Rev’d Dr. Leander Harding

The First Commandment, Political Islam and The Da Vinci Code.

Exodus 20:3 “Thou Shall Have Not Other Gods Before Me”

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Introduction

Following the enumeration of the Decalogue explained in previous essay, we count as the First Commandment Yahweh’s Word “ you shall have no other gods before me (before my face.” ) This First Word/Commandment thus requires religious monotheism, the teaching that only one God exists. Monotheism is the theme of this essay.

Today, neither Christian nor Jewish monotheism is at the center of attention, but Islamic monotheism is. Islamic monotheism’s most radical expression today is Islamic Fundamentalism or Political Islam. This essay gives major place to this understanding of monotheism and its political implication.

However, Islamic Fundamentalism is not the only way monotheism appears today as a controversial and urgent issue. Another contemporary issue, central not to the political and international headlines but to what some have called our culture wars, is connecting monotheism with war, sexism, intolerance and disrespect of nature. Both at the level current academic theory and at the level of popular culture, polytheism, appealing to the sacred feminine and the sacrality of nature and sex— is promoted as a wholesome, indeed, saving alternative to monotheism.

This essay discusses first the meanings of the First Command in the New Testament, and also its meaning in the Old Testament. Following this we discuss Political Islam’s interpretation of Islamic monotheism. Finally, we address the contemporary appeal of polytheism as an alternative to religious monotheism, as presented in Dan Brown’s best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code. The goal of this essay is more descriptive than argumentative; we present the appeal of Christian monotheism only indirectly. But if the essay has a thesis it is that at the center of our current religious and cultural wars lies the First Commandment, what it demands, and how that demand is fulfilled.

Jesus and the First Commandment

We begin with how the Decalogue is appropriated in the New Testament, at whose center is the witness to Jesus as the Christ, as God’s Messiah. At the level of Jesus’ teaching, the First Commandment appears in Jesus’ Summary of the Law, also known as Jesus’ teaching of the Double Commandment. Nothing in the New Testament suggests that Jesus or the early Christian community rejected this Commandment or wanted to challenge or reject its claim as received from the faith of Israel. The First of the Double Commandments, as Jesus taught it, (Matt. 22:37; Mk 12:28;Lk 10:25-28) states: “Thou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart mind and strength.” The meaning is that the whole self should be oriented to God, the Father, alone; loving obedience, the intentionality of the whole self, should be focused on God. Christian faith finds its focus in God alone. Christian faith requires loving God above all others; it excludes divided loyalty. 1 Monotheism is implicit in this “first and greatest commandment.”

Another of Jesus’ teachings corresponds to the First Commandment. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount (Math. 6:24) that “no one can serve two masters”…You cannot serve God and wealth, ” where “wealth” (mamwna) might stand for all earthly loyalties requiring an absolute, therefore, idolatrous, commitment. An analogous teaching, also presented in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, is given in the verse: “But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (NRSV Matthew 6:33. ) The Christian’s first loyalty is to God’s Rule, just as Israel should have no other gods.

This last biblical reference reminds us that the Rule of God was the center of Jesus proclamation and teaching. Jesus is presented in the Gospels as understanding his purpose to be the proclamation of the Good News of God’s in-breaking Rule and calling people to “enter it,” i.e., to freely allow God’s will to rule their lives. Jesus’ Beatitudes, recorded in the two versions of the Sermon on the Mount, describe those belonging to, and, Jesus’ himself, in his teaching, actions and attitudes about and toward God. Many of Jesus’ parables intend to describe the nature and arrival of the Kingdom of God. Jesus’ focus on the Kingdom (Rule) of God is fully consonant with and expresses the First Commandment.

In Jesus’ teaching, therefore, obedience to the First Commandment meant responding to the Good News that God’s Rule is at hand, i.e., breaking into the present situation. God’s deity, God’s nature as God, is manifested in God’s rule.2 Thus, for the New Testament, God’s deity is not defined in the first instance metaphysically, as being in itself, God’s aseity or as absolute being. Rather, God’s Deity, in Jesus teaching, as in the witness of the First Covenant, is known in a living relationship in which God is acknowledged the rightful Lord of human life and the whole creation.

At the level of Jesus’ example, i.e., his actions and biography, Jesus incorporates and personifies this meaning of the First Commandment. Jesus loves, trusts and obeys his heavenly Father with all his heart, mind and strength. The test case is the Garden of Gethsemane, when the meaningfulness of this obedience is shrouded in darkness. Or, again, the test case is Jesus’ crucifixion. Jesus’ Cry of Dereliction from the Cross, combined with his statement, “Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit,” display Jesus’ fulfillment of the First Commandment, even when this obedience seems to mean only failure, pain and death. As Luther profoundly says in his commentary on the First Commandment in the Greater Catechism, the test of faith is trusting God in the face of affliction, when one is tempted to shift trust and hope to a worldly, visible power.3

At the beginning of Jesus ministry, in the Synoptic narratives of the Temptations of Christ we see another example of Jesus embodying in his actions the meaning of the First Commandment. Jesus’ response to the first Temptation shows how he interpreted the Tempter’s offer. The Tempter offers Jesus the possibility of living “by bread alone”, i.e., from the possibilities of this world independent from God. In modern terms, the Tempter’s offer is the worldview of secularism. The underlying principle of secularism is that this world’s space and time are the final horizon of what is true and real.4 Living according to secularism means that humans should live as if this world’s possibilities are all there is offered to the human mind, will and heart. Jesus’ rejection of this temptation is a form of living the First Commandment.

Jesus seems to have interpreted the Second Temptation as an illicit test of the Father’s readiness to exempt Jesus from the laws of nature. This test is illicit, because presumptuous; the Temptation asks Jesus to require the Father to do act such that Jesus’ Sonship is publicly demonstrated. The Tempter’s offer would force the Father’s hand, contradicting Jesus’ living in obedience to the Father. Jesus’ rejection of this temptation is a second way he lives the First Commandment.

The Third Temptation most directly and obviously contradicts the First Commandment. Here the Tempter asks Jesus to reject God as the object of worship and to replace the Tempter as Jesus’ object of worship. Rejecting this Temptation is a third way Jesus lives the First Commandment. Thus, the Three Temptation accounts in the New Testament are living interpretations of the meaning of the First Commandment.

