Opus Dei Finds Coded Message In Da Vinci Code

To all those out there outraged by the eruption of the Arian heresy, Fr. John Wauck (of Opus Dei!) says to cool it. Writer Dan Brown obviously doesn’t take himself too seriously, so neither should we. On the contrary, a coded look at DVC shows that Brown is having a grand old time with his book, even laughing at himself as a hack writer.

He sits his hero Robert Langdon down to a power lunch with his editor Faukman (an anagram of Brown’s own editor Kaufman) who is worried about whether Langdon’s book about the divinity of Christ is real scholarship. The editor,

worried by the manuscript’s daring conjectures about Jesus, Mary Magdalen, and the Holy Grail, wants to make sure that Langdon has scholarly support for his theory, so he reminds him: “You’re a Harvard historian, for God’s sake, not a pop schlockmeister looking for a quick buck.”

Ahem. No professional writer of thrillers could doubt what business he was in. And it does not take a genius to figure out that secular educated women, the major buyers of fiction, would could easily warm to a novel about the sacred feminine that interprets 2,000 years of history as a male patriarchal conspiracy. So Fr. Wauck advises us all to lighten up:

Brown is clearly a good sport who knows perfectly well what he’s up to, and he can’t resist tipping his hand to let us in on the joke. So hats off to an author who’s not ashamed of coming across as a “pop schlockmeister looking for a quick buck”—and, as we now know, finding it with a vengeance… literally.

But the big question is really, will the movie sell tickets? The schlockmeister made his quick buck, and good luck to him. But can Hollywood make its buck too?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

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Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
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E. G. West, Education and the State

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Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
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Faith and Politics

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Conservatism

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US Life in 1842

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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