Is Harry Potter a Christian? Well, lets start this conversation off with the basics, and I should note that my jumping off point is the two Bible quotations which appear on two noteworthy tombs in book 7 of J.K. Rowlings masterful series (By the way, this post has spoilers galore, but if you haven’t read book 7 by now you’ve got bigger problems anyway, and I would suggest professional help) So, to the quotations. Where your Treasure is, there will your Heart be also, and, The Last Enemy that shall be Destroyed is Death. Love and Death, then, are the themes which dominate these books, but as I always tell my students when we’re examining the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is Jesus’ most extended answer to the question of what Christian love is, Jesus gives a brand new look at love, going beyond even what the prophets had envisaged, present in his teachings, the full glory of which is seen in his death and resurrection. The message of HP is this: Love, fearing not the specter of the power of death, works a greater magic in this world than any deeds of muggles or wizards. Harry is clearly not as powerful as Voldemort, or even, as the latest movie makes splendidly clear, his legions of death-eaters (Helena!), but as Dumbledore unceasingly drones, Harry has a power of which the glorious V-cake knows not. Clearly, the entrance into victory over this serpentine monster is Harry’s baptism courtesy of his mother, that is, his love of love over any of the fruits of this world (Faux psychoanalysts take note—he loves love more than he loves his mother). His life is forfeit in the way that St. Paul’s was, not a stoical suicide his, but rather the uncontainable energy released by the breaking of these rusted bonds. What effect? He gives up his life for his friends, and he does die. And his soul goes to the place where souls go (Lord forgive Joanna for saying that “it’s all in our heads”), and then he simply returns, as simply as Christ rising from the tomb with a sternly confused look on his face as in Piero della Francesca’s rendering of it, Roman soldiers slumping in earthly defeat.
Next up: We’re hoping for a masterful post by Dr. Ramey of Rowan Univ. fame on John Milbank and the surnaturel, and I’m already asking myself how one can live in a world created by and for love, in which love is stronger than death, though no stranger to it, without the storyteller himself. Even if to simply put the idea “all in our heads”. . . . .
Wonderful and adroitly funny post, A. D. (Oh dear, I’m still laughing over, “they should have went on a date.” Sigh. All my nagging has gone for naught. And my kitties wonder why I wake up in the middle of the night, giggling.)
Still, I must protest one thing in A.D. review.
It was FINE for Joanna to have Dumbledore say “of course it is all in your head — but who said that means it isn’t real!?”
It was a stroke of brilliance. And it carried me appreciatively back to the final quatrain of George Herbert’s “The Collar”:
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methoughts I heard one calling, “Child,”
And I replied, “My Lord.”
That limitative “methoughts I heard” is an act of finesse, isn’t it, that risks an extra register of humility and honesty. Herbert takes these risks everywhere, in the practice of his scrupulous language of praise.
Where, after all, does our spiritual life and our intimate communion with God take place, if not “in our heads”?
And yet, real though we take it to be, we can always have been so very wrong, wrong, wrong.
Some would of course question whether there is a God, or whether God ever really calls to us. And to them, what can we say, or to ourselves, when we wonder the same thing?
But even without the humbling reminder of the fragility of our faith, there is also the much greater hazard that perhaps we haven’t heard what we thought we heard. That perhaps the voice we hear “in our heads” is the voice of a false god, or the voice of our own desires, wish-fulfilments, and self-gratifications. (”Lord, purify the motives in the grounds of our beseeching…”)
No, in my humble opinion, George and Joanna have got it exactly right. An unqualified positivity in these matters is a sure sign that we’ve got it wrong, spiritually, even when we’re “right.”
And the very best part of “methoughts I heard” is the way it relies on the previous line, “at every word.” For it is in the “words” of his own ravings, in his own grief, anger, and bitterness, that he hears an-other “word.” When we think about it, we come to realize that he could only hear it if this other word, “Child,” is already his own word, too.
How is this possible? I think George thinks it’s because the Word (”Child”) has always “come beforehand” for the speaking subject. “Child” is a prior word; a pre-venient grace. And none of us can re-member this word as our own, unless it is already lying deeper within us than the turbulent motions of our current rebellions, deeper than our disillusionment and our sense of deprivation.
Jefferson’s right in thinking that love compells us even in its own faintness, or even in its absence, like a voice we think we hear because we are deep down listening so hard for it. Even in our loss of that love, it is there,like the searing memory of the screams of a mother who takes the flash of green light into her own body, and then goes away.
Something like this must already have been put “into our heads,” for us be able to love love more than the mother who absents herself from us.
Only if love already lies in us deeper than death, can we think “in our heads” that a voice will call us Child, or that we actually have the power to make a free choice of life or death.
I think for me the most terrible and wonderful part of the scene in the “Terminal” is the abandoned baby in its basket under a chair, raw and suffering, but beyond the power of Dumbledore and Harry to do anything on its behalf. (Like a thorn in our own flesh.)
We know that this ravaged infant is the seventh part of Tom Riddle’s humanity, and that he has done this to himself. Yet we also know that this was done to him beforehand, and that this new infant has been a compulsive repetition of the life-destroying absence of love….
This is pretty deep stuff, and she manages to take us with her this deep-down into the heaviest of human and theological mysteries, and then she still manages to pull us back and lift the book out of it again, and to keep it all within the bearable limits of the genre of children’s fantasy. Remarkable.
By the way, I saw the NBC special where she talked about the books, and she was asked what part of life was the the most difficult thing for her. She said: “To keep believing.”
(She also mentioned, and I must pass along, that in the 19 years after the defeat of Voldemort, Harry and Ron totally reorganized the Aurors’ Office, and Hermione is now high up in the ministry that oversees the misuses of magic.)
Congrats to Joshua on the teaching post at Rowan University! Bring on his post!
