| by Emily Griesinger With the remarkable 3.5 million first printing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth volume in the series, thirty-seven-year-old Joanna Kathleen Rowling has achieved the dream of every adult or children's author: people everywhere are buying, reading, writing, and talking about Harry Potter. "You don't have to be a wizard or a kid," says columnist Cathy Hainer in USA Today, "to appreciate the spell cast by Harry Potter." Roger Sutton, editor of one of the best-known journals in the field of children's literature, The Hornbook Magazine, rained on Rowling's parade by judging the first book" critically insignificant" (500), but sales of the first four novels--Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1997), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1999), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000)--have earned their author over $30 million to date (Abanes 8n2). Her American publisher, Scholastic Inc., has made more than that, already as much as $200 million according to some estimates (Abanes 2), and will make even more when the remaining three novels are published in 2002 and 2003. Who could have predicted that Rowling, a single mother on welfare, would produce the "`cash cow'" (qtd. in Sokoloff) or, as others have said, the "golden goose" of the century (Maslin), inspiring a huge industry in everything from lunch boxes and beach towels to coloring books and jelly beans? And, since she recently sold the film rights for the complete series to Warner Brothers, the first film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, earning $31.3 million on the first day, with ABC picking up the television rights in a deal estimated at $140 million, there no doubt will be more Potter products to come (Abramowitz and Day). Meanwhile Rowling has toured the United States and Europe, been on dozens of talk shows, and was even invited to Buckingham Palace, where she received the Order of the British Empire (Soares). By any estimate this first-time author has made a significant contribution to the field of children's literature. In questioning the critical significance of Harry Potter, Sutton perhaps means to imply that these books, while wildly popular with the masses, are not to be read or taken seriously by scholars. Some scholars, however, are taking them seriously. Nicholas Tucker's "The Rise and Rise of Harry Potter" in Children's Literature in Education contextualizes Rowling's work within the fairy-tale tradition. The popularity of Rowling's "determinedly old-fashioned" (222) fairy tale suggests that modern children and their parents are tired of contemporary realism in children's fiction--stories about drugs, alcohol, divorce, and sex, none of which appear so far in the Potter series. What we have instead is a "distinctly backward-looking" fantasy of the children's boarding-school variety that, according to Tucker, caters to the escapist dreams of anyone who ever went to school and didn't like it. Harry Potter contains "melodrama, moral certainty, and agreeable wish fulfillment," which makes it "good but not great literature" (228). Still, we should not write off the series altogether because three titles remain. Perhaps it will get better. Feminist critic Deborah Thompson loves the series but cautions against "unbridled adulation" because, despite the cute fun and the magic, Harry Potter contains "gendered images more common to the mid-twentieth century than to the twenty-first" (42). Boy wizards like Harry have all the fun while girl wizards like his friend, Hermione, mope around, nag, or go to the library. Children's fairy-tale expert Jack Zipes agrees. The fantasy world in Harry Potter is not skeptical enough about the original messages of conventional fairy tales, which, claims Zipes, were sexist and patriarchal. Like all the other one-dimensional "good" characters in the story, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger circle around Harry with his "phallic wand" in order to "highlight his extraordinary role as Boy Scout/detective" (180). Like Tucker, Zipes finds the Harry Potter books old-fashioned and entirely predictable: "If you've read one, you've read them all" (176). A postmodern fairy tale that turns conventional fantasy upside down and inside out, like Roger Rabbit or The Stinky Cheese Man or the recent film Shrek, would have been more to Zipe's liking. Finally, in terms of the academic mainstream, those in the profession of English literature will be amused to know that Harold Bloom does not like Harry Potter at all. "Inferior to many comic books," "a mass of cliches," "derivative, foolish, and ... horribly written," says Bloom. "Kids are better off not reading at all than reading Potter." When we turn to literary scholars in the Christian community, we find few serious critics like Alan Jacobs or Gene Edward Veith who are willing to write about or even discuss Harry Potter. This is partly because these books have caused a firestorm of controversy among Christian parents and educators for their alleged portrayal of witchcraft and the occult. Fear, confusion, and self-righteous anger have characterized that debate, and it is understandable that Christians in academe shy away from the unpleasantness and downright silliness of some of what is going on. No one in the Christian community, however, can afford to be ignorant of or misinformed about the impact these books have had and will continue to have on our culture. "Christians do not easily sidestep such discussions, nor should we," writes Connie Neal in What's a Christian to Do with Harry Potter? "Indeed, every parent and Christian educator, and any Christian who cares about children or remaining culturally relevant, will need to face the Harry Potter phenomenon and the debate it generates" (3). I agree with Neal that Harry Potter is here to stay and that we cannot "untell" his story even if we wanted to. As a Christian educator and literary scholar, I am uncomfortable with the extreme position of those who would ban or burn Harry Potter, for example, to protect children from the Antichrist (Chambers). I am more sympathetic with those who acknowledge difficulties with Rowling's approach and world view, but who still enjoy and believe others should be allowed to enjoy Harry Potter For those who value the imagination and who are convinced that what children (and adults for that matter) read shapes what they believe and ultimately who they are, Harry Potter raises some perplexing questions. What is the role of the imagination and fantasy in drawing us to or away from God? Is there a way to read a fantasy text like Harry Potter that does not violate biblical cautions and prohibitions against "things magical"? What if anything might Christian scholars who are serious about literature and also serious about their faith contribute to the Harry Potter debate? I want to answer these questions by establishing a relationship between the genre of fantasy and the concerns of Christian eschatology, that branch of theology that looks at the future or latter days, sometimes called Kingdom theology or, in some circles, the theology of hope. Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim has argued that one of the purposes of fairy tales is to give children hope (4-19, 116-35). According to Christian eschatology, such hope finds its ultimate fulfillment in Christ and the Kingdom of God. Fairy tales and fairy-tale magic may have a role to play, then, in opening the reader to the Christian supernatural and eventually to salvation in Christ. At the same time, depending on the tale and the response of the reader, fairy-tale magic could open doors to a supernatural that is at best neopagan and New Age, at worst anti-Christian or even Satanic. Harry Potter does not fit easily into either category. For Christians one of its problematic features is the way Rowling employs the supernatural to highlight and make desirable the paraphernalia of witchcraft while at the same time embracing and seeming to affirm traditional Christian values--for example, loyalty, friendship, courage, honesty, perseverance, and love. If there is hope in Harry Potter, it is not always dear, certainly not as clear as many Christian readers would like, where that hope comes from and where it will ultimately lead. Combining insights from Christian eschatology with ideas found in two fantasy writers, both professing Christians well known in the Christian community, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, I will argue that, despite potential problems associated with witchcraft, Rowling's magic, like the magic of Tolkien and especially the "deeper magic" of Lewis, is best understood as a narrative device that articulates hope. Paradoxically, while drawing on imagery and symbols that are decidedly pagan and even anti-Christian, Rowling manages nevertheless to incorporate into the magic of her vision ideas that are supportive of Christian values and truth. I. Eschatology and Children's Fantasy: Narrating Hope In Christian tradition "eschatology" refers to the doctrine of the end times when Christ will return and the Kingdom of God will be established forever. Volumes have been written to sort it all out. When will Christ come? What will he do when he comes? What will happen to the Church? For our purposes eschatology is simply that branch of Christian theology having to do with the future. It seeks to answer the question of what I can know about tomorrow, about the day after tomorrow, and so on into eternity. What can I expect and anticipate about the future? What can I hope for? These are important questions because hope or lack of hope about the future changes what I do and who I am in the present. If we have hope, we can live well; if we have no hope, we sit on the stage like the two tramps in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and despair. Nothing to be done, we say to each other, and sit and stare, or we hang ourselves. For Beckett and other non-Christian existentialists, Godot has not and will never come. Christian theologians of hope, on the other hand, look for fulfillment of God's promise that His people and His creation shall one day be healed and made new. German theologian Jurgen Moltmann, author of a foundational work in this area, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications ora Christian Eschatology, argues that Christianity is fundamentally and essentially a religion of hope: "From first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present" (16). Secular eschatologies of the modern age have lost credibility. Few now believe that capitalism or Marxism or radical feminism is going to save us. Postmodernism is partly a response to the failure of hope for the future. The essential point of Christian eschatology, as explored in Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart's Hope Against Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium, is the refusal of postmodern hopelessness. Key to that endeavor is the creative activity of the imagination: | |
