by Dave
Harry’s credibility as a Christian symbol/figure fixed well and good within the Christian tradition marks most of the public discussion of HP in the wake of Deathly Hallows. I’m not nearly as well versed in theology and Christian thinking as Travis or Johnny, but I do teach a lot of Rhetoric/Composition for a living. We’ve looked at this debate over and over here at SoG, but I haven’t found much discussing the nature of this argument — its nuts and bolts. Perspectives from some Christian camps deny the Christian nature of the HP series, despite the stories’ deep indebtedness to symbolism and pathos stemming from wildly branching Christian roots in our culture. Michael O’Brien, Fr. Aguilar, He-who-must-not-be-named (who I will refer to as RA from here on), and many others in their corner argue that either the magic and its central place in the narrative is far too big a stumbling block to overlook in favor of some symbolism (see Travis’s recent pubcast), that Harry’s world fosters a focus upon humanity’s equivalence with a higher power/authority, or any number of other conclusions focusing on Harry’s faults as a character or Rowling’s as a writer.
Most of these we’ve dismissed as deriving from a profound misreading of the series and even its fans. After reading Michael O’Brien’s essay, I had some doubts he’d actually read Deathly Hallows, or at least read it closely. John Granger assesses Fr. Jose Aguilar’s take on the series as a shortsighted and shallow reading, one I would perhaps suggest is similar to Lev Grossman’s Time essay in its rhetorical fallacies. There’s more to the disparity between “Harry Haters” and we “dreaming slaves”. At its heart, this “discussion” becomes a primary example of a spiritual incommensurablity that defines the rhetoric of the debate. What’s more, the discussion of Harry’s Christianity reflects problems within the rhetoric of our cultural institutions, at least here in the United States: the tensions between the sacred and secular that boil over into questions about conservative versus liberal worldviews, the role of religion in a country with at least some secular design, or the distinctions between Intelligent Design and Evolution as purely philosophical claims or rigorous scientific hypotheses.
A False Dilemma?
At the very least, the language of debates like Christian?Harry tend to be rendered into a questionable dichotomy: “You, dear reader, must believe either X or Y. X is clearly bad, therefore you should believe Y.” One doesn’t need to embody logical genius to see the flaw in this line of reasoning. For virtually any debate, a plethora of answers exist with varying degrees of validity. This isn’t a relativist approach to the truth about Harry’s nature as a symbol, but it is a nod to the fact that symbolism is anything but a perfect conduit for meaning. Here’s an example from a recent blog post in which The-RA-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named takes exception to some points argued by Travis and John Granger:
[Granger] ASSERT[s]:”Severes Snape” - “I read in the Rev. Francis Brisger’s A Charmed Life that snape is ‘an English word meaning ‘chide’ or rebuke,’ and hence the whole name means ’severe rebuke.’”
ROWLING STATES:“Many of the names are taken form [sic] maps — for instance, Snape, which is an English village.” (”The Evil Hogwarts Professor” para 21)
A close reading of this passage reveals Rowling’s intentional equivocation. The answer RA provides doesn’t in anyway debunk Granger’s reading of Snape’s name (or of any of the names for that matter). Rowling picked the names while looking at maps. But RA’s assuming from the quote he’s provided that Rowling gave no other thought to the names in the books. So, the play on names throughout the books rests, apparently, as a series of happy accidents leading readers to near perfect character-defining interpretations. Punning through multiple languages is a pretty common allusive technique in literature, and Rowling deploys the trick as one means of scaffolding her alchemical narrative.
