A great writer. But... Christian?
Joanne K. Rowling and Christianity
Christianity is not just another word for decency. There can be no doubt that if a Christian lived out the full implications of the doctrines he or she believes, he or she would live a morally very impressive life; but the defining feature of the Christian is not his or her moral excellence, but his or her faith. That is, to be a Christian, you have to take a certain number of propositions as true. It is, in other words, possible to be a Christian scoundrel; and not impossible, according to Christian doctrine, to be a Christian and damned. (St.James: “Faith without work is dead… Even the demons believe - and tremble!”)
And that is not really surprising: it is the defining feature of any religious or philosophical identity, from Platonists to Mormons to atheists. Only, Christianity makes it even more evident, by making faith itself into a positive virtue. Other religions do not do that. Without going into the thicket of how or why, which is beside the point here, let us just note the basic point: Christianity is a doctrine, not a rule of behaviour, and a Christian is a person who accepts that doctrine, not a person who behaves correctly.
Which is why I was astonished beyond telling when, years ago, I was informed that JK Rowling was supposed to be one. A great writer - of course; and this I will defend in the face of all the snobs who think a simple style and a popular subject matter signs of inferiority. The bearer of a set of attractive, indeed noble, attitudes and moral teachings; yes, indeed. A Christian? Why? How? There was no sign whatsoever in any of her writing, of any understanding, let alone acceptance, of any properly Christian doctrine. In my mind, I had already placed her with the admirable heathens, a race by no means extinct today, and triumphant in Britain.
(At the time, mind you, I had already defended her against the silly attacks on her use of witchcraft, made on her in the name of Christianity and even - alas - of Catholic doctrine. But that did not mean that I considered her a Christian - only a noble writer and nothing like a Satanist. At any rate, the Satanists I read are mostly dreadful writers.)
Once I found out that the information was true, I decided I would wait for the end of the saga - which looked within sight at the time, though it would take more than two years to come - before I made up my mind. And now it has finally come. And it has brought plenty of evidence about Mrs.Rowling’s philosophy and beliefs.
We can start with a central statement of what the story regards as wisdom. We are near the climax. Battle is coming. But one of the dreadful Horcruxes, receptacles of torn bits of soul, by which Voldemort is kept alive and immortal, is not yet found. Meanwhile, Voldemort is on his way, and almost nobody is ready to resist him. To find the Horcrux, and to begin the revolt against the tyrant, two characters must enter Ravenclaw House - the House of Wisdom of Hogwarts. Now, other houses are entered by knowing the password: but Ravenclaw has no password. You have to answer a gnomic (wisdom) question correctly (a beautiful invention, by the way - typical of JKR’s superlative imagination) or else wait till someone who can will help you.
Let me underline the importance of this. We are faced with a structural part of the approaching climax: unless Harry enters Ravenclaw House, he will not find the Horcrux; and unless he and Professor McGonagall meet, there will be no battle - with the teachers still unaware, Voldemort will come upon Hogwarts by surprise and do whatever he will. The fundamental role of the riddles is echoed by their structural importance in the school: they are built into Ravenclaw House, that is, they are an essential component of the structure of Hogwarts. The “wisdom” they contain is built into Hogwarts. And another brilliant plotting invention underlines their significance: Minerva McGonagall only turns up at all because the crude and stupid Amycus Carrow, one of Voldemort’s henchmen, cannot enter on his own. He has no wisdom. And what is worse, instead of getting the point of this, he starts insulting and threatening the truly wise McGonagall as soon as she has shown hers by getting through where he was unable to pass. Not only does he have no wisdom, but he stupidly despises those who have. From then on, not only Minerva and Harry, but the prose itself, treat him with contempt. It is not necessary to be wise to be admitted into the house of Wisdom, but it is necessary to respect those who are: Harry, who, like Carrow, cannot answer himself, gets in because he has treated Luna, who can, with respect - and indeed, he has done so from the beginning, even when she seemed more dotty than wise.
So what is the wisdom built into Hogwarts? We have two samples of it. One: “Which came first, the phoenix or the flame? Answer: a circle has no beginning.” Two: “Where do Vanished objects go? Answer: into non-being, that is to say, everything.”
Though pointed specifically at issues of Hogwarts magic as we have learned to know it, both these questions have a specific philosophical content that is totally contrary to Christian doctrine. The first denies the very idea of Creation (and, incidentally, the scientific theory of Evolution), by positing that a specific magical bird who renews itself from flame had no beginning in time. The second denies the fundamental Christian (and Aristotelian) contradiction between being and non-being, from which the very idea of Creation springs: that is, that God created the world out of nothing.
JKR’s boldness is in fact rather fascinating. A lot of fanfic writers have grappled with the issue of vanishing, materializing, or transfigurating objects, which JKR’s wizards regularly do. Every one of them, to the best of my knowledge, simply had the vanished objects reappear somewhere else, or the materialized ones being taken from somewhere else; in unconscious obedience to the scientific law that “nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed.” But this law, in turns, rests on the religious and philosophical concepts that existence is certain, limited, and defined by non-existence, and that A is not non-A. JKR firmly denies it. According to her second question - answered by the Transfiguration expert Minerva McGonagall, who ought to know about it - vanished objects are simply taken up in a state of non-being which is also and at the same time a state of ultimate being. From this state, wizards can evidently also draw the resources to materialize objects, as they not infrequently do, and I do not think it is too far-fetched to imagine that Transfiguration also makes use of it. It is, after all, another instance of violating Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction. To Aristotle, a table cannot be a pig; but in the hands of Minerva McGonagall, a table can be a pig, a pig can be a table, and both can both be and not be by being made one with a non-being that is one with everything.
