Lecture #11: Harry Potter II

Course: Fantasy & Religion

Lecture #11: Harry Potter II

NOTE: Text in Highlight is Optional

Harry Potter/Inklings: Christian Meaning

The Harry Potter book series logo/wordmark in its stylized font, in black on a transparent background.

A very famous writer once said, “A book is like a mirror. If a fool looks in, you can’t expect a genius to look out.” J.K.Rowling

There has been no shortage of critics who dislike the Harry Potter books because they are (allegedly) poorly written and because (it seems to them) they teach an ‘unbiblical spirituality.’

No one to date, however, has tried to explain the Harry Potter phenomenon in light of Ms. Rowling’s peculiar genius, the profound themes explored in the books, or her efforts to emulate the achievements of the Inkling Christian writers of the last century. Why ‘the high road approach’s been left vacant is something of a mystery. There are four reasons that come immediately to mine:

The story of her being a single mother on the dole striking it rich has since that time become the predominant image in people’s minds because every media story about her includes it. This image has made it impossible for many to consider her work as the would say, a book by Jane Austen or George Eliot. How many welfare moms do you know who have double firsts in Classics and French from a prestigious university (as Ms. Rowling does) and the ability to write fiction drawing on ancient and medieval philosophy? I bet you can count them on one hand.

2. Several Christian groups and individuals have branded the Harry Potter books as satanic and gateways to the occult because of their magical milieu. This wrong-headed interpretation, almost 180 degrees off, remains an albatross around Ms. Rowling’s neck.

3. Ms. Rowling did not start to write children’s books. Probably the major theme of the books is death and her treatment of this theme and others, drawing as it does from the richest streams of Western philosophy, theology and traditionalism, is anything but childish or superficial. Serious readers, however, do not read the books or do not read them attentively or seriously because they believe children’s books are beneath them or such critical attention.

4. And last but not least, it needs to be mentioned that Ms. Rowling has not been taken seriously because she is a woman. If a male Oxford university don had written these books I am sure Harry Potter would have been put under the literary microscope for interpretation and in-depth analysis years ago.

The secret of Harry Potter, i.e., that it is Christian fiction however, is evident in what we know of Ms. Rowling without a formal statement of her spiritual creed. She has a superior formal education in Classics and French in addition to a working familiarity with ancient and medieval philosophy and literature. This intellectual backdrop is evident in the Harry Potter books’ language, mythological references, and philosophical underpinnings.

She has also said that she is a great admirer of the Inklings, especially Lewis. When compared to with him, she says that Lewis is a genius and she is not, which response suggests that she sees him as something of a mentor. She admits to being physically incapable of being in the same room with a Narnia book and no sitting down to read it.

If she had not said these things, the many allusions to Narnia and Lewis’s books on education and literature would have brought us to the same conclusion. The professor hero in the Narnia books for example, is named Digory Kirke’ and is Lewis’s self-portrait; Dumbledore’s forceful admonition to us in Goblet to ‘remember Cedric Diggory’ is a flashing neon road sign directing critical traffic to her role model.

Her similarity to Lewis is not limited to writing charming fantasies for children (that have magic in the) as not a few of her defenders against Christian criticism imply. The Harry Potter books are the whole Inkling show, to include training in the ‘stock responses”, right alignment of the soul’s faculties and most important, the ‘baptism of the imagination’ in Christian symbols and doctrines. Rowling’s books are ‘instructions while delighting’ in the real world struggle to choose love and life over hatred, prejudice and spiritual death.

Not that these books don’t have a biting satirical and sardonic edge! “Harry Potter’ is a traditionalist broadside attack on the modern world and its absurdities. Rowling’s traditionalism shows itself in her profound use of alchemical symbolism in every book and the medical and magical settings of Hogwarts. She creates a technology free, virus laden world in order to critique modernity’s obsession wit toys and neglect of everything meaningful. She fills this world with magic as a counter spell to break the materialist enchantment of our effeminate, one-dimensional culture. Harry is a Christian hero, and a masculine icon of the traditionalist, symbolic outlook to boot.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the second Harry Potter novel Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. It is the most explicit Christian of the series and the most didactic about the dangers and delights of reading books. This explicitness is understandable in light of the response to the first book, Philosopher’s Stone, a response that must have been surprising to Ms. Rowling.

What was the response to the publication of “Philosopher’s Stone?” It sold very well. Scholastic books bid six figures for the American publishing rights. Some Christian groups, not just peripheral fundamentalist sects but several mainline churches in England and America, objected to the magical milieu of Harry’s world. Other reviewers rushed to its defense (usually reducing the objections to a straw man and defending all fantasy and fiction), a few noted the literary references.