The quest for meaning, truth, goodness and beauty is closely bound up with
hope as an activity of imagination in which we seek to transcend the
boundaries of the present, to go beyond the given, outwards and forwards,
in search of something more, something better, than the given affords
us.... Hope is a matter of both knowledge and will (we know what has
happened before, and we know what we desire) but is characterized above all
by the application of imagination and trust to a future which is
essentially open and unknown. With its eyes wide open to the threat which
the future holds, it nonetheless sees ways of averting this threat. Hope
is, in this sense, an activity of imaginative faith. (52-53)
| | Forms of imaginative activity that foster hope for the future are essential to living in the present: they "fit us for survival." Hope that is imaginative and not imaginary, Bauckhan and Hart continue, "insists on expanding our perceived horizons of possibility, broadening the landscape of reality in such a way as to set our present circumstance in a wider perspective and thereby to rob it of its absoluteness" (54). For the Christian artist, hope involves a hunch or intuitive judgment about "something which lies beyond us, as yet unseen but, we believe, real enough" (62). William F. Lynch describes the effect of such activity in Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless: "The artist, through imaginative self-transcendence, opens up for us visions of reality (including its possible futures) through a creative wager on transcendence, and thereby actually helps to invent the future of man and to extend man's possibilities" (34). Children's fantasy literature is a special form of imaginative self-transcendence that works in similar fashion to equip children to transcend difficult circumstances in their present lives and to hope for something better in the future. Borrowing from Bauckham and Hart, children's fantasy literature allows children to "protest in the face of the given, to refuse to accept its limitations and lacks and unacceptable features, to reject the inevitability of the intolerable" (86). In short, children's fantasy allows children to survive reality long enough to grow up and be ready to change it. In this way fairy tales and fantasy literature fit children for survival. Bettelheim argues something like this when he says that fairy tales help children deal therapeutically with the psychological problems of growing up: "For a story truly to hold the child's attention, it must entertain him and arouse his curiosity. But to enrich his life, it must stimulate his imagination; help him to develop his intellect and to clarify his emotions; be attuned to his anxieties and aspirations; give full recognition to his difficulties, while at the same time suggesting solutions to the problems which perturb him" (5). Through fairy tales children learn to cope with "narcissistic disappointments, oedipal dilemmas, [and] sibling rivalries"; they are enabled to "relinquish childhood dependencies, gaining a feeling of selfhood and of self-worth, and a sense of moral obligation" (6). Bettelheim thus agrees that the primary purpose of fantasy and fairy tales is to give children hope. John Goldthwaite locates the source of that hope in our hunger for the supernatural and the miraculous: "The reader lost in the right story at the right moment may be visited by a transcendent awareness that the world itself is in a condition we could only call a state of grace.... Every work of make-believe bears the same implicit message ... [that] the world is possessed of a quality that is beyond empirical knowing" (351). A Christian fantasy puts all this in a Christian context. According to Lewis scholar Colin Manlove, a Christian fantasy is a fiction dealing with the Christian supernatural in a make-believe or imaginary world. There is in Christian fantasy a particular "sense of the numinous" that makes us "thrill imaginatively to a divine reality both near and far, both with us and other" (163). For Lewis, all fantasy truly written, even where it is not Christian in intent, may baptize the imagination and impart a "real though unfocused gleam of divine truth" (Miracles 137-38). Indeed, the best fairy tales arouse longing for ideal worlds, even as they enrich the real world with a new dimension (Lewis, "On Three Ways" 37-38). Hence, there is a close connection between the genre of fantasy and eschatological longings in a postmodern age. Fantasy offers a skeptical age, says Kath Filmer, what religion once offered in an age of faith--namely, a way of "looking at and explaining the human condition, and of seeing in it something for which to hope" (138). The skepticism of this century, in Filmer's view, has actually provoked the writers of fantasy, bringing them out of the closet, as it were, to undermine or "deconstruct" the cynicism and materialism of this age and to offer in their place "consolation, healing, and hope." In its truest forms "fantasy fulfills the deepest and most heartfelt of human needs, the hope that the future will be better, that, indeed, there will be a future" (21-22). While religious discourse is alien to the postmodern age, there is still a psychological and spiritual need "if not to believe, then at least to hope," says Filmer, and this need is met in fantasy literature, which operates in the same domain and uses the same literary devices--metaphor, image, symbol--as the discourse of religion and "does so largely to the same end: the articulation of hope" (iii). Fantasy plays a significant role in legitimizing religious discourse that has typically been marginalized by the discourses of materialism and anti-supernaturalism characteristic of postmodern culture. If we combine this view of fantasy with the ideas contained in Christian eschatology, we have some notion of what fantasy might contribute to the moral and spiritual lives of children. "I have always loved fairy tales and to this day read [them] with more intensity than I read almost anything else," writes Presbyterian pastor and novelist Frederick Buechner. "And I believe in magic or want to.... I am a congenital believer, a helpless hungerer after the marvelous as solace and adventure and escape" (Alphabet 41-42). Given eschatological longings for the "already" but "not yet" fully accomplished reign of Christ, which is the essence of Christian hope, Buechner's statement expresses our desire to believe that the promised future is coming true here and now: | |
If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we
would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness,
beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to be born both within
ourselves and within the world; we would know that the Kingdom of God is
what all of us hunger for above all other things even when we don't know
its name or realize that it's what we're starving to death for. The Kingdom
of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. (Clown
152-53)
| | Perhaps the Kingdom of God is where the truest fairy tales come from as well. We glimpse Kingdom principles and values--bravery, loyalty, honesty, faith, hope, love--in the best fairy tales. In some we might even glimpse the King or at least His goodness and moral wisdom. Thus, fairy tales and fantasy literature are effective for adults and children because they tap into our hope not just for transcendence but for the kind of transcendence associated with and belonging to the Kingdom of God. In the language of fairy tales this is represented symbolically by the triumph of good over evil and the expectation of a happy ending. As Cinderellas or Ugly Ducklings or tiny Tom Thumbs, we are ignorant of or misinformed about our true identity as sons and daughters of the King. Through the magic of Christ's mercy and grace, we discover the "good news" that we are not orphans or beggars or slaves after all but beloved children. We enter a personal relationship with the King, inherit the treasures of the Kingdom, and live happily ever after. Fairy tales and fantasy literature do not simply meet children's psychological needs, then, as Bettelheim supposes, though they may do that. They also evoke and to some degree satisfy spiritual longings. As such they have a role to play in bringing us to Christ. That said, I want to take a closer look at the issue of fantasy and eschatology in Harry Potter. In particular, I want to examine the way Rowling uses magic, and especially "deeper magic," to awaken and communicate hope. The concept of "deeper magic" is developed by Lewis in the Narnia Chronicles, which Rowling says she read and loved as a child (Shapiro 25). Both Lewis and Tolkien believed in the creative use of the "baptized imagination" and acknowledged the capacity of fantasy and myth to arouse desire for heaven and for the only absolutely true fantasy