Tyree's Tuppence

by Tyree Campbell

Well, the DaVinci Code . . .

Will [and Ariel] Durant's The Story Of Civilization includes a volume subtitled Caesar and Christ.  Maybe history doesn't exactly repeat, but it sure happens over and over again. 

Consider, for example, the Roman civilization, which is taken to mean Rome between the years 508 BCE and 411 CE.  Italy in those early days was a granary, with rich and fertile lands owned, yes, by the rich, but worked by free men.  Whenever attacked, Rome summoned its free men, placed them under the leadership of someone very qualified [Camillus and Cincinnatus and two or three of the Scipios come immediately to mind], and went out and kicked butt.  And yes, sometimes Rome did not wait to be attacked before it went out on its butt-stomping exercises; that's how Rome expanded.  Captured enemy combatants and some populations in captured territories were sold as slaves.  But for that era Rome, though capable of great cruelty, could also be relatively benign, all things considered.

As wealth came to Rome from the provinces, the rich got richer.  They acquired more and more slaves.  The lands of Italy were pretty much owned by then, but there was plenty of land available in the provinces--Spain, Gaul, Sardinia and Sicily, the Balkans, Greece, north Africa--and great farming holds were established with slave labor.  These farmholds produced grain in large quantities, cheaply--cheaper than the free farmers in Italy could produce it. 

Unable to turn a decent profit at farming, free men migrated to the urban centers, worked in the trades when they could find work, fought in wars that were increasingly between Roman leaders or fought in civil uprisings, lived on doled grain, went into debt, became indentured, fought in the amphitheaters for pay, and were sent to work in the provinces . . . or hung around the Roman Forum, waiting to choose sides in the next civil war.

For these and yes, for other reasons, notably the onerous and destructive rates of taxation on the people least likely to have money in the first place [i.e., the poor] and the debasement of currency, the government of Rome evolved from a Republic run by the Senate to a dictatorship with a rubber-stamp, complicit, and effete Senate.

[In fact, just after the assassination of Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius needed to finance an army to defend themselves, and did so by taxing the Eastern cities of the Empire--Cilicia in Turkey, Rhodes, Judea, places like that--demanding ten years' taxes in advance.  After some wrangling that included quartering soldiers in homes until the taxes were paid and selling children into slavery, the money was obtained. 

Unfortunately for these Eastern cities, Brutus and Cassius got their butts stomped by Marc Antony's army.  Antony forgave the Eastern cities for financing his enemies--provided that these cities also pay him ten years' taxes in advance.

Nowadays, we simply call this "deficit spending."]

Over the next four centuries Rome continued to degenerate.  Barbarian tribes--peoples who had no appreciation of the greatness that had been Rome--moved through the Empire at will until finally, in 411, Rome was sacked by the Vandals, and eventually fell under the rule of tribal leaders and the Popes.

Today the United States is easily the equivalent of Rome--once the greatest power on Earth, now blissfully unaware that it is beginning to totter.  Although still vast and powerful, the U.S. imports food and manufactured products because these are more cheaply produced in foreign lands, where the costs of labor are negligible and the working conditions worse than abysmal.  Peoples migrate into and through the United States at will, with little or no appreciation or understanding of the greatness of the country.  At one time self-sufficient, the United States now imports resources on which it depends.  The country's military is spread too thin to effectively defend it.  And the Emperor does whatever he wishes, with the backing of a docile, complicit, and corrupt Senate [and House].

Rome lasted four centuries after the fall of the Republic before it finally dissolve.  But that was then.  Things happen faster these days.  Take communications, for example.  Back then, the telehorse took days to weeks to get messages to the outlying areas of the Empire.  Even in relatively recent times communication was slow.  Thus, the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 was actually fought several weeks after the official end of the war, because the opposing sides had not received word of the peace.  Nowadays, communications is instantaneous--well, as fast as the speed of light, anyway.  Which suggests that the collapse of a major nation might not take nearly as long as it did Rome.

I've no idea how much longer the United States will endure, or whether the damage it has suffered and wrought is irreparable.  My personal feeling is that it will not be repaired, and that eventually the country will collapse into chaos in a manner similar to that of Rome, the Ottomans, Alexander's Empire . . .   Historically, such collapses are inevitable, so such a prediction is on solid ground there.  Sorry.

If there is hope, it lies in the realm of thought, of ideas, of concepts--and especially in the realm of fresh ideas and new concepts.  For ideas and thoughts and concepts to develop, they must be vetted.  They must be shared, discussed, and refined, until they are viable and useful.

