The Thesis of Harry Potter

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the theme of Harry Potter!  Or, well, one of the many, many themes...anyway!

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.― C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Do I have proof that this is actually what Rowling had in mind? No, not really...oh, wait!

The Tales of Beedle the Bard:  "The Warlock's Hairy Heart "
Synopsis:  This dark, "gothic" tale tells of a young warlock who removes his own heart by terrible Dark Arts to protect himself from the foolishness of love. When he meets a witch who he wants to win for himself, his folly results in the both of their deaths.

Now, I would have to say that the ultimate thesis is love is stronger than death. But Lewis's quote is certainly another aspect of that overriding theme.

NPR's Top 100 Teen Books

Even though a number of them are far from merely teen books (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and anything by Madeleine L'Engle, for instance).  But still.... 

Why Michael O'Brien Opposes Harry Potter

Summed up in one review of The Father's Tale.  Excerpts:

...Readers familiar with O'Brien's work are no doubt aware that he proceeds from an essentially Manichean worldview befitting of an ascetic. He employed this worldview to great effect in the novel `Father Elijah,' which dealt with the beginning of the apocalypse and necessarily categorized characters and situations as good or evil. This time, however, in the confines of a more conventional work--and let us here posit that `The Father's Tale' is not a work of fantasy, sci-fi, or apocalypse, but general fiction--the worldview causes the book to suffer from several serious handicaps.

Chief among these is the treatment of characters. Most seemed childishly one-dimensional. The good are pure, innocent and worthy of our unquestioning admiration; those that are not good are portrayed as sinister, insensitive and unfeeling: beyond redemption. There is very little gray area....

Harry Potter: Shared Text for Our Time

Hurrah for sanity!  Excerpts:

....Harry Potter isn’t the gateway to the occult but a portal to a lifetime of edifying reading. The Harry Potter generation will be a generation that reads for pleasure. This in itself represents a significant cultural shift in the offing.

...Before meeting Allan Bloom and, through him, the Western canon, my friends and I were a sarcastic and self-absorbed, if good-hearted lot, nourished on stories that were only diversion and dissipation. I have to think my children are better prepared and more willing to embrace that tradition than I was because of their years of instruction at Hogwarts castle.

I struggle to think of any fictional work of the last two or three centuries that had the potential to shape the cultural and political agendas of its time as this one does. Dickens’s crusading social novels? Uncle Tom’s Cabin? The Jungle? Harry Potter differs from these in that the others ignited a latent Christian conscience. The Potter novels help foster one into existence.

Chuck Klosterman regrets the dawn of a Harry Potter generation but acknowledges it. I join him in pointing to the elephant at the door but rush to usher the pachyderm in. Harry is not the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, or Plutarch’s Lives; it is, however, a shared text and a profound one operating on many levels.

From this text, we can build a conversation about virtue and vice, and about what reading does to the right-side-up soul. From it, too, we can take an invitation to go on to even better books—ones that our grandparents’ great-grandparents had in common, and others that our children may one day write. Hasten the day!...

For more, see here.

Holy Fricking Yeah!

aka the trailer for Harry Potter 7.2:

Would You Like Some Gibbets With That?

So I had occasion to remember the exchange between Theoden and Saruman at the foot of Orthanc recently, which led to Google and the following awesomeness.  Excerpts:

...Memorable invective is a joy forever, whether it be that exchange or Moira’s scornful rejection of Thorfel’s offer to make her his lawfully wedded wife in “The Dark Man.” Churls will complain, as they always do, that words like “elsewhither,” “dotard,” or even “gibbet” itself discriminate against the 21st century reader, render Tolkien’s meaning inaccessible to the great unwashed or the borderline unlettered. Too bad. Howard and Tolkien were master dramatists when they wanted to be (which is why any REH adaptation that doesn’t revel in his dialogue is foredoomed, which is why no Germanic bodybuilder will ever pass muster as Conan), and their kings and malign beings regularly scale rhetorical Himalayas.

Like Mark Finn, I’ve devoured J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, but one place where she falls down hard without any cushioning is Voldemort’s dialogue. His each and every utterance is from a broken-spined, jaundiced-with-yellow-highlightings copy of The Supervillain’s Phrasebook. In a steelcage deathmatch or Thunderdome showdown to determine Most Hackneyed, I might bet on Voldmember even against the de Camp/Carter Thoth-Amon, who couldn’t verbally intimidate Scooby-Doo. When the worst of the worst achieve true immortality despite being killed deader-than-dead, (not just Dark Lords, a “human” character like Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop works as an example) it’s often because a language-kindled nimbus of hellfire blackens the edges of every page on which they appear...