In the New Testament witness, Jesus, and believers, honor the First Commandment not simply by repeating it as a verbal command. Rather, the First Commandment is lived as following Jesus and seeking the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed and embodied in his own life, death and resurrection.5 Jesus, in his actions, in his trusting obedience unto death, “loves God with his whole heart, mind and strength.” Insofar as Jesus’ life and teaching are morally normative for Christians, the meaning is clear. Christians, like faithful Jews, obey the First Commandment by trust in God alone and obeying God alone. But for Christian faith this obedience is following Jesus, indeed, sharing in Jesus’ own perfect obedience to the Father. 6

Trinitarian Monotheism

Clearly, the New Testament in no ways rejects the First Commandment. Jesus and the whole witness of the New Testament writings is that to God alone is due ultimate trust, loyalty and obedience. That ultimate loyalty owed to God ought not to be divided with any other being or thing.

However, in another sense, the New Testament transforms the meaning of fulfilling of the First Commandment. In the First Covenant (the Old Testament), obedience is demanded of Israel and is constantly not fulfilled. Moses receives the Law and communicates it to the People of Israel. But the history of the First Covenant, as interpreted by the Old Testament authors themselves, is the history of Israel constantly succumbing to the temptation to submit to other gods, to the gods of the nations. The continuing theme, from the Pentateuch through the Prophets is on Command and disobedience, and the continuing threat of God’s wrath and punishment because of idolatry.

In the New Testament, obedience is lived out fully by Jesus, and this changes Christian believer’s whole relation to God. Thus, Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5:17: “I came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it” is matched by his life and death. For the New Testament, Jesus’ fulfilling of the First Commandment radically shifts the focus of human being’s relation to the First Commandment. The shift might be described as from a relation of demand to a relationship of fulfilled demand. The demand remains; Jesus’ fulfillment of the First Commandment makes it no less binding on his followers. But the Commandment is no longer simply an unfulfilled demand. One human being, Jesus, has fulfilled it. Moreover, the New Testament witnesses also to the Holy Spirit’s capacity to join believers to Jesus.

Union with Jesus Christ, according to the New Testament witness, means sharing by believers in Jesus’ achievement, even when the believer’s moral achievement is not yet perfect. As achieved in Jesus, the Commandment to love God with the whole self is no longer simply an unfulfilled demand from a transcendent Lawgiver. The First Commandment is a demand, but a demand whose fulfillment is possible as a gift in and through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. The Commandment does not lose its demand character and disciples’ imperfect obedience is not ignored. Believers are called by Jesus and in Jesus to follow his Way to perfect love of God, the Father. But the Commandment is also a grace, because the Father credits, those who have not yet attained perfect obedience, with right relationship, because of Jesus. 7 What is true in Jesus is true for disciples, because it is true in Jesus.

Sharing in Jesus’ status of perfect obedience to the Father, this perfect fulfillment of the First Commandment, is accredited by the Father to those who believe in Jesus and are buried and raised with Jesus in baptism. The exclusive trust, loyalty and obedience Israel could only aspire to but by its own admission, could not sustain, God the Father makes possible to those joined to Christ, to those who are “righteous by faith, apart from works of the law”, by accrediting to them Jesus’ perfect fulfillment of the First Commandment. Thus, we can say that the Gospel of God’s justifying believers by faith through grace is all about the fulfillment of the First Commandment. This is certainly the center of Paul’s understanding, proclamation and teaching of the Christian Gospel, an understanding placed again at the center of Christian teaching by Martin Luther and John Calvin.

However, Paul is not the only New Testament witness to the transformation of the Old Testament’s perspective on the First Commandment (and of the Law as a whole). In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ perfect love of the Father, i.e., his perfect fulfillment of the First Commandment, carries a further meaning. Jesus’ love of the Father, Jesus obedience to the Father, means mutuality between the Father and Jesus. In the Fourth Gospel, the language of Jesus’ relation to the Father, as the obedient human being is, Jesus, the Son of God.

Jesus’ unity with the Father is expressed in several ways in the Fourth Gospel. One way is in the image of sending and returning. The Father sends the Son into the world, and when the Son has fulfilled the Father’s purpose, the Son returns to the Father (John 16:28). To be sent from and return to the Father implies a kind of union between Father and Son.

Another way the unity between Jesus, as Son, and the Father is expressed in the Fourth Gospel is through the image of glorification. The Father glorifies the Son and the Son glorifies the Father. (John 17: 1-5) This mutual glorification involves not only a making known the Father’s purposes, a revealing of God. Mutual glorification of Father and Son is also a mutual belonging and oneness, a mutual indwelling (John 17:9-11; 21) . Thus, in John’s Gospel, Jesus’ obedience, his fulfillment of the First Commandment, means not obedience over a distance, as it does in the First Covenant.8 Jesus’ obedience is a mode of union with the Father, a mode of mutuality.

This understanding of Jesus’ obedience to the Father, Jesus’ fulfillment of the First Commandment was one of the main trajectories culminating in dogmas of the deity of the Word incarnated by Jesus and of the union of divinity and humanity in the one person, Jesus. Thus, the reception of the First Commandment as Demand that is fulfilled by Jesus had immediate and direct implications for understanding Jesus’ relation to God and for the meaning of monotheism for Christianity.

The root of Christian teaching about Jesus’ relation to God, and thus of the Dogmas of Trinity and Incarnation, may very well be the experience of Jesus’ disciples, both before and after his death and resurrection, that unity with Jesus brought unity with God. Disciples experienced that Jesus did not just teach them about God (the Deistic and Liberal Protestant picture of Jesus) or just clarify and intensify their consciousness of God as transcendent cause (Schleiermacher’s picture of Jesus). Rather, the New Testament witness and continuing Christian experience was and is that union with Jesus means union with God. From this experience comes inevitably the claim that Jesus is, in some sense, one with God and that deity must be ascribed to Jesus Christ in some sense. The Council of Nicea (325) affirmed the full deity of the Word of God, incarnate in Jesus. The Council of Chalcedon (450) affirmed that the one Person, Jesus Christ, united in himself both human and divine natures. These two dogmas constitute, of course, the backbone of Trinitarian-Incarnationalism, the core of orthodox Christian teaching. And these dogmas distinguish Christian monotheism from both Jewish and Islamic monotheism.

