A number of years ago I issued this series of theological reflections on the Harry Potter saga for the former and now defunct Lutheran Forum website (since replaced with a far more excellent one: pay a visit!). So here they are again, fittingly raised from the black hole of internet death and lightly edited, for another Easter season. And if you are one of the approximately eleven people left on the planet who don’t know the story: needless to say, spoilers ahead!
The Harry Potter series, once giving rise to accusations of seducing young folk with witchcraft, ended a number of years ago with the most powerful christological themes to come out of fiction since the Chronicles of Narnia. Theological reflections on the Potter saga accordingly abound. Here are a few of my own.
The Paternal Presence-in-Absence
It’s not hard to see the ways in which Harry’s actions mirror the christological themes of self-giving love and atonement of both the propitiatory and expiatory varieties. And it’s no surprise that in fictional improvisations on the gospel story, the Christ figure is easiest to illumine of the triune persons. The Father is usually barely there (think of the only alluded-to “Emperor over the Sea” in Narnia) and the Spirit is entirely ignored (I don’t know of any fictional analogue at all).
But J. K. Rowling does manage to have a substantial image of the Father in her great tale and, what’s more, accurately captures the Father-Son drama. This Father here is, of course, Dumbledore. His own past failures don’t detract from this role; if anything, they are crucial to the emotional drama. The red thread of the final installment of the series is whether or not Harry will trust Dumbledore to the end.
This is also the divine drama of the passion narrative. Robert Farrar Capon notes in his book Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus that, in the very last parables Jesus tells before his arrest, the predominant theme is “the absence of the main character from the part of the parable that corresponds to our life now” (490). So it is in the King’s Son’s Wedding, and the Faithful Servant and the Bad Servant; and in the final trio of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, the Talents, and the Great Judgment of the Sheep and the Goats “the note of absence becomes practically the fulcrum of the judgment (krísis) that takes place when the main character finally appears” (490–1).
As Capon goes on to explain, “Accordingly, these parables are about a judgment pronounced on a world from which God, through all its history, was effectively absent—or to put it more carefully, was present in a way so mysterious as to constitute, for all practical purposes, an absence.” The parables “base the judgment solely on faith or unfaith in the mystery of the age-long presence-in-absence—the abiding parousía under history—of the divine redemption” (491). The crowning “parable” of Jesus on the theme of trust in the absent God is his own cry of faith and betrayal in his last words quoting Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” It is an analogue of Job’s cry as well: “Though He slay me, I will hope in Him.”
Throughout Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the titular protagonist is haunted by Dumbledore’s absence. It starts with the “flash of brightest blue” in the fragment of the mirror he finds in his trunk. He hopes for the master he has lost and seen dead, but it is only Dumbledore hidden under the sign of his unimpressive, resentful brother Aberforth.
In reading newspaper reports by the vicious Rita Skeeter, Harry is filled with rage that Dumbledore’s reputation has been called into question, but it is a rage suspicious of a hidden dark truth. When he finally gets a hold of the whole story, there is a bitter feeling of betrayal that Dumbledore did indeed have a dark past and withheld so much of it from Harry; and not only the bad things were withheld, but many of the good as well, like their common connection to Godric’s Hollow.
That raises the real emotional drama for Harry to a fever pitch: should he trust Dumbledore or not? Harry has two options for mastering death, possession of either the Horcruxes or the Hallows—and a further difference is that one set Harry must destroy, while the other he would have to preserve. Time does not permit him to pursue both options. So the critical question becomes, does he go after the Horcruxes according to Dumbledore’s wishes—the apparently unreliable, withholding, and now completely absent Dumbledore? Or does he pursue his own instincts toward triumph through ownership of the Hallows?
It seems that maybe, just maybe, Dumbledore wanted Harry to have the Hallows, too: after all, he’d passed on the invisibility cloak long before, and the Snitch is just the right size for hiding the resurrection stone. Which means Harry has to choose between the plain words of Dumbledore and his own hermetic reconstruction of Dumbledore’s true but hidden meaning. Which presence to choose, which absence to choose, which openness and which hiddenness? During his refuge at Bill and Fleur’s Shell Cottage, reeling from the death of Dobby the house-elf, Harry makes the critical decision for trust in Dumbledore and his instructions, even though the meaning is not clear to him and the outcome even less so.
