Dan Brown

My first impression of the Da Vinci code was that the man is either a bit barmy or a satirist! Nothing in the novel rings true: it is all slightly ludicrous: the stuff about the pentacles is rather second rate symbology. The description of Opus Dei cannot be other than a joke - nothing more unlike the lay/secular priest catechetical movement of Opus Dei can be imagined. Escriva is just a name to hang a concept on - a concept which sounds like a chunk taken from the writings of an early protestant preacher lambasting catholics.

However I think the real “key” is in chapter 1, where Langdon thinks “I’m trapped in a surrealist painting.” Dan Brown’s Mitterand belongs to the same fantasy world as Opus Dei - the Sphinx with a Pharoah complex in whose transparent pyramid Langdon waits for the Bull. This is the language of a Salvador Dali painting. Brown has written a surrealist novel out-of-time, brilliantly, but that is all it is - a surrealist novel. I suspect the real reason that the film is a flop is because it is not sufficiently a Salvador Dali painting. The film should bring out the surrealism of the book - it should have the multidimensional form layers in which nothing is what it seems. This includes the “Fact” written at the beginning which is such a comical Dali-esque parody, that it should alert the reader to the shifting unreality of the content.

I am not sure though, that Salvador Dali would have approached the subject the same way - under all his surrealism Dali was a catholic and rarely joked about his religion. I wonder how differently this novel would have turned out if Dan Brown had been a practising believer in the same tradition as the artist who inspired him?

Pope Benedict XVI

How can a celibate old man talk about love? But this is what Pope Benedict does spectacularly well. Precisely because he stands outside the love = sex agenda of the secular world, and - through his chastity - has had to confront love as more than, and greater than, any narrow sexual agenda, he is able to move us beyond our own frontiers into a deeper and more profound understanding of what love is.

Vatican documents are always hard to swallow in big chunks. They need to be unwrapped slowly, thinking over what each bit means. They are good to read and discuss in a group. This document is true to form and thus, sadly, liable to be overlooked or skimmed through. Benedict is not afraid to confront popular ideas, such a Nietsche’s “Christianity had poisoned eros, which..(presumably due to Christianity).. had gradually degenerated into vice.” The Pope contends that the secular world is stuck in ‘a counterfeit divinisation of eros which actually strips it of dignity and de-humanises it.’ He contends eros needs to ‘be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.’ The Pope contends man’s greatness comes when the body and soul are ‘intimately united’- a spirituality divorced from the flesh and a flesh which becomes purely animal are both equally untrue to our human destiny.

This little book challenges us to live a life of loving kindness which transcends selfcentred goals and finds fulfilment through caring for others ‘so that we, too, can become capable of true love and be fountains of living water in the midst of a thirsting world.’

Judith Herrin

Both these books have been enormously useful in preparing the Online Course. Ms. Herrin has an extraordinary grasp of the parallel timelines of east and west. Where else would you find out, by comparing dates, that Wilfred of England first visited Rome when Pope Martin had just been abducted to Constantinople? Where else would you find descriptions of various icons and frescoes in Italy carefully related to how they reflected the Ecumenical Councils and synods?

Other information, otherwise found only in dribs and drabs, through numerous books - such as that the organ was a Byzantine invention imported to Rome, that the original Nicene creed ( without Filioque) was for many years displayed in both Greek and English in the Vatican - is available, dated and sourced, in a closely written study. It is possible to find out what Pippin was doing in France or Leander of Seville in Spain in relation to the timeline of the Byzantine Empire.

Promising to be of equal value is Women in Purple, researching the Empresses who had a major political impact, particularly in securing the reversal of iconoclasm and the veneration of icons in the eastern church.

Olivier Clement

It is quite difficult to find information about the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople for non-orthodox, yet he is a key person for the western church to get to know about, in view of Pope Benedict’s keenness to strengthen relations with the Orthodox east. Olivier Clement’s book fills a very important gap, fearlessly conveying the Patriarch’s views on a number of hot issues - drugs, AIDS, church versus nation state, the primacy of Peter, and the various inter-faith issues which beset anyone growing up in the west as soon as they go to school, if not before.

In a transfiguring chapter on newness of Spirit, the Patriarch;s views on the role of Orthodoxy in the modern world are summed up. The Patriarch is known for his concerns about global warming and the ethical use of resources, and has instituted a Feast of Creation in the Orthodox church, which takes place on September 1, the beginning of the eastern liturgical year. We discover that the hymns and prayers for this were composed by an old monk on Athos and “call us to repentance because, even though we carry deep within ourselves a deep nostalgia for paradise, we have tortured the earth. The Patriarch has initiated a symposia on ecology and ethics,’ which takes measures to counteract consumerism.

Watch this space for a review of Pope Benedict’s first encyclical:
“Deus Caritas est” (God is Love)