If the later Heidegger went to great lengths to reinvigorate the ancient sense of thaumazein or wonder, which should be the root of all philosophy, he forgets that the Christian revamping of this wonder was not done without reason. It is just as possible to be flabbergasted by the Horrific as by the Good (see Kant’s sublime, and Lacan’s undoing of it), and it is of no small importance to determine what is the Good in this case. Dante’s Divine Comedy ends in wonder, but it is not wonder, simply, at that which we cannot comprehend — it is not the wonder at the void — but the wonder of gazing at the trinity, which we might call, inasmuch as it is a three in one, the ultimate example of rationality (of the triad, the minimum of knowledge) married to the beyond, the one (the maximum of unknowing). Thus Dante erects a bulwark in his poetry, the sense of wonder of the ancients, alied with the dogma of the Christian God. And the water does not run from his hands, even through these centuries.
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Interesting point about the object of wonder. Might it work to suppose that even if something horrible were the object of wonder that the person would ask, ‘why?’ ‘what is horror?’ Maybe I’m just assuming here that a person would suppose that a horrible thing ought not to have been– in which case the person would be directed to look for the good and why it didn’t ‘happen’?
Yes, I agree Scott. For persons who can’t ask “why is this so horrific?” it is NOT horrific (not to them).
So Nothing (whether sublimely Horrible or sublimely Good) — NO-THING is wonder-ful or inspiring of awe to someone who cannot respond with wonder first to what is genuinely good.
Hey, Scott and I are on the same page on this one. Wondrous!
I’m thinking about Voldemort in that final scene in Book 7. His own horrific acts are not horrific, TO HIM. His own horrific nature is not horrific, TO HIM. The things Voldemort “does not understand,” according to Dumbledore, make Voldemort incapable also of recognizing evil as evil. After all, evil is simply the deliberate destruction of something inherently innocent and good. That is all it is. The greater the innocence and goodness being attacked, the greater the evil.
But in Dante’s Inferno, even to the soul buried deepest in (a living) Hell, there is still given a reminder of Christ, an incarnation of what is truly good, and it is offered through the compassion of those who are closest to that soul, and therefore most likely to awaken it to regret and remorse. I mean the way Count Ruggieri carries within himself, in memory, the Christ-offer made to him when his own children offered him their flesh to sustain his life, when they were all being starved to death together, locked up in a Tower because of Ruggieri’s own treachery.
In Voldemort’s case, Voldemort himself chooses his own kin, the person he decides is destined to be his only “equal,” the person who will be most like himself (so he supposes) in the qualities he counts as valuable: daring, resolve, and magical power and skill. Through repeated choices of Harry, Voldemort forges an ever closer connection between the two of them. A fragment of his own soul is attached to Harry’s soul (though he does not know it) and establishes a strange and powerful interconnection between their minds (of which he becomes more and more aware). Then, the choice of Harry’s blood, with which to build a new body for himself, means Harry’s blood flows in his veins, blood in which Harry’s mother’s sacrificial protection still flows.
What better way, then, to capture the attention — even the most intense and obsessive interest — of a lost soul such as Voldemort, than to set before him — and intwine his destiny with — one who is supremely close to him, but who, like Ruggieri’s children, responds to deprivation innocently, with human qualities of love, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. Unfortunately, Voldemort responds to his “other” in the same way that Ruggieri does to the Christ-offer he receives from his children: he does not recognize it for what it is — or to the extent that he does, he chooses to ward off its power with increased hate and desire for retaliation.
I just finished reading the final book of the Harry Potter series for the third time, and at last, this time, I’m finally starting to “get” it. There are so many threads running in there all at once and they are deep ones — I missed most of them the first two times. How will the movie keep these underlying explanations clear? I don’t think it can or will. They’ll have to choose a couple threads and miss so much that is in the book…. (But then we know all about that from LOTR.)
During the scenes of final confrontation and battle, I noticed that only one thing causes Voldemort a moment of genuine surprise (wonder). It is when Harry in the final seconds of their last stand-off urges Voldemort to “try for some remorse.” “Be a man,” Harry says to Voldemort; remember your humanity. (Recognize what is good about being human and feel a human wonder and reverence towards it.)
But Voldemort’s wonder at Harry’s words is only momentary; he casts his wonder and its object aside at once. He knows that here is something he does not recognize, but he does not try to understand it for what it is, but instead to obliterate it. I don’t think much water runs through the hands of JKR either….
In the final two death scenes — in the first, when Harry “intends to die” on behalf of his friends, and especially in the second, when Harry reveals, “I am the true master of the Elder Wand” — we have the reciprical gaze that forever belongs to the Dantean beatific vision. When “the red eyes and the green ones” are locked together, this reciprocal gaze is, in truth, uniting two persons who have become deeply One over the course of a long journey. They have experienced a profound interconnection, become reflexes of one another. But now, in the last scene, Harry’s soul is “whole” once more, and what unites these two now is the shared blood running through their veins, carrying within it the protection of Lily’s sacrificial death.
All that protects Lord Voldemort from death, now, is that one thing that he still shares with Harry.
But in Dante’s art, at the end we have the pilgrim’s beatific vision of the Trinity, and the returning gaze of the God-man, who has been revealed to the Dante-pilgrim as the incalculable answer to the greatest and most wonder-ful of all enigmas. Their gazes lock, and they revolve around one another, Christ the God Made Human and Dante the human made divine in union with God gazing back at one another and reflecting upon one another the miracle of humblest humanity and sublimest divinity in one flesh. This sublimely Good gaze, possible because they are both human beings, united into One Body by sacrificial blood, is the highest and most satisfying knowing of all. And the two of them TOGETHER, in this shared knowing of one another, is also the ultimate Divine Goodness blazing forth and made actual, substantiated, more fully than ever before. The most wonderful thing in the world.
