Larvatus Prodeo

It’s hard to go into a bookshop these days where they display the best selling ten without seeing multiple Dan Brown tomes, or without being lured into the temptation of buying pseudo-lavish collectors’ editions of his (in)famous tale The Da Vinci Code, arguably more of a marketing phenomenon than a novel. Brown claims (kind of) to have uncovered a secret conspiracy of the usual suspects (including the Templars, who, as I revealed to an expectant blogosphere last year, are now living in tunnels under Hertfordshire) to conceal their true manipulation of history. It’s all there - the Holy Grail, Merovingian Kings, strange goings on in a French church in the 19th century, and of course the hidden bloodline of Jesus’ (and Mary Magdalene’s) children. Not to mention Opus Dei.

Now, Brown’s tale isn’t exactly new, and he’s being sued by the writers of the 80s potboiler The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

Christopher Sheil wrote a very very good debunking post on Brown at Back Pages, and Gary Indiana contextualised the book within conspiracy culture in the Village Voice.

But why write about it now? Not because it’s still a blight on good bookstores everywhere. It’s well known that the Church recently appointed Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone to expose the book’s distortions of history. The said Cardinal, now Archbishop of Genoa, was of course a former deputy to one Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

And as Joanne Jacobs noted, lots of bloggers mentioned Dan Brown when posting about Pope Benedict XVI.

See how conspiracy theory works? You string a few related statements together and imply a causal connection which isn’t spelt out!

But, while we’re on the subject of the Pope, it’s highly likely that Cardinal Ratzinger is aware of the prophecies attributed to St. Malachy - which predict that there is but one Pope to follow the current one. The last Pope will be Peter the Roman, and in his reign Rome will be destroyed, and Christ will return to judge the living and the dead:

In persecutione extrema S.R.E. sedebit Petrus Romanus, qui pascet oves in multis tribulationibus: quibus transactis civitas septicollis diruetur, & Judex tremaedus judicabit populum suum. Finis.

Intriguingly, the tradition is that the penultimate Pope will be from the Benedictine Order. Another reason for Ratzinger’s choice of name?

In actual fact, St. Malachy’s prophecies are thought to have been concocted in the Sixteenth Century, possibly from within the Jesuit Order (usually found when there’s a conspiracy theory about). The website from which I quoted (and I could multiply the quotations - try this google search) states:

These short prophetical announcements, in number 112, indicate some noticeable trait of all future popes from Celestine II, who was elected in the year 1130, until the end of the world. They are enunciated under mystical titles. Those who have undertaken to interpret and explain these symbolical prophecies have succeeded in discovering some trait, allusion, point, or similitude in their application to the individual popes, either as to their country, their name, their coat of arms or insignia, their birth-place, their talent or learning, the title of their cardinalate, the dignities which they held etc. For example, the prophecy concerning Urban VIII is Lilium et Rosa (the lily and the rose); he was a native of Florence and on the arms of Florence figured a fleur-de-lis; he had three bees emblazoned on his escutcheon, and the bees gather honey from the lilies and roses. Again, the name accords often with some remarkable and rare circumstance in the pope’s career; thus Peregrinus apostolicus (pilgrim pope), which designates Pius VI, appears to be verified by his journey when pope into Germany, by his long career as pope, and by his expatriation from Rome at the end of his pontificate. Those who have lived and followed the course of events in an intelligent manner during the pontificates of Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius X cannot fail to be impressed with the titles given to each by the prophecies of St. Malachy and their wonderful appropriateness: Crux de Cruce (Cross from a Cross) Pius IX; Lumen in caelo (Light in the Sky) Leo XIII; Ignis ardens (Burning Fire) Pius X. There is something more than coincidence in the designations given to these three popes so many hundred years before their time.

Well, maybe not. The nature of cryptic prophecy is that the space for interpretation is so wide you can read almost anything into it.

Which brings me back to the interpretation of history and The Da Vinci Code. I’ve been dipping into a scholarly but well written history of the Grail legend by Richard Barber. As readers of Umberto Eco will know, there are grave difficulties in treating ancient and medieval texts as having a self-evident meaning. For instance, many theological texts sometimes called “forgeries” were just conventionally attributed to an author with authority (literally) - one example being the Pseudo-Irenaus. The intent wasn’t to deceive. Similarly, Barber notes that the early romances of the Grail usually claimed to have access to a secret book or codex that the author dared not circulate, or sometimes even summarise in full. Robert de Boron, the first writer to give the Grail legend a Christian twist, claimed to own a book containing the words Christ spoke to Joseph of Arimethea after his resurrection. The words he discloses are conventional medieval Eucharistic theology.

I’m in thorough agreement with Barber:

And finally, why, in the twenty-first century, are we unable to face uncertainty about the past? Many of us are not content with possibilities as the answer to historical problems, but are driven to see questions like these as secrets locked from us by some vast conspiracy, for which a key must be found.

In fact, we do violence to the past by imagining that our futures were so easily manipulable. And often, as notoriously the case with the anti-Semitic forgeries of the recent past, conspiracy theory slips easily into caricature and hatred. More often than not, what happens in history is unintended, and history as such is ultimately unknowable - all we have is texts and artefacts from which we reconstruct a past. This is in no way to disparage scientific enquiry into history or to promote relativism - often it’s the results of serious history that we are afraid to confront. So we retreat into fantasies unredeemed by logic. It’s a worry.

So why then Cardinal Ratzinger’s choice of the name Benedict - so striking when considering the prophecy?

(Rhetorical questions also mark out conspiracy theory).

Just between you and me, I suspect it’s in part his little joke.