of Christian redemption. Both authors were entirely comfortable using magic in the creation of secondary worlds, and, though differing and even disagreeing with each other on how these secondary worlds relate to the primary world, or reality as we know it, both agreed that the craft and artistry involved in imagining such worlds was a God-given gift and could be used under His inspiration and guidance to communicate religious experience and divine truth. Both acknowledged as well the contrary position that unbridled imagining could do harm as well as good, that even morally good literature could be read poorly, and that morally bad literature could corrupt and lead astray. In Miracles: A Preliminary Study Lewis claims that the best fantasy, whether pagan, neopagan, or Christian, imparts a "real though unfocused gleam of divine truth." In Narnia this is the function of the "deeper magic," which is the equivalent of Christian grace and can be linked as well with Tolkien's concept of "eucatastrophe," the turning point in a fairy story that brings a "lift to the heart" and assures the happy ending (81). The greatest eucatastrophe of human history for Tolkien is the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ (83-84). What these two concepts have in common as literary devices is that they both articulate hope. Can such ideas be found in Harry Potter? Are there episodes where magic is used to bring a "lift to the heart," as Tolkien says, or in the Lewisian mode to hint at Christian redemption and other divine truths? Does the magic in Harry Potter arouse hope? If so, what does it look like and feel like? Where does it come from, and where does it ultimately lead? Finally, how does the literary portrayal of hope through the vehicle of magic in Harry Potter confirm or critique or even allude to a Christian theology of hope? II. Harry Potter and the "Deeper Magic" The magic in Harry Potter can be divided into two sorts: that having to do with the style, the magic, of Rowling's literary art; and that having to do with the content or meaning, the magic, of what happens to Harry Potter during his years at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. While our primary interest is magic, of the second sort, we cannot overlook the magic that makes all of this possible, which is Rowling's imagination. This is what attracts readers, child and adult, to the novels in the first place and keeps them reading and waiting for more. The art of true fantasy, according to Tolkien, is the ability to create a secondary world in such elaborate detail as to compel belief: | |
To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible,
commanding Secondary belief, will probably require labor and thought, and
will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt
such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree
accomplished[,] then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative
art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode. (68)
| | Rowling has this special skill and employs it to create a compelling secondary world full of humor, suspense, and elvishly crafted imaginative detail. In the Harry Potter series, magical things are not supposed to happen in the real world, but sometimes they do. For example, in The Sorcerer's Stone Harry talks to a Brazilian boa constrictor in the reptile house at the zoo. Not knowing yet that he is a "parselmouth," one who can communicate in snake language, Harry learns that the snake has never seen his homeland, Brazil, and is surprised when the glass case magically disappears and the snake slithers out the door: "Harry could have sworn a low, hissing voice said, `Brazil here I come.... Thanksss, amigo'" (28). Rowling saves her most elvish craft for the secondary world of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Nothing in the Hogwarts world is exactly as it seems: | |
There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping
ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday;
some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump.
Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or
tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really
doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was very hard to remember
where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people
in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and Harry was sure the
coats of armor could walk. (Sorcerer's Stone 132)
| | Within this setting students study courses in Herbology, Transfiguration, Charms, Potions, and Defense Against the Dark Arts. They visit magical places like Gringotts Bank, Diagon Alley, and a bookstore named Flourish and Botts. They meet magical creatures--Basilisks, Bogarts, Hippograffs, and Dementors--and eat magical food--Fizzing Whizbees, Pepper Imps, Ice Mice, and Berrie Bott's Every Flavor Beans. Best of all, students at Hogwarts compete for prizes in a magical game called Quidditch, something like soccer and baseball combined, played while flying on a broomstick. Such magic provides the backdrop or stage props for the story of Harry Potter, a fairy-tale version of the Bildungsroman. These props are imaginatively conceived and have the "inner consistency" required of effective fantasy according to Tolkien. Surely this magic is just for fun, not occultic or subversive as some critics have alleged. It also has a role to play in articulating hope, in this case the hopeful suspicion that the world in which we live, the real world of airplanes and telephones and boring school, is not the only world there is. We can escape to another world through a platform marked nine and three-quarters at King's Cross Station in London. This requires a willing suspension of disbelief or, as Bauckham and Hart might say, the application of imaginative faith. Harry has no idea where he is going or what he is getting into when he boards the train for Hogwarts School. Indeed, until Mrs. Weasley points the way, he's not sure there is a train or even a platform: | |
"Not to worry" she said. "All you have to do is walk straight at the
barrier between platforms nine and ten. Don't stop and don't be scared
you'll crash into it, that's very important. Best do it at a bit of a run
if you're nervous. Go on, go now before Ron."
"Er--okay," said Harry He pushed his trolley around and stared at the
barrier It looked very solid. He started to walk toward it. People jostled
him on their way to platforms nine and ten. Harry walked more quickly. He
was going to smash right into that barrier and then he'd be in
trouble--leaning forward on his cart, he broke into a heavy run--the
barrier was coming nearer and nearer--he wouldn't be able to stop--the cart
was out of control-he was a foot away--he closed his eyes ready for the
crash--It didn't come ... he kept on running ... he opened his eyes. A
scarlet steam engine was waiting next to a platform packed with people. A
sign overhead said Hogwarts Express, eleven o'clock (Sorcerer's Stone 93)
| | Running for that invisible platform is good for Harry. Since there really may be no platform and no Hogwarts Express, it is also risky. He might smash headlong into the barrier and make a fool of himself. Our "wager on transcendence" is not that different. There may be no heaven and no God. We are commanded to take a risk, to walk or run by faith like Harry Potter until we obtain the "substance of things hoped for" (Heb. 11:1). Thus magic is used to introduce the major theme of the series, which is Harry's development from neglected, unloved orphan, who knows nothing about magic, to world-famous wizard. While he must learn how to use magical power, for example, in the fight against Lord Voldemort, it is not magical powers that make Harry Potter heroic. We identify with Harry not because he is a wizard but because in the war between good and evil he makes the right choices. Magical powers are important, but so is moral character. Some readers have been concerned that the world view in Harry Potter is normless, morally neutral, without clear boundaries between good and evil (Abanes, Chambers, Fawcett, Lentini, Murray). I don't agree. From his entrance into Hogwarts, Harry is informed as to the proper and improper, legal and illegal, uses of magic. He is not to use magic in the Muggle world during summer vacations, for example. Similarly, discipline at Hogwarts revolves around appropriate and inappropriate uses of magic. There are definite moral and ethical ground rules. It is true that Harry sometimes breaks the rules, but it is not true that he does so without consequence. Helping Hagrid get rid of an illegal baby dragon, Norbert, causes Harry, Hermione, and Neville to lose 50 points each for Gryffindor, which puts them 150 points behind in the Quidditch championship, and they all must accompany Hagrid into the Forbidden Forest as a form of detention. Wizards who break more serious rules, like using forbidden curses to wound, maim, or kill, end up in the Prison of Azkaban. That genuine good and genuine evil are key elements in the formation of Harry's character is my point: the more powerful the evil, the more Harry has to grow in his ability to make wise choices and overcome evil with good. The importance of such choices is hinted at from the beginning. All first-year students are assigned to houses or dormitories by sitting on a stool and putting on a singing hat that magically reads their thoughts and desires and "sorts" them accordingly: | |
You might belong in Gryffindor,
Where dwell the brave at heart,
Their daring, nerve, and chivalry
Set Gryffindors apart;
You might belong in Hufflepuff,
Where they are just and loyal,
Those patient Hufflepuffs are true
And unafraid of toil;
Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw,
If you've a ready mind,
Where those of wit and learning,
Will always find their kind;
Or perhaps in Slytherin
You'll make your real friends,
Those cunning folk use any means
To achieve their ends.