This last point is key when we turn to Islam, which confesses to take the Commandment of “no other gods” with absolute seriousness. Needless to say, the relationship between Christianity, Judaism and Islam is of extreme importance, not only for Christian dialogue with these two religions but also for very immediate international geopolitical concerns. The date, September 11,, symbolizes the relevance and urgency of this comparison and contrast between Christian and Islamic monotheism.
Political Islam

To explore the relationship between Christianity’s understanding of the First Commandment and that of Islam, we select here the most radical form of contemporary Islamic thinking, so-called Islamic Fundamentalism or Political Islam. Islamic Fundamentalism is a movement in modern Islam that accepts and intends to put into practice a radical understanding of having “no other gods.” Islamic Fundamentalism holds that because obedience is owed to God alone, God’s Law—Shariah–, is binding not only in the private sphere of individual Moslem religious practice, but in all of life, including civil and criminal law and in governance of the society as a whole. More than that, the most extreme of the Islamic Fundamentalists insist that everyone should submit to God’s will (the meaning of the Arabic word, “Islam”); all persons, Moslem or not, should obey Shariah. Therefore, the mere existence of other religious loyalties insults Allah and contradicts belief that Allah alone is god. 9

The purpose of the following section is first to present this interpretation of monotheism in Islamic Fundamentalism. Then we will address the very difficult question of a possible response from the side of Christian faith.

Judaism and Islam both regard themselves as monotheistic religions. Their interpretation of monotheism is different from that of Christianity, however. In the previous sections of this essay, we have said that the divine status accorded to Jesus, already in some New Testament texts, led to a new understanding of the First Commandment and to a reinterpretation of Israel’s understanding God’s “oneness.” In this section, we turn our attention to Islam, and particularly, to political Islam/Islamic Fundamentalism.10

The religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity have quite different understandings of the teaching that “God is one.” These differences are often overlooked; many group the three religions together under the heading of “monotheistic religions” without explaining the differences in their teachings that God is one. Given the political implications of these different views of monotheism, inquiring into the different ways the sovereignty of God is appropriated is very important. We start with Islam’s understanding of monotheism.

A. The First Meaning of Islamic Monotheism

The central article of belief in Islam is expressed in the claim La ilaha illa Allah (There is no God but Allah). Implicit in this fundamental faith claim is the doctrine of the unity of God, God’s tauhid. This doctrine about God’s unity is the basis of all other Islamic principles.

In Islamic teaching, to say that God is one means at least two things. First it means that Allah is unique. There is only one God. God has no equals. This teaching is, in fact, the same as later Jewish teaching and to Christian teaching. This sense of God’s oneness is that no other being rightly can claim divine status. Put another way, this first sense of monotheism pits Islam, Judaism and Christianity against any forms of polytheism, (poly =many; theos=god) .

Polytheism teaches that more than one divine being exists, that a plurality of beings rightfully deserves being regarded as divine. This first sense of monotheism—again a sense shared by Judaism and Christianity—regards polytheism as false teaching. One God exists; God is unique; the adjective “divine” or noun “deity” can be predicated of only one Being, i.e., Allah, in Islamic teaching.

This first denotation of monotheism, the belief that God is one, logically implies the concepts of idols and of idolatry. To hold that only one God exists, whether this God be referred to as Allah, Yahweh or God, the Holy Trinity, means that all other beings called “god” or divine are not truly God. These are false gods and their worship if false worship, idolatry.11

In the founding years of Islamic religion, i.e., during the life of Mohammed, the tribes living in the Arabian Peninsula were polytheists, believing in and worshipping a plurality of divine beings. One of Mohammed’s major struggles during his work as the foremost prophet of Allah was to repudiate the polytheism of his countrymen and to exclude such polytheistic worship from Islam.

Jewish Monotheism and Islamic Monotheism

If we follow the witness of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, we can discern the difference between Islamic monotheism and Jewish teaching. The First Commandment, “Thou shall have no other gods before me” (literally: before my face”) does not explicitly deny that other gods exist. In fact, many passages in the Old Testament, including the Psalms, refer to other gods, i.e., the gods worshipped by “the nations” which surround Israel. The force of what we are counting the First Commandment, at least in the early centuries of Israel’s faith, was not so much to make an ontological claim that the alleged gods of other people are unreal, and therefore that the other nations practice idolatry, worshipping creatures as divine, when in fact they are only products of human imagination.12 Rather, the original understanding of the First Commandment was that Israel should never worship these gods of other nations but obey and trust only Yahweh. Fulfilling the First Commandment meant having only Yahweh as the God of Israel.

Only later in the formulation of Israel’s understanding of God does the Old Testament clearly teach that Yahweh alone truly is God and that the gods of the nations are idols, i.e., human creations that are not divine. That is, only in later Israelite teaching, does Jewish monotheism mean the same as it does in Islam (and in Christian teaching), i.e., that only one divine being exists and all other beings worshipped as god or as divine by people are idols, fakes, not really divine.

B. The Second Meaning of Islamic Monotheism

If the first meaning of Islamic monotheism is that Allah alone is truly God, the second meaning of La ilaha illa Allah (there is no God but Allah) is the unicity of God. God ‘s nature or being or essence is single, undivided. That is, Allah’s Being is numerically one. In the Koran this teaching is expressed by the claim that God has no partner and that God has no son. This second meaning is directed against Christianity’s teaching about Jesus Christ and the Christian Trinitarian understanding of God. This second meaning of Islamic monotheism, denying that God’s nature is differentiated, means that, for Islam, the Christian teaching that God is Three Persons in One Essence denies Allah’s oneness. God cannot be one, in the Islamic understanding, if the Son and Holy Spirit are equally divine. When Christians insist they are monotheists, because in some sense, the three Persons share the same divine nature, Moslems are unconvinced. For Islamic doctrine the affirmation “God is one” means that no differentiation exists in the divine nature.

