THE DA VINCI CODE
By Dan Brown
Doubleday, 2003
454 pages, $24.95
Book Review by the Rev. J. Douglas Ousley

At the beginning of The Da Vinci Code, there is a page called “FACT.” On this page, after mentioning two Christian groups, The Priory of Sion and Opus Dei, Dan Brown says this: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this book are accurate.”

Without such a claim to veracity, the book might be considered a rather routine thriller enlivened by sectarian conflict over the proper understanding of the life of Jesus. In fact, many readers have indeed assumed that the book is grounded in solid research.

Unfortunately, few serious scholars would support Dan Brown’s pretensions to accuracy. No credible source, for example, supports the idea that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. Even feminist scholars who stress the importance of Mary Magdalene in the early Church would likely doubt that there were progeny from her relationship with Jesus — much less the astounding assumption that offspring of Jesus and Magdalene were Kings of France! (Dan Brown’s historical claims are patiently refuted by Sandra Miesel in the September 2003 issue of Crisis magazine, www.crisismagazine.com.)

Yet to say that “everybody” is reading this book is only a tiny exaggeration. The Da Vinci Code has been an enormous best-seller. Because its main subject is Christianity, churchgoers shouldn’t be surprised if they are asked what they think of Dan Brown’s views.

And while many Christians will reply that his portraits of Roman Catholic clergy are caricatures, they will be forced to agree with the book’s claim that the religion of Jesus has repressed sex and women. Here is the serious edge to the book. Since there is much truth in this charge, readers inside as well as outside the churches tend to get carried along with the more dubious claim that the truth about the life of Jesus has been kept secret by Church leaders for centuries.

Even so, the alleged secrets wouldn’t really be important if they were true. The central message of Jesus that God loves us and that we should love God and our neighbors wouldn’t necessarily be undermined by revisions to the Gospels’ view of Jesus. Whether or not Jesus was married and had children, for example, has little to do with whether his teaching and ministry lead people to the Realm of God.

There is nothing secret about this teaching and ministry. Christ’s Gospel of freedom and love and justice is to be proclaimed openly to the whole world. The Christian message isn’t hidden, to be preserved and passed on by an elite hierarchy. It’s a message of truth for all people.

The Da Vinci Code rightly objects to something all Christians should condemn: the illusion that Christianity depends on secrets. The book portrays Church leaders from the beginning of the Christian movement as obsessed with maintaining their version of orthodoxy, even at the expense of the truth.

John’s Gospel, by contrast, gives a picture of Jesus with a completely open view of his mission. For example, John gives these words to Jesus — words that somehow seem to have escaped the author of The Da Vinci Code: “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Christians, then, are people who seek to enter the kingdom of truth. And that means we have nothing to fear from anyone else who seeks the truth. We don’t have anything to fear from the far-fetched New Age interpretations of Gnostic writings that clearly influenced Dan Brown. Nor do we have anything to fear from sociology, or from history, or from any other branch of learning that brings truth.

As the foolishness of this admittedly exciting novel suggests, mainstream Christianity is as likely to be damaged by ignorance as by knowledge. All the more reason to have confidence that in the fullness of God’s time, the real truth will emerge. “The truth will come out” because we are guided by the Spirit of truth.

RESTORING THE TIES THAT BIND:
THE GRASSROOTS TRANSFORMATION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
By William Sachs and Thomas Holland
Church Publishing, 2003
360 pages, $24.95
Book review by the Rev. Carole Johannsen

It has been a while since we’ve had really good news about the Episcopal Church. Months of reading and hearing about the divisions created by General Convention makes one hungry for such news, and this book is a feast for the heart.

Restoring the Ties That Bind: The Grassroots Transformation of the Episcopal Church is the story of what is happening these days in parishes across the Church. The information in the book was compiled by William Sachs, an Episcopal priest with years of parish and academic experience, who is now Director of Research at Episcopal Church Foundation, and Thomas Holland, a Ph.D. and Director of the Institute for Nonprofit Organizations at the University of Georgia. The book is the report of the Zacchaeus Project commissioned at the end of the 20th century to evaluate the state of the Church. Information from written questionnaires and face-to-face interviews in nine representative dioceses is interpreted by the authors, and it paints a surprising — and rather delightful — snapshot of the Church today. (While New York is not one of the target dioceses surveyed, it is mentioned repeatedly, especially in the historical review.)

