I’ve often wondered: what chord, exactly, did The Da Vinci Code strike with so many people for it to sell more than 40 million copies? After all, it’s not a very good book. The prose is tedious. The plot is ridiculous. The characters are stereotyped stick-figures. It contains page after page of strained dialogue about esoteric and nigh-on indecipherable symbolic analyses.
But—and this, no doubt, is the key to the book’s appeal—it does offer a version of Christianity that confirms our deepest suspicions and conspiratorial fantasies.
As we all now know, the punch-line of the book is that Mary Magdalene is the lost Grail, the "absent cause" of Christianity, a kind of primordial sacrifice who must be forgotten for the Christian faith to exist. The fate of Mary Magdalene, for Brown, is thus a parable of the erasure of the sacred feminine from Western life, and his book stands as a testament to her quiet nobility against the habitual violence of monotheistic religions.
As the story goes, the sacred feminine has taken flight from the West and Middle East after centuries of persecution—from Mary’s defamation at the hands of male-dominated Church Councils, to the imprisonment of Muslim women behind the hijab, to the maltreatment of Gaia, the Earth-Mother, by testosterone-fuelled multinational corporations—and must now be sought in the holistic, non-cerebral practices of Eastern spirituality.
The moral injunctions embedded in the narrative are clear: abandon the self-destructive scientific and military drive of the West (a drive it has inherited from its monotheistic past) and embrace the unfathomable mysteries of life; renounce the can of science in favour of the ineffable should of spirituality; reject the male compulsion to dominate and adopt the female willingness to nurture.
This dichotomy led me to consider the polarity of feminine/good versus masculine/bad in the context of the debate over embryonic stem-cell research. Is it too much to posit that fertilised embryos may be implanted in a woman’s uterus, even though the process inevitably entails the disposal of excess embryos, but that those cold "male" scientists cannot be trusted with so precious a commodity, for fear that they will create all variety of chimeras, perverse human-beasts, that will erode human dignity and desecrate human life?
The basic division here is between what is innate (a kind of universally accessible spirituality, the inherent dignity of human nature, etc.) and what is imposed (organised or dogmatic religion, biogenetic experimentation, etc.)—and the former