The notion that non-being is equal with total being is a paradoxical and fascinating one, but in Christian terms it is simple heresy. “God said: Let there be light. And there was light.” The Pagan writer we know as Longinus regarded this as a proper instance of the sublime in literature, since it was a suitable instance of God speaking as God ought - perhaps the only one. But to postulate a connection between non-being and ultimate being is to deny that there is any need of an active will, of an active command, of a choice, for the latter to be created from the former. It is Hegel’s attempt to overcome the dichotomy of Sein and Nichts, Being and Nothing, by postulating an intermediate stage called Werden, becoming. And Rowling’s wizards and witches are masters of becoming.
So much for ontology (the philosophy of being); except for the never-sufficiently-underlined fact that these statements of “wisdom” are a serious matter, serious in the extreme, placed at the hinge of fate where victory or defeat will be decided, and built into Hogwarts itself. The next issue is anthropology (the philosophy of man).
If JKR’s view of ontology was placed at a central moment of the story, her view of anthropology is placed at one that is, if possible, even more significant. Harry has just died. He meets his dead former teacher in a curious, faint otherwordly place; and his teacher instructs him about life and death - mostly, by hints.
The Christian position in these matters is certain: “Man is destined to die only once, and after that the judgement” - Hebrews 9.27. All other views are incompatible with Christian teaching. It is worth pointing out that, in the early days of the Church, this was a truly revolutionary statement. All the Mediterranean civilizations, not only Greek or Romans, but also Syrians, Egyptians and so on, shared two views on the possible destiny of man: either everlasting reincarnation in a sequence of succeeding ages, or simple annihilation. The two friends who were the greatest Roman poets who ever lived, Virgil and Horace, disagreed on this: Virgil gave a splendid account of the sequel of incarnations in the sixth book of his Aeneid, while Horace repeated in several poems that even the wisest and greatest men of the past are dust and ashes now, and only the fame given by the poets remain.
A monument I built hardier than bronze,
Placed on a kingly site above the Pyramids,
Which not devouring rain, arrogant winds
Shall yet destroy, nor the train beyond counting
Of years that follow, and the flight of time.
I shall not wholly die; a mighty part
Of me shall avoid Hell, and I shall grow
In future praise, ever young, ever renewed
As long as priests and silent virgins scan the Capitol.
It shall be said, where the violent Aufidus rushes
And where Daunus, poor in water, ruled the nations
That till his fields, that I, from small estate
Grew mighty in words, and that I was the prince
Of those who took Aeolian song to Italy. Be proud
Of the merits achieved by your great art,
And grant my head the laurels, Melpomene.
(Horace, Ode 3.30; my translation)
Yes, this is not much to the point; but please allow me the pleasure of a mighty poem as we pass through and look. My point is that the Christian doctrine of a single death and immediate judgement - which is not even common to all Jews and all Muslims, as both religions have deviant branches which believe in reincarnation - was a complete break with the past, and as such is highly, profoundly defining of Christian doctrine.
Now what does JKR do with death? The answer is: anything and everything but the clear, undisputed Christian doctrine. No, that is not quite fair. Another thing she denies is that death is the complete end, as Horace understood it. But Dumbledore remains deliberately vague about what would happen if Harry resolved to leave his life behind altogether; he only says that he would - travel on. Whatever this means, the one thing it cannot possibly mean is the judgement awaiting all the dead according to Christian doctrine (the novissimi or Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Hell, Heaven). It has a clear suggestion of post mortem spiritual evolution that has nothing to do with Christianity, whereas it can suggest both reincarnation and a completely different doctrine - the doctrine of post-mortal spiritual advance.
First, a qualification. Many Protestants will assert that the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory is no different from a doctrine of post-mortal spiritual advance. But that is not the case. People who enter Purgatory have already been judged; Purgatory is no more than the ante-chamber of Paradise. There is a lot of difference between Purgatory and the doctrine that the soul can grow and change after death. This is a doctrine hinted at in Goethe’s Faust, and taught, if I understand correctly, by the Mormons. And this, it seems to me, is the most natural and likely meaning of Dumbledore’s hint about travelling on and taking trains.
Another very strong suggestion dropped by the King’s Cross chapter is that the soul can, post mortem, pretty much set its own parameters and create, if not its own reality, at least its own interpretation of reality. Harry experiences the opening of life after death in a form that reminds him of King’s Cross station, and that is because that particular station had that particular meaning for him. Dumbledore goes as far as to say that there is no contradiction between the proposition that Harry’s experience is real and the proposition that it all takes place in his own mind. Whatever this means, one thing at least is certain - that it totally and completely denies Christian teaching. Christian doctrine teaches, first, that what we shall experience in the beyond is beyond any of our own imagination, to the extent that even trying to imagine it exposes us to the risk of idolatry (making inadequate and misleading images, and then wasting worship on them); second, that far from being unreal - or “taking place in your own head” - it is infinitely more real than created reality; and third, that it involves the resurrection of the body in a glorified form. This bears on the whole business of things taking place “in your own head,” which becomes pretty meaningless when we reflect on the promise of a celestial but wholly corporeal body.
