Dan Brown’s Fractured History

 

David Begelman

 

Dan Brown is one of those popular novelists who has the best of all possible worlds. His Angels and Demons (2000) and The DaVinci Code (2003) were both made into films with narrative lines that stockpile unending surprises. The author’s advantage is that his novels have become all the rage because they purport to give a new slant on church history. When it becomes clear what a poor historian Mr. Brown actually is, the sudden excuse is that his books are, after all, only entertaining fiction. We are to suppose that in providing entertainment, all those disfigurements of the historical record not only come with the territory, they can be summarily ignored in consuming the commercially successful product.

In The DaVinci Code, for example, Mr. Brown has his hero, Dr. Robert Langdon, aver that in European history five million witches were burned as heretics. The author has his holocausts confused. The actual number of victims of the witch-craze is probably nearer fifty thousand. Moreover, the percentage of executions to judicial accusations or arraignments of witches averaged only fifty percent across the European landscape. With a colossal mistake like this, Mr. Brown’s error-prone work seems to be on a fast track of being only fictional entertainment (and without an authentic historical backdrop, hardly a stellar example of the species).

That is not all. There is the relentless silliness in the book about the Priory of Sion, the secret of the Holy Grail, and the true bloodline of Jesus down through the ages. This fanciful lineage had been previously circulated in that madcap screed Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Far from what it asserts, there is no reliable historical evidence that Jesus married and fathered children. There is only an alternative version of the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene described in the Gnostic gospels. (The same scriptures also provided a different spin on the character of Judas.)

Angels and Demons continues the zany, albeit popular, tradition  of imagining that history is pretty much driven by the machinations of secret societies out to have things their own way. In the novel and Ron Howard’s recent film adaptation, the culprit is the Illuminati, an undercover conspiratorial group scheming to blow up the Vatican with a canister of anti-matter after kidnapping four cardinals. Their homicidal grousing is presumably driven by their witnessing such unfair treatment of scientists like Galileo by the Catholic clergy in the seventeenth century.

Mr. Brown’s ode to conflicts over science has a like-minded representation in the history of cinema from Dr. Mabuse to Dr. Caligari to Dr. Cyclops to Forbidden Planet to The Thing to Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. In these films, scientists may be smart all right, but they are all rather mad and screwy. In Angels and Demons, the scientific sore-losers, the Illuminati, are depicted as homicidal to boot, supposedly insinuating what happens to reason unhinged from faith—in the minds of lesser novelists and enterprising movie-makers along for the ride.

Pieties aside, Mr. Brown seems to have a voracious appetite for anachronism. The Illuminati were nowhere in sight during Galileo’s era. The order was in fact founded by Adam Weishaupt, a Bavarian professor, in the year of American independence, 1776. Weishaupt was of Jewish descent, although earlier in life trained by Jesuits. His argument with the Vatican was initially over championing the Protestant cause. Weishaupt, like Mozart, flirted with Freemasonry, but like all would-be perfectionists, felt that the order lacked the punch a proper cult should possess. For him, it wasn’t pagan enough to pass muster. (The Illuminati, ironically enough, were originally dubbed the “Perfectibilists.”) He grew to hawk an anti-clerical philosophy of egalitarianism, sexual freedom, and an emancipation from church authority spiced with ancient Greek and Mithraic mystery religion strains.

In Angels and Demons, Dr. Robert Langdon, a “symbologist” on the faculty of Harvard University, is the future hero and sleuth extraordinaire of the subsequently published The DaVinci Code. In the recent film adaptation of the book, the specialist is contacted by a church representative to aid in unraveling the mystery of an Illuminati plot in the midst of the election of a new pope. Just in case you missed it, there was a brief shot of a banner “Exeter” on the wall of Dr. Langdon’s room. The Exeter Academy is one of the top prep schools in the country, just in case you made the mistake of assuming that any Vatican consultant configured by Mr. Brown’s adaptors wasn’t a true blueblood in the best elitist tradition.

Dr. Langdon, together with his sidekick, Vittoria Vetra, an expert on anti-matter, hurtle breathlessly through a series of clues left by the Illuminati on majestic art works. The names Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Bernini rush past us, without even a nodding reference to Leonardo, as though The DaVinci Code had given us our fill of the master creator of The Last Supper, the Mona Lisa, and The Vitruvian Man.

Why the Illuminati, supposedly a secret society bent on destroying the Vatican, should leave a tell-tale trail of arcane clues as to its intentions, must be reckoned a divine mystery. At any rate, Dr. Langdon, with an ingenuity that itself has a supernatural flavor, traces them all out just in the nick of time to have someone else prevent the impending tragedy. It’s what we should expect from a Harvard professor with more brains than he can productively use in a clinch.