Most arguments fail at the warrant level, or the assumptions that provide the binding reasoning between claims and evidence. RA’s interpretation fractures through his use of some shifting warrants that undergird his arguments. First, Rowling proves herself untrustworthy because “Her life before and during the writing of early HP books certainly doesn’t shine Christian”:
(I refer to her: adulterous affair with her now-husband according to some fairly accurate reproting done during that time, her flip comments about belief in God, her hostile responses to “fellow” Christians, and her incessant exaltation of revenge as an acceptable response to persons one doesn’t like). (para 6)
Yet, the quotes above shine as truth amidst the cluttered landscape of her personal foibles? Forget for a second that most of Rowling’s commentary on Christianity and differing Christian interpretations are responses to attacks from critics like RA. Despite his accusations of decontextualizing Rowling’s comments, RA couldn’t possibly read what he’s posted any more isogetically, picking, choosing, and assigning truth value where he sees fit as if it were revealed to him while reading.
RA is adding to the false dilemma in positing that Rowling must be clear in her statements about her faith. A troubling assumption rests in this premise, echoed by this from Snyder and Baehr:
Perhaps Rowling will come up with a more Christian explanation for this problem when she writes her encyclopedia and background stories to Harry Potter [...] Even though the author of HARRY POTTER professes Christianity, she lives in a truly post-Christian society, the United Kingdom, where pagan syncretism is the norm and where any public mention of Jesus Christ is avoided. (para 4-5)
The character of Rowling’s beliefs as a professed Christian do not matter when standing next to those of these critics, and Johnny took a look at this in his last post. Perhaps one problem is that Rowling must profess her Christianity in a manner that satisfies her critics, otherwise her faith cannot be trusted. These particular stones call into question Rowling’s ethos as a writer working within Christian traditions. There is one version of faith, Rowling’s opponents have that version, and she doesn’t.
To be fair, Rowling has said she is a Christian and that her Christian beliefs are fundamentally important in her writing of Harry’s story. But, she has elaborated very little beyond that. Of course, she has every right not to. And the evidence thus far suggests critics such as RA, Snyder, and Baehr wouldn’t really care, anyway.
Harry’s Problem? Purpose and Time
The other warrant underpinning these criticisms suggests that Rowling must be willing to openly evangelize her faith to her readers — a purpose often bedrock important to fundamentalist strains of any faith. In an interesting example, the Left Behind books have given rise to a Real-Time Strategy game with conversion as a core gameplay mechanic. But, we’ve hammered to death the idea that Rowling is not preaching for the sake of conversion. The major problem with postmodernism for many is the lack of a clearcut, unequivocal sense of Truth. Rowling deposits her Truth within two simple words evoking a complex range of ideas: love and choice. I don’t have anything new to add to the exegesis of these themes here, but they are read as ambiguous references to God and faith by critics like Snyder and Baeher:
No wonder her own main character, Harry Potter, is confused by the words on his parents’ tomb and returns to the pagan/occult witchcraft he has been practicing before he defeated the evil Lord Voldemort, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Ironically, therefore, despite the Christian symbolism in the final Harry Potter book, the real Person-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in HARRY POTTER is not Voldemort but Jesus Christ, the One who died for our sins and delivers us from the awful slavery with which witchcraft and other evils has shackled the Heart of Man. (para 6)
Sound at all like Lev Grossman’s Nietzschean declarations in Time? Of course, another possible reading includes Hermione’s sense that the words have a deeper meaning which Harry comes to understand later in a manner more in tune with Christian teaching. The process of discovery is highlighted in Deathly Hallows (otherwise, there isn’t any point to wondering in the wilderness with a book, a luggage-load of emotions, and a broken wand at one’s side). Rowling’s authorial choices here hint at a belief that one must come to her own revelation about Truth (Christ, or otherwise) in order for faith to be sincere — something echoed by none other than Martin Luther in On Christian Liberty.
In the March 2006 Journal of American Culture, Amanda Cockrell posits another literary choice by Rowling as problematic to fundamentalist sensibilities:
Harry lives in our world, making him more of a threat. Rowling has abandoned the realm of high fantasy and laid her story in contemporary England, rather than in the imaginary and medievally flavored otherworld of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, or in a place like Baum’s Oz, which can only be reached by tornado and that proves in any case to be all a dream. (pg. 25).