As for its moral meaning, the first thing that comes to mind is that this is pure relativism, pushed to the point of solipsism - “everything is taking place in your own mind”. And relativism, or Bulverism as C.S.Lewis called it, is in my experience the chief intellectual sin of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But to leave it at that would not be fair to the evidence. The beyond in which Harry is plunged, while it reflects his own mind and experience, is not solipsistic. He encounters a maimed and whimpering being who evokes both pity and disgust; and we are told that this is what is left of the many-times-maimed soul of Voldemort. Description and implication are both memorable:
It had the form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough, flayed-looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat, where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath.
He [Harry] was afraid of it. Small and fragile and wounded though it was, he did not want to approach it. Nevertheless, he drew steadily nearer, ready to jump back at any moment. Soon he stood near enough to touch it, yet he could not bring himself to do it. He felt like a coward. He ought to comfort it, but it repulsed him.
Here, I simply cannot praise JKR’s moral imagination enough. The mystery of evil’s self-inflicted suffering, terrible beyond words yet beyond compassion and redemption, has never in all literature been so simply, pregnantly, magisterially described. If anyone thinks otherwise, let them quote a passage - any passage. And the progression is so perfect that we actually know the next line - “You cannot help” - before we read, and know who is going to speak it, and who he speaks it about. Of course, it is Albus Dumbledore; and of course, the thing that whimpers is what is left of Voldemort.
This scene tells us several things. However close to solipsism it may seem, JKR’s view of the afterlife is not solipsistic. Harry perceives the pain, horror and isolation of Voldemort, and perceives it from the outside - that is, as that of a person extraneous to himself: as that of a real person. This is not his own closed world: other people, real people, Dumbledore, Voldemort, exist in it. Indeed, when you analyze the discussion between Harry and Dumbledore, you find that Dumbledore repeatedly fails Harry’s expectations, either for better or for worse. For instance, it is my very strong feeling that a young man in Harry’s position would want his mentor to be strong, decisive, without guilt or self-doubt, and I think there is little doubt that Dumbledore’s outburst of guilt leaves him unsettled when he least needs it. Dumbledore is full of information Harry cannot possibly know, and makes guesses. This is not merely a reflection of Harry’s own mind: real people are present. The best explanation I can think of for what JKR was trying to say is this: she was trying to design a world of discorporate minds, in which only the apparatus of the mind is active - with no physical reality, no bodies, and hence no real senses. Harry’s mind perceives Dumbledore’s mind, and Voldemort’s mind, on his own terms; no doubt, if we saw through Dumbledore’s eyes, we would see something very different, and through Voldemort’s, something different still. But the contact between minds is real, and the information they exchange is real. I need hardly add that this disincarnate afterlife directly contradicts - once again - the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body.
JKR’s attitude to death, though noble in itself, is built on much less impressive intellectual foundations. Death is to be accepted and courageously faced; all well and good, though, again, pagan rather than Christian. Socrates said it better: “And now we all go, I to die and you to live. But which of us has the happier lot, only God knows.” And when her imagination raises the possibility - hardly inconceivable in a world where the Law of Non-Contradiction is abolished! - that a man may become the Master of Death, the response her intellect comes up with is weak in the extreme. It is nothing but a restatement - in different terms - of the old necessitarian doctrine that the acceptance of what is inevitable is true liberty. The “master of Death” is he who can look death in the face and accept it.
I wonder whether there is a single reader, older than twelve perhaps, who has found this a satisfactory statement. It is, to begin with, a very curious notion of mastery, certainly out of keeping with any other expressed even in the book: Minerva McGonagall is not the mistress of Transfiguration because she surrenders to Transfiguration, is she now? Everywhere else in the novels, and in ordinary English, mastery means control, not acceptance. Here, it means acceptance. What is more, it means a complete surrender of the possibility to know. The other connotation that the word “mastery” normally has, is profound and correct knowledge; but there is no indication that the Master of Death in the Rowling sense of the term knows anything more about death as such than anyone else. At no point in any of the seven novels are we told anything about its nature and what makes it so terrible (given that the one thing we are told is that the mind survives - and if the mind survives, what is there to fear?). And Rowling’s effective intellectual surrender on this point, her lack of any effort to take in and explain what death is and why it is there, makes death, in effect, a wholly arbitrary presence. It is a mighty presence right from the beginning; even the fairly light-hearted first novel opens with the fact that Harry is an orphan - and his parents’ death quickly becomes a major issue - and closes with a death-struggle that leaves a teacher dead. But she never tries to invent a myth of death, as she invents myths for just about any other subject that concerns her. She can render, emotionally, the impact of death, none better; the chapter on Dumbledore’s funeral is perhaps the finest in the whole heptad; as it should be expected from a writer who wrote her whole cycle in the shadow of the early and cruel death of her own beloved mother. But she does nothing to grapple with it intellectually. From beginning to end, death is simply an arbitrary, unexplained, destructive force.
(It is my own view that this springs from a defect in her philosophy. If she takes seriously the “wisdom” expressed in the two riddles I examined, then there is no place for death in her system - for the cessation of existence, for a nothing which is NOT at the same time everything. And on the other hand, having experienced the full force of its arbitrary cruelty, JKR is not disposed to deploy the resources of pantheistic doctrine to reduce its meaning or pretend that it is anything less than annihilation and ultimate loss.)
