Let’s Talk About The Da Vinci Code Movies (and How God Uses Us Despite Ourselves)

Potboiler films like director Ron Howard’s trilogy, The Da Vinci Code (2006), Angels and Demons (2009), and Inferno (2016), invite us to accept outlandish fictions with a promise of thrills to come. Excitement builds once we buy into their imagined world. These three movies are underrated, unappreciated, and mired in theological debate. But such disputes seem to miss the point. Movies may enhance our belief, but they do not define it. Faith is a gift of the spirit, not of Hollywood. 

The official Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano agrees. In its review of Angels and Demons, the periodical reminds us that the film is merely “harmless entertainment that has little to do with the genius and mystery of Christianity.” An editorial in the same issue suggests that rather than battle fictional films like The Da Vinci Code, which to no one’s surprise was banned in Vatican City, the church may take a different approach: “It would probably be an exaggeration to consider the books of Dan Brown an alarm bell but maybe they should be a stimulus to rethink and refresh the way the church uses the media to explain its positions on today’s burning issues.” 

The films make this same point. In Angels and Demons, they give the best lines about faith to actors who deliver them with resonance and mature assurance. “Religion is flawed,” Armin Mueller-Stahl’s character Cardinal Strauss confesses to the lead character, Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks). “But only because man is flawed. All men, including this one.” 

Nor is Stellan Skarsgård’s Commander Richter blind to the failings of humanity. But he trusts in the good done by the institution he serves: “My church comforts the sick and dying. My church feeds the hungry. What does your church do, Mr. Langdon? That’s right, you don’t have one.”

Langdon’s belief is complicated. He admits that he has no clue what is divine, what is human, or neither, or both. Near the end of The Da Vinci Code, he relates that as a child he fell into a well:

And what I did, I prayed. I prayed to Jesus to keep me alive so I could see my parents again, so I could go to school again, so I could play with my dog. Sometimes I wonder if I wasn’t alone down there. Why does it have to be human or divine? Maybe human is divine. Why couldn’t Jesus have been a father and still be capable of all those miracles?

Langdon did not come out of that hole a convert. Rather, he is searching, as we all are searching, particularly when trapped in our own wells of despair. In Angels and Demons, Camerlengo Patrick McKenna asks Langdon if he believes in God. He replies with admirable candor, courage, and tact: 

LANGDON
I’m an academic. My mind tells me I will never understand God.

MCKENNA
And your heart?

LANGDON
Tells me I’m not meant to. Faith is a gift that I have yet to receive.

Langdon is flawed, yes, but curious, humble, broken, searching, intelligent, educated, and open to the idea that there is much we may never understand in this life. He struggles to be honorable in an endlessly challenging world. These films are the tale of his journey. But they aren’t theology.

Neither is the book.

Detractors often point out that the epigraph to Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code lists some rather dubious information under the heading FACT. This is followed with another teaser: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” 

But rewind a moment. 

Brown is using an old storyteller’s ploy that should not be taken too seriously. Remember the book’s full title—The Da Vinci Code: A Novel.  Anything after the word novel is fair fictional game. Authors and filmmakers often create “facts” within their invented worlds to move the plot along, especially in enigmatic epigraphs or title cards. Brown is no exception. 

“This book is not anti-anything,” Brown says. He believes that a majority of his devout Christian readers understand this. They enjoy the book as entertainment and, perhaps, as a means to spark interest in important topics of faith. “It’s a novel. I wrote this story in an effort to explore certain aspects of Christian history that interest me.”

Bart Ehrman (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) was asked by Oxford University Press to comment on The Da Vinci Code. Ehrman, an agnostic, is one of our finest New Testament and Early Church scholars. “I know that a lot of people learn about the past from works of fiction or from film,” he says. “The ability of film directors and book authors to affect public sentiment and to shift public thinking is neither a good thing nor a bad one; it is simply a reality of the times.” 

But Ehrman doesn’t bother with vilifying Brown. Instead he demonstrates that the novel doesn’t bear critical historical scrutiny. Nor should it. Ehrman concludes that a rousing thriller is the wrong place to look for fact. Or, as Tom Hanks quips about Brown’s books, “Those are delightful scavenger hunts that are about as accurate to history as the James Bond movies are to espionage.”

Fair enough. It’s not history. Let’s talk about the movies.

The Da Vinci Code suggests that Christ’s bloodline continues in his living heir. But it is the villain Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen) who persuasively presents this slightly rabid argument. Audrey Tautou’s heroine Sophie Neveu is equally convincing as a French National Police cryptographer, reared on great art, who inexplicably believes Teabing’s hogwash. 

But it’s compelling cinema nonetheless. After a throw-away line about Leonardo da Vinci subscribing to what follows, Teabing trots out a computer presentation on The Last Supper. He treats the painting as though it is photographic evidence that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. (I don’t recall which gospel mentions Leonardo being present with his iPhone.) But the sequence works as pure film: suddenly a fifteenth-century mural seems to represent actual events. It’s a lot of fun, and as we learn later, a clever bit of sophistry by Teabing. This is why our hero Langdon shakes his head throughout the scene. 