With this premise in mind, we might more easily understand the problems with Harry “preaching a false god promoting evil rebellion against the One True and Only God” (Snyder and Baehr para 10). Writing Harry as a character living within “contemporary England” makes him an accessible character and hints at the thought that witchcraft does wholeheartedly exist as a very real threat to Christianity (Cockrell pgs. 26-28).
The presence of this realism also leads us to Fr. Aguilar’s assertions of gnosticism grounded in this:
Consider now the concept of man implicit in J.K. Rowling’s narrative. Humans, called “muggles,” are divided into three categories: ordinary “muggles” with no magical power who disdain the magic world (the despicable Dursley family); “muggles” who fancy the magic world but cannot reach it (Hermione Granger’s parents); and the witches and wizards.
The ideal is, no doubt, to become a good witch or wizard. What’s the way? Train yourself to look into yourself to find the magical powers within you. (para 54-55).
Granger’s response points out this isn’t the case at all (”‘Judging Harry Potter” by Fr. Alfonso Auilar’ para 9). The only Muggle in the books with a hope to become magical is Petunia as a child, who morphs more into an example of bitterly holding to arbitrary prejudices. The prejudice wizards carry towards “others” (including Muggles) is the basis for the conflict driving the whole book: prejudice versus love; fate versus choice. Problems arise in Harry’s world when one dominant group begins stratifying the world into a hierarchical cosmology placing themselves at the top, often via reducing the transparency of their stamp on the narrative of that cosmolgy, citing its source as some grander Truth. Sound familiar? Of course it does. The HP books skewer the very rhetorical and epistemological bases from which fundamentalist culture warriors like RA and Michael O’Brien operate. No wonder they don’t like the series.
It would be misleading to suggest that fixing Harry’s fictional world in a high fantasy realm would alleviate the tensions here. After all, magic is the killing curse for the books’ credibility as far as most Christian opponents are concerned, casting the books in a gangrenous pall from which they cannot be resuscitated. The only thing to say about the books as magic manuals is that they clearly aren’t, as The Escapist tries to “prove”. I tend to wonder if engaging in the debate with the “Harry Haters” is worthwhile, or if we’re only stoking the flames. My fidelity to Socratic discourse as a means to understand is too powerful — I prize discussion, even if it may not lead anywhere in the end. The process of discovery is what matters to me.
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Travis Prinzi
09.11.07 at 11:02 pm
A masterful essay, Dave, and right on the mark.
I’ve been through the same debate that you hit on in your concluding paragraph. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve constructed responses to RA and then deleted them. I find it better to sit back here at SoG with reasonable people and discuss the “nuts and bolts” of the arguments as you have done in this essay. It is fascinating discussion, and even when the “haters” get involved, though it’s frustrating, I end up learning something - the “process of discovery,” indeed.
Interesting thoughts about “high fantasy” and Rowling’s fantasy (wainscot fantasy?) - I do wonder if there would be quite the reaction if she had not placed the Wizarding World in contemporary England. It’s much, much closer to our own world that Middle Earth or Narnia. The closeness is where Drs Snyder and Baehr get their complaints - it’s as if the only way the series could be in any way “Christian” is if, in the epilogue, all the main characters were converted to Christ and repented of Hogwarts. And I do wonder if they’d be saying the same thing if the world was an entirely imaginary realm.
These are themes I’m exploring at length in my book, and I hope to have more profound conclusions soon!
john granger
09.11.07 at 11:03 pm
First rate! This passage was especially helpful to me:
Problems arise in Harry’s world when one dominant group begins stratifying the world into a hierarchical cosmology placing themselves at the top, often via reducing the transparency of their stamp on the narrative of that cosmolgy, citing its source as some grander Truth. Sound familiar? Of course it does. The HP books skewer the very rhetorical and epistemological bases from which fundamentalist culture warriors like RA and Michael O’Brien operate. No wonder they don’t like the series.
Thank you, Dave, for this post!
reyhan
09.12.07 at 12:15 am
Dave, you write at a higher level of abstraction than I’m used to, at least nowadays, so I have to check: does “reducing the transparency of their stamp on the narrative of that cosmology” mean the same thing as “hiding their role in creating that view of reality”?
