The Unfortunate Dan Brown & the Simonopetra Monastery

This morning I received some disturbing intelligence (HT Athos-Agion Oros): the most overrated writer of our day, the unfortunate Dan Brown, has suggested through a photo on Twitter that his new book may have something to do with the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos. Although the novel, entitled The Lost Symbol, is said to be set during a 12-hour period in Washington, DC, a photo intended as a teaser for fans clearly shows the Monastery of Simonopetra (it can be viewed at the Athos blog—please don’t add traffic to the Twitter page!). The prominent Masonic symbol on the cover of the book leads one to wonder if perhaps the Patriarchs Meletios (Metaxakis) or Athenagoras (Spyrou) of Constantinople, both reported Masons, may figure in to the plot somehow! More information can be found in this article, courtesy of the Telegraph.

Considering Brown’s clumsy handling of history, art, and architecture, and his particular delight in distorting Church history and attacking any kind of traditional Christian faith, this is an ominous development. Despite his frequent claims to do intense research for his books, I myself have pointed out one of the author’s many gross errors (perhaps mixed with outright lies) in this post. I’m afraid there is only more to come. Furthermore, while Brown has obviously spread a tangled web of seriously mistaken beliefs about the early Church, in the past it has been the Roman Catholics that have borne the brunt of his campaign of misinformation. It is troubling to see that we Orthodox may be explicitly dragged into it as well.

Update: I am relieved to note that Bishop Savas of Troas has informed me that there appear to be no references to the Holy Mountain in The Lost Symbol. The question of why Brown or his publisher would post a photo of an Athonite monastery remains unanswered however. Perhaps it was merely a deliberate red herring!

A Play of St Constantine

I’ve just begun reading Dorothy Sayers’s play, The Emperor Constantine: A Chronicle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), about St Constantine the Great and the Council of Nicaea. The play was written for a festival at Colchester (named for ‘old King Coel’, traditionally the grandfather of St Constantine). In the Preface, Sayers introduces St Constantine with a passage remarkably level-headed for a non-Orthodox treatment of the man who ended the persecution of Christianity:

The first Christian Emperor was thus, in the economy of Providence, the instrument whereby Christendom was brought face to face with two problems which have not yet found their full resolution: the exterior relations between Church and State; the interor relation between orthodox and heretic with the Church. It has long been fashionable to lay the blame on Constantine for the corruptions incidental to any alliance of the spiritual and temporal powers—for the rise of secularism and institutionalism within the City of God—for the unedifying spectacle of a Church compromising on the one hand with the world and on the other hand employing the arm of the State to police and persecute her own dissident members. But such criticism is scarcely helpful. The problem of power is not to be evaded; the changes were in the nature of things inevitable, and would have come about in course of time, if not by Constantine then by some other means. If the Gospel was to be ‘preached unto every creature’, then Christianity must some day cease to be the cult of a minority, and the power of purse and sword must eventually come into Christian hands—as indeed the Lord Himself had told His disciples that they must. And sooner or later the Church must needs use her intellect to define her faith, lest identity be lost, and the truth once delivered to the Saints be merged in the welter of Gnostic and semi-pagan cults which proliferated upon the decaying remnants of Hellenistic philosophy and the old religions. (pp. 5-6)

I would also commend Sayers for her detailed and down-to-earth account of how well her play gels with history, an account that contrasts markedly with the dramatic and misleading notes prefacing the sadly overrated novels of that hack, Dan Brown:

The outline of the main events is . . . faithful to history and tradition, and the substance, if not the form, of the great theological argument which ‘split the Church for an iota’ is that which was heard at Nicaea.

Of the two possible dates for the birth of Constantine I have, for dramatic convenience, chosen the later (see A.H.M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe, pp. 1-2). The prayer issued for use by the army (Act I, Sc. 3) is historical, though connected with a later campaign. Historical, too, is Constantine’s letter to the bishops in Act II, Sc. 7, as also his speec to the Council, and the letter from Arius to Eusebius of Nicomedia, in Act III, Sc. 5. The song sung by the Fishmonger’s Boy in Act III, Scs. 2 and 3 is a (very) free adaptation from the Thalia—a popular poem composed by Arius and sung to ‘the tune of a bawdy song’. That Fausta accused Crispin of attempted incest was alleged by the later historians to explain the double murder; but the suggestion that this accusation was part of a plot to dethrone Constantine is my own, and I have put back the date usually given for the execution of Licinius by a few months in order to tie up the ends of the plot more neatly. Similarly, to make the action more compact, I have caused Constantine to be baptized upon his death-bed, although in fact the ceremony took place a few days earlier, in a church near Nicomedia. The characters of Togius and Matibena have no historical foundation, neither has the prophecy spoken by Coel. (p. 8)

Contrast this with Brown's, 'Fact: All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate. The Priory of Sion, a European secret society founded in 1099, is a real organization.'