We should not ignore the significance of Christian Trinitarian teaching in Christian dialogue with Islam, and especially in relation to Islamic Fundamentalism. When Christians teach that that the Son of God exists and with the Holy Spirit is equally divine with the Father, Moslems are sincerely convinced that Christians commit the one sin that Allah cannot forgive, i.e., the sin of shirk, setting another being alongside Allah as divine.13

In the Koran, jihad is used with different emphasizes. Its root meaning is “effort”, expending effort on behalf of Allah. Therefore, it is incorrect to translate “jihad” with holy war. However, in relation to polytheists jihad in the sense of military force is affirmed in the Koran. Thus, Sure 9: 5 , Allah says, “If the holy months have passed, however, attack the idolaters, wherever you find them….” . In Sure 9.22 the Koran states: “battle against those to whom the Scriptures are given, who do not believe in Allah and on the Final Judgment, and who do not keep what Allah and his messenger honor.

Also important in the Koran and in Islamic belief is the concept of Da’wa, the call to Islam. If nonbelievers refuse to submit to God (Islam), Moslems are justified in using force to defend Da’wa, the call to Islam, against the resistance of unbelievers. This defense is Qital, battle. The Koran’s word for war is Hurub, not Qital. But the notion of Qital justifies the use of force against the hindrance of the spread of the call to Islam. According to Bassam Tibi, modern theorists of Islamic Fundamentalism, like the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, a founder of the militant Moslem Brotherhoods in Egypt, these concepts are interpreted to justify military jihad.14

Overlooking this profound difference between Christian and Moslem belief leads to a radically false understanding of the meaning of monotheism, implied in the first Commandment, for the two religions. Many uninformed people repeat the idea that “all religions teach the same thing.” They do not, and to think they do is useless. Also useless is insisting that Judaism, Islam and Christianity downplay or ignore their teachings about God and focus only on the morality that they hold in common. This is also fallacious, because the moral teaching in these religions, while in some ways overlapping, are often quite different.

The Shariah15

According to the Koran, the book dictated by the angel Gabriel and recorded by Mohammed, God, i.e. God’s revealed will, should govern all aspects of human life. The Arab term for the divine law is Shariah. The faithful Moslem believes that all aspects of human life, public and private, should be governed by Allah’s will, i.e., by Shariah.

In the early stages of Islamic religion, the determination of God’s will depended on idschtihad, the exercise of reason discerning and applying the teaching of the Koran and the oral and written record of Mohammed’s own teaching and practice (Hadith/tradition). During the 8th and 9th centuries Islamic law was codified as juridical decisions to specific questions. In the modern day, Islamic Law (Shariah) consists in several systems of legal decisions developed by Islamic jurists.

The five most important categories of Islamic law are those actions that are absolutely obligatory (wadschib/fad); those actions that are recommended (mandub); those actions that are morally indifferent (mubah); those actions which are discountenanced but not legally forbidden (makruh) and those actions that are explicitly forbidden (haram). Important to emphasize is that Shariah is not viewed as personal and private morality, which can coexist beside a different public civil and criminal law. Shariah, in theory and in principle, should govern all aspects of private and public life, from the conduct of married couples to the creation of business contracts. Why is this? Because Allah, alone, is creator and judge of the world, and because Allah’s will should be respected and obeyed everywhere and by all.

Monotheism and Shariah

The logical link between Islamic monotheism and Shariah is direct and clear. Allah alone is God. Allah is the creator of all human beings. Allah’s revealed will is valid for the behavior, public and private, of all people, believers and unbelievers. Because Allah’s will is binding for all persons, Shariah should determine the public and private law and morality of all people.

Bassam Tibi’s major thesis about Political Islam (Islamic Fundamentalism) is that this group within Islam holds that Shariah should govern the modern national state. The modern territorial state was, of course, created as a concept in Europe at the beginning of the modern era. Preceding the notion of the nation state was the concept of an empire, whereby a center of power, e.g., the Roman Caesar and Senate, exercised rule through the means of local governors, who applied imperial policy, collected duties and taxes and enforced the imperial rule through the presence of imperial soldiers.

The empires of the middle ages were gradually replaced by national states. National states were given further definition at the end of the Thirty Year’s War (1648). National States had fixed territorial boundaries and a more or less common culture, i.e., a social group, the nation, sharing a common history, common official language, common ethnic/racial ties, and usually a common religion. Absolute monarchs, i.e., inherited royal houses, having in theory exercised sole rule, although in practice a rule dependent on the support of powerful noble families and the church, governed post-medieval nation states. Whatever the case in practice, in theory, sovereignty was exercised by an inherited royal family. Characteristic of the post- medieval nation state was that each member of the national state thought of himself or herself as “belonging” to that State, as being a “subject” of that state, whether that State be England, France, Germany, Holland or Sweden.

National states ruled by inherited monarchies were gradually superseded by democratic sovereign nations. The Civil War in England (1640); the French Revolution in 1789 and the American Revolution in 1776 were milestones in the development of the modern nations, whereby sovereignty was grounded not in an inherited sovereign royal lineage but in the people, the “citizens” of the nation. Government “of the people, by the people, for the people” is expresses this new, democratic notion of political sovereignty.

Fur understanding Islamic Fundamentalism, we must always remember that this modern notion of political sovereignty, sovereignty of the people, is the result of the distinctive history of Europe and North America, a consequence of the interplay of Greek and Roman political traditions, of Judeo-Christian teaching and of Renaissance and Enlightenment political theories. What we now call “Moslem nations” have not shared this history, In fact, the nation of the national state has been usually imposed by colonial force upon Moslem peoples. This point Bassam Tibi is at great pains to make and document.

This principle of “sovereignty of the people” is the decisive point for our present consideration of Islamic Fundamentalism. For Moslem Fundamentalists, the modern western political belief that sovereignty, i.e. legitimate political authority, resides in “the people” flatly contradicts the Moslem dogma that all authority, i.e., all sovereignty, resides in Allah. For Islamic Fundamentalists, only one acting in the name of Allah exercises true political authority and does so only when he governs in accord with Allah’s will, i.e., according to Shariah. These are the mullahs and imams, the religious leaders of the Moslem Ummah (the universal fellowship of Moslems).

