Then we have this one-dimensional fundamentalism, which splits the other way. The fundamentalists are keenly aware that there is good and evil, but they believe they can cut off evil by defining it their way, opposing it, fighting it, and clinging to their vision of good. They think they can always be on the side of good, independent of the evil, despite the indications to the contrary. Finally, we have this kind of very heavy-handed overly materialist, atheistic view of the world, embodied by people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
Those three views—New Age, fundamentalist, and materialist/atheist—are the three major perspectives within religious thinking in the West right now and something is off in each of them. The New Age is too sweet and too easy and easily descends into a narcissistic sense which says that my thoughts create reality. The terror of life is not included here or blamed on our thoughts. The fundamentalist splitting is also too easy and simplistic. Good and evil are just not that clear and severable. Most of life is lived in very ambiguous areas regarding our motivations. There’s so much essential nuance of life that’s missing from the fundamentalist vision. The Dawkins/Hitchens view, meanwhile, is a disenchanted view of life. This vision is too flat to be acceptable to most people. It’s T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” The chief exponents of this view don’t seem to be logical role models. Dawkins seems so rough and Hitchens so acerbic. No one wants to be like that.
In TLS, as in Freemasonry more generally, there is a major emphasis on the “name of God”—different versions, different meanings, some singular, some plural, some renderable in Hebrew letters, some unpronounceable or that are forbidden to be pronounced.
What’s interesting is not so much that there were all these editors and writers in different time periods, but that the final document that we know today as the Bible integrated all these varieties of experiences, yearnings, aspirations, images, partial glimpses—fragments of the totality of reality. That the product has many, many sources doesn’t surprise me. That there isn’t one name for God doesn’t take away from God’s holiness. That’s actually a manifestation of the holiness, the inexhaustibility, the incomprehensibility of the totality of reality and existence that is just another name for God.
The more names the better, because each name is providing a touchable window into the experience of reality itself. In fact, a problem arises when any one name hardens. Today’s atheism is in part a response to a moment in which one image of God has become concretized and is crowding out other depictions and ideas and images and intuitions. Basically what you have today is an atheism that is an attack on one specific image of God—the fundamentalist, voyeuristic, Peeping Tom God in the sky who rewards and punishes—in other words, the view of God that has dominated our culture for the last thirty years.
What about the difference between references to God as Elohim, which is plural, and also Adonai, which is singular?
The use of Elohim begins early on. It seems to me it is an early generic name for God that brought the pantheon together. Through the grammatical plural form, you’re getting a tiny glimpse into what it was like before there was One God. Here’s a reference point I give people to help them understand the premonotheistic mind-set: I ask: “How many interior voices do you have?” And a person responds, “What do you mean, I’m just me.” And I say, “Well, I’m curious. Do you ever hear your parents’ voices? Do you ever hear your colleagues’ voices? Do you ever hear Glenn Beck’s voice? Do you ever hear your greedy voice? Your envious voice? Your lustful voice? Your angry voice? How many selves do you have?” Now imagine that each of those voices is the voice of a different god. There are many voices with many characteristics, thus many gods. I hear all of those voices and more. But there is still some chairman of the board who I imagine speaks for me, balancing all the different voices, poles, inputs. Now project that out onto a cosmos. And you can see what ancient peoples were doing. They didn’t yet have the split between the external and the internal like we do.
This split is really a recent Western one that has come at great cost. This dichotomy between interiors and exteriors; the internal and external is only a partial truth, but in some ways a very beneficial one. We can cure cancer because of this truth, go to the moon, build dams, etc. But it remains only a partial truth. That’s where The Lost Symbol comes in. We have lost contact with the truth beyond the material, the truth beyond appearances, the truth that before the modern Enlightenment, people could more easily understand and feel their inherent connectedness to one another and to the universe. That moment when something was different, when everybody was connected at the deepest level of truth about the oneness of the world, is gone, and we consequently feel a sense of loss.
Was it really ever that way? Did the ancients “know” more than we moderns do in a spiritual sense?
The experience of something lost is a constituent of what it means to be human. I start with that as a base. At some point in our very early development, there is this experience of loss. The loss is the experience of some deeper, more profound harmony. One cannot recognize oneself as a person without separation, a split consciousness so to speak. Now, whether that happens at six months when the separation from the breast occurs, or at thirteen when teenagers reject their parents and teachers, or at some other age or stage, the fact is, there can be no identity without separation. But it turns out that the second you experience yourself as separate, a sense of loss, longing, and yearning also develop.
