I began this letter a month ago so it is in danger of being old news. First, however, thank you for all the enquiries and good wishes in relation to my health. Perhaps it would be helpful to explain a little of what incommoded me so as to allay anxiety and save me from having to explain too often. Since my teenage years I have had a bronchial problem hence the cough which is perhaps the best known thing about me. The fact that my bronchial tubes don’t work as well as they should means that I am vulnerable to chest infections that are kept at bay by regular medication, but from time to time flare up, necessitating more drastic intravenous antibiotics which have to be administered in hospital. For the last three years this seems to have happened in the early or late summer hence my recent absence.
The editorial note in the last magazine promised a disquisition on that film which I have now seen and Dr Who, which I see regularly. The headline announcement is that I think the film of The Da Vinci Code is much more religious (perhaps even Christian) than both the book and its publicity might have led us to believe.
Before I saw the film various conversations prompted further questions about why the novel has proved so successful. In reaction to the suggestion that Jesus might have been married and had children I have heard several people express a somewhat wistful hope that it might have been true. This idea of his having married is linked in book and film with the claim that Jesus was not the Son of God. This supposedly is the truth that the church has been trying to cover up for two thousand years and the revelation of which will change the course of mankind for ever.’ As one of the characters (played by Sir Ian McKellen) says, Jesus must be shown for what he was, not miraculous, simply man’ implying that the church’s power, which he believes to have been nothing but abusive, stems form that miraculous nature. (If you want another version of this argument come and see the Hampstead Players dramatic reading of The Lark). The logic in all this is somewhat confusing. If Jesus was just an ordinary human being then his children and their descendants (even if the line does run through the French Royal family) must be equally ordinary, existing only to debunk a fictitious extraordinariness created by the Church. But the novel claims that there is something special about this bloodline something divine (?) – which has to be protected and carried on, and something still special about the alternative’ Jesus which might even continue to inspire an alternative’ church. Some Catholic reactions to the film have suggested that it is full of calumnies and offences and historical and theological errors, though I have read these passages only in quotation so do not know whether the idea of Jesus being married and having children is one of the claims that counts as an offensive calumny.
None of these issues is new, of course. The flesh and bloodness of Jesus was a hot topic of debate in the Gnostic literature of the third and fourth centuries on which much of the film’s material is based even though Brown gives a totally erroneous impression of such literature. The Gnostic Jesus is a spiritual messenger who rescues men (and women if they consent to become more like men) from the entrapment of the soul in the physical world of matter. So spiritual is he that in some accounts a substitute is provided at the crucifixion and anything so sordid as sex is definitely not on his agenda. In some of the Gnostic literature he is specially linked with Mary Magdalen but only in a spiritual way. In some early Christian sects women exercised a prophetic role, representing a spiritual wisdom that transcended flesh and blood and linked the soul (whether male or female) in a spiritual marriage to its redeemer. In reality the Gnostic material is no help to those who want to see a more human Jesus.
But why is it that there is still a desire for a more human Jesus in people’s minds? The history of 19th and 20th century Biblical criticism has been focussed on the quest for the historical Jesus. After a period of considerable scepticism about the possibility of our knowing very much at all about Jesus the pendulum has swung the other way. We now have a picture of Jesus firmly rooted in its Jewish setting but breaking free from that setting in various significant ways. Preachers have been talking about the historical and the human Jesus for many decades now, devising an understanding from below’, concentrating on the suffering rather than the more glorious Christology from above’ of former centuries. And yet, it seems, the message has not got beyond the church walls. People still apparently think of Jesus (or perhaps the Jesus of the Church’) as a judgmental, anti-feminist, anti-gay, remote, severe and other-worldly figure. And the idea that he actually married and had children seems somehow to dissolve that image and bring Jesus closer to the kind of spiritual leader we are all looking for.
At the end of the film there is a moving dialogue between the central characters (not in the novel but presumably approved by Brown) where Tom Hanks says, Why couldn’t Jesus have been both Son of God and a man, why couldn’t he be a father and still capable of all those miracles why is it always human or divine. May be human is divine. One thing I do know. A living heir to Jesus Christ would she destroy faith or would she renew it? . What really matters is what you believe.’ To which the answer is that Jesus was both divine and human and that his being son of God took nothing away from his being son of man and vice versa. The problem which the novel and the film never tackle and which the church has been discussing since it came into existence is what we mean by saying that Jesus was Son of God’ and divine’. The fact that he was unmarried and had no children has nothing to do with that question he could have had a wife and children and still been divine there is nothing in sacred doctrine that I know of to prevent that possibility.
An interesting light on the issue was cast recently by an episode of Dr Who. The new series delves more deeply than before into the Doctor’s character, feelings and identity. This episode was discussing the possibility of his ever finding a permanent companion even a wife. The answer was in effect that his mission made it impossible. He could not save people from disaster unless he made the personal sacrifice of freeing himself from all personal attachments however much he might feel for the friends he made along the way. There is of course the small matter of his twelve re-incarnations and his seemingly permanent agelessness, but it struck me as ironic that we are prepared imaginatively to accept the tragic possibility that some saviour figures have to work alone, but at some other imaginative level want Jesus to have been married. Perhaps there are also echoes here of the church’s historic uncertainty about whether the clergy ought to marry.
So we might at least for the moment conclude that The Da Vinci Code is after all a religious film because it raises the important questions of what we mean by saying Jesus is divine and how we understand the nature of the sacrifice he made and the mission which required that sacrifice. We are sent back to that strange saying from Matthew 8:20, Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath no where to lay his head.’ And we are sent back to the understanding that Jesus’ divinity has nothing to do with any characteristic or power added to his humanity (which might seem to undermine any kind of humanity we can see ourselves sharing with him). He is Son of God because we believe God has demonstrated through scripture and history the significance of Jesus’ humanity for us: This is my beloved Son, listen to him.’
With my love and prayers,
Fr Stephen