The common cold and the Da Vinci Code

Sunday evening, and I feel as if my brain is made of fudge: thick and sticky. Although I have nothing more than a head cold, illness is always a source of immense frustration for me because it compromises efficiency. I started the weekend with a couple of lectures to write, one undergrad, one postgrad, and also my NoATE paper and a presentation for a job interview. The postgrad lecture was a doddle, and I've pretty well finished the undergrad one, but although the paper is in my head, I can't seem to make the words make sense on paper. And the job interview presentation will just have to wait until I can think more clearly. And so I get frustrated and miserable and sulk quietly, until a dear friend pops in for coffee bearing chocolate and sympathy and cheers up my evening.

Someone once send me a "Prayer for the Common Cold": it bears repeating here. Oddly enough, when I checked out my email archive, I find that the person who sent it to me is the same friend who called round this evening.

From 'The Prayer Tree' by Michael Leunig

God bless those who suffer from the common cold.
Nature has entered into them;
Has led them aside and gently lain them low
To contemplate life from the wayside;
To consider human frailty;
To receive the deep and dreamy messages of fever.
We give thanks for the insights of this humble perspective.
We give thanks for blessing in disguise.
Amen

Part of the reason I feel so terrible is that I haven't been sleeping very well, and last night decided to use the wakeful time in the wee small hours to finish a chore. I have been reading "The Da Vinci Code", only because I am so often asked my opinion thereof, and so I read for several hours to find out whether the book has any redeeming features. There are a lot of reasons that I was disinclined to like it, and to be fair, it wasn't all that bad as an adventure mystery for the lumpen masses.

But it is not a book for the literati: The characterisation is almost non-existent, and the prose is typical of the genre, devoid of elegance or charm. I found the puzzles very simple, and the solutions over-explained, but I suppose the target audience isn't really Guardian crossword afficionados. Grail mysteries of one kind or another are almost a genre in themselves, and if that were all there were to it, I would pass the book over as trivial but entertaining. What gets my goat is the gross misrepresentation of the development of Christology up to and during Nicea, presenting as fact things that have no basis in truth, and against which there is overwhelming evidence. To suggest that Christology was invented from nowhere by Constantine in 325 ignores 250 years of theology and doctrinal development, and disregards the witness of Paul, the author of Hebrews, Clement of Rome, Igatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tatian, Tertullian, Origen, Arius and Athanasius, to name but few.