Two
years after the American author
Dan
Brown published his sensational novel
The
Da Vinci Code, the Roman Catholic Church cast its voice in
this matter. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Archbishop of Genoa, has
publicly
denounced it as a sack full of lies against the Church,
against the real history of Christianity and against Christ
himself. Also, during the Easter celebrations, the Vatican
called upon bookstores to take the novel off their shelves.
Quite clearly it would apply to The Da Vinci Code as well.
Does it seem strange that the Church speaks with passion about
a thriller?
The
Roman Catholic Church, as it appears, basically deals with all
the unfavourable comments or unfortunate events in two ways.
One way is to keep silent. But it is difficult to keep silent
over something that has been published in dozens of millions
of copies around the world. The other way is to make a stern
repulse. The repulse, of course, would not be necessary in an
unimportant case. So, on the second glance, the matter does
not look unimportant. Hence the Church's rebuke. One also
needs to keep in mind that Cardinal Bertone used to be an
assistant to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the
Catholic Church's
Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith, not just a Vatican
employee.
Formally, we are dealing with a sensational thriller. A good
reading, if you ask me; one can literally gobble the novel, of
course, someone, who still has something of a child in his/her
soul. But it is not worth to comment on that, as well as it is
not worth to comment on the mistakes the author made in
portraying some of London's landmarks. Brown's novel contains
issues that are so important, and attract so much attention,
that they had made the Vatican bureaucracy uneasy so much that
it has decided to react.
First of all it is about the feminist theme - the attempt of
rehabilitation of Mary Magdalene as the first disciple of
Jesus Christ. Because usually we hear about rather patriarchal
arguments, whether it is St.Peter, or St.Paul, or maybe
St.John, second to Jesus. And here comes a competitor: female
- not male. And on top of that, she has solid basis to take
her place next to St.John as the teacher's beloved disciple.
Or perhaps she is even going to take St.John's place!
Christian tradition
says that there were several women around Jesus. Most notably
three: Mary of Magdala, from whom Jesus cast out seven demons,
Mary of Bethany, associated with the woman
in the city who was a sinner [Luke 7:37] and washed
Jesus' feet, and also identified as Lazarus' sister, and
finally, Mary Magdalene, whom Jesus saved from stoning after
she had been taken in adultery. [John 8:1-11] The film
The
Passion of the Christ made this connection,
although it is not explicitly taught in the Bible. In my
humble opinion, all three are the same person, and although
she is given little attention in the Bible, she is an
incredibly important a figure.
First, the Gospels say that Jesus cast seven demons out of
Mary Magdalene - and that corresponds to the purging of seven
esoteric chakras - in
other words, Jesus initiated her, made her introduced. Then,
Mary Magdalene witnessed most of the events surrounding the
Crucifixion. She was present at the mock trial of Jesus; she
heard Pontius Pilate pronounce the death sentence; and she saw
Jesus beaten and humiliated by the crowd. She was one of the
women who stood near Jesus during the crucifixion to try to
comfort Him. And finally, who is the earliest witness to the
resurrection of Jesus? Nobody else, but Mary Magdalene! Yet,
she was a woman, so the Apostles did not believe her... It is
also worth mentioning that it was not until the 6th century
that Mary Magdalene, courtesy of pope Gregory the Great, was
depicted as a harlot. It is true that the Gospels, both
canonical and apocryphal, refer to her, with a certain
disapproval, as porne,
but never as a harlot. Whereas porne
means an unorthodox person, a trouble-maker, or an outsider.
One can accept that there was a relationship between Jesus and
Mary Magdalene, from which a child could be born. But Brown
goes farther - he claims that Christ's offspring gave the
beginning to the Merovingian dynasty, later overthrown by the
Carolingians, which in their turn produced the consecutive
royal houses of France - Valois and Bourbon. A Bourbon, Louis
XVI was executed during the French Revolution, which in its
turn was prepared by the Franc Masons, a secret society
founded by the Templars. And they were guarding the secret of
Jesus and Magdalene - here comes the revenge after centuries!
Nice story, nothing more. Undocumented hypothesis at best.
In fact, it is not even original. The whole plot of The
Da Vinci Code is based on the novel
Holy
Blood, Holy Grail written by three Englishmen -
Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln - back in
1982. There they unfold the whole story of Jesus, Mary
Magdalene, their child and the Merovingians. While the story
of the secret society called Prieure
de Sion - the Priory of Zion - which reportedly has
been guarding the genealogical line of the Merovingian sons,
grandsons, great-grandsons and so on till present days, is
simply a hoax. The documents, the authors had studied at the
National Library in Paris, have been exposed as a bogus. Brown
only replicates it.
So, why the Roman Catholic Church is so afraid of a bogus?
After all it did not protest so vehemently after the
publication of the Holy Blood.
