“Pain is good.”

The cilice Silas wears around his thigh digs into his flesh, a constant reminder of Jesus’s suffering and of his own attempts to atone for his original sin—and by extension all of humankind’s. Silas has learned to equate pain with the joy of reverence, a masochistic mindset that his fringe sect, Opus Dei, encourages and advocates. His mantra stands in direct opposition to the pagan rites of sexual communion as well as the more liberal tendencies of the Church since Vatican II. Silas’s suffering is a desire for martyrdom, a desire to approach divinity in his own starkly human way.

“We fear what we do not understand, Aringarosa thought.”

Ironically, Aringarosa cannot see the truth of his own words. He opposes any kind of progress in the Church; he views any deviation from the status quo as a degradation of orthodoxy.

“In the battle between the pagan symbols and Christian symbols, the pagans lost…”

Langdon explains how the early Christian Church appropriated pagan iconography into its own mythology, and, in the process, demonized the pagans as heretics and Satan worshippers. In a highly successful propaganda campaign, the Church not only swayed millions of people with its claims of a divine, male-centered theology, but it also buried all evidence of the role of women in Jesus’s life and ministry.