Breda O'Brien: Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought. Even a judge could not resist using the lure of a cryptic code to advance an agenda. Mr Justice Peter Smith was the judge in the plagiarism case taken by the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail against Dan Brown of Da Vinci Code fame. He planted italicised letters in his judgment, that refer to Admiral John "Jackie" Fisher. The judge believes that Jackie Fisher, who was a radical naval reformer instrumental in the design of the battleship Dreadnought, has been unfairly treated by history and deserves rehabilitation and recognition.
It is not surprising that the judge decided to take advantage of the current fascination with codes and conspiracies. Everyone loves a conspiracy, the sense of being in a secret that only the few know. Yet there is much more to the appeal of The Da Vinci Code.
Like many commentators, I was bewildered by the attraction of Dan Brown's airport-style novel, and like many commentators, I proceeded to attack the wrong target. In the first piece I wrote, I highlighted some of the more obvious errors in a book that is riddled with them. Yet such an approach will only appeal to those who have enough knowledge not to be impressed by the book in the first place, because it is an approach that appeals to the rational.
Dan Brown may be a poor enough writer, but he has a far better grasp of what appeals to a significant number of people than most churches do. Brown cannily recognised a struggle between competing visions of what human life is ultimately about, where wisdom is to be found, and what constitutes a good life. Those may be weighty claims for a page-turner written by a shrewd individual with one eye to his bank balance. However, why is it so successful, while so many other airport novels sink into oblivion? Of course, it did not harm Brown that the churches were caught in a catch-22. Ignore it, and the field is clear for outrageous claims. Engage with it, and the hype is multiplied, thus generating the kind of publicity that literally, money cannot buy.
What Brown has given us is Gnosticism ultra-lite. The original Gnostics were a rum lot. They believed (insofar as it is possible to be definitive about a movement that was often internally contradictory) that the present world of space, time and matter is essentially evil, and that salvation consists of escaping from it into an esoteric reality. Some humans have a divine spark within them, which can be revealed by access to secret knowledge. Through this "gnosis" the believer can escape from all the nasty messiness of human existence into a spiritual sphere.
Far from being proto-feminists, the Gnostics were often particularly repelled by women and human sexuality. In the Gospel of Thomas, the Jesus figure states that "Mary will be saved if she makes herself male, because every female who makes herself male will become fit for the kingdom of God." An odd statement about somebody that Brown alleges was Jesus' wife. The only one likely to be comforted by it is Ian McKellen, who plays Sir Leigh Teabing in the film. He says that he read the book and believed it completely, until he put it down and realised that if it were true, it would mean that Jesus could not be gay.
Gnosticism has many aspects that are repellent to modern, much less postmodern sensibilities, so Brown repackages it, just as much of Celtic spirituality has been repackaged with scant regard to history.
Gnosticism-lite promises that we can all be one of the elite, even though one of the defining characteristics of an elite is limited membership. To gain access, all we have to do is to look deep within us, find out who we really are, and follow our dream. Brown just packages it in a fantasy that undermines the basis of Christianity, because orthodox Christianity is one of the few challenges left to the navel-gazing that is currently so popular.
That is why the churches may be on a loser, because they have nothing as cosy to offer as self-realisation through discovery of one's own centrality in the universe. Instead, they have a first-century Jewish prophet who declared uncompromisingly that the only way to find life is to lose it, that love of self that is not balanced by love of God and love of neighbour is ultimately a delusion, and that suffering is an inescapable part of life.
Part of the reason that Brown found such fertile soil on which to sow is because many Christians for whom bodily resurrection and the divinity of Christ are central have been sheepish and defensive for decades. Others have toned down the Christian motivation for their commitment to social justice so as to be more publicly acceptable. Then there is the incalculable damage caused by the sexual abuse of children by clergy.
Catholics, and particularly parents, find it impossible to comprehend how any child could have been left in danger. Clerical abuse may constitute a tiny percentage of all sexual abuse cases, but the fact that it happened at all, and that the initial reaction of the churches was often to avoid scandal and thereby endanger children, has led to an atmosphere where people will believe literally anything about the Catholic Church in particular.
So is all lost? Are Christians reduced to a defensive and useless boycott of the film? Personally, I am disappointed that the movie appears to be pretty hopeless, because I love Audrey Tautou's and Ian McKellen's work.
Perhaps Christians could learn from the reaction of the wonderfully eccentric Rev Robin Griffith-Jones, an Anglican cleric who is Master of the Temple, a church that owes its name to the Knights Templar. His church was by-passed on the tourist trail until The Da Vinci Code, and now it has up to a thousand visitors a week.
Without a shred of defensiveness, Rev Griffith-Jones cheerfully provides evidence that Gnosticism was world-denying, misogynistic and exclusivist, then benignly watches his visitors rapidly reconsider being spiritual heirs to such a movement. In short, he views The Da Vinci Code as an opportunity, not a disaster. The pity is that more Christians did not follow suit.
bobrien@irish-times.ie