Angels & Demons

Dan Brown

New York: Pocket Star Books, 2000. ISBN: 0-671-02736-0; Pages: 572

Like, I suspect, most of the readers of this book, I came to it after reading Mr Brown's The Da Vinci Code, so comparisons with the latter (and later) novel are inevitable. First, the good: it is just as breathtakingly fast paced, and laced with artsy references as the other. It even has roughly the same winning structure, sharing more than a few plot devices with the blockbuster.

In this adventure, Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist who happens to be a great swimmer and a nice guy all around, is called upon to decipher a mysterious message carved in the chest of a murdered physicist at CERN, the Swiss research facility where scientists spend their time accelerating particles and watching them collide, mostly for scientific, but also, we are told, philosophic and religious, purposes. (The author also helpfully informs us that they invented the World Wide Web and then admonishes us for stupidly believing that it was an American invention. What the author fails to explain is that while a CERN scientist did put together HTML, the language in which most webpages are written, nothing would have come out of it without the internet, which really was an American (military) invention. So while there is truth here---the internet did need a snazzy look before it could graduate from geekdom to the commercial real world---it really wasn't the brilliant CERN people that did it.)

Anyway, the novel opens with said gruesome murder, much like the other. Then Langdon is called to help, improbably and implausibly, just like in the other. (This time around the excuse for calling him and flying him from the US to Switzerland is even flimsier: CERN director ran a google search and saw his Harvard credentials.) Of course, the dead body contains a riddle, and of course the dead guy's daughter just happens to be yet another brilliant and beautiful assertive female that will be integral to the developing love story. Does any of this ring a bell? It should be like a clarion blare at this point.

Not only does Mr Brown recycle the basic setup, but there's also a nameless and brutal killer, although mercifully he's not an Albino. He's an Arab. Almost as bad. Also unlike the pious Albino this guy revels in going to expensive brothels and gratifying his penis with thoughts of murder, revenge, and assorted mayhem against the female form. In short, the guy's a real bastard. Not even remotely likeable, that is.

Fortunately for Langdon, he does not get to revisit the places from this novel in the later one. He only gets to visit Rome, but what a visit it is... about 400 pages of running around churches and looking at statues, basically an art historian-in-a-rush-and-on-a-tight-budget's wet dream. We are rushed through a mind-numbing succession of sculptures laced with hidden Illuminati meanings. Never mind that the Bavarian Illuminati, the 18th century radicals were easily hunted down by the government when they were thought to have become threatening, ironically as a result of a secret-society scare that peddled myths about these orders that the Illuminati themselves sought to emulate. In other words, secret societies had gained a lot of currency in Europe since the 15th century, causing periodic outbreaks of panic. It was the writings of their opponents, with their wildly exaggerated claims about infiltration and illicit influence, that have captured popular imagination and rendered these groups far more dangerous than they were simply because the new myth attracted imitators. A sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Even the claim about the Illuminati-influenced design of the American currency is pure nonsense. "Novus ordo seclorum" means "new order of the ages" (probably a quotation from Virgil), not "new secular world order" or whatever. The eye on the top of the pyramid is the all-seeing eye of Providence, which is connected to the other Latin phrase on the seal: "Annuit Cœptis", which means that [Providence, God] has "approved our beginnings". It is worth noting that the triangle in which the eye is inscribed is quite Christian and represents the Holy Trinity. The thirteen-step pyramid (representing the original 13 states) is unfinished to represent future growth. The seal was designed in 1782 (after six years of deliberations). The first Masonic reference to the eye is from 1797, and the eye does not appear in triangles there. It is worth noting that all-seeing eyes are not solely Christian as they appear in Egyptian art as well. Yet another instance of symbol adoption that has nothing to do with doctrine.

Okay, so factual accuracy is not the strong suit here. What about style? I am afraid I have more bad news. The major twist becomes obvious about 200 pages before the end of the novel. I don't know why but when Vatican security is constantly hammered into the reader's brain, one is bound to get suspicious. When one's prime candidate for such a suspect gets killed off, one is excused for thinking a bit ahead and arriving at the obvious conclusion. At any rate, this is not really the big problem. One big problem is that because of the timing straitjacket forced by the antimatter container expiration date, Langdon & Co. have to solve a never-ending succession of supposedly extremely secret puzzles that the Church had been unable to break, and that were supposed to weed out any unenlightened soul that would go in search of the ancient scientific brotherhood.

And yet this still isn't the really big problem. The annoying thing about this book (and the other) is that a lot of the information comes from lectures characters deliver to each other, and, when that is not enough, in flashbacks of lectures they have delivered to others. Mr Brown will also rehash some of the same themes in the sequel, with the same unsatisfying results. For example, Langdon harps yet again on the supposed unoriginality of Christianity (pp. 424-43):

December twenty-fifth, my friends, is the ancient pagan holiday of sol invictus---Unconquered Sun---coinciding with the winter solstice.. Conquering religions often adopt existing holidays to make conversion less shocking. It's called transmutation. It helps people acclimatize to the new faith. Worshippers keep the same holy dates, pray in the same sacred locations, use a similar symbology... and they simply substitute a different god... Christianity did not borrow only from sun worship. The ritual of Christian canonization is taken from the ancient 'god-making' rite of Euhemerus. The practice of 'god-eating'---that is, Holy Communion---was borrowed from the Aztecs. Even the concept of Christ dying for our sins is arguably not exclusively Christian; the self-sacrifice of a young man to absolve the sins of his people appears in the earliest tradition of the Quetzalcoatl.