On the Value of Harry Potter

by the typically thoughtful Mark Shea:

...If there is anything that Christian parents should pay attention to, it is the curious way in which Harry's universe manages to be magical while never attaining to the truly supernatural as Christians understand the term. This is not bad, but neither is it quite good enough.

What I mean is this: all the Harry Potter novels confront Harry with real choices between good and evil and Harry, like all good protagonists, always manages to struggle through to choosing good in the end. But Harry seems to be aware only of what Catholic theology would call the "natural virtues" of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. These things are real virtues and Catholic parents should get down on their knees and thank God that a series of books which takes these virtues seriously are currently inspiring children to shut off the boob tube and wolf down these tales as starving kids eat bread.

But it is also vital for Catholic parents to recognize that these virtues are only natural virtues and that a fully formed human person cannot live on bread alone. Therefore, we must finish the job Harry Potter begins by introducing our children to a truly supernatural world, not of magic, but of grace and, in particular, the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. Harry's universe simply knows nothing of these things, nor do religious questions or the reality of God ever enter into the picture, with the unfortunate consequence that Harry is likeable, but not a light whose brightness is equal to the magnetically frightening black hole of Voldemort's evil.

A secular universe-even one filled with magic-cannot summon the human spirit to its full potential. So after Harry, don't forget to introduce your children to other writers such as Tolkien and Lewis who can take your child "further up and further in." And above all, don't forget to point them to the truly supernatural person of Christ who is not only a greater source of wonder than Harry Potter, but real...

He wrote this early on in the series. I think certain things later on might offer some further light on the supernatural virtues, especially charity, but it's still a good point.  Shea, writing after the conclusion of the series, also had this to say about charges that the Harry Potter universe lacked any hint of God:

When The Lord of the Rings came out, Sir Ian McKellen demonstrated yet again that actors should stick to acting by replying to Christians who suggested Gandalf has some Christ-like aspects:

What I liked about Hobbits was that it was the perfect community but it didn't have a church. There is no God in Lord of the Rings, no Pope, no bishop, no credo, or no one telling you what to do.

The irony of Michael O'Brien's "death of God" claims about HP is that they echo McKellen's thinking about Middle Earth. Nobody in HP goes to church or prays. God is never invoked. Harry feels forsaken by Dumbledore, so that allegedly proves that the world Rowling has created has no room for God. As O'Brien says: "There is no God, apparently, so we must be our own gods. If there is no father (as every orphan knows) than we must be our own fathers."

But, then again, as McKellen says, it "proves" exactly the same thing about Middle Earth. The closest you get to prayer is the Standing Silence of the Men of Gondor (and that, only among the best of them, such as Faramir). Gandalf makes dim mention of Frodo being "meant" to find the Ring, but surely this can't mean Frodo is the humble one chosen by Providence, because then we might have to admit the same possibility for Harry.

For the same reason, Frodo's soldiering on through sheer dint of will despite death, betrayal, loss, and apparent abandonment by the world are really Tolkien's way of asserting that God is dead, and that Frodo must achieve salvation without the help of grace. After all, if we acknowledge that this is preposterous, then we might also have to acknowledge that when Harry must undergo a baptism to retrieve the Sword of Gryffindor that Rowling carefully describes as shaped like a cross, or is helped by the phoenix (an image of Christ as old as 1 Clement), that too might just possibly suggest that Harry isn't quite living in the autonomous existentialist atheist universe O'Brien insists he is. Indeed, Rowling's books are stuffed with Christian imagery, climaxing in Harry's own sacrificial self-offering "death" and "resurrection" by which he saves the wizarding world and robs Voldemort of his power. Not for nothing did Rowling note that she did not discuss her Christian faith too much, lest it give away the end of the series...

For a ton of analysis of all things Potter (with frequent use of the hermeneutic of the Christian faith), see here.

And, if you still don't bite, I refer you once again to St. Basil.