(Sorcerer's Stone 118)
| | Bravery, loyalty, wisdom, and a willingness to work are all positive qualities that parents hope to cultivate in their children. Even in the real world, however, everyone is not going to be morally upright and righteous and good, certainly not all the time. There will be those who seek power and glory, those cunning Slytherin folk who "use any means to achieve their ends." For Harry, as for the rest of us, discernment is required, and discernment implies choice. At crucial moments in the narrative Harry and other characters are confronted with choices between good and evil. Those familiar with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe will remember the scene where Edmund Pevensie chooses evil by betraying his brother and sisters into the hands of the White Witch. This choice has serious consequences. The White Witch demands Edmund's life in accord with the law of Deep Magic written into Narnia from the dawn of time. In Lewis's symbolic representation of what Christ's death and resurrection would have been like if they had happened in Narnia, Asian, the King of Narnia, offers himself as a sacrifice for Edmund's sin. After grieving his death, Lucy and Susan experience a turn of joy or "eucatastrophe," as Tolkien would say, when Asian magically appears to them "larger than they had seen him before" (178), definitely not as a ghost but alive and real. When they ask him what this means, he explains the "deeper magic": | |
Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which
she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if
she could have looked into the stillness and the darkness before Time
dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have
known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed
in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start
working backward. (178-79)
| | Aslan's death is a fairy-tale picture of the "self-sacrificing compassion" of Christ (Ford 131), the magic of grace, an example of the "archetype of the dying and returning god" (Schakel 28), which recounts in images children can understand the good news of the Gospel. "Deeper magic" has "divinely magical effects," Peter Schakel goes on to say, always working toward life and goodness (Lindskoog and Ellwood 196). In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the "Deeper Magic of mercy triumphs over the Deep Magic of the law of justice" (Glover 142). The concept is taken originally from Lewis's friend Charles Williams, who called it the "doctrine of substituted love" (qtd. in Ford 132). Lewis himself defined "deeper magic" in a letter to another friend, Arthur Greeves, written several months after he completed The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: | |
It is the rule of the universe that others can do for us what we cannot do
for ourselves[,] and one can paddle every canoe except one's own. That is
why Christ's suffering for us is not a mere theological dodge but the
supreme case of the law that governs the whole world: and when they mocked
him by saying, "He saved others, himself he cannot save;" they were really
uttering, little as they know it, the ultimate law of the spiritual world.
(qtd. in Hooper 514)
| | While there are obvious differences between Aslan and Christ (for example, Aslan dies only for Edmund, not for the entire world, and we are not sure that Edmund accepts Aslan's gift or even knows about the cost of his salvation), dearly Lewis means for these scenes to resonate in profound ways with the Christian doctrine of the atonement. In terms of Christian theology, "deeper magic" is the basis of Christian hope. Christ has redeemed us from sin and death and given us a future and a hope. On another level, as Charles Huttar points out, "the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice on another's behalf ... is one that is valid throughout the universe," an archetypal myth involving" descent into the underworld, a journey to danger and death, to perform a rescue" (131). "Deeper magic" can be interpreted more broadly as the triumph of voluntary sacrificial love on another's behalf for the purpose of overcoming in oneself or rescuing another from the forces of death, destruction, and evil. Variations of this theme run throughout the Potter books, beginning with the encounter between Harry's parents and Lord Voldemort when Harry is a baby. Part of Harry's development as a wizard and as a young man involves coming to terms with what happened that night, the details of which are only revealed as the series unfolds. It begins with the mysterious conversation between Albus Dumbledore, Grand Sorcerer and Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and Professor McGonagall in The Sorcerer's Stone. Dumbledore and McGonagall are waiting outside the Dursleys' house for the Hogwarts gamekeeper, Hagrid, to deliver the now orphaned baby, Harry Potter, to his mother's sister, Petunia Dursley, at whose house he will have to live until he is old enough to attend Hogwarts School. Lord Voldemort has murdered his parents, Lily and James Potter, but something or someone protected Harry. People in the wizard world cannot stop talking about it. Lord Voldemort is gone, and no one knows why. McGonagall tells Dumbledore: "[T]hey're saying that when he couldn't kill Harry Potter, Voldemort's power somehow broke--and that's why he's gone" (12). Harry's identity may be in question in the Muggle world, but among magical people he is destined for greatness: "He'll be famous--a legend--I wouldn't be surprised if today was known as Harry Potter day in the future--there will be books written about Harry--every child in our world will know his name!" (13). Rowling probably had no idea how true that line would be when she wrote it. The "deeper magic" that defeated Lord Voldemort is never fully explained. Eleven years later Hagrid announces to Harry that he is a wizard and that it is time to begin his education in wizardry at Hogwarts, but he has no further information about why these events occurred the way they did. Harry has only the lightning-bolt scar on his forehead as a reminder that the Dark Lord wanted to kill him but could not. It would be easy to misinterpret Harry's scar as evil, or even Satanic, something like the "mark of the beast" in the Book of Revelation. Certainly the lightning bolt has been linked with the occult in popular culture, as, for example, the jagged letter "S" used by the heavy-metal group AC/DC, but Rowling seems to have something else in mind. Not only is Harry's scar not a symbol of evil, but it also protects him from evil. "That's what yeh get when a powerful, evil curse touches yeh," Hagrid tells him. "Took care of yer mum an' dad an' yer house, even--but it didn't work on you, an that's why yer famous, Harry. No one ever lived after he decided ter kill 'em, no one except you, an he'd killed some o' the best witches and wizards of the age--the McKinnons, the Bones, the Prewetts--an' you was only a baby, an' you lived" (Sorcerer's Stone 56). There are clear biblical overtones here. Some great and powerful goodness has been born into the world, and everyone knows it, including the powers of darkness. The shepherds and the wise men, in this case witches and wizards, are celebrating in the streets. Harry does not know who he is at first, but he gradually understands his life's calling. In addition to making friends with Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, who will be his companions throughout the series, one of the most important things that occurs during Harry's first year at Hogwarts is the revelation of how and why he was saved from death at the hands of Lord Voldemort. The clues are planted at the beginning in the conversation between McGonagall and Dumbledore and in the remarks of Hagrid, but we must wait with Harry until the end of the novel for a full explanation. The mystery begins and ends with the famous Philosopher's Stone. While the allusion is largely obscured for American readers by Scholastic's decision to change the original title, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, still used in the British edition, to the more dramatic and exciting Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Rowling clearly has in mind this old tradition. Ancient philosophers believed the Philosopher's Stone could turn base metal into gold and produce a potion, the Elixir of Life, that gave immortal life. Dumbledore has hidden this stone in the dungeons at Hogwarts. Obviously Lord Vol&mort, who has lost his power and is rumored to be near death, would like to get his hands on the stone. Harry's job is to make sure he doesn't. Harry has all sorts of adventures along the way. He kills a dim-witted troll in the girl's bathroom, rescues a newly hatched baby dragon, and, of course, flies around on his broomstick in the Quidditch championship. Although the most valuable "Seeker" on the Gryffindor team, Harry gets penalized so many points for breaking school rules that Gryffindor loses the championship to the Slytherins. The climax of the novel occurs when Harry confronts the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, a weak wizard named Quirrell who has allowed himself to be possessed by Voldemort. When Harry faces Vol&mort in the dungeon where Dumbledore has hidden the Sorcerer's Stone, he discovers that Voldemort, now acting through Quirrell's body, can only touch him with great pain, both to himself and to Harry. Before he can get the stone (which has somehow fallen into Harry's pocket) and kill Harry, Dumbledore intervenes, rescues Harry, and destroys the stone. Voldemort is defeated and disappears, Quirrell dies, and for Harry's courage and bravery Dumbledore awards Gryffindor enough points to take back the Quidditch Cup from the Slytherins. Everyone celebrates their victory, and the novel ends. In terms of personal identity and character formation, the most important thing Harry learns in this novel is not that he has magical power but that it matters how he uses this power. When he asks Dumbledore why Voldemort could not kill him, Dumbledore explains: | |
Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot
understand, it is love. He didn't realize that love as powerful as your
mother's for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign ... [;]
to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone,
will give us some protection forever.... It was agony to touch a person
marked by something so good. (Sorcerer's Stone 299)
| | Without the Christian theology that Lewis "smuggles" into The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, this still bears resemblance to the "deeper magic" in Narnia. A sacrifice of love is made that thwarts the purpose and the power of evil, that of the White Witch in Narnia and that of the Dark Wizard in Harry Potter. Just as Christ's sacrifice is not the end of the story--we must accept that sacrifice and work out our own salvation with "fear and trembling"--so Harry's mother's sacrifice is only the beginning of his formation. There are more tests ahead, tests that involve magic and wizardry but also tests of character. How will Harry use his power? One of the first bits of advice Hagrid gives Harry before he begins training as a wizard is, "Just be yerself" (Sorcerer's Stone 86). While his mother's love has marked him for a special destiny, Harry still has to determine what kind of "self" it will take to fulfill that destiny. When he puts on the Sorting Hat in Book I, there is a question about whether he belongs with the Gryffindors or the Slytherins. He knows that Lord Voldemort, once a student at Hogwarts, was also a Slytherin, and he cannot understand why the Sorting Hat thinks he, the one born to defeat Voldemort, might want to be a Slytherin: | |
"Hmmm," said a small voice in his ear. "Difficult. Very difficult. Plenty
of courage, I see. Not a bad mind either. There's talent, oh my goodness,
yes--and a nice thirst to prove yourself, now that's interesting.... So
where shall I put you? ... Not Slytherin, eh? ... Are you sure? You could
be great, you know, it's all here in your head, and Slytherin will help you
on the way to greatness, no doubt about that--no? Well, if you're
sure--better be GRYF-FINDOR!" (Sorcerer's Stone 121)
| | We needn't push the comparison too far, but this could be read as the kind of temptation Jesus experienced in the wilderness when Satan, who also appeared once as a "slithering" serpent, told him: "You could be great, you could have all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, just throw your lot in with me" (Matt. 4:8-9). Jesus refused to play this game, and so does Harry. The issue, however, is not fully resolved. Earlier in the novel when Harry is buying his magic wand from Mr. Ollivander, the question comes up again. Who is Harry Potter? He understands that he is a wizard, but what kind of wizard? Mr. Ollivander recognizes him at once as the famous Harry Potter, son of James and Lily Potter, and explains how dangerous it can be if these powerful wands get into the wrong hands. While he can try out all the wands in the store, there really is only one for Harry Potter because, Mr. Ollivander assures him, "it's really the wand that chooses the wizard" (Sorcerer's Stone 82). This is problematic because in the end the wand that chooses Harry contains a tail feather from the same phoenix that gave another tail feather to the wand sold to Lord Voldemort years before. "Well, well, well ... how curious ... how very curious" he tells Harry, "that you should be destined for this wand when its brother--why, its brother gave you that scar" (Sorcerer's Stone 85). It takes the rest of the novel, and really the rest of the series, for Harry and the reader to understand what this means. Does it mean that Harry Potter is a dark wizard after all? Or is Harry a good wizard who will somehow fall from grace, get corrupted, and go over to the dark side? Recalling the story of Star Wars, is Harry going to discover that he is actually related to Lord Voldemort, as Luke Sky Walker is related to Darth Vader? Finally, if the wand chooses the wizard, does this mean that the wizard has no choice in how the wand gets used? Such questions cannot be answered fully until the series is complete. In each novel published thus far, Harry's understanding of himself as a wizard changes and grows. In the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, we learn more about Voldemort--how he came to be a student at Hogwarts and why he has an evil grudge against Harry. The conflict turns around the issue of racism and class, not just who belongs to which school--Slytherin, Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, or Ravenclaw--but who belongs at Hogwarts at all. Purebloods like the Weasleys who are poor economically but who have wizard blood going back several generations are more worthy of being there than Mudbloods like Hermione Granger, whose parents are both dentists, or even Harry Potter, whose mother was a witch and whose father was a wizard but whose family line includes the Muggle blood of Vernon and Petunia Dursley. To his credit, and against much opposition, Dumbledore has opened Hogwarts to anyone magical, regardless of class or race. Something dark and evil, however, is opposed to this, something locked in a secret chamber for years but now on the loose. Harry is plagued by voices and visions: "Come to me.... Let me rip you.... Let me tear you.... Let me kill you" (Chamber 120). This thing, which turns out to be a giant snake call-ed a Basilisk, is slithering about beneath and inside the walls of Hogwarts. Because Harry speaks Parseltongue, the language of snakes, there are grave doubts about his character. Is he the "heir of Slytherin" who has opened the Secret Chamber? We are not surprised to learn along with Harry and the rest of the school that the real culprit is Voldemort, acting this time through his own ghost, Tom Marvolo Riddle, whose name, we discover, is exactly that--a riddle. When he waves his wand, the letters rearrange themselves into "I AM LORD VOLDEMORT" (Chamber 314). At the novel's climax Harry confronts Voldemort, and again there is this question of "deeper magic" Voldemort desperately wants to know why he has been unable to destroy Harry: "Twice--in your past, in my future--we have met. And twice I failed to kill you. How did you survive? Tell me everything. The longer you talk ... the longer you stay alive" (Chamber 316). When Harry explains that "my [common Muggle-born] mother died to save me" Voldemort concludes that she must have used some kind of "powerful countercharm," which proves there is nothing special about Harry after all; it was merely a lucky chance or lucky charm that saved him. Voldemort does not understand the "deeper magic" because he does not understand selflessness and sacrificial love. What saves Harry on this occasion is not his mother's love but his own love for Dumbledore. As Voldemort directs the Basilisk to rip and tear Harry apart, Dumbledore's phoenix flies into the chamber carrying the old Sorting Hat, the one that questioned Harry's placement in Gryffindor the year before. Harry challenges Voldemort's claim to be the "greatest sorcerer in the world" by a simple statement of the truth: "You're not.... Sorry to disappoint you and all that, but the greatest wizard in the world is Albus Dumbledore" (Chamber 314). The phoenix recognizes Harry's loyalty to Dumbledore, a Gryffindor himself when he was a student at Hogwarts, and claws out the eyes of the Basilisk. Meanwhile the Sorting Hat delivers into