In Rowling, we get a dark inverse of the beatific vision, embodying the same principles in a tragically different unfolding. We get Voldemort gazing at Harry, and seeing only an enemy and rival to be destroyed, refusing to see himself in Harry, or to recognize Harry in him as his one chance for life. This, while Harry is offering Voldemort at the same moment a way out, a route to salvation. And finally we have Voldemort striking out to kill all of that, not just Harry, but in that act to murder his link to Harry and in doing so to murder himself.
The Elder Wand recognized Harry and refused to kill its true master. I think we could say that the wand’s rebounding Killing Curse might have had equally little effect upon Voldemort, in whom Harry’s blood flowed and in whom Lily’s protection dwelt, except that by making the choice that Voldemort made, of “intending to kill” Harry, Voldemort had broken and cut off any kinship that might ever have existed between them. (The meaning of every murder.)
I don’t want to over-read the book, or to allegorize it. But its marvelous conclusion is really rich, with allusions to many works and to wonder-ful principles that transcend any (artifical) boundaries between secular and religious. What is good, if it truly is good, is good alike from the point of view of humanity and from the point of view of divinity, alike in the everyone’s human life and in revelation, and for the same reasons. But the issue is choosing to — or being able to — recognize good for what it is, when it unfolds itself before our eyes, and choosing accordingly.
Voldemort’s mother did not — could not — give herself to her son’s well-being the way Lily did. Instead, she abandoned Riddle to his fate. Without experiencing it while young, it’s hard to recognize a good as a good when you haven’t ever experienced it. Tom Riddle is “the riddle of evil” in this way too. Why, why do persons choose to turn away from what is genuinely satisfying and worthy of wonder and to “cast themselves into the nowhere”? Could they choose otherwise? Are they capable of doing so, if they don’t “know” the good experientially? As Scott says, you have to be able to “look for the good and ask why it didn’t happen” to recognize what things are. But if your world has contained only evil? Then it is nothing unusual, curious, or Horrible. (There’s nothing to compare it against.)
At least with Tom, we can say that his extraordinary straying into the deepest evils brought about an equally extraordinary manifestation of everything he was missing out on. Felix culpa.
Hey, sorry I’m didn’t respond to these wonderful responses. For some reason, I don’t get email notification anymore when a response is made. Nice reading of bk. 7 Janet. I just posted on Sophia, and I think there is a strong connection between mother love in childhood and cultivation of internal Sophia (Creaturely Sophia). This is the connection between Pychoanalysis and Theology, and its basically Thomistic: we can’t know God (in heaven) unless we’ve seen God (on earth). And for better or worse, much of that seeing depends on our parents. In the words of Outkast: “Thank God for mom and dad, for stickin two together cause we don’t know how”
Yes. So I’ll repeat here the question I asked Bishop Rickel at his visitation to my parish, on the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary when he spoke so eloquently about her; about the love of the mother as the face of God….
The question: what if we haven’t experienced in childhood either the safety and warm protective love of the mother, or the mysterious “sticking two together” of a well-functioning marriage, how then do we seek to repair that emptiness, in our spirituality and relationship with God? (and: how does God speak to us during THOSE childhoods?)
I wonder if the womb of Nature enters in as a substitute source of nourishment? Everything A.D. says about Nothingness reminds me of a womb. And there’s the pervasive Womb/Tomb imagery of iconography and Western poetry as well, as when Christ rises from the empty tomb as from a womb…. If the earth and the clouds and perhaps the speechless unconditionally love of an animal can all step in and be our mother, what does this say about the Nothing/Sophia/Mirror-that-is-a-window?
In all of Lewis’ fiction, I love best the image of “the great, dumb, beautiful mother,” to whose adoptive care the astonishing singing bird of Perelandra owes its nurture and arising. This image has intrigued me for years, and now there’s perhaps a fresh significance for me in the fact that this mother is an “adoptive” mother, because like a cuckoo this bird is hatched in another’s nest, as I recall. This Peralandrean mother has always seemed to me to be typifying of Nature, while the phoenix-type bird she rears is humanity, gifted with articulate voice…
But I wonder…why do some children unprotected by their mothers become Stalins (or Voldemorts) and others will find some glimpses of the adoptive mother somewhere? Alice Miller, the psychologist and great child’s rights advocate, thinks that just one outside person in an abused child’s early life can make all the difference. She calls them “witnesses.” She thinks these children have resources that are necessary in later life for them to endure therapy; sometimes they can experience the essential trust of the therapeutic bond and that makes all the difference….
And this is such a mirroring thing! Miller says what counts for the child is that the witness affirms the child’s own feelings that the situation is difficult; that things happening to the child are NOT right (Scott’s mention of the turning to the good and wondering why it didn’t happen, in response to the Horrific…). Of course there is the matter of concern, care, love, coming from the witness, but fundamentally apparently the child needs to be able to trust its OWN instincts, and that is what the witness does. They lies at the root of being able to trust another later on in therapy.
And yet that self-trust, the sense of not being crazy or at fault for suffering and being unhappy, comes to the child through the outside mirroring of the witness to the child in its isolation….