The Christian doctrine on this matter is not exactly unknown either. “The wages of sin is death.” Death entered the universe because of sin, because of the Fall. The Christian writer Thomas Browne expressed the ultimate meaning of this most beautifully: “I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof.” And indeed, this is an instinctive reaction to death and its surroundings. Most ancient religions required that burials and cemeteries should be outside the city walls (as a result, by the late Roman Empire, every major Roman city was approached through thickets of ancient funeral monuments, sometimes as large as palaces). The Hindus, who firmly believe in reincarnation, nevertheless regard death and everything connected with it as simply impure, and treat the burning grounds where their dead are cremated with horror, abandoning them, apart from the ceremonies, to filthy animals and hermits who placed themselves deliberately outside society. The shame, as much as the fear, of death, is a widespread feeling.
It is therefore interesting that there is practically nothing in JKR’s writings to suggest it. Horror and shame are associated with cases where death is not respected, not left alone, not allowed to take place and be done: in particular, the episode of the Inferi in the lake and the animation of Bathilda Bagshot’s corpse. Normally, and unless some corrupt will meddles with it, death in JKR has no taint of shame to it. And this, perhaps, is the place where she is furthest not just from Christian doctrine, but from Christian feeling. For if the grave has no shame, cruelty, or horror about it, then the notion that God can overcome it has no great value, and Easter no meaning. And we notice that, unlike Hallowe’en and Christmas, Easter never plays any role in any of the novels.
So far, so pagan. JKR’s views would have been at home in ancient Rome or Athens. But at one or two points, she is not even as far along as the great pagans of the past. Compare Dumbledore’s frightened and selfish attitude to political office to the rolling thunder of Socrates’ patriotism (which I will publish separately, for fear of making this essay too long). Is it not clear that, just as he accepts death at the hands of his country’s laws, so Socrates would accept high office (and in fact he had done some) if ordered to? Dumbledore had been offered the post of Minister at least four times, and he was more qualified for it than any other candidate. Duty to his country and to the laws, let alone the existence of a dreadful political danger of which he knew more than any man alive, demanded he should accept; he preferred to indulge his fears and self-disgust, and let through inferior candidates, one of whom proceeded to place the whole country in danger.
Patriotism, in fact, is a virtue wholly unknown in Harry Potter’s world. It is replaced by provinciality. Nobody has to worry about the fate of Britain as Britain, or of England as England and Scotland as Scotland, because the world beyond them barely exists. The only danger known is internal - for all we know, Voldemort is active exclusively in Britain. Foreign policy is, quite literally, not required. Where foreign relations are mentioned, it is with shallow and uncomprehending hippy talk about unity and friendship which, if quoted, would sink Dumbledore’s reputation as a sage. One gross failure of imagination shows how alien the whole concept is to JKR: the monument to the fallen in Godric’s Hollow, which magically disguises a monument to the Potter family. Now, it does not take a PhD in history to know that the monuments to the fallen in Britain - indeed, all across Europe - were all built within a few years of the end of World War One, to commemorate, on all sides, the unprecedented effort and loss of a whole generation. As everyone knows, every British village has one, because every British village lost men. But the Potters did not die in 1918. So what is the story here? Did Godric’s Hollow, implausibly, have no Monument to the Fallen until the local wizards raised one to the Potters - presumably some time in the eighties? Or did such a monument exist, and then get magically transfigured, or even destroyed and replaced, for the one to the Potters? That would have been sacrilegious, an outrage to the dead. Either way does not make sense, and shows clearly that, where patriotism is concerned, JKR does not bother to think. It would have been easy enough to deal with this topic without being offensive, too: just add, at the end of the inevitable list of the village Fallen in World Wars One and Two, the two names, James Potter, Lily Evans Potter, in letters readable only by wizards. That would have placed them where they deserved to be - among the honourable list of those who gave their lives for freedom and for their country. And that is not because JKR does not feel the value and honour of dying for a good cause: to the contrary, it underlies her whole narrative. It is because, to her, history is at best a joke and at worst a nightmare. The mere fact that she had the all-wise Dumbledore allow the hopeless Binns to go on teaching it - with the certain effect that dozens of successive generations would leave Hogwarts full of ignorance laced with contempt for the subject - says all that needs be said about her views. (As a historian, I find them appalling. I had once planned an article on JKR’s view of history, but I gave it up as too depressing a subject.)
This is relevant because if there is a religion that is historical in its nature, claims and structure, that is Christianity. Hinduism, Mormonism, Buddhism, even Hebraism, could survive an attack on their historical claims, because their centre is the doctrine, the philosophy, the attitude, the code of laws; but without the actual death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, outside the city of Jerusalem, by decree of the Jewish Sanhedrin and the Roman Procurator Pontius Pilatus, in or about the year 33AD, Christianity is nothing. A person who treats history with the ignorant contempt JKR does, does not even have the grounding on which a properly Christian faith - a faith in the actual death and resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ - can be based.
At Godric’s Hollow, Harry and Hermione meet with the past, with history, and with the faith of their fathers. The village is steeped in history, of which the death of Harry’s parents is only a small part. But they get almost nothing from it. Both of them being Muggle-raised, they do not have even the ordinary wizarding lore that would have allowed Ron to tell them about Ignotus Peverell and maybe make the connection with the symbol on the grave. They are aliens - aliens to their own past, aliens even to Harry’s own family history. And what is more, the oh-so-widely-read Hermione proves that she has no idea of the New Testament (“It means… you know… living after death” - not if you know anything about Revelation, it does not) and that Harry has never heard a single line of Scripture all his life (“Isn’t that a Death Eater idea?”). So, in the end, what they do when they come upon the little village church is almost mythologically typical and perfect: they look at it from outside, they see the lights and a Christmas carol being sung, they are made aware that the great Christian holiday is on its way - they remain outside in the cold, and pass it by.