My idea about the Harry Haters is that debating them is pointless if one’s aim is to convince them - my experience is that opposition makes people dig their heels in deeper. However, there is also the majority who haven’t read the books, who don’t have a strong opinion, and who are swayed by what they hear most often (or have heard most recently). If all they hear is the strident Harry Haters, they will come to believe their rhetoric. It is up those who can see another point of view to express that point of view so that others can become aware of it.
It reminds me of Edmund Burke’s quote: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
I’m not sure we’re talking about good and evil here - although we may be - but I feel that the same principle applies.
Dave, the Longwinded
09.12.07 at 7:37 am
Reyhan, your “translation” is right. Sorry about the abstraction. I should probably have written that the way you suggested. I just got all poetic for a moment.
Travis and John, Thanks for the compliments! It’s nice to ket some kudos every now and then!
Mary Jo Neyer
09.12.07 at 9:22 am
Dave,
Your last paragraph “I tend to wonder if engaging in the debate with the “Harry Haters” is worthwhile, or if we’re only stoking the flames. My fidelity to Socratic discourse as a means to understand is too powerful — I prize discussion, even if it may not lead anywhere in the end. The process of discovery is what matters to me” is wonderful.
I have wondered myself if directly debating with Harry Haters is a waste of time. On the other hand, I think the process of discussion does lead to discoveries worth thinking about. So in that sense our consideration of what the Harry Haters are saying is valuable.
reyhan
09.12.07 at 9:46 am
Dave, I like your version better: “their stamp on the narrative of that cosmology” has a very satisfying ring to it. I can almost hear the jackboots marching off into space.
Mary Jo, discussion may be very useful for those who seek the truth. But we need to recognize that it may be a one-way street. The other person may be less interested in considering our point of view, or even less interested in the truth. He may only be interested in winning, or proving us wrong. He may also not adhere to the rules of rational discourse.
I am thinking of televised political debates, and political debate shows, both of which I avoid. Neither side seems interested in even trying to understand the position of the other. Worse, they try to deliberately misrepresent the other’s point of view, and try to set up straw-man arguments which they can then knock down.
Johnny
09.12.07 at 10:47 pm
Excellent essay! You bring up valid points for the Harry Haters to consider, although I doubt they will. It’s basically their way, or “version of faith”, or the highway. Thanks so much for this Dave.
Black Angus
09.13.07 at 12:30 am
You cannot have a fruitful conversation with someone who is convinced they are right. Some of the Harry-haters who cannot be named are too in love with their own voice to consider another point of view.
But on a local level the Harry-haters I know trip up on the magic. As Dave beautifully puts it, it is the killing-curse for them. No matter how editfying the rest of the work is, they cannot see past the magic. And no amount of exlanation on my part can change their mind.
I know a local pastor who condemned Harry from the pulpit because of the magic and the next week used an illustration from Bedknobs and Broomsticks… What can you do?
I think if left alone the Harry-haters will fade away and go and choose something else to hate. They shrivel without attention.
Mary Jo Neyer
09.13.07 at 10:00 am
One of the reasons I like to read these discussions in Sword of Gryffindor is because I feel like I “need to know what’s out there” as fake-Moody put it.
As a Roman Catholic, I cringe with embarrassment when I read the articles by O’Brien and Father Aguilar. But I am grateful to John Granger for calling them to my attention, because I might not have seen them otherwise, and I am VERY grateful to the literate and thoughtful people who discuss the articles on this blog, because it helps put my muddled thoughts into a coherent frame and I can logically explain to others who might ask me, especially my own children, why do some Catholics so oppose to Harry Potter? The discussions on this topic also make me think more deeply about my own understanding of faith expressed through different symbols and literature. So thank you, everybody.
korg20000bc
09.14.07 at 2:02 am
Felicity wrote:
I certainly believe Rowling is sincere when she says she’s a Christian, and given the post-Christian culture of the UK, it’s astonishing that she’s invested the HP books with such clear Christian imagery and philosophy. In the 2001 UK census, 72% identified themselves as a member of a Christian denomination while only 50% claimed to believe in God. UK social researchers explain this disparity as a phenomenon of UK cultural religiosity, since many people who do not believe in a divine being still identify with a religion because it’s part of their social identity and family tradition.
