What's Wrong with The Da Vinci Code? Continued
The truly serious danger stems from the novel's frequent references to historical events that never happened: matters regarding the Emperor Constantine, the council of Nicea, the Gnostic "gospels," Pope Clement V, the phony "Priory of Sion," the Knights Templars, Leonardo da Vinci, devotion to Mary Magdalene, the execution of witches, and much much more. Recently, the actor Jean Reno, who plays the Paris police detective Bezu Fache, said that the novel's version of history is "not the way it was in reality." That needs to be said much more loudly. It is not sufficient to say that the book is "fiction" - because fiction frequently contains historical truths. Not every novel is a pure science-fiction fantasy. In the case of The Da Vinci Code, many things that seem to be reliable historical background are entirely imaginary.
While these cannot be accidental mistakes - they are deliberate and tendentious - this doesn't mean that Dan Brown necessarily intended to defame Catholics or the Church. Perhaps, in order for the plot to make sense, the novel simply needed a villain, and, the luck of the draw having fallen to the Church, Brown proceeded, with poetic license and in the voices of fictional characters, to paint with a very broad brush. What is certain is that, in order to make the Church the villain, he made things up, knowing that he was doing so.
And, of course, novelists and fictional characters are allowed to utter all the falsehoods they like. It makes no sense to accuse them of lying. It would be wonderful if every reader took to heart the words on the novel's copyright page: "In this work of fiction, the characters, places and events are either the product of the author's imagination or they are used entirely fictitiously." Indeed, in some ideal universe, in which every reader were well versed in ecclesiastical history, the pedantic nonsense spewed by Prof. Langdon and Sir Leigh Teabing would merely provoke amusement.
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