Christianity is not just another word for decency. There can be no doubt that if a Christian lived out the full implications of the doctrines he or she believes, he or she would live a morally very impressive life; but the defining feature of the Christian is not his or her moral excellence, but his or her faith. That is, to be a Christian, you have to take a certain number of propositions as true. It is, in other words, possible to be a Christian scoundrel; and not impossible, according to Christian doctrine, to be a Christian and damned. (St.James: “Faith without work is dead… Even the demons believe - and tremble!”)
And that is not really surprising: it is the defining feature of any religious or philosophical identity, from Platonists to Mormons to atheists. Only, Christianity makes it even more evident, by making faith itself into a positive virtue. Other religions do not do that. Without going into the thicket of how or why, which is beside the point here, let us just note the basic point: Christianity is a doctrine, not a rule of behaviour, and a Christian is a person who accepts that doctrine, not a person who behaves correctly.
Which is why I was astonished beyond telling when, years ago, I was informed that JK Rowling was supposed to be one. A great writer - of course; and this I will defend in the face of all the snobs who think a simple style and a popular subject matter signs of inferiority. The bearer of a set of attractive, indeed noble, attitudes and moral teachings; yes, indeed. A Christian? Why? How? There was no sign whatsoever in any of her writing, of any understanding, let alone acceptance, of any properly Christian doctrine. In my mind, I had already placed her with the admirable heathens, a race by no means extinct today, and triumphant in Britain.
(At the time, mind you, I had already defended her against the silly attacks on her use of witchcraft, made on her in the name of Christianity and even - alas - of Catholic doctrine. But that did not mean that I considered her a Christian - only a noble writer and nothing like a Satanist. At any rate, the Satanists I read are mostly dreadful writers.)
Once I found out that the information was true, I decided I would wait for the end of the saga - which looked within sight at the time, though it would take more than two years to come - before I made up my mind. And now it has finally come. And it has brought plenty of evidence about Mrs.Rowling’s philosophy and beliefs.
We can start with a central statement of what the story regards as wisdom. We are near the climax. Battle is coming. But one of the dreadful Horcruxes, receptacles of torn bits of soul, by which Voldemort is kept alive and immortal, is not yet found. Meanwhile, Voldemort is on his way, and almost nobody is ready to resist him. To find the Horcrux, and to begin the revolt against the tyrant, two characters must enter Ravenclaw House - the House of Wisdom of Hogwarts. Now, other houses are entered by knowing the password: but Ravenclaw has no password. You have to answer a gnomic (wisdom) question correctly (a beautiful invention, by the way - typical of JKR’s superlative imagination) or else wait till someone who can will help you.
Let me underline the importance of this. We are faced with a structural part of the approaching climax: unless Harry enters Ravenclaw House, he will not find the Horcrux; and unless he and Professor McGonagall meet, there will be no battle - with the teachers still unaware, Voldemort will come upon Hogwarts by surprise and do whatever he will. The fundamental role of the riddles is echoed by their structural importance in the school: they are built into Ravenclaw House, that is, they are an essential component of the structure of Hogwarts. The “wisdom” they contain is built into Hogwarts. And another brilliant plotting invention underlines their significance: Minerva McGonagall only turns up at all because the crude and stupid Amycus Carrow, one of Voldemort’s henchmen, cannot enter on his own. He has no wisdom. And what is worse, instead of getting the point of this, he starts insulting and threatening the truly wise McGonagall as soon as she has shown hers by getting through where he was unable to pass. Not only does he have no wisdom, but he stupidly despises those who have. From then on, not only Minerva and Harry, but the prose itself, treat him with contempt. It is not necessary to be wise to be admitted into the house of Wisdom, but it is necessary to respect those who are: Harry, who, like Carrow, cannot answer himself, gets in because he has treated Luna, who can, with respect - and indeed, he has done so from the beginning, even when she seemed more dotty than wise.
So what is the wisdom built into Hogwarts? We have two samples of it. One: “Which came first, the phoenix or the flame? Answer: a circle has no beginning.” Two: “Where do Vanished objects go? Answer: into non-being, that is to say, everything.”
Though pointed specifically at issues of Hogwarts magic as we have learned to know it, both these questions have a specific philosophical content that is totally contrary to Christian doctrine. The first denies the very idea of Creation (and, incidentally, the scientific theory of Evolution), by positing that a specific magical bird who renews itself from flame had no beginning in time. The second denies the fundamental Christian (and Aristotelian) contradiction between being and non-being, from which the very idea of Creation springs: that is, that God created the world out of nothing.
JKR’s boldness is in fact rather fascinating. A lot of fanfic writers have grappled with the issue of vanishing, materializing, or transfigurating objects, which JKR’s wizards regularly do. Every one of them, to the best of my knowledge, simply had the vanished objects reappear somewhere else, or the materialized ones being taken from somewhere else; in unconscious obedience to the scientific law that “nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed.” But this law, in turns, rests on the religious and philosophical concepts that existence is certain, limited, and defined by non-existence, and that A is not non-A. JKR firmly denies it. According to her second question - answered by the Transfiguration expert Minerva McGonagall, who ought to know about it - vanished objects are simply taken up in a state of non-being which is also and at the same time a state of ultimate being. From this state, wizards can evidently also draw the resources to materialize objects, as they not infrequently do, and I do not think it is too far-fetched to imagine that Transfiguration also makes use of it. It is, after all, another instance of violating Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction. To Aristotle, a table cannot be a pig; but in the hands of Minerva McGonagall, a table can be a pig, a pig can be a table, and both can both be and not be by being made one with a non-being that is one with everything.