C. Christian Monotheism and Political Islam

Before Christians condemn Political Islam, they should examine carefully their own history. The concept of Jihad, when interpreted to mean aggressive forcing of people to submit to Allah and Shariah is not very different from ways Christians have acted in the past. Before Christians declare that violent conversion is foreign to Christianity, we should study carefully the more or less forced conversions of German tribes in the sixth and seventh centuries, the violence against Moslems in the Crusades, the Inquisitions against those declared opponents of the Roman Catholic Church and the indirect violence against non Christians and non Roman Catholics in modern nations, like Spain, with a large Roman Catholic majority. Protestant Christians should remember the theocracies established in “the New World, , e.g., the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Religious tolerance was a foreign concept to that colony. Protestants should also examine the missionary policies of suppressing indigenous language and cultural practices, e.g., among North American Indians for the sake of Christian education and conversion. This historical record seems to show that, when political power is in the hands of religious leaders, Christians are quite ready to try to coerce nonbelievers to become believers. 16

However, the instinct that coercion is foreign to Christian faith is certainly correct. God’s way of eliciting faith, if measured by Jesus Christ, is not by force but by appeal and persuasion, calling for fee decision. Contrary to all coercive strategies, God’s way is what the German Lutheran theologian of the Enlightenment period, Georg Hamann called, the condescension of God. God does not appear as overpowering force, coercing with threats, but as a poor teacher, healer and martyr. Just as Jesus called people to discipleship and just as Christian mission must finally rest on the power of appeal and not of force, so Christian faith cannot justify, in theory, violence in the name of faith against unbelievers. 17

Monotheism and Violence against Difference

A common theme in so-called postmodern philosophy is criticism of “totalistic” worldviews. The basic criticism is that attempting to organize all reality under one concept, whether that be Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, Marx’s Classless Society, the Enlightenment’s Reason, or theism’s One God, inevitably works violence on and oppression of individuals, on “difference” and on pluralism. Such totalizing intellectual ideas tend inevitably toward totalitarianism.18

The thought lies near that violence and an intolerance of difference is implicit in monotheistic religions.19 The key idea is that a religion which understandings all creation as the work of one God and under the claim of one God is by nature violent. The logic of monotheism is to perceive any thing or person not subject to the one God to be an aberration and, finally, a form of blasphemy that cannot be tolerated.

The implication of this critique of all forms of philosophical (e.g., Hegel, Marx) or theological (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) is an alternative religion, not monotheistic, or no religion. The belief that if religion is inevitable, then polytheistic religion is preferable, because more tolerant, more humane, more democratic, likes close to hand.

Popular religious literature is replete with literature informing about and commending alternative religions to monotheistic ones. Bookstore chains’ religious sections are filled with books about Feng Shui, Shamanism, White Magic, Hindu gods and goddesses, and the sacred power of crystals. Countless self-help religious books offer to help readers discover their own divine center or sacred selfhood. In the next section of this essay, we turn to a novel, which, as a novel, does not present a theological argument in favor of the truth of polytheism. Instead, this novel commends a polytheistic religious viewpoint indirectly, rhetorically, by presenting it attractively in contrast to Christianity.

In the following discussion, we do not read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code20 as a formal argument for a polytheism that would contest the truth of the First Commandment. We do not insinuate that Brown is anti-Christian or is mounting a polemic against the Roman Catholic Church. Such a reading would falsify the nature of a novel, whose goals are to entertain the reader and to make money for the author and publisher. Any polemical intention Brown may have against Christianity, generally, or against Roman Catholicism, specifically, cannot be proven from this novel, even were Brown to have such a polemical intention.

Our purpose for discussing this novel, rather, is to show one widely read book, (months on the bestseller lists), presents polytheistic religion in an extremely attractive and persuasive manner and presents Christianty in a distinctly unattractive way. 21

The Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is a novel operating at two related levels. One level is a fast moving murder mystery and a race to find the Holy Grail. While in Paris to give a lecture, Harvard professor of symbology22 (sic!), Robert Langdon, is suspected by French police to be guilty of the murder of the Louvre’s Curator. With beautiful and talented French cryptographer, Sophie Neveu, Langdon tries to decipher a number of codes left by the curator. Cracking these codes would lead to discovering the location and the content of the age-old mystery referred to as “The Holy Grail.”

Also seeking the Holy Grail are “The Teacher,” whose identity is disclosed only at the end of the novel, and Bishop Aringarosa, head of the Roman Catholic organization, Opus Dei. Another group, a secret society called the Priory of Sion, seeks to protect the secret of the Holy Grail, and has successfully done so for centuries. At this level, the novel is hard to put down; Brown presents an exciting story.

At a second level, the novel dramatizes an historic struggle between two religions and their institutional representatives. Christianity represented by the Roman Catholic Church and the Priory of Sion , whose members worship o nature, more specifically the power of birth and life, symbolized by “woman” or “the feminine. “ Brown uses the protagonist, Langdon, to describe Christianity as a religion that deliberately falsified the real Jesus and has historically tried to eliminate, often with violence, pagan religions, especially paganism’s worship of the sacred feminine. At this second level, two religions are compared in contrasted. In the comparison, paganism wins the beauty contest hands down.

Mediating between these two forces is the hero, Langdon. Langdon acknowledges the good that some Christians have done; indeed the novel presents at least one believer, a nun, sympathetically. As Harvard Professor, Langdon symbolizes the modern ideal of tolerance, education, and critical, historical scholarship. Langdon is also in touch with his feminine side, a man fully open to the value and truth of the paganism which the church has, over the centuries, ferociously persecuted.

Langdon discloses to Sophie Neveu (and the reader) that Christianity is built on a deliberate lie. This is that Jesus is divine. The lie is deliberate because early believers did not think Jesus was divine; the declaration of his divinity occurred through the political power plays of the emperor Constantine four centuries after Jesus’ death, at the Council of Nicea. Jesus, Langdon says, was an unusual man and not God. At the Council of Nicea, called by the Emperor Constantine to strengthen his political power, Jesus was declared to be divine. Until then, Jesus

was viewed by his followers as a moral prophet…. a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.” Jesus divinity is portrayed as the result of a vote engineered by the pagan Emperor Constantine, who convened the Council of Nicea and determined the vote “because Christ’s divinity was critical to the further unification of the Roman Empire and to the new Vatican power base. By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world, an entity whose power was unchallengeable. This not only precluded further pagan challenges to Christianity, but now the followers of Christ were able to redeem themselves only via the established sacred channel-the Roman Cathie Church.” 23

Another scholar sums up the lie at the center of Christianity thus: ”It was all about power“ Teabing continued. “Christ the Messiah was critical to the functioning of Church and state. Many scholars claim that the early Church literally stole Jesus from His original followers, hijacking His human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using to expand their own power. I’ve written several books on the topic.” (p. 233).