Greydanus on Potter

This is the first decent criticism I've seen of the Harry Potter series from the Christian side of things. Michael O'Brien, for all his undoubted genius as a writer, has yet to level a criticism which I find impressive--the fictional magic of the books does not bear any replicable resemblance to real world magic. The supposed condemnations from the Pope were no such thing, but rather a form letter in response to a woman sending him a book. Father Amorth's comments make sense as the caution of an exorcist, but do not seem to reflect a true level of danger since the books are so completely different from wiccan/occultic agitprop, or even the modern neo-pagan teen fiction made so popular by Mercedes Lackey, Tamora Pierce, and many others. In fact, none of the above have really begun to address the reality of the deeply pagan or occultic fiction which is growing up today (and was growing before Harry Potter hit the scene), being distracted by the Potter series. Anyway--Greydanus:

Here are the seven hedges in Tolkien and Lewis. 1. Tolkien and Lewis confine the pursuit of magic as a safe and lawful occupation to wholly imaginary realms, with place-names like Middle-earth and Narnia — worlds that cannot be located either in time or in space with reference to our own world, and which stand outside Judeo-Christian salvation history and divine revelation. By contrast, Harry Potter lives in a fictionalized version of our own world that is recognizable in time and space, in a country called England (which is at least nominally a Christian nation), in a timeframe of our own era. 2. Reinforcing the above point, in Tolkien’s and Lewis’s fictional worlds where magic is practiced, the existence of magic is an openly known reality of which the inhabitants of those worlds are as aware as we are of rocket science — even if most of them might have as little chance of actually encountering magic as most of us would of riding in the space shuttle. By contrast, Harry Potter lives in a world in which magic is a secret, hidden reality acknowledged openly only among a magical elite, a world in which (as in our world) most people apparently believe there is no such thing as magic. 3. Tolkien and Lewis confine the pursuit of magic as a safe and lawful occupation to characters who are numbered among the supporting cast, not the protagonists with whom the reader is primarily to identify. By contrast, Harry Potter, a student of wizardry, is the title character and hero of his novels. 4. Reinforcing the above point, Tolkien and Lewis include cautionary threads in which exposure to magical forces proves to be a corrupting influence on their protagonists: Frodo is almost consumed by the great Ring; Lucy and Digory succumb to temptation and use magic in ways they shouldn’t. By contrast, the practice of magic is Harry Potter’s salvation from his horrible relatives and from virtually every adversity he must overcome. 5. Tolkien and Lewis confine the pursuit of magic as a safe and lawful occupation to characters who are not in fact human beings (for although Gandalf and Coriakin are human in appearance, we are in fact told that they are, respectively, a semi-incarnate angelic being and an earthbound star.) In Harry Potter’s world, by contrast, while some human beings (called “Muggles”) lack the capacity for magic, others (including Harry’s true parents and of course Harry himself) do not. 6. Reinforcing the above point, Tolkien and Lewis emphasize the pursuit of magic as the safe and lawful occupation of characters who, in appearance, stature, behavior, and role, embody a certain wizard archetype — white-haired old men with beards and robes and staffs, mysterious, remote, unapproachable, who serve to guide and mentor the heroes. Harry Potter, by contrast, is a wizard-in-training who is in many crucial respects the peer of many of his avid young readers, a boy with the same problems and interests that they have. 7. Finally, Tolkien and Lewis devote no narrative space to the process by which their magical specialists acquire their magical prowess. Although study may be assumed as part of the back story, the wizard appears as a finished product with powers in place, and the reader is not in the least encouraged to think about or dwell on the process of acquiring prowess in magic. In the Harry Potter books, by contrast, Harry’s acquisition of mastery over magical forces at the Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft is a central organizing principle in the story-arc of the series as a whole.

Interesting comments, and certainly worth taking into account when attempting to judge whether the books are appropriate for your kids. Read the whole thing. I would still say they serve a very valuable purpose in conveying truths about death not being the worst thing, love conquering all, the absolute necessity of good men and women standing up to fight evil, etc. But I acknowledge the concerns Greydanus has.

Inaugural Post: Hope and Warning

I am by no means the equal or near the stature of Gandalf--or his real world counterparts, all of whom shall be making their own appearance on this blog. But I can promise to fulfill a similar function here. I offer hope and warning, assistance and alarm. For the times grow ever darker and the light masses for a counter blast in this time at the end of an age. All that Lewis and Tolkien, Chesterton and Pius IX, Our Lady of Fatima and J. K. Rowling, different artists of all sorts, different figures from different vantage points, have foreseen, are watching, and we are all living--this shall be what populates these pages. “Be merry! We meet again. At the turn of the tide. The great storm is coming, but the tide has turned.”