The success of the books certainly stunned Ms. Rowling, who claims earnestly she had no idea that would prove so popular. What must have been at least as surprising - and disappointing consider their sales - was that there was no interpretation of the book per se and no defense of the book from the position that it is a remarkably Christian book. Philosopher’s Stone, despite its being a tale of the soul’s purification, illumination and perfection in Christ (written in the medieval language of spiritual alchemy) and heavy with traditional Christian symbols from the golden griffin to the Philosopher’s Stone, was read by many as occult fantasy.

Ms. Rowling bristles at the Christian objections to her books, especially those that suggest she is a Satan worshipper. She remarked at the release of Goblet of Fire that it and the Chamber of Secrets were the hardest to write and her favorite books.

But Chamber is also an answer to her Christian critics within the story and a ‘book about books” to boot. It couldn’t have been easy to write but it is the best single volume of the series. It is simultaneously:

*A wonderful mystery/adventure story, tightly plotted;

*that moves the larger story line along with

revelations about Riddle and others; and

*a response to critics via a textbook demonstration

of the meaning and power of Inkling literature.

As a book about books, Chamber discusses the quality, value and dangers of three books; Riddle’s Diary, Lockhart’s corpus, and the Harry Potter book the reader is holding and experiencing.

THE DANGER OF TOM RIDDLE’S DIARY

Chamber turns on the diary of Tom Riddle (a.k.a., Lord Voldemort) and what happens when it returns to Hogwarts. When Harry and Ron discover the diary in Moaning Myrtle’s toilet, Ron warns Harry about the dangerous magic in books.

Rowling is having a little fun here. Notice the Sorcerer book title and what it does. “Sorcerer” is a word rarely used in Harry Potter but it is in the title of the American edition of Philosopher’s Stone. Could she be accusing her American Christian critics of making laughable accusations? Few of those who read Stone, after all, have magically been transformed into Wicca coven devotees.

Harry, after Ron’s hysterical warnings and barely concealed prediction of a fate worse then death, decides he’ll have to read it to find out. I don’t doubt that Rowling is saying that this is the course of the sensible, sober reader; in the matter of a controversial or supposedly dangerous book, read it and decide for yourself what it is about.:

What we know for sure, though, is that she is not dismissing the possibility that books can be dangerous. Riddle’s diary certainly is. Let’s lay out what we know about this diary:

*It is Tom Marvolo Riddle’s (a.k.a., Lord Voldemort)

*delivered by Lucius Malfoy -

*in a Transfiguration Textbook -

*to Ginny Weasley.

Lucius Malfoy’s intentions in planting the book in Ginny Weasley’s textbook are not, as one might think, to restore Lord Voldemort. That Malfoy could have done on his own Quirrell like, with any stooge. Dumbledore tells us the book planting was a “clever plan” to undermine Arthur Weasley’s standing among wizards and destroy the Muggle Protection Act Weasley sponsors. Mr. Malfoy is understandably nervous about this Act and the raids the Ministry has been making to round up ‘dangerous toys’ from dark wizards. Draco Malfoy also suggests that his father was trying to remove the ‘muggle loving’ Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore from Hogwarts, which he did at least for a while.

“What the diary does’ highlights Rowling’s point about authentically dangerous books. The diary in Chamber, as an example of such books, is a book in which:

*The innocent (again, ‘Ginny” here should be read as “Virginia” or Virgin)

*are transfigured (note the Transfiguration textbook in which Malfoy

hides the diary)

*into the wicked (it is the possessed Ginny that opens the Chamber and

releases the Basilisk)

* by the author a a book of dark magic (Riddle/Voldemort is the bad

guy.

*hidden inside their textbooks and pretending to be what they are not.

The effect of the book on Ginny is that she turns into a rooster murdering, basilisk releasing servant of Riddle. She thinks she is losing her mind and she is right; her mind is Voldemort’s and in this is the death of her innocence and purity. The effect of the book on Harry, too, is remarkable. After his time inside the memory of Tom Riddle he more than half believes that Hagrid is the heir of Slytherin. It is a pretty powerful drug or ‘confundus charm’ - or evil magic - that could make Harry suspect his friend, the Dumbledore-adoring gamekeeper. Rowling isn’t telling us to beware of the sneaky diaries of dark wizards. She is pointing to the dangers hiding in children’s textbooks.

