Harry Potter and the Place of Skulls
Originally Published in the Goodness of God (Winter 2010) Issue
I wish to attempt a short defense of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.
There is much to engage in the work of Ms. Rowling, but I shall be limited to one question: is Harry Potter bad for you? Interest in this was piqued by the fact that many of Ms. Rowling’s most vocal critics are Christians who claim that her work is morally corrupting. What is impressive about this constituency is that they manage to marshal an array of authorities that can happily be described as encouragingly ecumenical: everything from personal conscience, to Holy Scripture, to the pope of Rome. What is curious is that their efforts are directed against a professed Christian – the author herself.
Magic and Rebellion
Much heat and little light has been produced by complaints about the treatment of magic in the Potter universe. It does not seem to be something that should detain us overlong; Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings make use of magic yet they are uncontroversial. May we not extend the same courtesy to Rowling? The point is made several times in her books that magic is a neutral thing, akin to technology; it does not confer special dignity. Morality, on the other hand, is personal; it, for Rowling, determines the worth of our actions. As Dumbledore explains, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
In Rowling’s universe there is a coherent moral law that applies equally to the magical and non-magical. Thus we dislike Draco and Dudley for the same reasons: they are both proud and cruelly selfish. That one is a wizard and the other a muggle is irrelevant. In fact, the four houses of Hogwarts mirror the four classical human virtues. That Ravenclaw, Gryffindor and Hufflepuff are the houses of prudence, fortitude and justice is obvious enough; that Slytherin is the house of temperance, perhaps not so. But this is one of many instances where Rowling’s moral insight shines. The author is not peddling moral relativism, offering Slytherin as the house for the ruthlessly ambitious. The archetypal Slytherins are not the house founder nor Lord Voldemort, but rather Regulus Black and Severus Snape. It is temperance that allows them to subordinate lesser goods to higher ones. Refusing themselves all comforts and consolations, they practice “self-less self-preservation”[i] in pursuit of the goal of Voldemort’s defeat.
Still, the point may be pursued that Harry, the hero of the books, has what Dumbledore diagnoses as “a certain disregard for rules” and an unseemly ease with lying. With regard to the lying, maybe we are being overly sensitive. No one seems to make too much of an issue about the cheating by which Bilbo Baggins came by his magic ring, nor that by which Robin Hood came by his golden ones. Nor are we terribly excited about the lies, for instance, of Abraham to Abimelech, Jacob to Isaac, or Rahab to the emissaries of king of Jericho. This is not to say that lying and cheating are commendable, but merely understandable and forgivable given the harshness of the circumstances and the rightness of the cause. In Augustine’s words, “It cannot be denied that they have attained a very high standard of goodness who never lie except to save a man from injury; but in the case of men who have reached this standard, it is not the deceit, but their good intention, that is justly praised, and sometimes even rewarded. It is quite enough that the deception should be pardoned, without its being made an object of laudation.”[ii]
With regard to charge that breaking rules at school makes Harry a bad person, one must question the legalistic conflation of the civil and moral laws. The moral law is prior to the civil and has higher authority. Harry generally does not break school rules for selfish reasons (and Minerva McGonagall readily deals with such infractions) but for good ones, and often with the sanction of the headmaster. The issue here is authority, a theme that Rowling devotes herself to with remarkable insight in The Order of the Phoenix. Throughout the book Harry is in the middle of conflicting forces that would claim his obedience: his personal feelings and instincts, Dumbledore, the Order of the Phoenix, Dolores Umbridge, the Ministry of Magic, Sirius Black, etc. Unfortunately, he also happens to be in his most rebellious mood. Through this Rowling shows that authority is a question of truth and trust, not moods and feelings. The resistance to Umbridge’s tyranny rightly brings forth the student group, Dumbledore’s Army, while the immature distrust in Dumbledore and Snape ends up needlessly imperiling Harry’s friends and brings about the death of his godfather. The need to trust in legitimate authority is the principal message of the book, a lesson too often missed or misunderstood.
Dealing with Death
That said, we have not yet zeroed in on the main themes of the whole opus. While Harry Potter does not sit as comfortably within the genre of epic literature as Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings, its orientation benefits from this tradition. Rowling’s main theme is death and immortality, a concern older than Gilgamesh. The two opposing forces are the Death Eaters, who would subdue death by devouring lives, and the Order of the Phoenix, who would kindle life by risking death. Not for nothing is the main villain’s name Voldemort, which translates from French as ‘flight from death’. So how does Rowling propose that we make sense of death?