Excellent points, Janet, you know I can’t argue with you when you start analyzing Herbert, and yet. . . . I still feel (help me out here, Dan, if you can remember our conversation) that she minimizes the real-ness of that purgatory in her phrase. I believe that Harry at that point went beyond the necessity of that question. He no longer needs to ask Dumbledore questions. I was talking with JADR at mass today about the levitation that is achieved when Harry goes to die, such a joyful moment, only a master could have pulled it off. And at that point, in the minimal distance between “Christ is risen” and “Christ will come again” she has no need to remember the old Harry. He is like Neville now, quite brave. The reason Herbert can get away with it, I feel, is because the phrase “in our heads” is not loaded for him. For us, it is reductive.
Okay, I hear what you’re saying, but…
Maybe I’ve just been reading too much Bertrand Russell — the man is so dissociated as to be entirely out of this world. So these over there with all these Brits and she’s surrounded with all this analytical philosophy stuff that makes concrete objects the measure of “reality” even though that project has totally failed. (Dawkins, for instance.) So I thought there was a certain defiance in it putting it “all in your head.”
After all, Harry and we the readers have just experienced the most real things we’ve ever encountered in the Harry Potter world, and then that puritanical little petty-fogging doubt rears its head, the voice that says that all “mythopoiesis” and all “Reality” (in Lacan’s sense)is merely “lies” and illusions. And our Authority Figure roars with laughter and puts reality right back where it is for human beings, in our lived experience and how we make sense of it and work it through.
Yes, “all in our heads” is a loaded phrase, because of British empiricism and rationalism, and I think Dumbledore is speaking right back at that “loadedness.”
But she’s definitely taking a risk, that this will be latched onto by some as a way out of taking it “seriously.” But isn’t this exactly what keeps the experience of these chapters IN contention? No one can just toss the book away and say it turned out to be a load of religious crap at the end. She keeps these realities in play for everyone, and they stay in play better when they aren’t asserted as positivities. Positive assertions always rouse our defenses and resistance. That’s why Lweis said Aslan could glide right past all of our defenses and enter our hearts…
“The poet nothing lieth BECAUSE the poet nothing affirmeth.” Even in Dante, the pilgrim wakes up at the end and it was “all a dream.” You know that the defenders of the poets’ truth spent two centuries arguing for the fictiveness of Dante’s universe, against those that wanted to literalize it and make it revealed theology, because they knew that if we literalize a truth, then we cease to read it on all its levels. (This is what’s happened with Genesis 1-3 in the reductive creationist way of thinking.)
I definitely hear you, and its a good argument. I still feel there is something missing, perhaps I am not so annoyed that she said its all in our heads, but that Harry would frame it as an either/or: either its real or its in my head, of course Dumbledore throws it back at him as a both/and, yet I feel that the spell was broken there. She had managed to sway us away from our petty dualisms with this surging up of the real. And the question of the real and of the resurrected body cannot be answered by making it a choice between reality and symbolic truth
Yes, what you say at the end there is deeply true, and I agree that the spell was broken. I just thought that it had to be broken.
But up until then, I was thinking, “this is it.” This is going to be added to the treasure chest, where I hold the greatest treatments in literary art of the depths of suffering and meaning in the atonement, along with Dante, and Tolkien’s journey of Frodo and Sam up Mount Doom in LOTR, and all of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.
She took us that deep.
Then she pulled the throttle back and smoothly lifted us out of the dive, and the book went back to being “only” very, very excellent children’s fantasy again. (And I guess for you it wasn’t all that smooth!)
So I was disappointed, too. But not with the depths of her conviction or her nerve. Just with the fact that the whole thing was premised upon a certain good-faith contract with her readers that she couldn’t suddenly set aside and still continue to be an honest writer, or in that respect at least, an honest believer.
But would that she would write some adult fiction next….
To add some Both/And, then, I would say that you are both right, in your own rights :). Janet comes close to saying this, but I would remind us that Rowling did in fact set out to write a children’s lit series, which she did in spades. I agree with AD’s concern, wholeheartedly. yet, part of me understands her move from the world of the story and where she wants her kinderlesen to depart from that story. Remember that the allure of magic for Harry, Dumbledore, and Riddle had been to conquer death to one degree or another. Harry had hoped for a physical resurrection in his interaction with both the Mirror in book 1 and his initial duel with Riddle in book 4, only to be reminded by Dumbledore that such is not possible. Dumbledore, we learned in this book, had hoped to acquire the Deathly Hallows for much the same reasons. Riddle, of course, had hoped to prevent his own death through the Horcruxes. As such, it seems that Harry’s most understandable desire in meeting Dumbledore again would have been for some kind of return of Dumbledore. But Dumbledore had in fact “gone on”, in a way that not even magic could rewind. I think Rowling wants her readers to understand that, in the world of her text, she’s playing by the rules strictly when it comes to death. Harry’s meeting with Dumbledore was a meeting with a human, not God. Thus, it’s fitting that it would have been in his head, so to speak. It’s not a perfect explanation, but it at least helps me to not see it as quite so psychologized, of her playing the mind/body dualism.
Wow. This is very true, her consistency about the inability to reverse death. And the undesirability of trying to do so. Harry really had a choice. He could have gone on, too, to reunion with all those he loved, or he could go back, to being under the law of death. He went back. He wasn’t in either world, was he, when he was in that “limbo” of lost babies…
The only word for what happens to Harry in his return is resurrection. I think she is extremely close to a Christian theology here. Harry is a “first fruit” here due to the still potent effect of his mothers sacrifice. There is a process here. Just as Harry had to defeat Voldemort as a youngster to parallel baby Jesus’ defeat of the raging Herod, so Harry’s mother had a co-mediating role in his gift to his friends