In all of history, there has been and continues to be only one condition under which thoughts, ideas, and concepts can be shared, discussed, and refined until viable and useful.  Yes, I know you know the answer:  Freedom of Speech, and its logical derivative, Freedom of the Press.

Well, the DaVinci Code . . .

It's a novel.  Specifically, it is a mystery novel.  The reader experiences the investigation of a crime vicariously through the protagonist as he blunders about in search of clues.  Analyses of these clues lead inevitably to the resolution of the mystery.

It's a work of fiction.  You know, fiction?  The stuff you and I also write?  Stuff we make up?

It's a mystery novel.

And a damned good one.  Each chapter ends in a cliffhanger.  Because of the connection with real events and people--e.g., Leonardo da Vinci, the Louvre--and the appeal to the sense of conspiracy in all of us [who have imaginations] and the relative plausibility of some of the postulates, all skillfully woven into the novel by a very good writer, The DaVinci Code snags us--as any well-written novel should do.

For the 173 people on the planet who are still unaware of the thrust of the novel, The DaVinci Code proposes that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that they had at least one child, Sarah, and that after the execution of Jesus, Mary and Sarah and Lazarus and some companions landed on the south coast of France and lived out their lives there.  Sarah married into what at that time passed for royalty, and helped generate a line of rulers known as the Merovingians, which line lasted roughly to the late 8th Century.  The DaVinci Code proposes that the Roman Catholic Church suppressed the records and knowledge of these events . . . for nefarious reasons, one result of which was to further the power of a male-dominated religious structure.

So...?  What's the problem here?

Here are the facts. 

1.  Jesus and the woman we know today as Mary Magdalene existed as persons [whether Jesus was a deity is another matter, not relevant here].  There is a high degree of probability that Lazarus existed. 

2.  The Merovingian Dynasty is a fact of history.

3.  There exists a tradition of veneration of Mary Magdalene in southern France, but dates no further back than the middle of the 8th Century.  NB:  The existence of the tradition is fact; the factuality of the tradition has yet to be determined.  [In fairness, it should be noted that the Eastern Orthodox Church holds that Mary Magdalene and Mary--Jesus' Mom--went to Ephesus and eventually died there].

There's more in the book . . . the Holy Grail hypothesis, secret societies, and the like.  But those factors are only window dressing for the primary conflict between Dan Brown and Benedict XVI, and between Freedom of the Press and the Roman Catholic Church.

It is the position of the Church that Jesus did not marry.  Brown's supporters have pointed out that Jewish men all married in those days.  The Church agrees, but points out that Jesus was trained in the Essenee tradition, in which men remained celibate.  Let's examine these arguments and their implications. 

In support of this celibacy argument, Church supporters point out that the priesthood itself is celibate.  But this argument is not material.  Gregory VII compelled celibacy in the early 12th Century.  Prior to that time, the priests and monks of the Church took on wives, concubines, the occasional overnight penitent, and . . . er . . . streetcorner entertainment centers.  Gregory proclaimed celibacy because the priests and monks were setting bad examples for their flocks and were neglecting their duties.

The celibacy rule served to drive sacerdotal sexual activity into the closet [and into the confessional, apparently].  Sons and grandsons of popes became popes; for that matter, teenage sons were sometimes appointed cardinals--the cardinal being a Prince of the Church, rather a lot of authority for someone who was still learning how to count change and not fling boogers. 

But I digress.  The celibate nature of the priesthood is irrelevant here, merely a straw man flung up by Church supporters to sway those who are unaware of Church's history of celibacy.

Go back to the bit about Jewish men marrying and the Essenees remaining celibate.  Both statements are historically factual.  But is it possible that one of these statements has no bearing on the debate?

The Essenee connection--which is not mentioned in the surviving gospels, and you'd think it would be, if Jesus were Essenee--holds that Jesus went into religious training for about eighteen years [which conveniently explains his disappearance in the gospels from the ages of twelve to about thirty].  But the Church, proponents of the Essenee argument, holds that Jesus was God.  Which begs the question:  Why would God require religious training?  Until and unless the Church can respond convincingly to this question, this argument must be held in abeyance.

Which leaves us, for the moment, with Jewish men marrying.

The problem here for the Church is that Jesus, as God, had no need to marry [or to receive religious instruction].  The gospels support this--when the adolescent child Mary was impregnated by God [with her permission, of course--as the gospels take pains to assure us], God--rather in the manner of

Zeus in the Greek myths--left it to the human Joseph to serve as the father figure for the boy.  God, and Jesus as God, remained above and beyond marriage.

