macho man), who seized Christianity, got rid of the poor “feminist Goddess,” grabbed the humble prophet Jesus (a nobody), and — zap! — turned him into a “Hero-God of the Sun.” He then staged a Stalinist-style raid to make disappear all the Gospels he didn’t like and keep the four prettiest ones, with a touch-up here and there, naturally.
To close this chapter: Constantine only intervened when the bishops attending the Council failed to enforce the conciliar decisions. The Emperor stepped in only if it was necessary to apply them — never to impose them. His intervention was understood as purely subsidiary, since the final authority rested with the bishops themselves, who in turn drew on the traditions and canons already established previously through, of course, the Holy Spirit.
Moreover, many of the bishops at Nicea were veteran survivors of ancient persecutions and bore on their bodies the marks of imprisonment, torture, or forced labor for the sake of their faith. Were they going to let an Emperor change it? Was that not the very reason for the persecutions since Nero — the Christian refusal to be absorbed as just another pagan cult?
Indeed, if Christianity before 325 had been what the film’s characters and many clever progressive/postmodern types describe, it would never have been persecuted — it would have fit in perfectly with the many other pagan options and would have been easily assimilated. Christianity was always persecuted precisely for refusing to accept the religious impositions of political power and for proclaiming that only Christ is God, with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
There are many more things to expose about this film — for instance, the references to “Opus Dei.” Most of these references provoke more laughter than anything else, but calling Opus Dei a conservative Catholic sect goes well beyond a joke. The Church itself should take action, since this is legally actionable: Opus Dei is a personal and autonomous prelature but fully under the Vatican. In fact, the Prelate (Father), the visible head of the prelature, is appointed directly by the Pope. It then has its offices in various countries, subject in turn to the corresponding territorial diocese.
Another very amusing thing (which, incidentally, is the film’s central thesis) is the idea that a group of chosen ones, “The Priory of Sion,” has safeguarded the secret through the centuries. It is, plain and simple, a hoax: this “fact” the film presents as established simply never existed. Well — this deserves a clarification: the Priory of Sion does actually exist; it’s a French association (of course) registered since 1956, no earlier, possibly originating after the Second World War, claiming to be heirs to the Masons, Templars, Egyptians, etc. The whole game here is to invent organizations in order to attack the Church (boring).
Another point: apparently it’s now the Templars who built the cathedrals. That’s false: cathedrals were commissioned by bishops, not Templars. The model for cathedrals was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or the ancient Roman basilicas.
Another: Pope Clement V did not eliminate the Templars through a Machiavellian scheme. The entire initiative against the Templars came from the French King, Philip the Fair.
Another: The Mona Lisa does not represent an androgynous being, but Madonna Lisa, wife of Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo. Mona Lisa is not an anagram of the Egyptian gods Amun and Isis.
Another: In Leonardo’s Last Supper, there is no Chalice — only the young and handsome Saint John, the beloved disciple. The film claims (through crude manipulation) that young Saint John is actually Mary Magdalene, and that she is the Grail. The truth is that the Chalice is absent because the painting depicts the Last Supper as described in the Gospel of Saint John — without the institution of the Eucharist. That’s why there is no Chalice; more precisely, the scene shows the moment when Jesus announces: “One of you will betray me.”
Another: Constantine and his male successors, through patriarchal Christianity, wiped out matriarchal paganism — and as a result, poor Mother Earth has become a man’s world. The wicked masculine ego has spent two millennia causing instability, marked by testosterone-fueled wars, a host of misogynistic societies, and a growing disrespect for “Mother Earth.” But not to worry — here come the new feminists of the twentieth century, to tell humanity that what man needs is a woman to complete him; his consort would be Mary Magdalene. For that we have drivel like “The Da Vinci Code,” where you can find material of many kinds: New Age, occultism, conspiracy theories, neo-paganism, Wicca, astrology, etc. — but the Gnostic/feminist cocktail is the base of the fruit salad. There is little real research on the “Holy Grail,” but plenty of cheap wine.
Another: According to a line in the film, during the Inquisition millions of witches were burned. Serious historians estimate that between the years 1400 and 1800 (four hundred years) between 30,000 and 80,000 people were executed in Europe for witchcraft. The majority were not burned (being subject only to lesser punishments such as prayers, imprisonment, or community labor). Not all were women, and most did not die at the hands of Church officials or even Catholics. The majority of victims were in Germany, coinciding with the peasant and Protestant wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When a region changed its religious denomination, accusations of witchcraft and collective hysteria multiplied. Civil, local, and municipal courts were especially enthusiastic — particularly in Calvinist and Lutheran areas. In any case, witchcraft has been persecuted and punished with death by Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Vikings, and others; paganism, naturally, always killed witches too. The neo-pagan-feminist idea that witchcraft was a pre-Christian feminist religion has no historical basis — rather, I think, it has a “hysterical” basis. By way of comparison, it is worth recalling that in just one week, the charming lads of the famous and highly popular “French Revolution” sent more people to the guillotine to the strains of “La Marseillaise” than all the years of the “Inquisition” in Spain combined — and we had the terrifying Torquemada, no less. The French, being more practical, did not waste time with such nonsense as ecclesiastical tribunals (What an extravagance!!).
Another: In the final scene, watching Tom Hanks kneel before the tomb of Mary Magdalene — discovered through a combination of pagan symbols — is simply hyperbolic. Of course, it’s no longer Rome that is the religious center of the West, but Paris. Well, well… and we had no idea! It’s no longer a Basilica like Saint Peter’s that serves as the place of prayer, but a “Museum,” seat of human knowledge — the only wisdom admitted and imposed by that pack of pseudo-intellectuals in service of that Western left which, since the 1960s, spread the idea that the West was responsible for poverty on earth.
Attention!! The good news, “è voilà”: the prostitute saved by Christ is now “The Goddess of Reason.”
Epilogue
Let us get clear, once and for all. That Christ is God cannot be demonstrated by “Carbon-14,” nor by this pathetic collection of amateur sorcerers — but because he did and does things that are impossible for men: above all, the most inaccessible thing to human will, which is to change the heart, to satisfy longings, to fill with joy, to introduce a dynamic of positivity, love, and forgiveness… which breaks through all the limits of death and evil.
That has been the engine of history, and it is the explanation for why a reality “so full of sin” as the Catholic Church is the only one that traverses history by ennobling the humanity of all those who sincerely allow themselves to be touched by it.
In short, to finish: a film that deals with Christ and the Catholic Church while being completely ignorant of its subject matter does not deserve to be taken seriously. There is not a single flash of historical, theological, or anthropological truth in its entire course. It is superlatively vacuous.
The Church deserves more serious critics. Please!! I am referring to filmmakers of the caliber of Bergman, Dreyer, or Pasolini.
Well, my friend, I hope this effort was worth it and that you enjoyed reading it — it was a pleasure for me.
CARLOS