Means, Motive and Opportunity
I just wouldn't be a fulfilled blogger without dropping a few lines about The Da Vinci Code. Everybody's doing it, even people who say they don't care or haven't read it, or seen it, or even who have never been to Paris.
As a fiction reader, writer and lover, I'm all about the willing suspension of disbelief. Storytelling may be the highest art. Even so, I have two big gripes that strain my susceptible, gullible mind. (This piece neatly explains many more.)
First, our protagonist is roused from his hotel room at about 1:00 in the morning. By 5:30 on the same day, he has unraveled a 2000 year old conspiracy, driven to the Louve, investigated a crime scene, ran for his life, escaped from the Louve, walked, ran and scurried his way across and out of Paris, stopped in the woods, sneaked into a mansion in the 'burbs and got a little teaching from a handy English expert. Then the sun comes up. He and his new friend leave the mansion, sneak to an airport, catch the handy jet to England, with no super-secret ramjet necessary to get to London, walk around for a while, from the Templar's joint, to Westminster, again running for his life, then on the way again to Scotland, making his way out of town to the countryside to Roslyn, then solving said mystery. Then the sun goes down.
Second, let's set aside for the moment the extraordinary means by which the historic conspiracy and counter-conspiracy allegedly transpired. The Templars were serious dudes and could have done it. Here's my problem: for all the cloak and dagger hubbub, the book, its proponents and critics seem too easily to ascribe a single bad motive to a huge church and religious movement. That is, men in charge were so afraid of women that they worked very hard to change a religion fundamentally, and secretly, by great conscious machinations to keep them oppressed. I don't buy it.
Now, to be sure, women have been and are still oppressed. Patriarchy is the dominant cultural trait in nigh upon every culture, in just about every time of known humanity. In or about 500 A.D., in the Roman Empire and Hebrew culture and all those societies who surrounded them, women were oppressed and in a lower caste than men. This wasn't a church thing; this was a global cultural, social thing. To be sure, Jesus declared that in His Kingdom, there are no men or women, that all such social, cultural and gender barriers are dissolved in His grace. In harsh reality, though, as in most things, His will and grace are corrupted by its recipients.
Thus, the church had no reason to take such malicious steps to cover up the messianic message regarding women, because there never really was any threat. The male power structure would not have recognized or appreciated a threat on its borders. The "male power structure" could not have acted corporately, because it is a cultural factor, not an organization.
Even more basic, perhaps, is that men certainly are prone to act selfishly, to grab power, to defend our turf ruthlessly and to compete with other relentlessly for power and prestige. Over history, however, those fights occur between men, among men, among tribes and countries run by men. In short, men could not work together collectively to conspire against women, and men would not, could have felt collectively threatened by women collectively. That sort of sexism or feminism would not have occurred to anyone in that age.
Am I wrong? Can any of our feminist historians set me straight? Do I underestimate the capacity of men to wage consciously such a subtle war on women? Does anyone believe and can they support that the men assembling the canon even once rejected a book because of its feminism? An adverse result is not necessary the product of an evil plot; it might just be the unfortunate product of long-standing (and still standing?) cultural forces.
(For the record, I'm a gender justice kind of guy and believe that Paul meant what he said and that Jesus in fact dissolved those barriers, whether we like it or not.)
As a fiction reader, writer and lover, I'm all about the willing suspension of disbelief. Storytelling may be the highest art. Even so, I have two big gripes that strain my susceptible, gullible mind. (This piece neatly explains many more.)
First, our protagonist is roused from his hotel room at about 1:00 in the morning. By 5:30 on the same day, he has unraveled a 2000 year old conspiracy, driven to the Louve, investigated a crime scene, ran for his life, escaped from the Louve, walked, ran and scurried his way across and out of Paris, stopped in the woods, sneaked into a mansion in the 'burbs and got a little teaching from a handy English expert. Then the sun comes up. He and his new friend leave the mansion, sneak to an airport, catch the handy jet to England, with no super-secret ramjet necessary to get to London, walk around for a while, from the Templar's joint, to Westminster, again running for his life, then on the way again to Scotland, making his way out of town to the countryside to Roslyn, then solving said mystery. Then the sun goes down.