It is only in the final battle of Hogwarts, when the suspected traitor Snape finally tells Harry the whole story through a bequest of memory, that Harry finally sees the plan in its entirety (or so he thinks). “Finally, the truth… His job was to walk calmly into Death’s welcoming arms.” Which meant that Dumbledore had “been raising him like a pig for slaughter,” as Snape objects. The word “pig” could easily be replaced with “lamb.”
As Harry reflects on it, “Dumbledore’s betrayal was almost nothing. Of course there had been a bigger plan; Harry had simply been too foolish to see it, he realized that now. He had never questioned his own assumption that Dumbledore wanted him alive. Now he saw that his life span had always been determined by how long it took to eliminate all the Horcruxes.” And Dumbledore knew that Harry wouldn’t cut out at the last second, because Harry had come to love all the people that his death alone could protect. Harry was trapped by his own character and by the all-seeing eye of the Dumbledore he trusted. The Dumbledore he loved and trusted, the Dumbledore who taught him to love and trust, turns out to have taken advantage of that love and trust for his own righteous ends, apparently indifferent to the cost of Harry’s own life. And in the end, Harry has to agree with him.
Harry has no way of knowing that life waits for him on the other side of death. Jesus did, but it’s hard to believe that it made facing an unjust, abandoned, and excruciatingly (!) painful death much easier to face. What Rowling shows, though, is that Harry, like Jesus, is not simply a cog in the wheel of a righteousness machine set in motion by the all-wise Father. He is a person, a Person, who matters too, whose life is precious every bit as much as his death. The reward of self-sacrifice is not an honorable memory but a new life, free from the power of evil and death—Voldemort’s curses no longer affect Harry in the slightest. And, in the passage from death to life, the best gift of all: beholding the face of the trusted Father who answers the questions, unmasks the mysteries, and grants above all his own presence.
None of us walks by sight. Sight is speaking with perfect sincerity and truth when it says that all is not well, that evil has the upper hand, that death is the end. Sight can’t honestly say that things aren’t as bad as they seem and everything will turn out right.
But sight doesn’t see all that is. Faith doesn’t see it, either, but faith trusts in the Father’s promise that there is more to the story than our eyes can behold. This was the faith that took Jesus to the cross. It is the faith we are invited into through the preaching of the gospel and baptism. It is the faith by which we are justified and reconciled to the Father. It is the faith given by the Spirit, Who is most hidden and most present of all.
The Resurrection of Saggy, Lumpy, Longing Bodies
The book is one thing, the movie is another. Naturally there is a challenge in the translation process, but in my view the hugest error in judgment in the whole movie series is right at the end of the final installment, when Voldemort is finally defeated—his own death curse rebounding upon him—and his body explodes into a billion pieces.
This is critically, devastatingly wrong. First, from a narrative perspective, the backstory informs us that when Voldemort had tried to kill one-year-old Harry the first time, the protection afforded him by his mother’s sacrificial death on his behalf caused the death curse to rebound on Voldemort. In that case, it didn’t manage to kill Voldemort because he’d already divided his soul into seven parts and distributed them among his various Horcruxes. But, importantly, his physical body vanished.
All that was left was a shadowy something, the nature of which we are never exactly told, but it sounds pretty horrible. As Voldemort describes it himself in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: “Aaah… pain beyond pain, my friends; nothing could have prepared me for it. I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost… but still, I was alive. What I was, even I do not know.” So—to come back to the final movie—having Voldemort’s body simply explode suggests the same thing that happened the last time around, denying the crucial difference Harry and his friends have made by eliminating all the Horcruxes.
But the theological reason for its wrongness is even deeper. Nothing offends Voldemort more deeply than bodiliness. For him, bodiliness is merely a tool to accomplish his evil ends. Later in the same speech quoted above, he remarks, “I was as powerless as the weakest creature alive, and without the means to help myself… for I had no body, and every spell that might have helped me required the use of a wand.”