Well, Langdon should have been denied tenure at Harvard for teaching such nonsense to supposedly bright students (some of them appear to be mostly asleep or at any rate so ignorant of history, it would make Orwell's Big Brother weep with joy).

The Holy Communion, or the Eucharist, has always been an integral part of the Christian religion. It is described in the gospels, and it is followed (sometimes in different ways) by all three major branches. It cannot have been "borrowed from the Aztecs" who were unknown to the early Christians, and who did not even make themselves known to history until the 13-14th centuries.
While we are on the Aztec subject, one can hardly see a lot of parallels between their human sacrifices on a massive scale and Christianity, no matter how jaded one's view of the latter is. And Quetzalcoatl did not sacrifice himself for any sins of his people: according to one version of the myth, he willingly left or was sent into exile by his bad opposite (Tezcatlipoca), which is why Moctezuma initially believed the Spaniards to be the returning god; and according to another, he was actually seduced by the bad one and then killed himself in remorse. I am surprised the Langdon did not mention the virgin birth of the two opposites, surely Christianity borrowed that too.
I don't know what the "ancient 'god-making' rite of Euhemerus is. As far as I know the guy was a Greek philosopher whose pastime was explaining myths rationally. That is, trying to find some logical, natural reason for particular myths. For example, he would argue that gods were originally mortals who earned lasting fame through their deeds (e.g. conquests), and later became immortalized. Ironically, the early Christians loved Euhemerus because his writings allowed them to brand pagan beliefs as myths that could easily be rationalized away.
The "ancient" cult of the Sol Invictus was actually imported to Rome in the 3rd century by emperor Heliogabalus (a high priest of the cult). Sun worship was a minor part of indigenous Roman religion. We actually don't know much about the cult of the Sol Invictus, but Emperor Constantine remained dedicated to it until his death.
December 25 was, in fact, the day that games were held in honor of the sun. But the reason the Church adopted it has probably less to do with making the day convenient to new converts but rather with making sure all festivities were now connected to the new religion.
This brings me to my most serious gripe with Langdon's claim: he has a very cool and rational explanation of how religion spreads; one has the impression that it is a conquering faith that imposes itself on subjugated peoples. Nothing can be farther from the truth about Christianity. The early Christians were heavily persecuted, they could not conquer anything, and it is a miracle the religion survived at all. Interestingly, it was mostly spread and supported by women who were denied any importance in Roman society. Christianity spread because it presented an attractive alternative, a spiritual existence outside the dreary world of the ancients. It prevailed because people were attracted to the faith, not because they were forced into it. Incidentally, if one wants to talk about a conquering religion, the early period of Islam is a much, much better example.

None of this is meant to deny the simple fact that religions do adopt convenient symbolism. If people associate halo with holiness, then of course Christian artists would use it. It's a readily available symbol that perfectly communicates intended meaning. The halo was widespread, in Egypt, some in Greece, but also in India and China (Hindu and Buddhist art is also filled with them). That, however, has nothing to do with doctrine, and is therefore quite peripheral to the subject.

It truly is a pity for at the core of the novel is a truly profound question, which could have made this one much, much better than the exhilarating thriller that it is, and certainly much better than the conspiracy-mad follow-up. The problem for modern man is neatly summarized by the camerlengo's speech even if it is obscured by the unnecessary vitriol and the anti-Catholic ending. The facts are plain: science is value neutral, and yet man is a moral being. The march to secularism has rendered God obsolete but has not offered a worthy replacement. Religion, the great socializer has given way to a cacophony of miniature self-involved hedonistic cults, usually numbering not more than one member, that pass for modern "spirituality." What we see is the total disintegration of society and its fragmentation into tiny isolated islets that communicate wirelessly with each other, and yet fail to interact in the organic way people traditionally have. In short, we are witnesses of something utterly unprecedented in human history: today each man truly can become an island. But the problem is that we are social animals who will be really lonely on their separate islands. Religion, and I mean organized religion, provided people with a common belief, a common purpose, and a common existence, all of which is now gone.

We cannot really blame science, for science does not really do anything by itself. But we can blame ourselves for our lack of vision. It really is a pretty dumb belief that what science tells us today is better than what faith told us eons ago. Why? Because our scientific knowledge consists of a collection of theories that are augmented, amended, and changed every time we learn more. We laugh today at the way Newton and Galileo perceived the universe, but we shall be laughed at tomorrow for our own primitive notions. Faith we are told has no proof, it requires blind belief in something quite uncertain. Sure, so does science. It took hundreds of years for people to prove Newton was wrong, it may take hundreds more to prove Einstein was wrong too, and then hundreds to disprove the next one. Unless one has an unwarranted belief that we shall learn everything about the universe, one must accept science in the same way one accepts God: on faith. Yeah, experiments support the current hypotheses, but they often supported the old ones.

At any rate, what I have come to think these days is simple: having faith is the "natural" state of man. Looking at history, I find not a single instance of a large community of atheists. The grand experiment in extermination of religion in the Soviet Union and its replacement with a secular version failed miserably and not for lack of trying. It is as if man has an innate predisposition to believe in something higher than himself. Atheism is profoundly lonely, dark, and hopeless. I say this as a dedicated atheist... but I have strayed from the point.

The point is that Mr Brown completely misses the opportunity to make an interesting point. Instead, he presents the messenger in most unsympathetic light, and relegates the believers to the status of scheming manipulators or cunningly manipulated dupes. Pity.

Bottom line: a nice read for the beach. Brain cells-safe.

October 13, 2004