The Code's Code

Michael Novak dissects The Da Vinci Code:

During the two-millennium age of the goddess of fish, Pisces, Brown says that the Christian ideal was that “man must be told what to do by higher powers because man is incapable of thinking for himself.” But does Dan Brown of Phillips Exeter and Harvard really believe that towering intellects who became Christian converts by the thousands in the first one thousand years, such as Ignatius of Antioch, Tertullian, Origen, Clement of Alexandria and Augustine, did not think themselves out of the ancient paganism, Roman and Greek philosophy, and all that they then heard from the seers of Persia and Egypt? He is surely too smart a man not to have read in such sources himself. Christianity vanquished pagan Greece and Rome by giving better arguments to ancient human perplexities and hungers. It did not win over the Empire by force of arms, but by force of ideas.