Guest Post by Morbo
I have not read The DaVinci Code, and I don’t intend to see the movie. Still, I find the religious right’s reaction to the film adaptation quite interesting.
Nearly every religious right outfit in the country is offering a book, DVD or pamphlet debunking the claims made in Dan Brown’s novel. Opus Dei, the secretive right-wing Catholic organization that comes off in the book as a bunch of thugs, has actually been forced to come out of its shell and launch a P.R. offensive.
Some Christian groups welcome the controversy, seeing it as an opportunity for evangelism. Under this line of thinking, which was explained in a recent Washington Post story, curious readers of the novel will approach their conservative Christian friends asking what parts of the book are true, one will thing will lead to another and bingo! Another soul for Jesus.
I find all of the angst interesting. Remember, The DaVinci Code is a novel. Brown’s claims that parts of it are based on real incidents and actual history strike me as only so much clever marketing. At the end of the day, Brown has written a fast-moving potboiler. Folks need to chill out.
From what I’ve read about the book, it’s pretty clear Brown makes some fairly huge assumptions and liberally interprets historical material in the service of his plotline. Big deal. That’s what novelists do.
But it’s also clear to me that not every claim Brown makes can be so casually dismissed. One of the assertions that has fundamentalists so worked up is Brown’s claim that the Roman emperor Constantine the Great helped shaped the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity.
There is truth here, although Brown has oversimplified the issue for the sake of his story. The debate in the early church did not so much focus on Jesus’ divinity but rather his relationship to God the Father. Followers of the Bishops Arius believed in a Jesus that was somehow separate from God, maybe even subordinate to him. This view was called Arianism.
Today this belief is deemed a heresy, but as scholar Richard E. Rubenstein notes in his 1999 book When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity During the Last Days of Rome it was not always so. Writes Rubenstein:
Two of the most brilliant and influential of the Eastern Church Fathers, Origen and Dionysius of Alexandria, had taught that Jesus was in some respects inferior to God.
What made Arianism a heresy? Basically, the fact that it was on the losing side of history. Church councils met to hammer out doctrine. Many of these councils were convened by Constantine. Constantine was a forceful personality who often used a ham-fisted approach in dealing with those who opposed him. He was also an anti-Arian. It’s absurd to think that Constantine would not have taken steps to ensure that his view prevailed, and indeed the historical record shows that he did. For example, he exiled bishops who refused to endorse the Nicene Creed.
But even these councils failed to settle matters. Emperors who came immediately after Constantine — mostly his sons and nephews — divided over the question of Arianism. Some favored it, among them Constantius II, third son of Constantine, who ruled the eastern portion of the empire from 337-361 A.D.
The matter festered for several years. It was not really resolved until the reign of Theodosius I, who ruled from 379-396. He took steps to wipe out remaining heresies (including paganism) and officially established Christianity, as determined by the Nicene Creed, as the sole religion of the empire.
So there’s a kernel of truth in what Brown says. Secular leaders did play a role in forging church doctrine. That is beyond dispute. The only way to get around it is to assert that the Roman emperors who helped shape early Christian doctrine were divinely inspired or perhaps led by the Holy Spirit and because of this could not make mistakes. Some Christians assert this, and they are free to do so. But of course, it is a non-falsifiable hypothesis.
My point is that history is full of what ifs. Constantine the Great ruled for 31 years. He began as a pagan emperor but even after his conversion did not accept Christian baptism until he lay on his deathbed. What if he had been assassinated before converting, or had died in battle as a young man? If an Arian emperor had taken Constantine’s place and ruled for such a long time, Christianity might look very different today.
There is one other intriguing “what if”: What if the Roman Empire had never been successfully Christianized? In 361, a nephew of Constantine’s named Julian came to the throne. As a young man, Julian pretended to be a Christian but was secretly a pagan. As emperor, he dropped the pretense, dismissed Christians from teaching academies and ended financial subsidies to Christian churches. Julian clearly wanted to reverse the Christianization of the empire; however, he was killed in battle two years later — but not before penning a scathing attack on Christianity titled Against the Galileans. (Julian, known to history as “the Apostate,” is the subject of a great novel by Gore Vidal titled Julian.)
The odds were always against Julian, but what if he had succeeded? What if the West had remained pagan? I can hear Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer, etc. right now: All this country needs is to return ritual sacrifice to public schools and get back that old-time religion. We are, after all, one nation under Gods.