The hidden ‘dark wisdom’ in our children’s schoolbooks is transforming them from something human into people who are somehow less than human. Because of their having grown up “having read the wrong sort of books” they are incapable of the sentiments and emotions that buttress and create courage and the other moral excellencies. Rowling communicates this real danger of the vacant naturalism and godlessness of textbooks through the mind of Tom Riddle hidden in Ginny’s Transfiguration schoolbook, part of Rowling’s intended response to the objections to Magic in her books. Let’s look at that enchantment for a moment. Because understanding Rowling’s attack on it in her books is one way to appreciate her genius and the tragic-comic objectives of some Christians.

ROWLING’S MAGICAL WORLD

Rowling’s magical world, existing alongside the pale, materialist Muggle world is the same world experienced “diagonally” which reveals what is eternal in the ephemeral, the quality in the quantity.

Diagon Alley as not a few critics have noted, is word play for “diagonally”. This street hidden in the heart of London is a magical avenue of commerce with a Wizard’s bank (run by goblins), a wand shop, and the best bookstore. The numbers on this street are without exception prime numbers or the product of primes. Is this just cleverness run amuck or is Rowling telling us something?

Rowling asks us to look at the world magically, which is to say, not accepting that what we see is all there is. Seen “diagonally”, material things (to include people!) are better understood in light of their qualities, their beauty, truth, and virtue. Rowling in her use of prime numbers points us to consider even quantities, what we measure in number, as qualities; primes differ in quality from other numbers in their being irreducible to lesser constituents. Look she says, for what is irreducible and eternal in the world rather then for only its “straight on’, ephemeral, quantitative value.

And the magic? ‘Magic’ is activity not obedient to naturalist law and material quantities. Rowling is writing a broadside, Christian attack on “the reign of quantity’, error, evil, and ugliness in the modern world; what better place to cast the counter spell to the enchantment of modernity than in a technology free world of magic alongside our own? And, yet, because of the poetry of magic she uses in her defense of the great view, she has drawn fire from the very community she defends.

Objections to the magic in Harry Potter, however, mistake the editing use of magic in literature for actual invocational soccer condemned by Scripture which it clearly is not. Those who object to her magic do so with good intentions; they are blind, however, to the great service she does them in her attack on the mortal invisible enemy inside our gates. It is the materialist heresy that undermines the belittles the traditional world-view of Christianity.

SIGNIFICANCE OF GILDEROY LOCKHART

Chamber is the Harry Potter ‘book about books’. We have looked at the ‘portrait of evil’ Rowling paints in Riddle’s diary of the dark, moral philosophy hiding in modernist textbooks; let’s move on to the most comic figure in the Potter series, Gilderoy Lockhart.

In an interview with amazon.com, she mentioned that Gilderoy Lockhart “started as an exaggeration version of a person I’ve met.” That person is not difficult to identify - and this identification reveals another sort of dangerous book that Rowling warns her attentive reader about. Break with a Banshee, Gadding with Ghouls, Holidays with Hags, Travels with Trolls, Voyages with Vampires, Wanderings with Werewolves, Year with the Yeti, Gilderoy Lockhart’s Guide to Household Pets, Magical Me - Gilderoy Lockhart has written a bunch of books. Here is what we know about them:

What we learn about Gilderoy, himself, beyond his being “Order of Merlin Third Class Honorary Member of the Dark Fore Defense League and five-time winner of Witch Weekly’s Most-Charming-Smile Award” (which he “won’t talk about” but manages to mention four times in Chamber), is:

His cowardice is revealed in spades when Ginny Weasley is taken into the Chamber of Secrets by Riddle ad the teachers tell Lockhart he has a “free rein at last” to slay the monster. When Harry and Ron go to him to explain where they think the Chamber is, he tells them this sort of wasn’t “in the job description”:

“You mean you’re running away?” Said Harry disbelievingly. After all that stuff you did in your books-“

“Books can be misleading,” said Lockhart delicately.

“You wrote them!” Harry shouted.

“My dear boy,” said Lockhart, straightening up and frowning at Harry.

“Do use your common sense. Why books wouldn’t have sold half as well

If people didn’t think I’d done all of that,”

“So you’ve just been taking credit for what a load of other people have

Done?” Said Harry incredulously.

In the world of Harry Potter, where the virtues of bravery, selflessness and loyalty are prized above all you’re not supposed to like Gildroy. We can laugh at him but Rowling clearly doesn’t want us thinking of him as a role model. He is a carton figure of everyone self-important self-promoting superficial, effeminate and emasculating: everything the Harry Potter books hope to overcome and replace with heroic masculine virtues and ‘Stock Responses’.

