It was another trip to the UP, and once there, another possible death. On the serpentine newly-paved road past the dirt two-track to the cabin was a police car by a pick-up truck that had smashed into the trees off a curve, airbag popped. The ambulance was just arriving. The first responders did not seem in a hurry, meaning there had been only slight injuries or obvious death. I still don’t know, although the chill that has become familiar up there came to me again.
All very real, but what I want to talk about is not real in almost any sense, for on the long drive up I listened to a book on CD, a book by a very famous author, Dan Brown, titled Angels and Demons.
I knew the author from his first famous novel, The Da Vinci Code, as hackneyed and trite a book as I had read in a while. Stock phrases abounded, as did stock assumptions about big things and institutions. Even the main character’s name, Robert Langdon, could have been pulled from an early 60’s spy novel. And yet I had stayed up until 3AM to finish it. Like it or not, Dan Brown knows how to turn black words into bricks of gold. Like many other readers of his books, I love the sense of historical conspiracy, the religious issues involved, and of course the deadly ‘seriousness’ of them all. Like too-sweet chocolate, I wince at the taste but have to have more even though I know it will make me feel sick.
This one, Angels and Demons, was a big chocolate bar, with 15 disks of an hour-plus each that I could not quite finish, either on the drive or at the cabin, where I had to burn electricity stored in a handful of precious D batteries. But I did hear enough, 9 CD’s, to write about it, or really, to write about what it did not and could not say.
The plot: enter a disgruntled secret organization, The Illuminati, whose time has come to exact final revenge on the Catholic Church for – OMG – burning Copernicus at the stake nearly 500 years ago, as well as for threatening or jailing or killing other Renaissance and early Reformation scientists for their heretical views. Bad ancient Church. But bad Illuminati, too, for the enlightened scientists (thus the name Illuminati) that had started the organization to protect themselves from the Church had been infiltrated long ago by many other religion and Church haters, including – gasp – the secret members of the ancient Indian-Muslim sect, the Hashashin – known now by its Anglicized word, the Assassins. Over time this bad Illuminati had then infiltrated many other institutions, from the US government (note the pyramid and glowing eye on the dollar bill) to the nuclear research center and particle accelerator in Switzerland, CERN. And it is there where a tiny but vastly powerful particle of anti-matter was stolen by an Illuminati Hashashin and secreted in the Vatican just as the Conclave of Cardinals was meeting to proclaim a new pope. Vatican City was to be destroyed, along with the top echelon of the detested, and often vial, Church.
Thank goodness for Robert Langdon, professor at Middlesex Community College – I mean, Harvard – of Art History, whose specialty just happens to be the Church and the Illuminati. Fortunately for him, his lack of STEM knowledge is satisfied by a beautiful young Italian woman scientist whose adopted father had been a Father of the Church as well as CERN’s leading scientist – the very one who had created the anti-matter, which had been neutralized in a containment system – the one stolen by the assassin - designed by his daughter Vitoria (this adopted Father had been the first to be assassinated by the Hashashin. Enter filial revenge). And off and running they go to save the Church and Vatican City, as well as thousands of Roman lives.
We are brought back in time to the 1500’s and 1600’s, with secrets hidden from the Holy Powers, to see how science had outsmarted the big, clumsy hand of Roman faith. Back in the present, Cardinals are being killed one by one before the Big Explosion, their manner of deaths harkening back to ancient Pagan sciences that mixed pantheistic worship with observational and mathematical brilliance. Revenge is being satisfied as in days of old, where an eye was traded for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, albeit with a lag time of 500 years, and against a Church that now has no secular power.
But as I read the sometimes accurate and sometimes fictional historical and occult references, it was not the corny writing (the Italian scientist, we are told breathlessly, has almond-scented hair and lithe, sun-tanned legs) nor the denigration of the Catholic Church that bothered me. After all, what did I expect? Rather, my disappointment was due to the lack of mystery in this mystery, although I should have expected that, too. Where, it stuck me over time, was the real strangeness? For me, it is not to be found in the devious underground society, and certainly not in the technically interesting but otherwise dry science. Rather, it is to be found in the very point of the Church itself. Yes, it would have been nice if he had contextualized the Church’s paranoia in the 16th and 17th century in lieu of the Reformation and rising secularism, but that, too, is not surprising. But as a mystery writer, it is almost odd that he missed the greatest mystery of all, that on which the entire Church is built: the mystery of the Holy Spirit.
This has been done by commercial entertainment before. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” had Spirit influence the sequence of events throughout the movie, and of course it was present in abundance in the Ark itself, but Brown seems to have no sense of spiritual power at all, not even where it exists in the pagan rites and symbols. He should know this stuff. It has long been believed that there is real spiritual power in the pagan religions, as even the Bible attests, although it was not nearly as great as God’s power. This, the power of the Jewish god, or God, was manifested in the prophets and the greatest of priests. After Christ, Christians came to believe that God’s power is now accessible to all adherents because the loving relationship of God the Father and Christ the Son has been realized. It is this relationship that forms the Holy Spirit. Its power is as limitless as God Himself, and it is what the Church is built upon. It is not built upon good deeds or being nice and certainly not on worldly power. Those are to be found in it, for better and for worse, but they are not part of the foundational mystery.