Christianity, Langdon further informs Sophie Neveu (and the reader), is also an organized conspiracy against the secret of the Holy Grail. That secret is that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that together they had a child; from that union began a royal line through European history to the present, ending most recently with Sophie Neveu herself!!! Jesus’ and Mary Magdalene’s marriage and their child was well known and recorded in early “Gnostic Gospels” that male leaders of early Christianity suppressed or ignored when they constructed the New Testament canon. That secret, however, has been guarded through the centuries the Priory of Sion. The Priory of Sion, in addition to guarding the secret of the Holy Grail (Mary Magdalene as Jesus’ wife) keeps alive the Church-suppressed worship of the Feminine and of the sacred powers of nature. Langdon’s didactic monologues in the novel describe Roman Catholicism as the result of the early Christian movement, which itself was an “newly emerging power [which took over] the existing [symbols of feminine religion] and degrade them over time in an attempt to erase their meaning. “

Standing in for Christianity, as a whole is Roman Catholicism, and standing in for Roman Catholicism is the Roman Catholic conservative movement, Opus Dei. Opus Dei’s present leader, in the novel, is Bishop Aringarosa.24 He has enlisted Silas, an albino and former sexually molested criminal, to find the Holy Grail in order to strengthen Opus Dei’s hand in the current power struggles within the Roman Catholic Church. In blind obedience to Aringarosa and to the mysterious “Teacher,” Silas murders the four current leaders of the Priory of Sion. The last to be murdered, the Louvre’s curator, manages to communicate the location of the Grail in the form of codes to his grand daughter, Neveu, and to Langdon.

Thus, we gradually learn that the Holy Grail, is not the chalice Jesus used at the Last Supper. Rather, “Chalice,” Langdon explains, is a symbol for the female womb, and symbolizes also Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ wife. The secret guarded by the Priory of Sion is also a set of documents proving Jesus and Mary’s union and progenitors. The excitement of the novel consists in the race between “The Teacher”, Langdon and Neveu, and Aringarose, using Silas, to recover and decipher the secret codes to find the Holy Grail.

In the novel we learn further from Langdon of Christianity’s (Roman Catholicism’s, Opus Dei’s) fear and oppression of women. In Opus Dei, women are deemed servants of men, required to sleep on hardwood floors and forced to endure additional requirements of corporal mortification…”all as added penance for original sin. It seemed Eve’s bite from the apple of knowledge was a debt women were doomed to pay for eternity. Sadly, while most of the Catholic Church was gradually moving in the right directions with respect to women’s rights, Opus Dei threatened to reverse the progress.”25

Langdon explains:

In the battle between the pagan symbols and Christian symbols, the pagans lost. Poseidon’s trident became the devil’s pitchfork, the wise crone’s pointed hat became the symbol of a witch, and Venus’s pentacle became a sign of the devil.”26 Thus did the Church triumph over and degrade the religion of the Feminine, symbolized by Venus, “the goddess of love and beauty. “27 Venus and the many ancient gods, Langdon instructs other characters, symbolized different forces of nature, “Early religion was based on the divine order of Nature,” Langdon explains. He adds, “Venus, the Eastern Star, Ishtar, Astarte—all of them powerful female concepts with ties to Nature and Mother Earth.28

The novel’s title, The Da Vinci Code, draws from several sources. One is that Leonardo Da Vinci was, in his day, the leader of the Priory of Sion. A second reason for the title is that Da Vinci, besides being a “flamboyant homosexual” was also “a worshiper of Nature’s divine order,” …an adherent of the religion of the Feminine Principle, “ both of which had placed him in a perpetual state of sin against God.”29 After himself experiencing a “shiver of amazement” in discovering that the murdered curator in his dying moments had spread his naked body within a circle, just like Da Vinci’s The Vitruvian Man, the famous drawing of a male enclosed in a circle. Langdon instructs Sophie (Greek: sofia, female figure of wisdom30) about the essential teachings of the suppressed religion of the Feminine, i.e., male-female harmony, more specifically, the belief that the human soul can only be enlightened if it has both male and female elements.

According to Langdon’s depiction, Constantine the Great and his male successors, with the forces of the Vatican, converted the world from “matriarchal paganism” to patriarchal Christianity “by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever. “

Also, Langdon explains that a goal of Priory of Sion’s is to teach that the Church’s “deceitful and violent history” amounts to “[the Church’s] brutal crusade to ‘reeducate’ the pagan and feminine-worshipping religions.” 31 The Catholic Inquisition published The Witches Hammer which instructed the clergy how to “locate, torture and destroy” “freethinking women, i.e., all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lover, herb gatherers and any woman ‘suspiciously attuned to the natural world.’” The Church succeeded in recasting “the once hallowed act of Hieros Gamos—the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole—as a shameful act. The Priory of Sion fears that obliterating of the sacred feminine in modern life had brought life out of balance, “an unstable situation marked by testosterone-fueled wars, a plethora of misogynistic societies and a growing disrespect for Mother Earth.”

To seek in Langdon’s description of the beliefs of the Priory of Sion a coherent religious teaching would be frustrating. The pagan beliefs the Priory is protecting from the assault of the church is a motley assortment of convictions. In the novel the following tenets are mentioned: sacred feminine (p. 22); pagan religion (p. 37); seemingly mythical number PHI, “God’s building block for the world; the worship of Nature (p. 94); Hieros Gamos, the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole (p. 125); peace, in contrast to the violent crucifix symbol of Christianity (p. 145); women as life-bringer, the foundation of ancient religion (p. 238). But the central theme seems to be the notion of “the sacred feminine.” (p. 261).

Thus, the Brown’s novel contrasts Christianity and paganism. Nowhere does the novel directly say that Christian monotheism is the root of the violence, misogyny and growing disrespect for the earth. However, pagan polytheism is so positively described that the reader is invited to conclude that the evils laid at the door of Christianity follow from Christianity’s monotheism, a concentration of all deity in God so powerful that even Jesus is denied his humanity and declared divine.