The tremendous advances of the last three hundred years from the point of view of material wealth and well-being, health, life span, knowledge, communication, and medicine make the last few hundred years leading up to the present moment the best time in the history of the human being. But at the same time that our society has reaped these unbelievable gains, something has been crowded out. To me, what has been crowded out are the other dimensions of the human experience of reality that are necessary for us to feel happy, creative, loving, compassionate, generous. We are seeing now that we are incomplete without those experiences. This is what it means to be at the end of the modern era and be moving to the postmodern era. We’re beginning to know that we have to recover some lost wisdom—perennial wisdom, if you will—from previous eras.
Dan Brown’s Religion
Is It Me or We?
an interview with Deirdre Good
As we have seen in the previous interview with Rabbi Kula, The Lost Symbol provokes discussions on some of the most important themes in religion. We asked Deirdre Good, a professor of the New Testament at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, to assess Dan Brown’s overall belief system. Can it be characterized as amounting to a theology? Are the biblical verses and the context in which Brown uses them a reliable interpretation of the book he honors as “the Word”? Is his interpretation of the phrase “Ye are gods” from Psalm 82 accurate? Why is the dean of the National Cathedral blind?
Good’s answers to these and other questions are thoughtful, and often surprising. Dan Brown is conveniently selective at times, she says, using snippets from the more complete verses virtually as sound bites. And, she asks rhetorically, what happened to Dan Brown’s worship of the sacred feminine, so extensively seen in The Da Vinci Code?
Deirdre Good is a widely respected scholar of religion whose work centers on the Gospels, noncanonical writings, and the origins of Christianity. She has been a contributor to three prior books in the Secrets series, Secrets of Mary Magdalene, Secrets of the Code, and Secrets of Angels & Demons. Her latest book is Starting New Testament Study: Learning and Doing.
What did The Lost Symbol tell you about Dan Brown’s point of view on religion?
In this book Dan Brown conveys a very individualized notion of religion. It’s all about individual growth, individual purification, and individual sacrifice. In that regard, I suppose his ideas are a reflection of our times, including my world of Christian seminaries as wel
l as the wider world of spiritual quests. It’s a kind of religious perspective that says, “My own quest is the thing that I’m engaged in, and as long as I don’t harm anyone else through it, then it’s perfectly okay for me to keep pursuing it.”
What is wrong with that?
I strongly believe that at its core, religion calls us to collective action instead of simply a process of individual self-realization. For example, many more spiritual insights can be gained from communal prayer, singing, chanting, or interpretation of Scripture than when you do that same activity alone.
Still, The Lost Symbol talks about the “collective truth” and the “collective unconscious.”
True, but Brown limits his support of this collectivism to the “science” side of his story. In chapter 133, the last chapter of the book, Katherine tells Langdon, “We’ve scientifically proven that the power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought.” That’s a great idea precisely because it moves us away from individualism. It is saying, “You can’t just have a single person and hope that the power of that one person’s mind is going to affect anything.” Perhaps a person acting alone can have an impact on something, but surely it is the collective action that ensures change. As the Bible says, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20).
The problem arises when Katherine, in that same paragraph, says that the new spiritual awareness can be conveyed through the power of the new technologies—Twitter, Google, and Wikipedia. That these in themselves allow us to link together “to transform the world.” The irony is that those resources often complicate our relationship to religion; I don’t believe the links we forge that way can create the same spiritual fulfillment as those we make in person, and I do not believe that is where we’ll discover the exponential power of collective minds. I think in the end it just isolates us further. People hold online prayer groups all the time, but aren’t they a substitute? If you can, why not pray in the flesh, in real time, with other human beings?
What do you think of Dan Brown’s use of the phrase “Ye are gods”?
First, he is being very selective, as is his wont. “Ye are gods” is only one part of Psalm 82, verse 6. Brown uses it to demonstrate human potential, but if you look at the whole verse, the psalmist is saying in the voice of God, “I have said ‘ye are gods. . . .’ And all of you are children of the most High.” Then the next verse says, “But you shall die like human beings,” which Dan Brown has chosen to leave out. In other words, while God recognizes human aspirations, it is impossible to create “one-ness” with God.
What the psalm is perhaps expressing is that while you can be elevated by your connection to the divine, your life will end just like everybody else’s. You will indeed die. Only God is infinite. What Brown gives us is tantalizing, but it’s just one of those little snippets he carries around like instant mantras.
What about Brown’s use of the phrase “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20)?
The verse can be interpreted two ways, and both are presented in any Bible that has footnotes. It’s not only that the verse could be about individual potential, but that it also discusses another possibility: the kingdom of heaven is in our midst. In other words, it uses the plural “you.” The kingdom of heaven is among us collectively, not in the middle of your psychological development. That’s a very different reading from Brown’s interpretation of individuated divine potential.
Resurrection is another major theme in The Lost Symbol.
Definitely. Robert Langdon “comes back to life” after having ostensibly died. The method of Langdon’s “drowning,” made possible by technology, provides a way for regular people to appear to have been resurrected. Human beings are thus accruing to themselves the power of life over death. And if human beings have the ability to control death, then the meaning of life is going to radically change.