Jesus as human, however, need not have been above marriage and children [again foregoing for the moment the Essenee argument].  It is plausible, then, that he married and even did a fair bit of begetting. 

And that is the point of The DaVinci Code.  It could have happened.  That's what makes it attractive to the reader--which is what writing fiction is all about.

I'll leave it to others to explain how one's faith in Christianity as a way of life is altered by Jesus' humanity as opposed to his godliness.  Christianity, after all, consists of teachings, of practices recommended as a way of life that will lead to an afterlife.  It's how you are supposed to live, if you are a Christian.  The precise nature of Jesus is/ought to be irrelevant here. 

To repeat:  The DaVinci Code is a work of fiction.  It does not even pretend to be a historical novel.  It is a mystery novel.

Ironically, the Church, the self-admitted victim in all this controversy, is responsible in large part for that very controversy and its own victimization.  Sales of the book spiked--went off the chart, really--when the Church recommended to the faithful that the book be avoided:  effectively, a Church ban of the book.  Up to that point, the book was regarded as just another best-selling novel--a bit quirky, but a good read.  With its opposition, the Church practically guaranteed that the book would be widely read.  [To its credit, the Church has come a long way since the 1950s, when watching certain movies, such as "The Moon Is Blue" and "I Am A Camera," was a mortal sin, putting the viewer in direct danger of spending eternity in a barbecue pit][sin, apparently, just ain't what it used to be]. 

But now the movie has been banned:  in the Philippines, in Samoa, in Sri Lanka, in the Solomon Islands, in several states in India where Christians are in the majority and who, it was feared, would resort to violence if the movie were to be shown. 

Christians?  Violent??  Did Jesus say that was okay?  I could have missed a verse or two . . .

The operative word, of course, is "banned."  We're back to that.  Even in this country, with its two-century Constitutional protection of Freedom of Speech and of the Press, certain groups have demanded--so far without success--that the book be removed from stores.  They have also demanded--with some small successes--that the movie not be shown.

It's not the first time that books have been banned, and banned by religious leaders.  During the Reformation, Catholic works were burned by the Protestants, and Protestant works were burned by the Catholics--this not a century after the development of the printing press.  It's a wonder any books got read at all, surviving the religious incinerations.  Once again, history happens over and over again.

It never seems to end, this notion that "some" books and other works should be banned.  In this country, at this moment in time, the notion awaits only a precedent.  Once one book can be banned, any book can be banned.  All it takes is the first one.

And we're already close to establishing a precedent--not with The DaVinci Code, but with, of all things, the Quran.  It seems some of our soldiers and interrogators have been desecrating the book, and the Moslems are demanding that this practice be stopped, on religious grounds.

Let us be clear:  I personally do not feel the need to urinate on, or fold, spindle, or otherwise mutilate pages of, the Quran, the Bible, or A Tale Of Two Cities.  But in this country I am free to do exactly that, because these are inanimate objects, and the law regards them as inanimate objects, without rights or innate significance.  At the moment, and for the past two centuries or so, the law is and has been enjoined from regarding these objects as anything but inanimate.  In the eyes of the law, these books have no more significance than a toadstool, a a deodorant stick, or a chrysanthemum.  They are objects.

But it follows that, if one book can be regarded in the eyes of the law as sacred, then another can be regarded as profane.  There's your precedent.

Which brings us back to the original point:  the media for the transmission, discussion, and refinement of ideas.  The DaVinci Code is also a tale of the search for the Holy Grail.  The holiest grail of all is Truth.  Evil is that which hampers, in any way, the search for whatever is true.

Mary Gentle, in her novella "The Logistics Of Carthage," puts the matter succinctly.  In the words of her future archeologist in an alternate history, "What matters is who tells the stories, and what stories never get told.  Because people act on what the histories are.  People live their lives based on nothing better than a skull, a fragment of a mail ring, and a misremembered battle site.  People die for that truth."

Which means we must be free to search for truth, and to discuss and refine our ideas and concepts.  To those who would ban media in any form, who would impede the search for truths, let me borrow something from Ayn Rand:  "Get the hell out of my way!"

Past Tuppence:
March 2006
December 2005
September 2005
June 2005
March 2005
December 2004
September 2004
June 2004
March 2004
December 2003
September 2003
June 2003
March 2003
December 2002
October 2002
August 2002
June 2002
April 2002
February 2002
December 2001
October 2001
August 2001

Read more from Tyree Campbell in any of the following:

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 5

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 4

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 3

Sex and the Single Alien
An anthology

Nyx
A novel by Tyree Campbell

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 2