Conclusion

The First Commandment implies that only one Being is God, Yahweh, and to truly worship this God, all other gods must be set aside or declared to be unreal. Our examination of Islamic monotheism highlighted the teaching that Allah is not only God alone, but that God is mathematically one, undivided and undifferentiated. In this second sense, not only is Allah alone divine, but that Allah is single, mathematically one, within Himself. Christianity’s doctrine of the Trinity, by contrast, affirms the uniqueness of God but affirms that God is related within God’s divine being as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

We said further, in contrasting Christian and Islamic Fundamentalism, that if God’s deity is defined by Jesus Christ, then Christians should affirm that God commends God’s self, wins hearts and minds, not by force but by attraction. God exercises divine power by way of humility and condescension, revealing Himself as a servant matyr. We also said that the demand character of the First Commandment, and of Jesus’ Great Commandment, while not removed, was transformed by its grace and gift character, as fulfilled in Jesus.

Our discussion of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code showed that a depiction of Christianity, as based on a quest for power and as built on a deliberate lie, and as violently suppressing pagan polytheism, and as guilty by association of misogyny, destruction of nature and male violence, can find a wide, appreciative audience today. In our western cultures, a one-sided, presenting a tendentious picture of Christianity is not only legal but is widely popular.

In this essay we have not addressed, much less provided a response to several extremely important and difficult questions. Can Christianity, unlike Islamic Fundamentalism, find within its traditional teachings the resources to live with integrity in societies that accord political sovereignty to the people, and not to God? Does Christian traditional doctrine, specifically Christian monotheism, logically require fear and suppression of women and of “feminine”? Can Christianity, without denying its core dogmas of Trinity and Incarnation of the Word, respond appropriately, i.e., by the attractiveness of its own teaching and ways of life, to the challenge of revived polytheistic religion in our day? Nothing less than these important issues arise when one asks about the meaning of the First Commandment in and for our time.

David Scott, Ph.D.

Murnau, Germany

August 2005

1 To block ab initio false understandings: the second part of the Double Commandment is evidence that Jesus’ and Christian teaching does not rule out an orientation to anything except God. The neighbor should be loved as oneself. However, the key is that all earthly loyalties are done in the light of, and for the sake of the first loyalty. In that sense the First Commandment is the first and greater of the two.

2 Of course, the nature of that rule, its character, is another, absolutely central issue. Serving love, condescending to the creature, marks God’s rule. Service to that Rule requires a corresponding attitude and way of life. God’s rule is God’s loving self-giving, implying an analogous self-giving of believers to others and to oneself. The doctrine of the eternal trinity teaches that mutual self-giving constitutes the eternal, essential life of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Thus, God’s Rule is expressed in humble service, a kind of kenosis or self-emptying. An Lutheran theologian of the Enlightenment, Georg Hamann, developed this theme in a powerful way. See the excellent article by John R. Betz, “Hamann’s London Writings: The Hermeneutics of Trinitarian Condescension” Pro Ecclesia XIV, No. 2 (Spring 2005)): 191-234.

3 See also Luther’s exposition of the First Commandment in his “Sermon on Good Works.”

4 Secularism should be distinguished from secularity. Secularism is an ideology, a worldview. As stated above, secularism declares– without proof — that this world, its forces, history, possibilities are real. According to secularism, everything in the world, including faith in God, must be explained by causes empirically found in the world. Any appeal to a reality not within this world’s space-time continuum is a prior rejected as an appeal to some not real. Modern natural science operates within the assumptions of secularism, in the sense meeting the standard of modern natural science, a ‘scientific explanation’ can refer only to a cause empirically measurable, or implied by empirical measurement in the world. No otherworldly causes may be referred to explain a phenomenon. For example, to say that the Holy Spirit of God inspired the Bible or that God’s providence is directing history are , in principle, claims not meeting the norms set by natural scientists for scientific truth. But natural science need not be secularist in the sense of a worldview. Natural science becomes secularist only when someone declares that the norms of scientific truth are the only basis for truth of any kind.

Secularist, in distinction from secularism, is not an ideology, not a worldview. “Secularist” describes the act of functioning independently from the control and authority of a religious institution. Thus, modern democratic governments are secularist in that the state is removed from the control of the church. As we will see in this essay, modern Islamic Fundamentalism operates on the principle that Shariah, Islamic law, should control the state and that the highest authority in a society should be Moslem religious leadership, e.g., Mullahs.

5 Thus, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:21) says not those who say to him, “ Lord, Lord” will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but those who do the will of his Father.

6 Sharing in Jesus exclusive obedience to the Father, i.e., discipleship, illuminates the meaning of Jesus “calling “ the Twelve Disciples, of his calling hearers to “enter the Kingdom” and of Jesus’ addressing God as “Our Father” in the opening of the Lord’s Prayer.

7 In his famous essay, Gospel and Law, Karl Barth seems to be articulating this insight. This essay appeared originally in Theologisiche Existenz heute, 32 (1935).

8 When we say that for the First Covenant, the Law, exemplified in the First Commandment, is primarily Demand, and the story of Israel is the story of failure to obey this Commandment, we should never forget that for Israel God’s Law was not perceived only as source of guilt. On the contrary God’s Law was and is for Israel a gracious gift, a gift given not just for Israel but for “the nations.” We discussed this important point in the first essay of this series on the Decalogue. . Psalm 119 eloquently expresses this appreciation for the Law, this love for God’s law. For Israel, the Torah, God’s Law, while Demand, was also suffused with meanings of grace and blessing, even though failure to fulfill the law remains a constant theme throughout the Old Testament.. For Israel, the Law was a wonderful gift, a grace, a sign of divine privilege, a means of relationship between God and Israel, and hence a source of joy. Thus, to the degree Martin Luther, in articulating his understanding of Justification by faith through grace, saw Law and Gospel as a dialectical contrast or dialectical opposites, he is not true to the whole witness of the First Covenant.

9 Jihad is the key term in this context. In some verses, jihad means “effort” on behalf of Allah. In other places in the Koran, jihad has a clear military meaning; non Moslems who do not freely submit to Allah’s rule can be forced to at the risk of death.

