31 May 2006

"Only" fiction. Right.

As a literary scholar I am often intrigued by the sorts of things people will say about fiction.  If someone starts talking about the “message” of a particular work of fiction, oftentimes their concerns are written off as “making a big deal about fiction, for crying out loud!”

People who say this sort of thing also invariably think rather highly of themselves.  They really think that they’re smart.  They get it; people who make a big deal about fiction don’t get it.  Of course the only problem with this is, well, reality.  Very few readers of Ayn Rand’s fiction (e.g., Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We the Living) deny that her purpose his to expound her worldview, the worldview of Objectivism.  It is not for nothing that  Nathaniel Hawthorne (e.g., The House of Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter) is known as a transcendalist writer, specifically one who, in the words of more than one Hawthorne scholar, wrote himself into a corner in using his fiction to expose his transcendalism.  In her novel, Adam Bede, the British novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) took an entire chapter (Chapter 17, to be exact) to explain a bit of  her worldview and her philosophy of art.  In his novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens takes on the philosophy of utilitarianism.  In their works of fiction and drama, Jean Paul Sartre (e.g., La Nausée, No Exit) and Albert Camus (e.g., The Plague) promulgate existentialism.  )Yours truly has been working on a novel for some time (presently being revised) which is a critique of a worldview.)

Of course, there are those novelists who are up to something else, depending upon the genre.  Tom Clancy and John Grisham, for example, although Christians, do not use their fiction to evangelize.  (This is not to say that their Christian worldview does not in some way inform their work as novelists, of course.  But, even writing as Christians, Clancy and Grisham are not up to the same thing as C. S. Lewis was in The Chronicles of Narnia, or The Space Trilogy.)  My point is not that all novelists are engaged in worldview exposition, only that some are.  And simply pointing out that a work is “only fiction” does not refute a claim that a novelist is expounding a worldview.  People who do this are not demonstrating the depth of their understanding.  Quite the opposite; they demonstrate the superficiality and and shallowness of their thought.

All of that serves as a necessary background for this.  I am one of those who do not believe that Dan Brown has written something that is “only fiction” in the same way that Clancy and Grisham write fiction.  (Granted: I spend most of my time studying texts much, much older than anything Dan Brown could write, but you didn’t really think I would let The DaVinci Code pass without comment, did you?)  I felt rather vindicated in this yesterday morning while listening to Coast to Coast with George Noori.  George’s guests were three scholars, none of them a “friend” (if you will) of orthodox Christianity.  All three of them agreed that, albeit a work of fiction, Brown’s book (and especially the movie) does a wonderful job of introducing the world to the symbols and thought-forms of gnosticism.  The reason is this.  Most people probably have no idea what gnosticism is.  Most people don’t read scholarly expositions of worldviews/philosophies.  Most people read novels and short stories; they see plays, watch television, and go to the movies.  If you want to expose a mass audience to a worldview or philosophy, one of the best ways to do so is through the arts.

Now, I have not yet read the book.  (It’s on my to-do list.)  But the reports I have of it from those who have, such as my daughter, lead me to agree that at least one effect of the novel is to expose the teachings of the gnostic interpretation of Jesus Christ and of church history.  And this is precisely why, on one hand, The DaVinciCode needs a response.  It is also the reason why, on the other hand, some of that response has bordered on overkill.

Look, orthodox Christians have been confronting gnosticism since the very beginning.  Most, if not all, of the New Testament was written to defend orthodoxy against gnostic claims, among others.  In so many ways The DaVinci Code is nothing new; and in so many ways, orthodox Christians should have engaged in business as usual.  And business as usual for the Christian concerns good news about salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, who accomplished for us the work of salvation on a cross.  It is not historical details, as important as those details are, that is brought into question by The DaVinci Code; it is the orthodox doctrine of salvation by faith which is brought into question.  Orthodox Christians have always proclaimed a salvation by faith (with vehement disqgreement about the role of works, of course).  And the gnostics have always proclaimed salvation by secret knowledge.  There is a difference between the two.  (It matters, for example, whether orthodox Christians worship a dead Christ [because He died on a cross, after all], as many gnostics claim, and whether gnostics worship a living Christ, as they claim to.)

And yes a novel can do that.  To assert otherwise is to demonstrate one’s ignorance, not one’s intellectual depth.

H/T Douglas Erwin, Ph.D., of the Kuyper Institute for the Study of Christianity and Culture for the insight into the gnostic implications of the DaVinci Code.

1 Comments:

Blogger Shfengoli said...

"Yours truly has been working on a novel for some time (presently being revised) which is a critique of a worldview."

How's it coming?

00:56  

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