Rowling hates Gilderoy’s kind of fiction; it’s everything her fiction is not. In this ‘second book within the book’, then, she offers this character to her critics as a foil to her own work. Children’s literature that does not come from true belief and out of genuine love and concern for readers demeans them and distracts them. There are no ‘stock responses’ in Gilderoy’s books, no right alignment of soul, and certainly no baptism of the imagination in Christian doctrines and symbols.

PHILLIP PULLMAN’S OPPOSITION TO CS LEWIS

Phillip Pullman: “Dark Materials trilogy”

I need to say something about Pullman because there is good reason to believe that Rowlings had him in mind when writing “The Chamber of Secrets”.

Pullman published his first part in 1995 a year or more ahead of the first Harry Potter book. Rowlings had met him at a conference in the 90's

The book was marketed to young adults though he had no targeted group in mind when it published. It functions in part as a retelling and inversion of Jon Milton’s epic fantasy “Paradise Lost”. The series has attracted controversy for its criticism of religion.

The dominant religion resembles Christianity and in the later books in the series explicitly named. Adam and Eve are referenced in the text.

The Church is called the “Magisterium”, the same name as the authority of the Catholic Church and exerts a strong control over society. However, the headquarters have moved from Rome to Geneva by his fictional Pope John Calvin.

There was not a creator in his story but rather matter became conscious of itself and developed “dust”. Dust becomes conscious of itself and the Authority was the first figure that condensed from the dust. Others coming later at first believed he was the creator but some angels decided he wasn’t and thus the fall came about and all else came from that. The figure of authority dies in the story showing he has a reality that is only symbolic. The last expression on his face is one of profound, exhausted relief.

These are based on the Gnostic myth. The idea that the world we live in, the physical universe, is actually a false thing, made by a false god, and the true God, our true home, is infinitely distant, far away from that.

This sense is what we find in popular culture (The X files, The Matrix). Everything we see is the false creation of some wicked power that is trying to deceive us.

So who is the real life model for Gilderoy Lockhart? Granger’s guess is Philip Pullman, author of The Dark Materials trilogy an many other, much admired children’s books.He has a few reasons for guessing Pullman, some good, some silly.

1 Every person I have met or read that loves his books, (including his daughters) is female.

2 His Dark Materials trilogy was ‘big news’ and Pullman a star at English book fairs when Harry Potter was still just a new title from a small publishing house - and it is at one of those events that Rowling is said to have met her ‘Lockhart’ model; and

3 One of the lead characters in more than one of Pullman’s balks is named Sallie Lockhart.

Onto more serious reasons for Rowling to choose Pullman is his disdain for C.S. Lewis and the “Narnia School”.

“Mr. Pullman’s book offers an explicit alternative to C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia with their praise Christian message. In the Narnia books nestled inside the delightful stories of talking animals, heroic challenges and whimsical scenes, the meaning is clear: the heroes find true happiness only after death when their spiritual superiority buys them passage to heaven. It is a conclusion with which Mr. Pullman thoroughly disagrees. “When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so antilife, so cruel so unjust” he said. “The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt.”

Instead, Mr. Pullman argues for a “republic of heaven” whee people live as fully and richly as they can because there is no life beyond. “I wanted to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife, he said’ (Sarah Lyall, NYT, 6 Nov 2000). “He opposes the tradition of children’s literature as Christian allegory, made famous by the Narnia Chronicles of C.S. Lewis.

Shockingly, Mr. Pullman, a 53-old former schoolteacher, has created a world in which organized religion - or, at least, what organized religion has become - is the enemy and it’s agents are the misguided villains…The author grew up in Wales listening to fantastical stories of his maternal grandfather, an Anglican priest bursting with imaginative energy. ‘I think he would be shocked by some of the things in [Dark Materials].’ said Mr. Pullman, who was raised a Protestant but became an atheist as a teenager” (Lyall, NYT op.cit)

“Pullman has made clear in a lovely essay called “the Republic of Heaven” that he is passionately against any religion that puts its vision of the spirit and the afterlife above human life and the natural world, where our moral and spiritual tests as well as our pleasures are found. And what does he mean by “ the Republic of Heaven”? “No kings, no bishops, no priests,” says one of the rebels. “The Kingdom of Heaven has been known by that name since the Authority first set himself above the rest of the angels. And we want no part of it. This world is different. We intend to be free citizens of the Republic of Heaven”. (Jefferson, NYT.)