Elegantly written and intelligently organized, this book sets the reality of today’s Episcopal Church firmly within the context of history, and over against current wisdom on management styles and organizational cycles. It acknowledges the series of conflicts that have unsettled us over the centuries since Anglicanism’s arrival in North America. How many Episcopalians know, for instance, that in the 1860s and 70s, the conflict between the Ritualists (High Church) and the Evangelicals (Low Church) over whether to use such innovations as colored stoles, flowers and candles on the altar, and hymns sung in procession so divided the church that a splinter group broke away and started the Reformed Episcopal Church in 1873? It is an old pattern: conflicting ideas about faith and practice, which are then legislated at Convention, thereby creating winners and losers, some of whom break away to form a splinter Church. None of the several splinters has been very successful, most likely because the majority of Episcopalians have continued to affirm the Anglican ethos that upholds diversity of opinion within unity of worship. That is both a great strength and a source of tension for Episcopalians: we espouse diversity, but then struggle to find common ground for unity. “Episcopalians usually have achieved more clarity about what was not to be practiced and affirmed than about what was” (p. 306).

A major concern for the Church today, according to the authors, revolves around leadership. Unnoticed by many, we have moved from a “vertical” (from the diocese and bishop down to the parish) to a “horizontal” (parish to parish, within networks of support) style of leadership. A recurring theme throughout the book is the disappointment felt by parishioners who look to their diocese for support in their mission and ministry and receive little or no help. One informed lay leader described the problem in the light of history: “The national church started off as a missionary society to support missions. They’ve become a bureaucracy that serves its own interests” (p.38).

But good news prevails: despite tensions caused by new styles of leadership and new conflicts — the current one revolving around human sexuality — mission and ministry continue unabated in, and from, the parishes. Regardless of how Episcopalians feel about homosexuality or women’s ordination or the inerrancy of scripture, most of us agree that our Anglican faith calls us to minister to God’s creation, and we are lively about doing so. Our tradition calls us to integrate faith and life — “what we do after we say ‘I believe’ ” (as an old stewardship phrase puts it) — and we come out of worship ready to do so.

Perhaps the even-better news is that increasingly we see ourselves not as a community that “rests upon rules and procedures,” but rather “a spiritual community that exists … more by prayer and discernment in the midst of ambiguities caused by rapid change” (p. 316). In recent years, the theme of our spirituality has moved from “fixed places and institutions” in the mid-20th century to viewing spirituality as a “journey” in the 21st. We resist change at the same time we seek to integrate new realities into our spiritual consciousness. Critical to this process is a new style of leadership among lay people and clergy, including bishops.

The challenges for the future are not to be minimized, but the authors, based on what they heard from the 2,500 discussions in 200 locations that produced the data for this study, are optimistic that we are faithfully moving forward within the broad patterns and agendas of Anglicanism. They conclude this most satisfying book by pointing to the leadership needed at this time of transformation:

This new leadership cannot be vested in historic structures or instinctively procedural; it cannot be defined by a sense of crisis or content to offer mechanistic solutions to particular problems; most assuredly, it cannot be the product of a specific ideology. Rather, it must seek to build redemptive connections among disparate communities. The leadership the church requires must be content with ambiguity yet clear about the contours of reconciliation. It must be rooted in “common prayer” yet comprehensive in honoring local experience. It must seek practical forms of discernment on difficult issues, emphasizing not winners and losers, but a common direction on difficult issues. We are encouraged to see such a pattern of leadership taking hold in local Episcopal settings and moving outward and beyond. The church’s challenge now is to allow itself to be redefined by such an emerging pattern” (pp. 328-9).

 

Byzantium: Faith and Power
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Through July 4
Art review by the Rev. Dr. Clair McPherson

The New York Times called it “vast and humblingly beautiful.” Vast it certainly is — perhaps the largest yet of the great “blockbuster” exhibits, Byzantium comprises almost 400 works of art. Do yourself a favor and allow plenty of time to enjoy it — or plan to visit more than once (the show has been extended to July 4). But it also really is “humbling.” This exhibit is different, and that is because the kind of art it displays is different.

The Metropolitan Museum is a perfect place to appreciate this. And not only because few other institutions could put it together. The Met provides the perfect context, because here the Byzantine art can be compared with kinds of visual art most viewers know and understand.

One of the first images that you will see is a late 13th-century icon of Peter and Paul, with the patron, the Serbian Queen Mother Helena. Note the way the faces and figures are depicted: the emphasis is on curves, on lines that sweep. Note also that the figures are not so much painted, as human bodies in Western paintings increasingly were. Step into the Impressionist galleries just next door to the exhibit on your way out to see exactly what I mean by this. The Peter and Paul by contrast are drawn, then colored in. The images are graceful and delicate, but this “colored in” aspect gives them something in common with cartoons, or even images in coloring books. Or with post-Impressionist modern art: visit the Gauguins and Van Goghs nearby, and note this surprising common feature.