Harry's hands a huge silver sword that he uses to kill the Basilisk and to destroy Voldemort's ghost, Tom Riddle. As in the previous novel, the meaning of these events is revealed only at the end in consultation with Dumbledore. Finally Harry has the courage to ask why he can speak Parseltongue and why the Sorting Hat almost mistook him for a Slytherin. True, Harry has many abilities that Salazar Slytherin valued in his best students--a disregard for rules, Parseltongue, resourcefulness, determination--but he is not a Slytherin, Dumbledore tells him, because he asked the Sorting Hat to assign him to Gryffindor: "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." At this point Dumbledore gives Harry the evidence of things hoped for, the proof that he really does belong in Gryffindor. He picks up the silver sword, still stained with the blood of the Basilisk, and asks Harry to read what is engrav-ed below the hilt: "Godric Gryffindor" (Chamber 333). Rowling may be drawing here on Arthurian legend, especially the scene where Arthur pulls the sword from the stone, but I hear echoes of Narnia as well, especially the scene where Peter "win[s] his spurs" by killing a wolf who has attacked Susan and Lucy. Once the wolf is dead and his sword has been cleaned, Asian rewards Peter by changing his name: "`Hand it to me and kneel, Son of Adam' said Aslan. And when Peter had done so he struck him with the flat of the blade and said, `Rise up, Sir Peter Wolf's-Bane'" (Lewis, Lion 145). This confirms Peter's identity as a loyal servant of the King. In like manner Dumbledore is pleased that Harry has "won his spurs" by killing the Basilisk, and he gives Harry the assurance that he belongs to the house of Godric Gryffindor, whose emblem incidentally is a lion, and not to the house of Salazar Slytherin, whose emblem is a snake. Despite his having a lightning-bolt scar and his wand's resembling Lord Voldemort's, Harry Potter has proven that he is a loyal servant of the noble and true Godric Gryffindor. Can there be any doubt that Godric Gryffindor, if not an image of God, is at least Rowling's representative of goodness or Ultimate Good? Can there be any doubt as well that Voldemort is a representative of Evil? We must be careful, though. Voldemort is not the equivalent of Godric Gryffindor; that role, if Rowling is setting up such a comparison, would go to Salazar Slytherin, the founder of Slytherin House. Voldemort calls himself the "true heir" of Salazar Slytherin; hence comes his ability to speak Parseltongue and control the Basilisk. As Voldemort's past comes to light in the story of Tom Riddle, we learn that he too was a student at Hogwarts, that Dumbledore was one of his teachers, and that like Harry he was a good student. We must disagree, then, with those who say that Rowling is toying with dualism of the Manichean variety in her presentation of good and evil (Abanes, Fawcett, Lentini, Zipes). If anything, Voldemort is an example of good gone bad, and not of Evil as an absolute, the opposite of Good. As in Christian cosmology, Evil in Rowling's universe would appear to be a corruption of Good. Voldemort opposes Dumbledore by seeking to kill Harry Potter, but it is not clear whether he is equal to Dumbledore in power, just as it is not clear that Salazar Slytherin was or ever could have been equal in power to Godric Gryffindor. This may change by the end of the series, but for now we can only conclude that Dumbledore and Voldemort, and for that matter Harry Potter, are neither gods nor demons, neither inherently good nor inherently evil, but simply human beings with choices. What distinguishes Dumbledore from Voldemort, and with this we return to our thesis, is his knowledge of "deeper magic." To be sure, Dumbledore does not create or embody "deeper magic" the way Aslan does in Narnia, but he believes in the principle of such magic whereas Voldemort does not, and he teaches Harry to do the same. The next opportunity to shape Harry's character in this direction occurs in the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. There is no direct encounter in this novel between Harry Potter and the Dark Lord, but he does do battle with the Dark Lord's supporters and friends, the Death Eaters, who have been in hiding since Voldemort's disappearance the year Harry was born. The plot is complicated. Three school friends of Harry's father have been implicated in betraying the Potter family to Voldemort. One of these friends, a shape-shifting werewolf named Lupin, is now a professor at Hogwarts. The one accused of the actual killing, Sirius Black, has escaped from Azkaban Prison and is supposedly coming to Hogwarts to kill Harry. Soul-sucking Dementors have been sent to guard the school and to recapture Black, who eludes them first by transforming himself into a large black dog and later by escaping on the wings of Buckbeak, the Hippogriff. The real danger to Harry, though, does not come from Black, who turns out to be innocent, but from a detestable man named Peter Pettigrew, appropriately nicknamed Wormtail. Like Black, Pettigrew is an animagus, meaning that he can transform himself into an animal. It was Pettigrew, not Black, who betrayed and murdered James and Lily Potter. For such a crime he should be confined for life to Azkaban, but in the final moments Pettigrew transforms himself into the rat that he is and escapes. Before he can do that, Harry hears the real story of what happened to his parents. Pettigrew offers all kinds of excuses for having betrayed the Potters to Voldemort, none of which impresses Black, who is determined to kill him: "YOU SHOULD HAVE DIED! ... DIED RATHER THAN BETRAY YOUR FRIENDS" (Prisoner 375). This is a crucial moment for Harry. Face to face with his enemy, the man who killed his parents, he makes a wise and noble decision: he lets Pettigrew go, or, rather, he does not allow Lupin and Black to kill him. "I'm doing it because--I don't reckon my dad would've wanted them to become killers--just for you" (Prisoner 376). Should Voldemort return, as Pettigrew has predicted, Harry is sure it will be his fault. He should have let Lupin and Black kill him, but Dumbledore, knowing the wisdom of "deeper magic" takes a different view: "When one wizard saves another wizard's life, it creates a certain bond between them[,] ... and I'm much mistaken if Voldemort wants his servant in the debt of Harry Potter." Why should this be so, Harry wants to know. Dumbledore answers, "This is magic at its deepest, its most impenetrable" (Prisoner 427). In Christian terms, Harry has chosen mercy over judgment, the impenetrable magic of grace. By far the most problematic treatment of good and evil occurs in the series' fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In this novel someone illegally enters Harry Potter in a TriWizard's Tournament to be held at Hogwarts. It is a contest for mature wizards only, not amateur wizards like fourteen-year-old Harry. There are three tasks. The first requires stealing an egg from a fire-breathing dragon; the second is an underwater adventure in which contestants must free a previously selected student (for Harry the committee chooses Ron Weasley as "the thing Harry Potter will miss most" [Goblet 491]) from chains of seaweed before each of them drowns, and the third is a treacherous maze at the center of which is the coveted TriWizard's Cup. Harry competes well against the three other champions, including two from transnational wizarding schools, Beauxbaton and Durmstrang. The third competitor, Cedric Diggory, is a Hufflepuff from Hogwarts. Although it takes over 600 pages to get to this point, the real battle, at least for Harry, occurs during Task Three at the end of the maze. Cedric arrives first but says that Harry deserves to win; they argue, but eventually Harry suggests that they grab the TriWizard Cup together and share the victory. They discover too late that the trophy has been turned into a Portkey, an object that transports the one who touches it to some other place, in this case a cemetery where Wormtail and Voldemort are waiting. As before, the novel ends with a confrontation between Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. Although the latter is only half alive, just a decaying blob under some blankets, his servant Wormtail--the same Peter Pettigrew whom Harry let go in the previous book--performs a forbidden "Avada Kedavra" curse that results in Cedric's instant death. At the command of his master, Wormtail exhumes a bone from Voldemort's father, the older Tom Riddle's grave, cuts off his own right hand, and stabs a dagger in Harry, now bound by ropes, and collects some of the blood. Filling a large cauldron with flesh, bone, and blood, Wormtail performs a dark ritual that looks much like baptism: | |