So it is that Brown’s mystery misses the real mysteries of life. In his depiction of science, he gives us the “flat earth” impression that things are only as he sees them - that all that exists is eternal and soulless, to be deciphered by the “pure language” of mathematics and objective observation. As for religion, which forms the other half of his subject matter, he gives us a few pagan symbols and a power-hungry Church, but no spirit. None. Yet, objective reality is wrapped in unanswerable riddles, and the Church is embedded in the workings of the Holy Spirit. Where is his sense of real mystery?
It is, I think, lost in the materialistic view of life, that which the Church was so desperately trying to quell 400 years ago. Brown should know that the Holy Spirit, the foundation of the Church, is not a flimsy myth. It has not only cured thousands of people, quite objectively, but has also appeared subjectively to millions. I have known a few of these millions and count myself as one of them as well. There is nothing, no-thing or any non-thing, which is more mysterious than the Holy Spirit. Yet Brown wants us to believe that mystery is created by time and secrecy alone. That is good only for a standard mystery novel or a soap opera. If Brown wants to rise above the rest, he should take the mystery of the Holy Spirit, and spirit in general, seriously.
I should talk. The guy’s as rich as Croesus, an ancient king I am sure he will unite, or already has united, with the Knights Templar. We are talking dime novel vapidity here. Still, it is Brown himself who chooses these religious topics, and so I believe is deserving of this critique. It is as if we were to choose to write about a trip up north and witnessed an accident and felt the floating sense of death - and then went on and on about the bumper sticker on the guy’s pick-up. We’d be missing the most important point.
Which might make, I suppose, a greater writer out of Dan Brown than we suspect. It could be. For all we know, in his vapidity he might very well be purposefully channeling the volkgeist of our era. In that vacuum, he might be telling us exactly what we are missing in life: that, just as the death of the guy is more important than the bumper sticker, so the foundation of the Church is more important than any personal or historic episode. He might just be saying that in a code so well hidden it is almost as mysterious as the Holy Spirit.
Or he might be just as he seems. Still, he channels and points, whether he knows it or not. The rock of the Church is not really a rock, just as the true temple of the Jews was not the stone and mortar Temple. Just as we ourselves are only represented temporarily in flesh and blood and in history, and all the rest is to be found in a holy spirit too grand to fit into a dime-store novel or in this world.
It was another trip to the UP, and once there, another possible death. On the serpentine newly-paved road past the dirt two-track to the cabin was a police car by a pick-up truck that had smashed into the trees off a curve, airbag popped. The ambulance was just arriving. The first responders did not seem in a hurry, meaning there had been only slight injuries or obvious death. I still don’t know, although the chill that has become familiar up there came to me again.
All very real, but what I want to talk about is not real in almost any sense, for on the long drive up I listened to a book on CD, a book by a very famous author, Dan Brown, titled Angels and Demons.
I knew the author from his first famous novel, The Da Vinci Code, as hackneyed and trite a book as I had read in a while. Stock phrases abounded, as did stock assumptions about big things and institutions. Even the main character’s name, Robert Langdon, could have been pulled from an early 60’s spy novel. And yet I had stayed up until 3AM to finish it. Like it or not, Dan Brown knows how to turn black words into bricks of gold. Like many other readers of his books, I love the sense of historical conspiracy, the religious issues involved, and of course the deadly ‘seriousness’ of them all. Like too-sweet chocolate, I wince at the taste but have to have more even though I know it will make me feel sick.
This one, Angels and Demons, was a big chocolate bar, with 15 disks of an hour-plus each that I could not quite finish, either on the drive or at the cabin, where I had to burn electricity stored in a handful of precious D batteries. But I did hear enough, 9 CD’s, to write about it, or really, to write about what it did not and could not say.
The plot: enter a disgruntled secret organization, The Illuminati, whose time has come to exact final revenge on the Catholic Church for – OMG – burning Copernicus at the stake nearly 500 years ago, as well as for threatening or jailing or killing other Renaissance and early Reformation scientists for their heretical views. Bad ancient Church. But bad Illuminati, too, for the enlightened scientists (thus the name Illuminati) that had started the organization to protect themselves from the Church had been infiltrated long ago by many other religion and Church haters, including – gasp – the secret members of the ancient Indian-Muslim sect, the Hashashin – known now by its Anglicized word, the Assassins. Over time this bad Illuminati had then infiltrated many other institutions, from the US government (note the pyramid and glowing eye on the dollar bill) to the nuclear research center and particle accelerator in Switzerland, CERN. And it is there where a tiny but vastly powerful particle of anti-matter was stolen by an Illuminati Hashashin and secreted in the Vatican just as the Conclave of Cardinals was meeting to proclaim a new pope. Vatican City was to be destroyed, along with the top echelon of the detested, and often vial, Church.