10 In this essay, I follow the research and interpretation of Bassam Tibi, Syrian-born Moslem and scholar of the history of Islam and, especially, of political Islam. Tibi is a widely recognized expert and authority on Islam generally and Islamic Fundamentalism in particular. I follow Tibi’s definition of Islamic Fundamentalism or Political Islam. According to Tibi, Islamic Fundamentalism’s decisive convictions are direct implications of Islamic belief in God’s oneness, i.e., monotheism. One Fundamentalist conviction is that all social law, including civil and criminal law, not just personal religious morality, must be subject to the will of Allah, i.e. by Shariah (divine law). The second key implication is that, in principle, all humans (not just the Moslem Umma/ brotherhood) should obey Allah’s will, and that, therefore, non Moslem societies, indeed, non-Shariah societies, must be brought under the rule of Allah and Allah’s will . The third implication is that societies and nations perceived to be trying to force their non-Islamic social order on Moslem societies are enemies against whom military jihad (today primarily taking the form of “terrorist acts” are justified. I develop these ideas further in the body of this essay. See for this essay, especially, Bassam Tibi Die fundamentalistische Herausforderung: Der Islam und die Weltpolitik (Muenchen: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2002).

11 Religions, which do acknowledge multiple divine beings usually, distinguish between lesser divine beings and a highest or supreme being. Thus, the Bandi tribe in Liberia acknowledges a highest “sky god” but also the reality of spirits in rivers, trees and mountains. The ancient Greeks and the Hellenistic and Roman Empire cultures in which Christianity spread distinguished between Zeus, “Father of the Gods,” (Roman Jupiter) and Zeus’ children, only some of whom his wife, Hera, (Roman, Juno) bore. Zeus’s children in turn had children, acknowledge as “gods.” Thus, gods, offspring of Zeus, included Hermes (Roman, Mercury) and Apollo. The Greeks and Romans believed that twelve of their gods lived on the “Mountain of the Gods,” i.e., Olympus. Others in Olympus were Artemis , goddess of the hunt (Roman, Diana); Ares (Roman, Mars) god of war. But other gods lived on earth (e.g., Pan, god of shepherds) and Amor (son of Aphrodite, Roman, Venus) of love. In addition, natural things were viewed as filled with sacred power (e.g., Bacchus, the god of wine). In addition, households were viewed to have their distinctive deities, as did cities. Well known is that in the Empire some Roman Emperors required homage as divine. Refusal to offer sacrifice to the gods or to the Imperator was a cause of persecution of Christians. When Christians refused to worship the gods or the emperor, because of their monotheism, they were accused of unpatriotic acts and viewed as a danger to the state.

12 Countless passages in the Old Testament assume that the gods of the surrounding nations are real beings; their reality as divine beings is not denied. These passages affirm that Yahweh, the God of Israel, is mightier, more powerful than these other gods, and that when Israel falls away from trusting Yahweh alone, and begins honoring those gods of the nations, Yahweh, Israel’s God, will desert and punish Israel.

13 A key Koran passage is Sure 4, v. 116. “Allah does not forgive putting other gods/idols beside him, although God can forgive any other sin.”.

14 My source for the analysis of these key terms in the Koran is Prof. Rotraud Wielandt, Professor for Islam and Arabic at the University of Bamberg, Germany. See her article “Krieg um des Glaubens willen? Graundlage udn neuere Entwicklung der Anschauungen zum Dschihad im Islam” Zur Debatte 6/2001:1ff.

15 Information in this section is drawn from the well regarded study prepared by the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, Christen und Muslime in Deutschland (Bonn: Sekretariat der Detuschen Bishofskonference: 2003) pp. 84ff “Der Begriff der Scharia. “

16 A book review of William T. Cavanaugh’s Theopolitical Imagination: Discerning the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism ) London: T&T Clark, 2002) by Michael Hanby (in Pro Ecclesia XIV (Spring 2005), 348ff., refers to Cavanaugh’s critique of modern liberal political theory as inherently oppressive and violent. However, the alternative of a Christian theocracy, whereby political power is controlled by an ecclesiastical organization, has also had a violent history. Cavanaugh, according to Hanby’s review, contrasts the implicit violence and oppression of liberal political theory with a political vision opened and sustained by the Eucharistic liturgy. However, such a contrast must not forget that societies would not be governed by liturgies but by political institutions. And ecclesial institutions, Protestant or Roman Catholic, have had a violent history. .

17 David Bentley Hart The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth” reviewed by Robert W. Jenson in Pro Ecclesia XIV (Spring 2005) emphasizes the importance of the attraction of Christian faith for its mission. .

18 An example of such a critique is Jean-Francois Lyotard’s , La Condtion Postmoderne, especially the final chapter, “La legitimation par la paralogie”, where Lyotard urges for liberal acceptance of a variety of “discourses” in contrast to attempting to control all aspects of life by one “discourse.” Critique of totalizing world views in the name of honoring “difference”, individual freedom and pluralism are common themes in other Postmodern writers, e.g., Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas . world views.

19 A direct attack against Christian monotheism is widespread in Germany. In this attack, monotheism is indicted for being by nature incapable of promoting civil peace, intolerant, and incapable of affirming democracy. See the article by Jueren Manemann, “Die Gewalt der Hypermoral-Christentumkritik in der ‘Berliner Republick’” in Zur Debatte 33 (2003): 1 ff.

20 New York: Doubleday, 2003. Other books by Brown are Angels & Demons; Sacrilege and Diabolus.

21 Like many other contemporary novels, e.g., The Shaman, by Noah Gordon, Brown combines historical fact with fictional characters and situations and with interpretations of events as scientific/historical truth . The reader who is not very well versed in the pertinent facts does not know what is fact and what is fiction. The rhetorical result is, oddly, to cast an aura of factuality over all the statement by the characters in the novel. .

22 To my knowledge, no academic discipline of that name exists, even at Harvard..

23 The Da Vinic Code, p. 232-233.

24 Entering the code discerning spirit of the novel, we can surmise that “Aringarosa” is most likely an ironically meant name, suggesting “a ring around the rose”., the being, we are told in the novel, a symbol of the vagina and of the feminine in general. The Archbiship’s search for the Holy Grail is at once an attempt to capture and ‘fence in’ the Feminine, and also an unwitting “dance” around the Feminine.

25 The Da Vinci Code, p. 41.

26 Langdon explains also that the pentacle symbol now adorns every US fighting plane, thus linking the former symbol for love and beauty (the Feminine) with war and killing.

27 Ibid 37.

28 Ibid 38.

29 Ibid 45.

30 Should we read Sophie Neveu’s name as a cryptic form of “New Wisdom.”?

31 Ibid 125