The thing Wormtail had been carrying had the shape of a crouched human
child, except that Harry had never seen anything less like a child. It was
hairless and scaly-looking, a dark, raw, reddish black. Its arms and legs
were thin and feeble, and its face--no child alive ever had a face like
that--flat and snakelike, with gleaming red eyes.... For one moment, Harry
saw the evil, flat face illuminated in the sparks dancing on the surface of
the potion. And then Wormtail lowered the creature into the cauldron; there
was a hiss, and it vanished below the surface; Harry heard its frail body
hit the bottom with a soft thud. (Goblet 640-41)
| | After more boiling and hissing, a tall skeleton of a man emerges from the cauldron: the Dark Lord has risen. He calls back his old friends, the Death Eaters, who look on as he tries to kill Harry in a wizard duel. There is plenty of reverse Christian symbology in what follows--Voldemort heals the severed hand of Wormtail, the Death Eaters kiss the hem of the Dark Lord's garment--as well as references to Harry's mother's sacrifice and the protection it has given Harry up till now. "This is old magic," Voldemort tells Harry; "I should have remembered it, I was foolish to overlook it" (Goblet 652-53). Indeed, through this "old magic" Voldemort's death curse has been revisited on himself. Now thanks to Wormtail, and the trickery that led Harry to touch the TriWizard's Cup that is really a Portkey, Voldemort believes he has won. By immersing himself in the cauldron that holds a drop of Harry's blood, Voldemort takes on some of the magic of Harry's mother's sacrificial love. In the electromagnetic wizard duel that follows, Harry's wand forces Voldemort's to regurgitate the ghosts of the victims he has killed, including those of Harry's mother and father. Before their wands disconnect, Harry, following the advice of the ghosts of his parents, grabs Cedric's body and the TriWizard Cup/Portkey, which brings him back safely to Hogwarts. This is difficult to untangle theologically. If the "deeper magic" is an archetype for the self-sacrificing love of Christ, does baptism in Harry's blood pass on the benefits of that magic to the evil Lord Voldemort? Is Voldemort's triumph over weakness and death a parody of Christ's triumph over weakness and death on the cross? Is Voldemort's rising from the hissing cauldron meant to mock Christ's rising from the dead? Do Voldemort's rejuvenated dark powers and the way the Death Eaters worship him suggest that he has become the Antichrist? Most puzzling, does the duel between Harry and the Dark Lord, the fact that their wands connect and interact in strange ways because they share a common core, suggest that Harry Potter is related in some mysterious way to Voldemort? However we interpret these events, we can be certain that for Harry Potter and Hogwarts School the return of Lord Voldemort is not good. At least Dumbledore takes Voldemort's return very seriously. At the end of Goblet of Fire we have hints that the last three books in the series will contain an Armageddon-like confrontation between good and evil on a global scale. To get ready for that event, Dumbledore urges the Ministry of Magic to extend the "hand of friendship" to the race of the giants, previously treated as outcasts in the wizard world, and he works behind the scenes to reconcile Professor Snape and Sirius Black, enemies since the days they both attended Hogwarts with James Potter. The whole point of the TriWizard Tournament, which in this can be likened to the Olympics in our world, is to promote "magical understanding" and "bond[s] of friendship and trust" (Goblet 723). Meanwhile, after grieving the death of Cedric, Harry gives his prize money to Fred and George Weasley, and so the novel ends. III. Conclusion We have looked at several episodes in Harry Potter where magic is used to "lift the heart," as Tolkien says, and ensure a happy ending. There is no difference in this regard between what Rowling does in Harry Potter and what Lewis does in the Narnia tales. In both cases magic is a literary device that helps the reader transcend the ordinary and the familiar and enter an extraordinary and unfamiliar "other" world. In both Hogwarts and Narnia we are invited to suspend belief in the natural and believe instead in the supernatural. The natural laws of gravity are suspended in Harry Potter, for example. People can fly. The natural laws of time and chronology are suspended in Narnia. The Pevensie children spend years in Narnia, while only a few minutes go by on the other side of the wardrobe in England. If natural laws are broken or suspended, however, there are spiritual laws that never change no matter what world the children are in. I would argue that these are the laws of deep magic. For Lewis, deep magic is the moral law, the law of fair play, human decency, some deep-seated conviction of right and wrong (Mere Christianity 17-18). It recalls the Tao, which Lewis discusses at length in The Abolition of Man, "the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false" (29). The law of deep magic is woven into Rowling's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as intentionally as it is woven into Narnia. According to Lewis, only when we realize that we have broken the law of deep magic and deserve to pay the penalty can the "deeper magic" of Christian atonement bring us to the point of conversion (Mere Christianity 3839). Rowling does not go this far. (For that matter neither does Lewis, since in the scene already mentioned Edmund is not converted in this manner.) Harry's encounter with Voldemort in the opening pages does not involve a choice to do evil the way Edmund's encounter with the White Witch does in Narnia. Deep magic in the sense Lewis uses that term in the Narnia books is certainly implied, however, in the lessons Harry learns from Dumbledore and the choices he has to make to become a wise wizard. Unlike Lewis, whose symbols lead obviously (for some readers too obviously) to comparisons with Christian morality and the story of Christ, Rowling's symbols--the lightning-bolt scar on Harry's forehead, the fact that he talks to snakes--are more problematic. The scar could be mistaken for the "mark of the Beast," and Harry's ability to talk to snakes could be interpreted as Satanic. Eve spoke to snakes in the Garden of Eden, and we know what happened to her. Biblical allusions presented in such a confusing manner may cause the uncritical reader to stumble, not to mention the Christian reader who has been taught to shun the occult. While this difference explains why Christians who applaud the magic of the Narnia tales are unsure of or even outraged by Harry Potter, it should not blind us to the similarities between these two authors. The most significant difference between Rowling and Lewis comes in their understanding and presentation of the "deeper magic," the power that flies in the face of evil no matter what the cost and ultimately defeats it. While Rowling uses the term "deep magic" to describe this power, thus far in the series it does not signify the "deeper magic" portrayed in Narnia, or not exactly. Rowling's "deeper magic" lacks the incarnational element of Lewis's Christology, the idea of a Master Magician intentionally laying aside His magical powers in order to defeat Evil once and for all, opening the way for Good to rule and reign. But the series is not over. We can speculate that Dumbledore himself will make this sacrifice on Harry's behalf, or perhaps that Harry will do so for Dumbledore. When approached on one occasion about her religious faith, Rowling responded that, while she was Christian, she was glad no one had noticed. If we knew that, she said, we would know how the series would end (qtd. in Fischer). That comment makes me wonder. Will Voldemort be thrown into a lake of unquenchable fire and burn forever? Will there be a last battle as in Narnia where somebody, Dumbledore or Harry Potter, pulls everyone into the Hogwarts Castle and locks the door? We will have to wait to see. In the meantime we can enjoy what Rowling has created thus far, an outstanding imaginative fantasy that articulates hope. More specifically, Harry Potter articulates the hope that goodness will triumph over evil, that wrongs done to the small and the weak will be righted, that courage, loyalty, and friendship will overcome hatred, bigotry, and fear. Time is indeed short, as Dumbledore tells Harry at the end of the series' fourth book; and, unless those of us who know the truth of such ideals stand united, there may be "no hope for any of us" (Goblet 712). The success of Harry Potter demonstrates the human need for play, fantasy, transcendence, and hope. For many Christians that is not enough. There is a legitimate fear that these books could arouse unhealthy