The Pantheon & the Errata of the Inept Dan Brown

Due to pressure from various persons in my life, I am unfortunately unable to claim that I have not read the wretched Dan Brown (about whom my friend Esteban has already posted, and concerning whom everyone should read these pieces as well as the comments here). Yes, I know, it is a sad fact. One rather positive by-product of this reading, however, is the notes that I was able to make on some of the pitiful Brown’s errata, particularly in the terrible Angels & Demons which has not been combed by others quite so thoroughly as its more famous cousin, the lamentable The DaVinci Code.

At one point in this atrocious novel, Angels & Demons, the renowned 2nd-c. Roman building (and now RC church) known as the Pantheon figures into the cookie-cutter plot of the thing. At that point, the pathetic author of this train-wreck makes three mutually-contradictory statements about the historic building.

Now, keep in mind that I did not actually 'read' (the printed version of) the catastrophically bad Angels & Demons. I listened to an audiobook. Thus, I had to rely on my memory of the aural presentation (not as trustworthy as my memory for printed words) to identify the following mistakes. When I later turned to the printed edition in order to confirm what I remembered, I discovered that the statements I am about to quote come from within the same 16 pages.

First, the laughable Brown writes: ‘The Venerable Bede had once written that the hole in the Pantheon’s roof had been bored by demons trying to escape the building when it was consecrated [i.e., converted into a church] by Boniface IV’ (p. 225 of the mass-market paperback).

Then, the hackneyed writer has: ‘The Vatican had all the statues in the Pantheon removed and destroyed in the late 1800s’ (p. 228). And now, I think one can begin to see the problem here. But wait! He’s not done!

Finally, the most over-rated novelist of our time ‘informs’ us: ‘...[T]he pagan sculptures had been destroyed when the Vatican converted the Pantheon to a Christian church’ (p. 241).

Now, granted the unlikelihood that the statues would have been left in the building when it was consecrated by Boniface, as well as the anachronism of referring to the ‘Vatican’ has having acted in the 7th c. (which date, admittedly, our unlearned author gets wrong), it seems to me that it is at least possible that any two of these statements can be correct simultaneously, assuming as well, of course, the law of non-contradiction. It is however, flatly impossible that all three of them could be accurate. Were the sculptures destroyed when the Pantheon was converted into a church? Or were they destroyed in the late 1800s? It is an insoluble difficulty.

But that is not all! The first statement also contains an internal error: while St Bede the Venerable does indeed mention the consecration of the monument by Boniface and the escape of the demons, he says nothing about the ‘boring’ of the hole in either the Ecclesiastical History II.4 or the Greater Chronicle, 6th Age, 4565, where the consecration is mentioned (see Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Judith McClure and Roger Collins [Oxford: Oxford U, 1994], pp. 77 & 331). The reader may well suspect that the bigoted Brown invented this detail to make Christians look stupid and benighted as well as intolerant.

To make matters even worse, the sentence immediately preceding the first one I have quoted refers to the Venerable Bede’s comments as ‘a famous sixth-century critique of the Pantheon’ (p. 225). Now first of all, the consecration took place in 609, so already we realise that no reference to that consecration could have been made in the sixth-century, except perhaps prophetically. But of course, the Venerable Bede, having referred to the 7th-c. consecration, must himself have been subsequent to that event, right? It turns out he was. He was born around 673, and finished the Ecclesiastical History in 731. So the wildly inaccurate Brown is actually two centuries off. And while St Bede refers to the idolatry once practised there with the greatest disapprobation (the words ‘abomination’ and ‘filthy’ are used in the translation), it is certainly misleading at least to call his remarks about the building per se a ‘critique’.

All of this seems to me to prove beyond reasonable doubt that when he writes, in his ‘Author’s Note’ at the beginning of the book, ‘References to all works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture in Rome are entirely factual (as are their exact locations)’, the inept Dan Brown is either perpetrating a great and largely successful hoax on the reading (or occasionally reading) public, or else he is perhaps the laziest researcher ever to have gained a publishing contract.