In contrast with the Pullman/Lockhart genre and Riddle’s diary, the third book in Chamber of Secrets does not demean or diminish the reader by indoctrinating them with worldly philosophies. The third book Rowling shares with us in Chamber, her ‘book about books’, is Chamber of Secrets itself. It ends with an answer for her Christian critics that one would think they would have a hard time rejecting: the best books for children are the ones that model for them a heroic life in battle with the Evil One and dependent on the graces only available in Christ. ‘Best book’ model is evident in the battle scene at the end of Chamber, a Christian morality play for anyone with ‘eyes to see’.

Chamber as Morality Play

Christian morality plays were the first theater in Western Europe. They were almost without exception either portrayals of Bible stories or ‘Everyman’ allegories of the soul’s journey to salvation through thick and thin. Imagine medieval street dramas at public markets and fairs by itinerant players putting on variations of Pilgrim’s Progress and the Passion Play. The finish to Chamber of Secrets, as morality play, is the clearest Christian allegory of salvation history since Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Lets look at it in detail.

Harry, our ‘Everyman’, enters the Chamber of Secrets to find and rescue Ginny Weasley. He finds her but she is unconscious and Harry cannot revive her. He meets Tom Riddle. He had thought Riddle was a friend and asks for his help in restoring Ginny. No deal.

He learns then that Riddle is anything but his friend; Tom Riddle is the young Lord Voldemort Satan’s stand in” in the Harry Potter books, the Dark Lord or Evil One,. Far from helping him revive Ginny, Riddle has been the cause of her near death. Harry boldly confesses his loyalty to Albus Dumbledore and his belief that Dumbledore’s powers is greater then Voldemort’s.

Conclusion

In her second book, Ms. Rowling clearly reveals to the discerning reader that she is writing Inkling fiction, i.e., stories that will prepare children for Christian spiritual life an combat with evil. Talk about baptizing he imagination with Christian symbols and doctrine!

She also points out to her Christian critics that their real enemies are not her counter-materialist magic but both the dark magic hidden in their children’s textbooks and the ‘good children’s books’ written by atheists and the worldly minded. Chamber of Secrets is a tour de force operating on at least three levels of meaning simultaneously. We can understand consequently, Rowling’s struggle in writing it and agree with her that it is the best single volume of the series.

In understanding the meaning and popularity of Chamber of Secrets, ‘Remember Ceric Diggory!’ As with C.S.Lewis’s Narnia and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Rowling’s Harry Potter books enjoy such remarkable sales and popularity because of:

1 The Need for then: Lewis described the aims of education in modern times as ’irrigating a desert’ in contrast to the popular belief that it is ‘to cut down jungles’ or clear away delusions. The desert that needs water is both spiritual and mental. Soft heads and hard hearts long for truth, beauty, and goodness even though they have been taught to despise or disregard these as subjective or sentimental qualities.

2 A Wow! Story; Whatever the demand for edifying literature, if it isn’t engaging and entertaining as story it cannot have the desired effect. Ms. Rowling’s detailed, magical world allows and invites head first immersion and suspension of disbelief. Her readers identify with Harry and are rushed to a catharsis in spirit with their hero via the imagination. They absorb consciously and unconsciously just sentiments, heroic virtue, and Christian doctrine while loving he adventures in which this moral education is wrapped.

3 The Christian Meaning: The Harry Potter books do not offer a generic ‘good over evil’ message. Ms. Rowling writes the powerful, spiritual answer in story form to mankind’s large questions in the only language even a post Christian culture can understand: she writes in the symbols and doctrines of the Christian faith. Harry Potter fans enjoy a resurrection experience in every book and are awash in word pictures and images of Christ and souls in pursuit of perfection. Without this specific meaning, Rowling could not have achieved her unprecedented popularity in a culture that only knows of God in these forms.

4 “Past Watchful Dragons”: Lewis was aware of how repugnant anything “churchy” is to most people and especially to children. He once explained that his Narnia books were written to sneak ‘past the watchful dragons’ that guard our hearts against the Christian meaning of life. Harry Potter is so popular precisely because no one has stirred these dragons. Rowling, by means of her cinderella story, the cover of being anti-Christian, our cultural misogyny, and because she too is considered to be writing only harmless children’s fantasy, has been able to pass the much more ferocious and watchful dragons of our day. Her disguise (as ‘welfare-mom Wicca-cultist’) does the concealment job more effectively that wearing both Frodo’s ring and Harry’s Invisibility Cloak.