interest in the occult. Kendra Gish urges common sense. Since the Harry Potter books are not going away, perhaps the best that Christian parents and teachers can do is to "balance the risks" by reading the books with their children and building on what the books say about magic to draw attention to the deepest magic of all--that of the Christian supernatural and the Kingdom of God (269-71). To return to Bauckham and Hart's definition of hope as an "activity of imaginative faith" the magic in Harry Potter might expand children's "perceived horizons of possibility" regarding the reality of a supernatural realm. Reading and discussing Harry Potter need not desensitize children to the occult; on the contrary, Rowling's books could call our attention to the battle between good and evil going on all around us, not in fantasy or fairy tales but in the real world. Parents and teachers might also keep in mind that Harry Potter is a work of literature. When making critical judgments about literature, we have to take into account the kind of literature with which we are dealing. Harry Potter is a fairy tale; therefore, we need to apply standards and criteria that are appropriate to the genre. Fairy tales are not descriptions of reality but imaginative fantasies. A responsible literary approach to Harry Potter, then, would understand that Rowling uses witchcraft and wizardry in the context of a fantasy world and does not portray or mean to portray witchcraft as practiced and promoted in the real world of the occult. Despite potential problems associated with magic, witchcraft, and the occult, Harry Potter can be interpreted as a creative narrative fantasy grounded in Christian ethics and a Christian theology of hope. As a literary device the magic in Harry Potter should not and need not be linked with the occult at all. It can be read simply as a metaphor for power. If we use power wisely, like Dumbledore and Harry Potter, we win. If we abuse power and use it for evil, like Voldemort, we lose. If nothing else, Harry's journey toward maturity as a wizard suggests that in the battle between good and evil our choices matter. We gain hope from Harry Potter--hope that in an age where moral goodness does not seem important and where evil is on the rise, one little nerdy person, not terribly smart or good-looking, can make a difference. Thus Harry Potter articulates or narrates one of the most basic human hopes, the hope that we can do something to make the future better, that because of what we do or do not do, as Filmer says, "there will be a future." I strongly reject the fear-driven position that would ban or burn Harry Potter, along with the inflammatory rhetoric and attitude of hostility that have characterized much of the Christian debate. A skillful work of fantasy that does not openly confirm Christianity or a Christian world view, Harry Potter still offers a truthful articulation of hope. From such fantasies all people, including Christians, can derive strength to meet the trials and difficulties of life. From such fantasies we derive hope. WORKS CITED Abanes, Richard. Harry Potter and the Bible: The Menace Behind the Magick. Camp Hill (PA): Horizon, 2001. Abramowitz, Rachel, and Patrick Day. "Harry Potter Works Magic at the Box Office." Los Angeles Times 18 Nov. 2001: A34. Bauckham, Richard, and Trevor Hart. Hope Against Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Random, 1975. Bloom, Harold. "Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes." Wall Street Journal 11 July 2000: A26. Buechner, Frederick. The Alphabet of Grace. New York: Seabury, 1970. --. The Clown in the Belfry. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992. Chambers, Joseph. "Harry Potter and the Antichrist." Accessed 14 June 2001. . Fawcett, John. "Harry Potter Review." Leanne Payne Pastoral Care Ministries Newsletter Winter 2000/2001: 5-6. Filmer, Kath. Scepticism and Hope in Twentieth-Century Fantasy Literature. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1992. Fischer, John. "From the Horse's Mouth." 30 Nov. 2000. Accessed 18 Jan. 2001. . Ford, Paul. Companion to Narnia. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Gish, Kendra. "Hunting Down Harry Potter: An Exploration of Religious Concerns about Children's Literature." The Hornbook Magazine May/June 2000: 262-71. Glover, Donald. C. S. Lewis: The Art of Enchantment. Athens: Ohio UP, 1981. Goldthwaite, John. The Natural History of Make-Believe: A Guide to the Principal Works of Britain, Europe, and America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Hainer, Cathy. "Second Time's Still a Charm." USA Today Online 2 Dec. 1999. Accessed 26 Dec. 2000. . Hooper, Walter, ed. They Stand Together. New York: Macmillan, 1979. Huttar, Charles. "C. S. Lewis' Narnia and the `Grand Design.'" The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C. S. Lewis. Ed. Peter Schakel. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1977. 119-35. Jacobs, Alan. Rev. of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J. K. Rowling. First Things Jan. 2000: 35-38. Lentini, Alison. "Harry Potter: Occult Cosmology and the Corrupted Imagination." Spiritual Counterfeits Project Journal 23.4-24.1 (2000): 18-29. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: Macmillan, 1947. --. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. New York: HarperCollins, 1950. --. Mere Christianity. New York: Macmillan, 1943. --. Miracles: A Preliminary Study. Glasgow: Collins Fount, 1960. --. "On Three Ways of Writing for Children." C. S. Lewis: On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. Ed. Walter Hooper. 1966. New York: Harcourt, 1982. 31-43. Lindskoog, Kathryn, and Gracia Fay Ellwood. "C. S. Lewis: The Natural Law in Literature and Life." The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer. Ed. Bruce Edwards. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1988. 195-205. Lynch, William F. Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless. Dublin: Helicon, 1965. Manlove, Colin. Christian Fantasy: From 1200 to the Present. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1992. Maslin, Janet. "At Last, the Wizard Gets Back to School" New York Times Online 10 July 2000. Accessed 12 July 2000. . Moltmann, Jurgen. Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology. 1964. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993. Murray, John Andrew. "The Trouble with Harry." Focus on the Family Citizen Magazine Spring 2000. Accessed 5 Feb. 2000. . Neal, Connie. What's a Christian to Do with Harry Potter? Colorado Springs: Waterbrook, 2001. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. New York: Scholastic, 1999. --. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. New York: Scholastic, 2000. --. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. New York: Scholastic, 1999. --. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. New York: Scholastic, 1997. Schakel, Peter. Reading with the Heart: The Way into Narnia. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979. Shapiro, Marc. J. K. Rowling: The Wizard behind Harry Potter. New York: St. Martin's-Griffon, 2000. Soares, Claire. "Harry Potter Uses Net Wizardry for Film Review" Excite Online 1 Mar. 2001. Accessed 1 Mar. 2001. . Sokoloff, Heather. "New Narnia Books Drop Christian Ethos." National Post Online 4 June 2001. Accessed 10 June 2001. . Sutton, Roger. "Potter's Field." The Hornbook Magazine Sept./Oct. 1999: 500-01. Thompson, Deborah. "Deconstructing Harry: Casting a Critical Eye on the Witches and Wizards of Hogwarts." Beauty, Brains, and Brawn: The Construction of Gender in Children's Literature. Ed. Susan Lehr. Portsmouth (NH): Heinemann, 2001. 42-50. Tolkien, J. R. R. "On Fairy-Stories." Essays Presented to Charles Williams. Ed. C. S. Lewis. 1947. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966. 38-89. Tucker, Nicholas. "The Rise and Rise of Harry Potter." Children's Literature in Education 30 (1999): 221-34. Veith, Gene Edward. "Good Fantasy and Bad Fantasy." Christian Research Journal 23.1 (2000): 14-22. Zipes, Jack. The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature: From Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. New York: Routledge, 2001. Emily Griesinger, Associate Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University, received the second annual Lionel Basney Award for her article on Toni Morrison's Beloved in the Summer 2001 issue of Christianity and Literature. A year earlier her essay "`Your Daughters Shall Prophesy': The Charismatic Spirituality of Hildegaard of Bingen," published in Christian Scholar's Review, won the Charles J. Miller Christian Scholar's Award. With Mark A. Eaton she organized the 2002 CCL Western Regional Meeting. |
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