To Voldemort, the body is a tool for wielding power but not a good in itself. It is significant that the “reborn” Voldemort’s body is disturbingly inhuman in appearance: “Whiter than a skull, with wide, livid scarlet eyes and a nose that was flat as a snake’s with slits for nostrils.” It is a body that is only meant to inspire terror as it wields power.
Though Rowling doesn’t explore this angle, only hinting at it, Voldemort’s body is one in which all sexuality has been suppressed, killed off even. For all his horribleness, there is nothing particularly masculine or feminine about him. He is snaky, but not even in the crudest Freudian sense.
Evidently the insanely murderous Bellatrix Lestrange nourishes a barely concealed passion for Voldemort; when she speaks to him at the beginning of the last book, her voice is “constricted with emotion” as she leans toward him, “for mere words could not demonstrate her longing for closeness,” and when he appears to pay her a compliment, “[h]er face flooded with color.”
But is all too clear that physical passion is definitely not a bonus Voldemort expects out of his domination of the planet. Promiscuity and rape will not be among his vices; incredible though it sounds, since these are acts of dehumanization, they require a certain level of humanity in the perpetrator, which Voldemort lacks. The physical closeness involved would be revolting for him. Even the most momentary loss of control, in the vulnerability of pleasure, is out of the question. Asexuality is a quality of the most far-gone of evildoers; you can’t imagine Sauron in The Lord of the Rings keeping a harem, either.
(Which is only one of many, many, many reasons why Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a betrayal and disappointment of the story arc. The one thing Voldemort cannot possibly have is a love child!)
That is why, ultimately, it matters so much to see Voldemort’s dead body at the end of the very last battle. For all his dark magic, he has failed to escape that fundamental fact about creatures: he is a body. Rowling narrates it exactly right in the book, including her calling the antagonist by his ordinary name: “Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing.” Creaturely powers all end in death, and for all his efforts to avoid it, Voldemort has ended up the same as everyone and everything else. It is the ultimate insult to his demonic pretensions: much more so than an explosion.
The resurrection of the body is what we celebrate at Easter, not the escape of the body, despite the continual resurgence of Neoplatonism in our midst. Our bodies are not heroic machines of power, not most of the time, anyway. They start out helpless and chubby, and if let run their full course they shrivel, wrinkle, and falter before they finally die. In between, they catch colds, throw up, ingest and excrete, burn with desire, shiver, chatter, sweat, and stink.
God must have a bizarre sense of humor, not to mention aesthetics. But this is what He wants to raise up to live with Him forever. It is not the most dignified company, perhaps, and certainly not the most powerful. But it is a blessed one that God has seen fit to share.
Tearing the Soul by Violating the Body
In fact, the whole plot hinges on bodiliness, its integrity and sanctity. Voldemort secures his rise and later return to power via the creation of Horcruxes: physical objects in which a fragment of his soul have been concealed, which mean that whatever assaults come on his body, he cannot die. Division of body from soul normally spells death plain and simple for mortal creatures, but in a Horcrux the division is turned to a warped sort of advantage.
Professor Slughorn, from whom the young Voldemort learns this, assures him “few would want” the kind of existence resulting from such an act. “Death would be preferable.” But to Voldemort, death is preferable to absolutely nothing—his own death, that is. In order to avoid it, the most hideous of acts is but a small obstacle. And indeed, that’s what it takes. Slughorn explains that the way to make a Horcrux is “[b]y an act of evil—the supreme act of evil. By committing murder. Killing rips the soul apart.” The split soul can then be stowed away in the Horcrux for safekeeping.
It seems a safe bet to call killing the “supreme act of evil.” But I wonder. First, there is simply the logic of the story itself, for example when Snape shoots an Avada Kedavra curse at Dumbledore and kills him. We learn much later that Snape, who had already committed murder during his Death Eater past and thus presumably struggles on with a torn-but-mending soul on account of his remorse, had killed Dumbledore precisely so the as-yet untorn soul of Draco Malfoy would not be bound to do so.