The Church is afraid of people's belief that The
Da Vinci Code presents facts. It is afraid of the
reality we might call a virtual reality, which is brighter and
more attractive than the reality we live in. The virtual
reality that is stronger than facts. It was
Carl
Gustav Jung, who wrote that mass psychical phenomena
become real facts. In German it is called wirklich
- real, from the word wirken
- to act. Beliefs act! The Holy
Blood, Holy Grail, could interest just a narrow circle
of sublime intellectuals, The
Da Vinci Code is addressed to the broad audience. It
was addressed to the masses and has captivated the masses. And
that is dangerous to the Roman Catholic Church. just like the
Satanic
Verses are dangerous to the Islamic
fundamentalists.
I personally prefer the analogy to semen and egg. A little
semen cell makes a big revolution in the egg! It does not
really matter, whether readers believe in Brown's story. It is
enough to start asking questions, and that is what makes The
Da Vinci Code something good. The Church is
simultaneously fossilized and decaying. It needs such a book,
which will shake its moulded construction. Are we looking at
the dawn of a new religious idea with Mary Magdalene as the
key figure? Why not?! The conspiracy theory is one thing, and
spirituality, which we can derive from Mary Magdalene, is
another. We still can remain Christians in a new form.
While the officials of the Roman Catholic Church on every
conceivable occasion tell us that the Church is two thousand
years old and survived everything, they forget to say that
there are two strata of the Church. One is the visible Church,
institutionalized, official Church of the sinners, and the
other one is the spiritual, mystic Church. The former may not
survive, while the latter may be eternal, although in
different forms. The whole Christian esoteric tradition is
exactly the dispute between the institution and the spirit, a
symbolic dispute between St.Peter and St.John. In the last
chapter of the
Gospel
of John, Jesus entrusts feeding his sheep to Peter.
When Peter points at John and asks what about him, Jesus
answers: What is that to
thee? If I will that he tarry till I come. And that is
interpreted as entrusting to John the esoteric Christianity.
Christianity that will not require going to church and paying
priests. Because esoterics puts forward one question: how to
recognize the deity, in other words, how to experience God?
This was the question first put by the mysticists, whom the
Church elevated to the altars after the death, but kept on
short leash for life. Some of them, like for example
St.Francis, had even got the taste of the dungeons of the
Inquisition.
Nowadays we see the decline of the institutionalized Church.
By that I mean that the people abandon it. People do not
revolt, because they seldom revolt, yet they abandon the
Church. Meanwhile the church bureaucracy remains as firm as a
rock. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is here a very symbolic
example. When I write this article, the Roman Catholic Church
is saying its farewells to the old pope and bracing for the
election of the new one. When you read it, the choice will be
already known. It is a good moment to summarize the experience
of the past pontificate and perspectives for future.
What can a beleaguered camp do? To capitulate or to make the
last stand. To the Roman Catholic Church the reign of Karol
Wojtyła (John Paul II) was such a last stand. After the
enthusiastic reception of the reforms of the
Vaticanum
Secundum, he bossed the crowd that already fancied
too many liberties, enforced conservative course, and silenced
liberal theologians like, for example, Cardinal Franz König -
all after the
mysterious
death of pope John Paul I (Albino Luciani). What would be
the world according to Wojtyła can be seen on the example
of his native country, Poland, which already has the concordat
with the Vatican, exemption of the clergy from taxes and legal
liabilities, religion in schools and state offices, ban on
abortions, ban on contraceptives, ban on prenatal diagnosis
and other beauties of a clerical state. But, of course, the
problem is not in legal regulations as such. The problem is
that through such regulations the Church acquires totalitarian
power over the state, and control of most of its citizens, as
it shapes their education and mentality.
There is a prophecy saying that after the Polish pope there
will be two another popes, and then the "end of the
days" will come. Among possible candidates, two are seen
as the most probable picks: Ratzinger and Cardinal Francis
Arinze. They both are "gurus" of the Catholic
ultra-conservatism. And when it comes to "gurus", I
recall that after the Revolution of 1905 in Russia, another
"guru", an occultist Rasputin, appeared at the court
of czar Nicholas II. Rasputin had induced the czar to organize
a spiritist seance, during which the ghost of the
strongman-czar Alexander III would be asked what to do with
the revolution. So they did and asked. Alexander III is
reputed to say: Suppress it
or in 12 years you will have another revolution, which will
wipe you off. So he said and disappeared. But Rasputin
remained, bound with the last of the Romanovs with a mystical
covenant that as long as he were alive, nothing bad would
happen to the royal family. Yet he died... in 1916! I do not
know, whether John Paul II had ever spoken to the ghosts -
surely he did not need to - but he assured us that as long as
he were alive, the Church would not crumble...
The end of the days, though, may have different forms. It may
be, for example, a radical revolution in the human minds,
leading to a new époque, in which the institutionalized
Church will no longer be needed. Perhaps the one that Jesus,
and St.Francis, and many others dreamt of. It would not be the
end of the world, but surely the end of the bureaucratic world
of the Vatican.
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