The Louvre began as a fortress to keep lurking enemies at bay. It is today the world’s most visited museum—home of more than 35,000 works of art—and the lurkers are mostly friendly. Though apparently, in the midst of the hype over Dan Brown’s best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, you could not stand in the museum’s grand hallways without hearing rumors of hidden messages, long-lost documents, and scandalous secrets. The Louvre had a record 7.55 million visitors that year of the book’s best-selling, and curators were bracing themselves for the release of the movie.

Like many, I am easily taken with a good mystery. There is something fantastic about lurking clues or ‘long-lost’ anything. Growing up around my mother’s antique store, I used to imagine we were harboring treasures unbeknownst to us. In every old painting was the possibility of a document hidden behind it, in every dresser drawer the possibility of a trinket that would change our lives. But I discovered something else in this antique store: the thing about treasures, theories, and mysteries sheathed in darkness is that they always seem to lose something in the light. Like a novel whose ending we’re not quite ready to discover, the obscurity of mystery enthralls us—perhaps even more than the possibility it seeing it solved.

That imaginations once caught up in The Da Vinci Code excitement seem to have fizzled is perhaps further evidence of the phenomenon. One of the raucous claims made by the book is that “almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false.” Multitudes were hushed at the possibilities. These were words in the mouth of a fictional character (if Brown’s own polemic), but it was a mysterious theory that captured imaginations by storm. Beginning with a great gathering of influential bishops in the fourth century, Brown drew readers in with the shadows of controversy. At this council, he argued, two new theories were put into play, changing the church forever and making impregnable its circle of control: the divinity of Christ and the infallibility of Scripture.

In fact, this gathering of men in dark hallways of antiquity was called the Council of Nicaea, which commenced in 325 at the call of Roman Emperor Constantine. In reality, the underlying faith confessed at Nicaea was bred amidst controversy. But it was hardly the conspiracy Brown describes. It was not a gathering of men contriving words in mystery and shadow, but a gathering of men squinting at the mystery of light. How do you put into words the logistics of the Trinity? How do you describe the two natures of Christ? Was Jesus equal to God or subordinate? What do we mean when we call Christ Lord?

The Council of Nicaea was a gathering of bishops from around the world who sought to unravel the mess of conflicting schools of thought. Up until this point they had few formal means to sort through variant teachings and emerging groups, but church leaders recognized that they were at something of a theological crossroads. Presenting the most formidable challenge to New Testament teaching was a theologian named Arius of Alexandria. Arius envisioned Christ as superior to creation, yet not fully God. It is along Arian lines of thinking that Dan Brown molds his shadowy interpretation of history. Jesus, he argues, was not God; he was a prophet at best, made into something much more.

The Council of Nicaea rejected such thinking, though not on grounds of power and deception, as Brown suggests. On grounds of reason and historical belief, they acknowledged Christ as the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.”(1) The Council recognized in the affirmations of the earliest Christians (including baptismal creeds that spoke in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) a distinct acknowledgement of Jesus’s divinity. If Jesus was not fully God, he was not really God at all, and to worship him was idolatry. On the contrary—as spoken from his own lips, as recorded in extra-biblical writings, as affirmed in the dark hallways of antiquity—Jesus is Lord.

In our best attempts to consider God, wrote Augustine, we are essentially asking the everlasting Light to “lighten our darkness.” The shadows of mystery and suspense are captivating, but there we are not meant to reside. May it be in a pursuit of truth and not a love of obscurity that we look to the mysteries of Christ and the decisive events of history. Light has come into the world; we need not move toward darkness to find ourselves standing in awe.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Excerpt from the Nicene Creed.