It’s mainly for that reason that British posters on HP forums noted that references to Christmas and Easter conveyed no religious significance to them because in the UK, even atheists and agnostics refer to winter break and spring break as the Christmas and Easter holidays, and they all celebrate Christmas with traditional religious carols. So for UK readers, the suits of armor charmed to sing “O Come All Ye Faithful,” corridors decorated with garlands of holly, and the Great Hall decorated with twelve Christmas trees covered with gold stars have great cultural significance but don’t necessarily have any more religious meaning than roast goose and Christmas cake.
And Polly Toynbee noted in her 2005 review of the LWW movie in The Guardian:
“Most British children will be utterly clueless about any message beyond the age-old mythic battle between good and evil. Most of the fairy story works as well as any Norse saga, pagan legend or modern fantasy, so only the minority who are familiar with Christian iconography will see Jesus in the lion. After all, 43% of people in Britain in a recent poll couldn’t say what Easter celebrated. Among the young - apart from those in faith schools - that number must be considerably higher. Ask art galleries: they now have to write the story of every religious painting on the label as people no longer know what “agony in the garden”, “deposition”, “transfiguration” or “ascension” mean. This may be regrettable cultural ignorance, but it means Aslan will stay just a lion to most movie-goers.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,2763,1657759,00.html
The undeniable Christian imagery in Deathly Hallows can’t be dismissed on cultural grounds as with Christmas celebrations, but it was still muted enough for most secular newspaper reviews I read to ignore it. And I’m intrigued by a comment made by a poster on one discussion board that atheists and fundamentalists alike are arguing that while the books contain Christian imagery and symbols, these are not comprehensive or explicit enough to advance an unequivocal endorsement of the Christian faith. I assume the atheist argument is that even though the books promote themes found in Christian philosophy (free will, sacrificial love, good and evil, redemption, forgiveness, mercy, “doing unto others,” life after death, etc.), these aren’t exclusive to Christianity.
Perhaps Rowling hasn’t been forthcoming about her specific Christian beliefs in interviews and decided to hold the Christianity in the books to an “undertone” because she suspected a more obvious declaration would put her UK public off and this is her way of smuggling the Gospel to her own society.
And am I right in thinking that most criticism of HP on the grounds of magic is coming from the US (or North America to include Canadians like Michael O’Brien)? I read recently that Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is marketed to children in the UK but to adults in the US, which tells me a lot about the cultural differences between those countries in terms of attitudes towards the Christian religion. Even Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, has defended the books by arguing that Pullman’s attacks are focused on the constraints and dangers of dogmatism and the use of religion to oppress and should be taught in the UK’s public school religious education classes!
I’m not sure I would agree with Dave’s statement “It would be misleading to suggest that fixing Harry’s fictional world in a high fantasy realm would alleviate the tensions here. After all, magic is the killing curse for the books’ credibility as far as most Christian opponents are concerned, casting the books in a gangrenous pall from which they cannot be resuscitated.” That’s true for Christian critics who put Lewis, Tolkien, and Rowling in the same bucket just for including magic in their stories, but it’s arguably not true of critics who don’t object to the magic in the worlds of Lewis and Tolkien but do object to the magic in HP, and there are a fair few of those.
I haven’t read Amanda Cockrell’s article, but the following article helped me to better understand why some Christians are comfortable with the magic in the fantasies of Lewis and Tolkien but are uncomfortable or less comfortable with the magic in HP. The whole article is much longer at the link; I’ve only pulled out a section (BTW - Graydanus is not hostile to HP).