Thank goodness for Robert Langdon, professor at Middlesex Community College – I mean, Harvard – of Art History, whose specialty just happens to be the Church and the Illuminati. Fortunately for him, his lack of STEM knowledge is satisfied by a beautiful young Italian woman scientist whose adopted father had been a Father of the Church as well as CERN’s leading scientist – the very one who had created the anti-matter, which had been neutralized in a containment system – the one stolen by the assassin - designed by his daughter Vitoria (this adopted Father had been the first to be assassinated by the Hashashin. Enter filial revenge). And off and running they go to save the Church and Vatican City, as well as thousands of Roman lives.
We are brought back in time to the 1500’s and 1600’s, with secrets hidden from the Holy Powers, to see how science had outsmarted the big, clumsy hand of Roman faith. Back in the present, Cardinals are being killed one by one before the Big Explosion, their manner of deaths harkening back to ancient Pagan sciences that mixed pantheistic worship with observational and mathematical brilliance. Revenge is being satisfied as in days of old, where an eye was traded for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, albeit with a lag time of 500 years, and against a Church that now has no secular power.
But as I read the sometimes accurate and sometimes fictional historical and occult references, it was not the corny writing (the Italian scientist, we are told breathlessly, has almond-scented hair and lithe, sun-tanned legs) nor the denigration of the Catholic Church that bothered me. After all, what did I expect? Rather, my disappointment was due to the lack of mystery in this mystery, although I should have expected that, too. Where, it stuck me over time, was the real strangeness? For me, it is not to be found in the devious underground society, and certainly not in the technically interesting but otherwise dry science. Rather, it is to be found in the very point of the Church itself. Yes, it would have been nice if he had contextualized the Church’s paranoia in the 16th and 17th century in lieu of the Reformation and rising secularism, but that, too, is not surprising. But as a mystery writer, it is almost odd that he missed the greatest mystery of all, that on which the entire Church is built: the mystery of the Holy Spirit.
This has been done by commercial entertainment before. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” had Spirit influence the sequence of events throughout the movie, and of course it was present in abundance in the Ark itself, but Brown seems to have no sense of spiritual power at all, not even where it exists in the pagan rites and symbols. He should know this stuff. It has long been believed that there is real spiritual power in the pagan religions, as even the Bible attests, although it was not nearly as great as God’s power. This, the power of the Jewish god, or God, was manifested in the prophets and the greatest of priests. After Christ, Christians came to believe that God’s power is now accessible to all adherents because the loving relationship of God the Father and Christ the Son has been realized. It is this relationship that forms the Holy Spirit. Its power is as limitless as God Himself, and it is what the Church is built upon. It is not built upon good deeds or being nice and certainly not on worldly power. Those are to be found in it, for better and for worse, but they are not part of the foundational mystery.
So it is that Brown’s mystery misses the real mysteries of life. In his depiction of science, he gives us the “flat earth” impression that things are only as he sees them - that all that exists is eternal and soulless, to be deciphered by the “pure language” of mathematics and objective observation. As for religion, which forms the other half of his subject matter, he gives us a few pagan symbols and a power-hungry Church, but no spirit. None. Yet, objective reality is wrapped in unanswerable riddles, and the Church is embedded in the workings of the Holy Spirit. Where is his sense of real mystery?
It is, I think, lost in the materialistic view of life, that which the Church was so desperately trying to quell 400 years ago. Brown should know that the Holy Spirit, the foundation of the Church, is not a flimsy myth. It has not only cured thousands of people, quite objectively, but has also appeared subjectively to millions. I have known a few of these millions and count myself as one of them as well. There is nothing, no-thing or any non-thing, which is more mysterious than the Holy Spirit. Yet Brown wants us to believe that mystery is created by time and secrecy alone. That is good only for a standard mystery novel or a soap opera. If Brown wants to rise above the rest, he should take the mystery of the Holy Spirit, and spirit in general, seriously.
I should talk. The guy’s as rich as Croesus, an ancient king I am sure he will unite, or already has united, with the Knights Templar. We are talking dime novel vapidity here. Still, it is Brown himself who chooses these religious topics, and so I believe is deserving of this critique. It is as if we were to choose to write about a trip up north and witnessed an accident and felt the floating sense of death - and then went on and on about the bumper sticker on the guy’s pick-up. We’d be missing the most important point.
Which might make, I suppose, a greater writer out of Dan Brown than we suspect. It could be. For all we know, in his vapidity he might very well be purposefully channeling the volkgeist of our era. In that vacuum, he might be telling us exactly what we are missing in life: that, just as the death of the guy is more important than the bumper sticker, so the foundation of the Church is more important than any personal or historic episode. He might just be saying that in a code so well hidden it is almost as mysterious as the Holy Spirit.
Or he might be just as he seems. Still, he channels and points, whether he knows it or not. The rock of the Church is not really a rock, just as the true temple of the Jews was not the stone and mortar Temple. Just as we ourselves are only represented temporarily in flesh and blood and in history, and all the rest is to be found in a holy spirit too grand to fit into a dime-store novel or in this world.
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