Second, let's set aside for the moment the extraordinary means by which the historic conspiracy and counter-conspiracy allegedly transpired. The Templars were serious dudes and could have done it. Here's my problem: for all the cloak and dagger hubbub, the book, its proponents and critics seem too easily to ascribe a single bad motive to a huge church and religious movement. That is, men in charge were so afraid of women that they worked very hard to change a religion fundamentally, and secretly, by great conscious machinations to keep them oppressed. I don't buy it.
Now, to be sure, women have been and are still oppressed. Patriarchy is the dominant cultural trait in nigh upon every culture, in just about every time of known humanity. In or about 500 A.D., in the Roman Empire and Hebrew culture and all those societies who surrounded them, women were oppressed and in a lower caste than men. This wasn't a church thing; this was a global cultural, social thing. To be sure, Jesus declared that in His Kingdom, there are no men or women, that all such social, cultural and gender barriers are dissolved in His grace. In harsh reality, though, as in most things, His will and grace are corrupted by its recipients.
Thus, the church had no reason to take such malicious steps to cover up the messianic message regarding women, because there never really was any threat. The male power structure would not have recognized or appreciated a threat on its borders. The "male power structure" could not have acted corporately, because it is a cultural factor, not an organization.
Even more basic, perhaps, is that men certainly are prone to act selfishly, to grab power, to defend our turf ruthlessly and to compete with other relentlessly for power and prestige. Over history, however, those fights occur between men, among men, among tribes and countries run by men. In short, men could not work together collectively to conspire against women, and men would not, could have felt collectively threatened by women collectively. That sort of sexism or feminism would not have occurred to anyone in that age.
Am I wrong? Can any of our feminist historians set me straight? Do I underestimate the capacity of men to wage consciously such a subtle war on women? Does anyone believe and can they support that the men assembling the canon even once rejected a book because of its feminism? An adverse result is not necessary the product of an evil plot; it might just be the unfortunate product of long-standing (and still standing?) cultural forces.
(For the record, I'm a gender justice kind of guy and believe that Paul meant what he said and that Jesus in fact dissolved those barriers, whether we like it or not.)
posted by JRB at 9:22 AM
2 Comments:
now, i'm one of those guys who's seen it but not read it. when my wife finished it, she said: it reads like a screenplay... and, an art historian friend of mine read it and said: brown's art history (despite consultations with his wife, who apparently has a degree in art history) is flimsy and weak.
so, i can only go with what i saw. your synopses is spot on...and quite funny.
the history in the book had the feel of a just so story (only nowhere near as good as kipling).
why is friday the 13th considered unlucky? why does the church hate women? what is the opus dei? why are these bad men following me?
and brown reached into his belly-button pulled out some fuzz and there you go a story that answers all of these questions.
what gets me about this, though... yes, there is the fortuitous coming together of conspiracy and shoddy history crammed into the form of a mystery novel, is that it's successful not because it is well-told (though, agian, i am only going on what others have told me about it) but because it has this air of truth. the truthiness of the novel, though, is because of its genre (the wise ivy league art history professor who solves a mystery that the reader is asked to solve along with him) and the ignorance of the reading public regarding the first few centuries of Christianity (which, were, it should be noted, just as contentious, sectarian, and fractious as today). this really is the advantage of living in an age where history is damned to the past... you can catch lightening in a bottle and not realize that it was just a little bit of indigestion.
i know, i've said nothing about the goddess stuff... i think you might be on to something, though.
You're right. It's all about Watergate. We find ourselves in an age where we're willing to believe a lie about a lie, rather than considering that the underlying lie might well have been true, so long as the lie about the lie sounds plausible and speaks to our lazy cynicism. We gorge on any hint of the underbelly revealed, especially when it may gloss our own sin with relative justification. Surely, there must be a subversive plot, and if your explanation is truthy, then we'll gobble it up.
I would have better said that we are ascribing a modern motive to ancients who, though with motives of their own, would not have understood the alleged crime.
There's nothing new under the sun.
My secretary today said, "But isn't it intesting that it COULD be true?" No, I said, it couldn't be true, but, yes, it would be interesting. Then we discussed why it wouldn't make much a difference. Then she, the newly converted Catholic, says, "because Jesus was divine because he rose from the dead."
Amen, sister, but wouldn't it be interesting....
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