Voldemort’s way is wrong; he wishes to be “like god” at the cost of losing his humanity. As his disciple Quirell expresses in a Nietzschean tenor, “There is no good or evil; only power and those too weak to seek it.” But the moral law is something that cannot be broken without consequence; evil acts come at a spiritual cost. As Firenze teaches after Voldemort kills a unicorn, “[It] will keep you alive … but at a terrible price. You have slain … to save yourself and you will have but a half life, a cursed life, from the moment the blood touches your lips.” This scene in the first book is a foreshadowing of the Horcruxes revealed in the sixth. The fragmentation of the soul needed to create them is “an act of violation” and “against nature,” spiritually maiming despite the gain of physical preservation.[iii] This is a profound description of the nature of evil, showing it to be a perversion of the natural good in the world. As Tolkien’s Frodo knows, “The Shadow … can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own.”
The right way to master death is offered by the words engraved on the gravestones of James and Lily Potter. The phrase, taken from the New Testament, reads, “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” This does not literally mean preventing death, but rather, as Hermione explains, “Living beyond death. Living after death.” In the natural order this is seen in the familial bonds across generations. On the one hand there is Voldemort who disowned his mother and murdered his father—a perversion of the priest who is “without father or mother, without lineage”—and who will regard no one as his companion; on the other there is Harry who lives because his parents gave up their lives to preserve his, and whose deepest yearning, seen in the Mirror of Erised/Desire, is to have a family. (Understanding this is key to appreciating the fittingness of the wrongly-maligned epilogue.)
In the supernatural order, however, this aspect of filiation takes on a new dimension by engaging the virtue of hope. Consider the other quote from the New Testament that Rowling uses, found on the graves of Dumbledore’s mother and sister: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” This phrase completes the hermeneutic key to the story. Voldemort’s treasure is life in this world, and thus he sacrifices his heart and soul to remain in it. Harry must learn that his treasure is not of this world, that he is to follow his parents beyond this world. He must learn to see beyond this life to keep his heart and soul. Voldemort’s hope is in the temporal; Harry’s in the eternal. And in this Harry shows himself to be a very Christian hero. It is clear that he lacks the power, knowledge and skill with which to defeat Voldemort, but even in such ‘hopelessness’ he realizes he must go on. As the Virgin Mary expresses to the hero of G. K. Chesterton’s epic poem, The Ballad of the White Horse, “I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea naught for your desire … Do you have joy without a cause, Yea, faith without a hope?” The Christian must fight the good battle, even if it is not to be the winning battle. Harry comes to maturity in the sixth book when he realizes that such was the path his parents took and resolves to follow it.
King’s Cross
Now we come to the crux of the matter. In the final sequence that begins with the death of Harry, Rowling paints with dominantly Christian colours. In the first place, there is the manner in which Harry approaches his death. Unlike Dumbledore, the young wizard really has no strategy in accepting his death, except trust. He is “obedient even to death.” In this he imitates more his mother than the late headmaster of Hogwarts, and reveals the true arc of the tale in vivid detail. The underlying current in the book is not a contest between Dumbledore and Voldemort, between Hallows and Horcruxes, but something more ancient. In the Bible, there are two figures in combat from Genesis until the Apocalypse. They are the mother of all the living and the serpent of death; the woman with child and the dragon who would devour her son. It is a battle between sacrificial love and consuming sin, between Lily Potter and Lord Voldemort. Harry accepts death for the sake of his friends – for “greater love has no man than this” – by walking the path of his mother. Thus bruised, he crushes death. For Rowling, love is stronger than death.
Following Harry’s sacrifice comes Voldemort’s defeat. Essential for this is not Dumbledore’s cunning calculation, but his magnanimous compassion. Of the noble headmaster’s acts in his final year of life, his orchestrated death is far less significant than his mercy in trying to protect the life and innocence of Draco Malfoy. It is not the wisdom, but the pity of Dumbledore that ultimately rules the fate of many, in a manner that it would not be wrong to call providential. And when Harry finally comes to confront the Dark Lord, he offers him first salvation of his soul, asking him to repent. Voldemort’s pride seals his doom and shows that evil ultimately is not defeated by force; instead it exhausts itself when confronted by Love.
Considering these reflections, it seems difficult to accept that Harry Potter is an anti-Christian or necessarily corrupting work. While not confessional, I think it uncontroversial to claim that Rowling is very Christian in her treatment of the themes of love, death and sacrifice.[iv] As for the place the series will hold in world literature, I can only hope that we shall long be raising our glasses: “To Harry Potter – the boy who lived!”
[i] Josef Pieper, “Temperance,” The Four Cardinal Virtues
[ii] Augustine of Hippo, Enchiridion, c.22
[iii] Rowling’s metaphysical theory of evil and punishment is probably indebted to Dante’s use of contrapasso. If you are interested in the theme, read his Inferno with Lee Yearley or Robert Harrison as your guide.
[iv] This need not be entirely intentional, of course; as T.S. Eliot has put it, the artist can and does unconsciously draw images and formulations from the tradition in which she operates.