Read the book, saw the movie - enjoyed them both, but didn't buy the T-shirt! Apart from its few literary stumbles, I enjoyed the pace of Dan Brown's mini-Baedeker tour. All the sights and scenes of glorious Paris: the Louvre, the church of St. Sulpice, and the friendly exterior of the American Embassy! Then, the flight to London and the twin-towers of Westminster Abbey and its lighter and darker interior places. The tour and detours ending peacefully at Rosslyn Chapel, a bus ride from the center of Edinburgh. Was it a divine co-incidence or simple happenstance that I've not only visited these places, but feel I have had a special relationship with each of them? St. Sulpice, where the key to the Grail was supposed to be found, was just a block or so from the tiny apartment I stayed in for a month as a student back in the late fifties; Westminster Abbey where Anna and I spent our last day in England visiting with the Dean before our departure on the Queen Mary to New York. And, Yes! Rosslyn Chapel, part of the Episcopal Diocese of Edinburgh where my supervisor in my first year as minister was dean. I made regular bus visits out there to discuss theology so nothing mysterious much less mystical. I wasn't even aware of the grail associations of all these places, though the story of the Grail has been told and retold by Christian of Troy, Von Eschenbach, and Sir Thomas Mallory in the middle ages, and immortalized in Richard Wagner's Opera, "Parsifal". Fragments of Grail fascination have inspired the very highest levels of even modern literature, art, and music.
According to tradition, the Grail was the cup that Christ drank from at the Last Supper, possessed of spiritual powers and qualities. The search for the Holy Grail was the task of the Knights of the Round Table in the Arthurian legend. Dan Brown's book affirms that Mary Magdalene was pregnant with Jesus' child at the time of the Crucifixion, and thus was the real vessel of Christ's blood. He further asserts that Christ's bloodline has survived, but that malevolent forces within the Roman Church have killed to protect such a dangerous secret. Any discovery of this truth would be to radically undermine the church's "masculine" authority and elevate the femine grail as the true spiritual quest, and this is at least one element in recent feminist thinking. It is a new story which, if true, would totally undercut the authority of the Roman Catholic orthodoxy and hierarchy.
Here we face the problem of historical truth. What really happened when we try to go back 2000 years? When the first records of Gospel events were written down some 30-45 years after Jesus' death. Where the actual events are so deeply colored by myth and legend as to be virtually inaccessible. As a modern critic has written, we know only two things for certain about the life of Jesus. First, he preached in parables; second, he was crucified. The Christmas stories of Matthew and Luke are pure legend. Only 18% of the words ascribed to Jesus actually go back to him and only 20% of his actions do so. Unitarian and deist thinkers, like most of our founders, already sensed the chasm between the Christ of Faith and the Jesus of history. Liberal protestants and Unitarians worked on the Gospels to separate fact from fiction, myth from reality, what Jesus actually said from what he is said to have said! This was not to destroy Jesus, but to distinguish his true teaching from later misinterpretations. The people who color-coded "The Five Gospels" were concerned not with reinforcing piety, but affirming the rights of honest literary and historical criticism. Any critic, including Dan Brown, must be bound by the canons of historical honesty, but he is careless of genuine history in at least two items. First, that to further the unity of the newly untied eastern and western parts of this empire, Constantine imposed the doctrine of Christ's divinity. Not true! The idea of Christ's divinity was broadly accepted by 325 AD. What was at stake was the nature of that divinity. To the orthodox, Christ was absolutely divine. To Arian Christians, Jesus was divine, but subordinate to the Father. This doesn't help Brown's credibility. Second, since Jesus was a good Jew, he would surely have been married, but it's likely that John the Baptist and many other holy men were not. So much hangs on this, especially for our Catholic friends. Jesus had to be celibate, just as his mother, Mary, had to conceive Jesus virginally, but - and Brown would like this - on the question of Jesus' celibacy, the majority of the scholars of the color-coded Gospels "doubted", in fact, that Jesus himself was celibate. They regard it as probable that he had a special relationship with at least one woman, Mary of Magdala.
Whether we're talking about the Gospels, or the Grail Legend, our first and foremost concern is the question of historical truth. The integrity of the Gospel records can never be a matter of pre-set dogma. It's my sad conclusion that however fascinating Brown's new twist on the Grail Legend, it damages his own valid agenda with its own historical errors and tends to obscure his obvious and admirable attempt to rehabilitate the idea of the sacred feminine: a central concern of both modern feminism and depth psychology. The very principle of feminist itself distorted and often brutalized by the Fathers of the Church and the Puritans in witch-hunt and general depreciation of the feminine. This becomes a moral issue, as feminists well understand, perhaps the moral issue of our time. That it is a painful issue is no argument against raising it.
Of course, there's more than a faint odor of old fashioned anti- Catholicism fed by the feud between French rationalism and Catholic authority. The important thing is what is most likely to be historically true. Given the antiquity and obscurity of the texts, we're always dealing with probability, not certainty, but it is probable to the point of certainty that the virgin birth of Jesus' mother is a legend grounded in ancient myth. Jesus' marriage to Mary Magdalene is far more likely to be historical, though as probability, not certainty. I was startled in reading the opinion of the Gospel scholars on this question of Jesus' celibacy. A majority doubted that Jesus was celibate. They regard it as probable that he had a special relationship with at least one woman, Mary Magdalene. Here our concern is with historical truth, not anti-Catholicism. It certainly provides a new way of looking at the Gospels.
I think we should be grateful to Dan Brown for putting front and center the issue of repression, of the feminine in the Christian Church - Protestant as well as Catholic: The exaltation of virginity over marriage, the sometimes demonization of women, not to mention the burning of innocent women as witches. Even into our own time, the religious and cultural failure to grasp the full moral and psychological dimensions of such unfathomable hostility to feminine values and sensitivity throughout the ages. The question of the feminine, in one form or another, becomes front and center. The Da Vinci Code, whatever its faux pas, dramatizes a profound cultural, psychological, and religious issue, and it is the issue that is twisting so many people into so many knots.