The notion that non-being is equal with total being is a paradoxical and fascinating one, but in Christian terms it is simple heresy. “God said: Let there be light. And there was light.” The Pagan writer we know as Longinus regarded this as a proper instance of the sublime in literature, since it was a suitable instance of God speaking as God ought - perhaps the only one. But to postulate a connection between non-being and ultimate being is to deny that there is any need of an active will, of an active command, of a choice, for the latter to be created from the former. It is Hegel’s attempt to overcome the dichotomy of Sein and Nichts, Being and Nothing, by postulating an intermediate stage called Werden, becoming. And Rowling’s wizards and witches are masters of becoming.
So much for ontology (the philosophy of being); except for the never-sufficiently-underlined fact that these statements of “wisdom” are a serious matter, serious in the extreme, placed at the hinge of fate where victory or defeat will be decided, and built into Hogwarts itself. The next issue is anthropology (the philosophy of man).
If JKR’s view of ontology was placed at a central moment of the story, her view of anthropology is placed at one that is, if possible, even more significant. Harry has just died. He meets his dead former teacher in a curious, faint otherwordly place; and his teacher instructs him about life and death - mostly, by hints.
The Christian position in these matters is certain: “Man is destined to die only once, and after that the judgement” - Hebrews 9.27. All other views are incompatible with Christian teaching. It is worth pointing out that, in the early days of the Church, this was a truly revolutionary statement. All the Mediterranean civilizations, not only Greek or Romans, but also Syrians, Egyptians and so on, shared two views on the possible destiny of man: either everlasting reincarnation in a sequence of succeeding ages, or simple annihilation. The two friends who were the greatest Roman poets who ever lived, Virgil and Horace, disagreed on this: Virgil gave a splendid account of the sequel of incarnations in the sixth book of his Aeneid, while Horace repeated in several poems that even the wisest and greatest men of the past are dust and ashes now, and only the fame given by the poets remain.
A monument I built hardier than bronze,
Placed on a kingly site above the Pyramids,
Which not devouring rain, arrogant winds
Shall yet destroy, nor the train beyond counting
Of years that follow, and the flight of time.
I shall not wholly die; a mighty part
Of me shall avoid Hell, and I shall grow
In future praise, ever young, ever renewed
As long as priests and silent virgins scan the Capitol.
It shall be said, where the violent Aufidus rushes
And where Daunus, poor in water, ruled the nations
That till his fields, that I, from small estate
Grew mighty in words, and that I was the prince
Of those who took Aeolian song to Italy. Be proud
Of the merits achieved by your great art,
And grant my head the laurels, Melpomene.
(Horace, Ode 3.30; my translation)
Yes, this is not much to the point; but please allow me the pleasure of a mighty poem as we pass through and look. My point is that the Christian doctrine of a single death and immediate judgement - which is not even common to all Jews and all Muslims, as both religions have deviant branches which believe in reincarnation - was a complete break with the past, and as such is highly, profoundly defining of Christian doctrine.
Now what does JKR do with death? The answer is: anything and everything but the clear, undisputed Christian doctrine. No, that is not quite fair. Another thing she denies is that death is the complete end, as Horace understood it. But Dumbledore remains deliberately vague about what would happen if Harry resolved to leave his life behind altogether; he only says that he would - travel on. Whatever this means, the one thing it cannot possibly mean is the judgement awaiting all the dead according to Christian doctrine (the novissimi or Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Hell, Heaven). It has a clear suggestion of post mortem spiritual evolution that has nothing to do with Christianity, whereas it can suggest both reincarnation and a completely different doctrine - the doctrine of post-mortal spiritual advance.
First, a qualification. Many Protestants will assert that the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory is no different from a doctrine of post-mortal spiritual advance. But that is not the case. People who enter Purgatory have already been judged; Purgatory is no more than the ante-chamber of Paradise. There is a lot of difference between Purgatory and the doctrine that the soul can grow and change after death. This is a doctrine hinted at in Goethe’s Faust, and taught, if I understand correctly, by the Mormons. And this, it seems to me, is the most natural and likely meaning of Dumbledore’s hint about travelling on and taking trains.
Another very strong suggestion dropped by the King’s Cross chapter is that the soul can, post mortem, pretty much set its own parameters and create, if not its own reality, at least its own interpretation of reality. Harry experiences the opening of life after death in a form that reminds him of King’s Cross station, and that is because that particular station had that particular meaning for him. Dumbledore goes as far as to say that there is no contradiction between the proposition that Harry’s experience is real and the proposition that it all takes place in his own mind. Whatever this means, one thing at least is certain - that it totally and completely denies Christian teaching. Christian doctrine teaches, first, that what we shall experience in the beyond is beyond any of our own imagination, to the extent that even trying to imagine it exposes us to the risk of idolatry (making inadequate and misleading images, and then wasting worship on them); second, that far from being unreal - or “taking place in your own head” - it is infinitely more real than created reality; and third, that it involves the resurrection of the body in a glorified form. This bears on the whole business of things taking place “in your own head,” which becomes pretty meaningless when we reflect on the promise of a celestial but wholly corporeal body.