Coming to terms with one’s own death is the last great challenge of life. All of us face it. So it’s interesting to note that Robert Langdon doesn’t seem to want to come back to life after they drag him out of the tank. He wants to stay in that womb. “His body returned to him, although he wished it had not,” says the narrator of TLS at the start of chapter 113. “This world felt hard and cruel.” Brown seems to suggest that perhaps death is not the frightening thing that we so often make it out to be. But is this an adequate response to death?
What do you think is the significance of Dan Brown’s use of the Akedah story—the binding of Isaac—in this novel?
When you think of Bible stories that could be central to a book that wanted to talk about religious values, assuming this one does, why choose the sacrifice of Isaac? Yes, it is an important story and it serves the novel’s ideas about sacrifice—Peter losing his hand, Katherine her lab, Mal’akh probably his life—but it is not an obvious selection, and it seems to me like a deliberate choice against the collective.
Brown could have used, for example, the story of the deliverance of the Israelites at the Red Sea—a fantastic tale of liberation that is absolutely central to Judaism’s notion of its people’s relationship to God. In both Christian and Jewish tradition, it’s a story about many things—redemption, salvation, and the creation of community. But as the Akedah story is usually interpreted, it’s all about an individual and his relationship to his father—or in the case of The Lost Symbol, it’s about Peter Solomon’s remorse and grief around the loss of his relationship with his son.
The question that doesn’t get asked is: where is Isaac’s mother? This is one of the great issues in the interpretation of Genesis 22: God does not to reach out to Sarah. I contend that by choosing this story Brown has chosen also, in the end, to marginalize women and to reduce religion to issues of relationships between fathers and sons.
Are you saying that the same novelist who celebrated the sacred feminine in his previous books now chooses to push women aside, both as characters and as spiritual figures?
Well, how many women are practitioners of Masonic traditions? None. It seems strange for Dan Brown, who was so focused on the role of the sacred feminine in The Da Vinci Code, to retreat from that idea now. But in The Lost Symbol, he chose Masonic traditions and the Akedah to express the book’s values, and both exclude women. I think no matter how much Brown as author and we as readers may maximize Katherine’s role, she is the exception that proves the rule.
Are there other things that you found odd in your reading of The Lost Symbol?
Yes. Take Brown’s interpretation of the Book of Revelation. It’s peculiar. I wonder if he may be using it as a counterpoint to the Left Behind series, which takes a very militaristic approach to Revelation. In this approach, the world is going to end in a giant conflagration and the few that are saved will survive. But there is nothing to do with war in the way Dan Brown reads Revelation. He never mentions war. He treats the text like the symbologist he is; Revelation is just a symbol system. The book isn’t in and of itself of interest; it’s an invitation for Langdon to decode its symbol system until he uncovers what has been obscure. It is an odd way to read Revelation.
I also found his portrait of the Reverend Colin Galloway, the dean of the National Cathedral, rather odd. You would think that having grown up an Episcopalian (Brown’s mother played organ at Christ Church in Exeter, New Hampshire) that Dan Brown would know that deans of cathedrals usually say much more mundane things about church business. A dean is also the officiant in all services at a cathedral, but Galloway is blind. I can only speculate on why Dan Brown describes him thus. Is he blind because he sees in a “different” way? It is hard to get into the mind of Dan Brown on this one.
Finally, I don’t think Brown does justice to the effort and discipline required for transformation through mental power to occur. I completely believe that the power of the human mind is limitless, but it�
�s not a question of hooking yourself up to instruments in a lab. If, for example, you were to look to Buddhist meditation and chanting as a means of transformation, it’s not a question of going off for three weeks to Tibet and suddenly something changes. No, this is a lifetime of discipline. We know from people who do this that it requires an immense commitment and long training. It’s the kind of activity that we need to start with on page one if we’re really serious about what it implies. Yet from a base of ignorance, Robert Langdon seems to accomplish it literally overnight. This is the promise of the human potential movement; it is not a practicing faith.
In The Lost Symbol, Brown asserts that all religious traditions share a fundamental core that, if we were only able to access and understand it, offers the promise of a kind of world harmony. Do you agree, or do you think different religious traditions have their own truths that are largely irreconcilable with those of others?
I think we have to bring our best selves, including our minds and our souls and our spirits, to bear on issues of crucial importance to human beings. By this I mean, of course, the healing of the human body, but also the survival of the planet, and the transformation of the world away from destruction toward sustainability. Whether that involves reaching across all of these traditions we will have to wait and see. But I do think religions are playing a crucial role in a common realignment of values. Compassion, for example, is certainly a universal religious statement. What great things might be achieved if we focus together on a value like that?
Secrets of The Lost Symbol Page 18