It’s all smoke and mirrors, of course. The Da Vinci Code does not center on whether Christ’s bloodline exists on earth today. That would make for a dull movie. Instead, the question Was Jesus Married? is merely another variation on a plot device as old as film itself: the hero’s quest to rescue the damsel in distress.

Teabing also asserts that Jesus was merely a man. Langdon admits he has no clue. The hero’s misgivings are often overlooked when detractors get worked up over the Was-Jesus-Married debate. Despite the bad guy’s claims, this issue is hardly a threat to any church, as L’Osservatore Romano suggests, and as a moment’s thought reveals. 

Suppose Jesus is the incarnate God. I believe he is. Well, as God made painfully clear to Job, he does as he pleases and we’re fools to think we can grasp why, how, or even the nature of his intent. If he chooses to marry while in human form, well, God is God. We’re not. And what does it matter? 

Okay, okay, maybe it matters because of sex. I suspect Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud would have a field day with people’s strong emotional reactions to whether or not Jesus had congress with a woman. I’m saddened and a tad bemused that there isn’t a similar backlash to the thought that Jesus ate, drank, probably needed restroom breaks, got angry, upset, and as we know, bled and died. 

Ah, but marital relations are far more intimate than breaking bread and downing wine with the boys. Even if maybe Matthew and Peter got a little sloshed and started toasting each other with the Aramaic equivalent of “I love you, man.” We have it on good authority that Jesus dearly loves his disciples. This doesn’t bother us, yet our reactions can sometimes be vociferous, even zealous, at the mere suggestion that the incarnate God might have chosen the joys and sorrows of honorable marriage. 

For one thing, Jesus tells us he is already married to the church. Augustine calls this indissoluble bond a sacramentum, “wedded to so great a husband by a spiritual marriage and a divine love.” This holy symbolism is reflected in earthly vows of conjugal unity and fealty, observes respected theologian Pierre Pourrat. And marriage goes both ways. We need look no further than the Book of Hosea for an example of the divine pain caused by disloyalty. In his influential volume Prophecy in Ancient Israel, Johannes Lindblom adds, “Occasionally, in bridal symbolism, there is mention of Israel’s love to her God.” 

If Jesus insists on the fidelity of his church, could he be a good husband and marry an earthly wife? 

In the twenty-first century we might say no, but God chose a specific time and place for his incarnation. Taking another bride was socially and legally acceptable, but not as widespread as we might think. “Although practices varied at different periods in Israel’s history, monogamy was far more common than polygamy,” says theologian Grace Emmerson (University of Birmingham). She adds that political and familial alliances benefitted from multiple wives, though the custom was usually limited to those who could afford it. 

So the question about Christ’s marriage is not could he, but would he?

The question seems to be one of propriety. Philosophers Eric Yang (Santa Clara University) and Stephen Davis (Claremont McKenna College) wrestle with this in their paper, “Marriage, Reproduction, and the Incarnation: What Could Jesus Do?” While the consensus among scholars is that Jesus did not wed, Yang and Davis ask if it is morally permissible for an incarnate God to do so. Yes, they conclude, it may have been ethically fitting, but seems highly unlikely given the time and location of the incarnation. “While there are some reasons that favor an incarnate God getting married, having children, or engaging in sexual activity,” they suggest, “it would have been overall unfitting for Christ to have done so.”

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Jesus was married to an earthly woman. Like Langdon, I have no idea. And like Job, I dare not presume to know the mind of God. Our charged reactions to discussions of Christ’s celibacy may say more about us than they do about the gospel writers’ silence on the subject. Such debates distract us from encountering God’s love in our lives today. Our hero knows this. And that’s why I enjoy these movies.  

The films are about hope, belief, and overcoming the frailties (and admitted evils) of humanity in our search for the divine. Langdon is not a dry academic pontificating on the ills of the church. He is a fellow pilgrim, wandering, wondering, cynical yet sanguine. In the final lines of Angels and Demons, Cardinal Strauss thanks God for sending our hero to protect the church. 

LANGDON
I don’t believe he sent me, Father.

STRAUSS
Oh, my son. Of course he did.

Yet even pilgrims may occasionally find their way. The denouement of The Da Vinci Code was filmed on July 9 2005, a date that has special meaning to star Tom Hanks. “It was my 40th-something birthday,” he recalls. “We were shooting in the Louvre at night. . . . Who gets to have that experience?” The scene is one of the most memorable and important of the film.

Langdon runs through Paris along cobbled streets to the stirring music of Hans Zimmer’s “Chevaliers de Sangreal” (Knights of the Holy Grail). At last the clues have come together; he has found where Mary Magdalene’s sarcophagus lies underneath the Louvre. Yet Langdon does not suddenly believe in a legendary bloodline. No, his reaction echoes what many of us might feel. Here rests a woman, some say a saint, to be honored with awe and humility. Kneeling like a knight of old, Langdon does just that.