As for its moral meaning, the first thing that comes to mind is that this is pure relativism, pushed to the point of solipsism - “everything is taking place in your own mind”. And relativism, or Bulverism as C.S.Lewis called it, is in my experience the chief intellectual sin of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But to leave it at that would not be fair to the evidence. The beyond in which Harry is plunged, while it reflects his own mind and experience, is not solipsistic. He encounters a maimed and whimpering being who evokes both pity and disgust; and we are told that this is what is left of the many-times-maimed soul of Voldemort. Description and implication are both memorable:
It had the form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough, flayed-looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat, where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath.
He [Harry] was afraid of it. Small and fragile and wounded though it was, he did not want to approach it. Nevertheless, he drew steadily nearer, ready to jump back at any moment. Soon he stood near enough to touch it, yet he could not bring himself to do it. He felt like a coward. He ought to comfort it, but it repulsed him.
Here, I simply cannot praise JKR’s moral imagination enough. The mystery of evil’s self-inflicted suffering, terrible beyond words yet beyond compassion and redemption, has never in all literature been so simply, pregnantly, magisterially described. If anyone thinks otherwise, let them quote a passage - any passage. And the progression is so perfect that we actually know the next line - “You cannot help” - before we read, and know who is going to speak it, and who he speaks it about. Of course, it is Albus Dumbledore; and of course, the thing that whimpers is what is left of Voldemort.
This scene tells us several things. However close to solipsism it may seem, JKR’s view of the afterlife is not solipsistic. Harry perceives the pain, horror and isolation of Voldemort, and perceives it from the outside - that is, as that of a person extraneous to himself: as that of a real person. This is not his own closed world: other people, real people, Dumbledore, Voldemort, exist in it. Indeed, when you analyze the discussion between Harry and Dumbledore, you find that Dumbledore repeatedly fails Harry’s expectations, either for better or for worse. For instance, it is my very strong feeling that a young man in Harry’s position would want his mentor to be strong, decisive, without guilt or self-doubt, and I think there is little doubt that Dumbledore’s outburst of guilt leaves him unsettled when he least needs it. Dumbledore is full of information Harry cannot possibly know, and makes guesses. This is not merely a reflection of Harry’s own mind: real people are present. The best explanation I can think of for what JKR was trying to say is this: she was trying to design a world of discorporate minds, in which only the apparatus of the mind is active - with no physical reality, no bodies, and hence no real senses. Harry’s mind perceives Dumbledore’s mind, and Voldemort’s mind, on his own terms; no doubt, if we saw through Dumbledore’s eyes, we would see something very different, and through Voldemort’s, something different still. But the contact between minds is real, and the information they exchange is real. I need hardly add that this disincarnate afterlife directly contradicts - once again - the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body.
JKR’s attitude to death, though noble in itself, is built on much less impressive intellectual foundations. Death is to be accepted and courageously faced; all well and good, though, again, pagan rather than Christian. Socrates said it better: “And now we all go, I to die and you to live. But which of us has the happier lot, only God knows.” And when her imagination raises the possibility - hardly inconceivable in a world where the Law of Non-Contradiction is abolished! - that a man may become the Master of Death, the response her intellect comes up with is weak in the extreme. It is nothing but a restatement - in different terms - of the old necessitarian doctrine that the acceptance of what is inevitable is true liberty. The “master of Death” is he who can look death in the face and accept it.
I wonder whether there is a single reader, older than twelve perhaps, who has found this a satisfactory statement. It is, to begin with, a very curious notion of mastery, certainly out of keeping with any other expressed even in the book: Minerva McGonagall is not the mistress of Transfiguration because she surrenders to Transfiguration, is she now? Everywhere else in the novels, and in ordinary English, mastery means control, not acceptance. Here, it means acceptance. What is more, it means a complete surrender of the possibility to know. The other connotation that the word “mastery” normally has, is profound and correct knowledge; but there is no indication that the Master of Death in the Rowling sense of the term knows anything more about death as such than anyone else. At no point in any of the seven novels are we told anything about its nature and what makes it so terrible (given that the one thing we are told is that the mind survives - and if the mind survives, what is there to fear?). And Rowling’s effective intellectual surrender on this point, her lack of any effort to take in and explain what death is and why it is there, makes death, in effect, a wholly arbitrary presence. It is a mighty presence right from the beginning; even the fairly light-hearted first novel opens with the fact that Harry is an orphan - and his parents’ death quickly becomes a major issue - and closes with a death-struggle that leaves a teacher dead. But she never tries to invent a myth of death, as she invents myths for just about any other subject that concerns her. She can render, emotionally, the impact of death, none better; the chapter on Dumbledore’s funeral is perhaps the finest in the whole heptad; as it should be expected from a writer who wrote her whole cycle in the shadow of the early and cruel death of her own beloved mother. But she does nothing to grapple with it intellectually. From beginning to end, death is simply an arbitrary, unexplained, destructive force.
(It is my own view that this springs from a defect in her philosophy. If she takes seriously the “wisdom” expressed in the two riddles I examined, then there is no place for death in her system - for the cessation of existence, for a nothing which is NOT at the same time everything. And on the other hand, having experienced the full force of its arbitrary cruelty, JKR is not disposed to deploy the resources of pantheistic doctrine to reduce its meaning or pretend that it is anything less than annihilation and ultimate loss.)