All this is important for understanding the art of the icon. And it is deliberate: the visual language of icons developed over many centuries, through a kind of devotional trial and error. No one would call these pictures of Peter and Paul “realistic.” They are neither historically nor photographically authentic. On the other hand, they are far from abstract: you know that these are male, human images (compare them with the 20th-century images of, say, Paul Klee upstairs and down the hall). They are not richly rounded through precise, tactile shading, the way so many figures in the Renaissance galleries around the corner are. If you know your symbolism, you know who they are: Peter holds the keys, the bald Paul holds the sword he mentions in his Letter to the Ephesians. If you still don’t know, there is, in most of these icons, a label identifying everyone: Paul, Peter, Helena. You will not find labels like that in any post-1500 image, but if you wander through the classical galleries on the first floor south, you will find many vases, busts, jars, and tombstones with just that kind of label.

This glorious exhibit is, as I mentioned, one of the largest shows the Met has ever mounted. Yet you will see that same style and these same features throughout. Compare this very uniformity with the feeling you get in any of the other galleries I have mentioned thus far: in the Old Masters galleries, the Impressionists, definitely in the ancient Greek, and above all in the modern, the feel is of infinite, virtuoso variety. Here the feeling is uniformity, consistency. But it is not at all boring. It is, rather, mesmerizing. Or, better, it is calming.

I suggest you stroll once through the entire exhibit just to savor the overall visual effect. It is literally “splendid” — everything, it seems, reflects light. Get the cumulative effect: image after image of the Madonna; of Christ; of Saints (Hagioi) Paul, Peter, Stephen; and of Old Testament and Gospel scenes.

And there are also hundreds — literally — of functional objects. They are functional for liturgy, that is: censers (thuribles), vessels, vestments, Crosses and the crowning glory of the exhibit, a Choros, “lamp,” 16 feet in diameter by 20 feet in height, hanging (by 12 apostolic chains) from the ceiling. (Imagine if the room, with its gilt, gold, tempera and silver, were lit solely by the 100 candles in this chandelier.)

This overall effect is exactly what you would experience if you were seeing these works of Christian art in their intended setting. For none of these were actually made to hang on the walls of a museum , a gallery or a wealthy collector. They were made to hang — or stand, or be used — in a setting of worship, a church space, or a chapel space in someone’s home. You would have caught your first glimpse of them, then, when you had come to the Eucharist or a Baptism or for meditation or to pray the Office. You would not have come to “look at” them. You would have come for something other than looking at art.

But you would have come to “look through” them. That is, in fact, how icons work. That explains the features of that simple initial painting of Peter and Paul. Traditional icons do not “represent” the photographic appearance of things and bodies, but they do “re-present” the persons depicted. Human figures in icons are deliberately simple (though the colors can be deep and rich), somewhat flat (though always slightly shaded) and distended (though not startlingly distorted). They are not there, like some of the Gothic images downstairs in the medieval gallery, to “teach people about the faith” — everybody who looked at these knew already who Jesus and Mary and Stephen and Boris were. Much less were they there to display the talent of the artists, like the vast majority of signed artwork in this museum.

The Orthodox Church today likes to claim a continuity with the earliest Church. For example, Kallistos Ware, in his Penguin survey of that Church, claims that Orthodoxy essentially preserves the earliest, undivided Christian teaching and worship. To some extent it is true. Orthodoxy has retained many things we Western Christians lost (but may be in process of restoring) — vital, powerful things: the classic theology of Christus Victor (evident throughout the exhibit); the primary importance of Baptism; the centrality of Eucharist; the Diaconate; the Daily Office for everybody and so on.

But if you walk through the Met’s permanent exhibit of early Christian art and artifacts before you leave, you will see that these magnificent Byzantine images are not simply continuous with the first Church. The art of the icon has developed, flourished, blossomed. Compare the 6-by-4 foot Russian icon of the founding Saints Boris and Gleb to any saint’s picture in the early Church. Compare the stunning Liudogoshch Cross, eight-feet high, with any fifth-century cross or seventh-century crucifix. Compare that choros with any early lampstand. And compare that initial image of Paul and Peter with any early one: look at what they hold in their hands. Both hold books: but Peter’s is the ancient scroll, Paul’s the modern codex.

One comparison is worth any number of words, but the essential difference is this: Byzantium developed its own powerful, pervasive Christian visual tradition. It is lovely to look at, but far more than that, it is mesmerizing, it centers the viewer. And it does something no other Christian art does as well. A great Raphael or Leonardo or Titian or Mantegna or Del Sarto can inspire you, elevate the spirit, make you think about worship. But the icon alone actually makes you start praying.