More than that, Snape committed the murder at Dumbledore’s own request—mainly to spare Draco, but also because Dumbledore knew his own death was imminent from other causes entirely. Yet earlier in the series we were told that it is not possible to perform any of the “unforgivable curses” without actually wanting to do them; the will has to back the act. So Snape, even while acting mercifully toward Draco and obligingly toward Dumbledore, and despite his own resistance to it, ultimately had to will the elder wizard’s death—and we are invited to judge this as a good decision.
The dilemma of justified killing is a well-known problem of Christian ethics. To say nothing of just war on a large scale, there are individual matters where one act of murder (say of a crazed killer on a shooting spree) will spare many more lives, even if we would hardly call that one murder an ideal or desirable act. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the plot against Hitler—his willingness to sacrifice his own good conscience in order to be a spoke in the wheel—is always near at hand when this subject comes up. I wonder if he was prevented from doing so, providentially speaking, so as not to establish a precedent. Involvements in assassination plots should never be a matter of precedent, to say the very least!
More pointedly, this problem reminds me of a section of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics that discusses acts that are never justifiable on any grounds whatsoever. Notably, neither war nor murder fall into this category. Acts not justifiable on any grounds might best be described as those that keep the victims alive in order to make their lives into a living death. As Bonhoeffer puts it:
“Protection against arbitrary encroachment on the freedom of the body is essential to the preservation of bodily life. The human body never becomes simply a thing that might fall under the unbounded power of another person, to be used only as means to that person’s ends. The living human body is always the human person himself or herself. Rape, exploitation, torture, and the arbitrary deprivation of physical freedom are all serious invasions of the right conferred on human beings at creation. Like all invasions of natural life, sooner or later they bring punishment upon themselves.
“Rape is the forcible use, by illegal power, of another body for one’s own purposes, especially sexual. It is opposed by the right of a person freely to give or withhold her or his own body, especially its sexuality. While, in special circumstances, the application of bodily strength to work for the sake of the common good can be forcibly demanded, human sexuality remains exempt from all compulsion…
“We speak of the exploitation of the human body where the bodily strength of one person becomes the unlimited property of another person or institution. We call this state of affairs enslavement… This condition exists wherever a person has become a thing under the power of another and is only a means to another person’s ends…
“By torture of the body we mean, in general, the arbitrary and brute infliction of bodily pain, through the use of superior power, especially with the object of extorting desired confessions or statements. Here the body is misused and dishonored exclusively as a means to accomplish the alien goals of someone else, such as satisfying a lust for power or obtaining certain information. An innocent body’s sensitivity to pain is used to torment a person… [E]very tormenting of the body means inflicting the deepest dishonor on the person” (Ethics, 214–16).
Certainly murder is a supreme act of evil, but I’m not sure it is the supreme act of evil all by itself. Rape, enslavement, and torture also qualify. Distinct from murder, they don’t eliminate a life but feed off of it. They desire the ongoing pain of the living person—emotional and psychological as well as physical—in order to inflate the perpetrator’s own diminished life. But they fail to nourish in the feeding frenzy and so only create a hunger for more. Rape, enslavement, and torture are rarely isolated incidents in the life of the perpetrator or community.
While these acts certainly tear the souls of the perpetrators, they also tear the souls of the victims by means of the violation of their bodies. The difference from murder hinges on this point. In Deathly Hallows, Hermione points out that if you are killed, your body is certainly harmed but your soul remains perfectly intact, which, she points out, is a comfort in its own cold way. The souls of the victims of rape, enslavement, and torture are certainly not damaged the way the souls of the perpetrators of these acts are. But they are truly harmed. That is, actually, the goal of these evil acts—to destroy not only body but soul, too.
“Trauma studies” have gained ground recently in the theological world, trying to find ways to think about the impact of such soul-tearing on human beings and what it means for their relationship to other people, to the church, and to God. It is a long-overdue discussion. But it is a hard and painful one, and it is probably no surprise that a children’s fantasy series—even one that confronts as much evil as the Harry Potter books—shies away from these extremes. It is, oddly, safer to stick to murder.