The Christian doctrine on this matter is not exactly unknown either. “The wages of sin is death.” Death entered the universe because of sin, because of the Fall. The Christian writer Thomas Browne expressed the ultimate meaning of this most beautifully: “I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof.” And indeed, this is an instinctive reaction to death and its surroundings. Most ancient religions required that burials and cemeteries should be outside the city walls (as a result, by the late Roman Empire, every major Roman city was approached through thickets of ancient funeral monuments, sometimes as large as palaces). The Hindus, who firmly believe in reincarnation, nevertheless regard death and everything connected with it as simply impure, and treat the burning grounds where their dead are cremated with horror, abandoning them, apart from the ceremonies, to filthy animals and hermits who placed themselves deliberately outside society. The shame, as much as the fear, of death, is a widespread feeling.
It is therefore interesting that there is practically nothing in JKR’s writings to suggest it. Horror and shame are associated with cases where death is not respected, not left alone, not allowed to take place and be done: in particular, the episode of the Inferi in the lake and the animation of Bathilda Bagshot’s corpse. Normally, and unless some corrupt will meddles with it, death in JKR has no taint of shame to it. And this, perhaps, is the place where she is furthest not just from Christian doctrine, but from Christian feeling. For if the grave has no shame, cruelty, or horror about it, then the notion that God can overcome it has no great value, and Easter no meaning. And we notice that, unlike Hallowe’en and Christmas, Easter never plays any role in any of the novels.
So far, so pagan. JKR’s views would have been at home in ancient Rome or Athens. But at one or two points, she is not even as far along as the great pagans of the past. Compare Dumbledore’s frightened and selfish attitude to political office to the rolling thunder of Socrates’ patriotism (which I will publish separately, for fear of making this essay too long). Is it not clear that, just as he accepts death at the hands of his country’s laws, so Socrates would accept high office (and in fact he had done some) if ordered to? Dumbledore had been offered the post of Minister at least four times, and he was more qualified for it than any other candidate. Duty to his country and to the laws, let alone the existence of a dreadful political danger of which he knew more than any man alive, demanded he should accept; he preferred to indulge his fears and self-disgust, and let through inferior candidates, one of whom proceeded to place the whole country in danger.
Patriotism, in fact, is a virtue wholly unknown in Harry Potter’s world. It is replaced by provinciality. Nobody has to worry about the fate of Britain as Britain, or of England as England and Scotland as Scotland, because the world beyond them barely exists. The only danger known is internal - for all we know, Voldemort is active exclusively in Britain. Foreign policy is, quite literally, not required. Where foreign relations are mentioned, it is with shallow and uncomprehending hippy talk about unity and friendship which, if quoted, would sink Dumbledore’s reputation as a sage. One gross failure of imagination shows how alien the whole concept is to JKR: the monument to the fallen in Godric’s Hollow, which magically disguises a monument to the Potter family. Now, it does not take a PhD in history to know that the monuments to the fallen in Britain - indeed, all across Europe - were all built within a few years of the end of World War One, to commemorate, on all sides, the unprecedented effort and loss of a whole generation. As everyone knows, every British village has one, because every British village lost men. But the Potters did not die in 1918. So what is the story here? Did Godric’s Hollow, implausibly, have no Monument to the Fallen until the local wizards raised one to the Potters - presumably some time in the eighties? Or did such a monument exist, and then get magically transfigured, or even destroyed and replaced, for the one to the Potters? That would have been sacrilegious, an outrage to the dead. Either way does not make sense, and shows clearly that, where patriotism is concerned, JKR does not bother to think. It would have been easy enough to deal with this topic without being offensive, too: just add, at the end of the inevitable list of the village Fallen in World Wars One and Two, the two names, James Potter, Lily Evans Potter, in letters readable only by wizards. That would have placed them where they deserved to be - among the honourable list of those who gave their lives for freedom and for their country. And that is not because JKR does not feel the value and honour of dying for a good cause: to the contrary, it underlies her whole narrative. It is because, to her, history is at best a joke and at worst a nightmare. The mere fact that she had the all-wise Dumbledore allow the hopeless Binns to go on teaching it - with the certain effect that dozens of successive generations would leave Hogwarts full of ignorance laced with contempt for the subject - says all that needs be said about her views. (As a historian, I find them appalling. I had once planned an article on JKR’s view of history, but I gave it up as too depressing a subject.)
This is relevant because if there is a religion that is historical in its nature, claims and structure, that is Christianity. Hinduism, Mormonism, Buddhism, even Hebraism, could survive an attack on their historical claims, because their centre is the doctrine, the philosophy, the attitude, the code of laws; but without the actual death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, outside the city of Jerusalem, by decree of the Jewish Sanhedrin and the Roman Procurator Pontius Pilatus, in or about the year 33AD, Christianity is nothing. A person who treats history with the ignorant contempt JKR does, does not even have the grounding on which a properly Christian faith - a faith in the actual death and resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ - can be based.
At Godric’s Hollow, Harry and Hermione meet with the past, with history, and with the faith of their fathers. The village is steeped in history, of which the death of Harry’s parents is only a small part. But they get almost nothing from it. Both of them being Muggle-raised, they do not have even the ordinary wizarding lore that would have allowed Ron to tell them about Ignotus Peverell and maybe make the connection with the symbol on the grave. They are aliens - aliens to their own past, aliens even to Harry’s own family history. And what is more, the oh-so-widely-read Hermione proves that she has no idea of the New Testament (“It means… you know… living after death” - not if you know anything about Revelation, it does not) and that Harry has never heard a single line of Scripture all his life (“Isn’t that a Death Eater idea?”). So, in the end, what they do when they come upon the little village church is almost mythologically typical and perfect: they look at it from outside, they see the lights and a Christmas carol being sung, they are made aware that the great Christian holiday is on its way - they remain outside in the cold, and pass it by.