The Da Vinci Code: A Lesson In Humility

Well, I was duped.

For the last month or so I have told over a dozen people about how cool “The Da Vinci Code” is, and in just 45 minutes I was shown by the History channel how relaxed my sense of skepticism had become.

First, I’ll start off with my mistake. I allowed myself to be tricked by one of the oldest tricks in the book — linking fact with fiction. I was quite aware that there was fiction in the book, and also that there was fact. What I was obviously quite out of touch with, however, was where the line was.

Since the Christianity-oriented areas were obviously not a big deal to me, I latched onto the “nuggets” of history in the book for my source of enjoyment. A few of these included the pentacle/Oylymic link, the Mona Lisa genetic ambiguity, the woman in The Last Supper, the marginal line through the church, etc. These tidbits of information that I’d never heard of before, combined with the concept of femininity being demonized by the Christian church in an organized way, were very interesting to me. What I did was allowed the impact of the book to become greater than any one of the nuggets, until finally the book became larger than life.

The problem here is that I should have kept myself from being taken by the book. In other words, very few things at this stage of my development should interest me to this degree, or at least without me doing extensive research on the matter before allowing it to. While I didn’t believe in the Holy Grail myth any more after reading the book than I did before, I did evangelize the novel as if I did. I’ve told countless people that it was a must-read, and that there was so much history in it separate from the Christianity side of it. It now seems that some, if not much of that history is false.

Again, I was duped.

On the positive side, I never believed any of the Christian conspiracy or secret society threads in the book; I accepted all that as part of the fiction. All I really did believe was the nuggets that I spoke of, but that’s more than enough to evoke my shame. At this point, it’s important to me that I seek out the truth related to all these so-called “nuggets”. Were the Olympic rings reallly related to a “sacred feminine” circle? An esteemed colleague of mine says no. Was the Mona Lisa really meant to be androgynous? Was the person to the right of Christ really painted as a woman, or was it a man with a purposeful feminine appearance? These are the things I found so interesting about the novel, and I intend to find out how many of them are true.

Here are a few resources that explore Dan Brown’s carelessness and/or attempts to mislead readers:

James Patrick Holding On The Da Vinci Code The Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code: A Challenging Response to the Bestselling Novel The Da Vinci Deception Breaking The Da Vinci Code : Answers to the Questions Everybody’s Asking

Ultimately, the main lesson I am going to take away from this is that of humility. To some degree, it’s one’s belief in their own intellectualism that drives them to latch onto new, exciting information like that contained within the novel. This is especially true when the information puts some organization that one feels superior to in a bad light.

The fact that I took many things put forth in the book at face value is quite lame, but to allow it to happen again would be an utter crime. I must ensure that this doesn’t happen, and writing this post is one step in that direction. Another step will be apologizing to each person I recommended the book to. Hat in hand, I’ll explain that I too became a sheep.

Baaaa.

– Edit: By the way, the biggest crime that Dan Brown seems to have commited here lies at the very beginning of the novel. There he immediately claims that every bit of information pertaining to art, history, architecture, etc. is absolutely true. It was precisely these aspects that I enjoyed so much, and it seems that this small bit of programming at the very beginning was enough to keep me from becoming skeptical about his facts. Shame on me.