Harry Potter vs. Gandalf: An in-depth analysis of the literary use of magic in the works of J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis (A booklet-length essay by Steven D. Greydanus) http://decentfilms.com/sections/articles/2567
Seven “hedges”
The gulf between real-world occult practices and clearly fantasy magic is an important factor in distinguishing more potentially hazardous fictional uses of magic from more potentially worthwhile ones. At the same time, in Tolkien and Lewis this gulf by no means the only obstacle in the path of potentially vulnerable readers who might be drawn toward an unhealthy interest in magic.
In fact, Lewis in particular took pains, as I will show, to avoid even the appearance of condoning any sort of magical study or practice in the real world. His fictional worlds have been consciously and deliberately shaped in such a way as to make quite clear that the pursuit of magic, while it might be imagined to be a safe and lawful occupation for someone like Coriakin in the fairy-land world of Narnia, is in fact dangerous and wrong for human beings in and of our world — something attempted by nasty personages like Digory’s Uncle Andrew.
Tolkien, too, created his imaginary world in such a way that the imaginative leap from the magic of Middle-earth to real-world occult practices would be difficult if not impossible for readers to make. The whole shape of his worldview as a Catholic Christian and of his imaginative life was antithetical to the “deceits of the enemy”; and the very quality of the magic of his world, as well as of the imaginary situations in which it might be lawfully pursued and exercised, was very much removed from, and opposed to, the forbidden practices of real-world occultists and practitioners of magic, and even from objectionable fantasy magic as found in the likes of “Buffy” and The Craft.
In fact, I have below outlined seven specific literary characteristics common to Tolkien’s and Lewis’s fiction — above and beyond the fantasy nature of the magic itself — that have the net effect of limiting and restricting the role of magic in their fantasy worlds, essentially acting as barricades or hedges between magic and the reader, in effect saying: “Magic is not for the likes of us.”
(snip)
Here are the seven hedges in Tolkien and Lewis.
1. Tolkien and Lewis confine the pursuit of magic as a safe and lawful occupation to wholly imaginary realms, with place-names like Middle-earth and Narnia — worlds that cannot be located either in time or in space with reference to our own world, and which stand outside Judeo-Christian salvation history and divine revelation. By contrast, Harry Potter lives in a fictionalized version of our own world that is recognizable in time and space, in a country called England (which is at least nominally a Christian nation), in a timeframe of our own era.
2. Reinforcing the above point, in Tolkien’s and Lewis’s fictional worlds where magic is practiced, the existence of magic is an openly known reality of which the inhabitants of those worlds are as aware as we are of rocket science — even if most of them might have as little chance of actually encountering magic as most of us would of riding in the space shuttle. By contrast, Harry Potter lives in a world in which magic is a secret, hidden reality acknowledged openly only among a magical elite, a world in which (as in our world) most people apparently believe there is no such thing as magic.
3. Tolkien and Lewis confine the pursuit of magic as a safe and lawful occupation to characters who are numbered among the supporting cast, not the protagonists with whom the reader is primarily to identify. By contrast, Harry Potter, a student of wizardry, is the title character and hero of his novels.
4. Reinforcing the above point, Tolkien and Lewis include cautionary threads in which exposure to magical forces proves to be a corrupting influence on their protagonists: Frodo is almost consumed by the great Ring; Lucy and Digory succumb to temptation and use magic in ways they shouldn’t. By contrast, the practice of magic is Harry Potter’s salvation from his horrible relatives and from virtually every adversity he must overcome.
5. Tolkien and Lewis confine the pursuit of magic as a safe and lawful occupation to characters who are not in fact human beings (for although Gandalf and Coriakin are human in appearance, we are in fact told that they are, respectively, a semi-incarnate angelic being and an earthbound star.) In Harry Potter’s world, by contrast, while some human beings (called “Muggles”) lack the capacity for magic, others (including Harry’s true parents and of course Harry himself) do not.
6. Reinforcing the above point, Tolkien and Lewis emphasize the pursuit of magic as the safe and lawful occupation of characters who, in appearance, stature, behavior, and role, embody a certain wizard archetype — white-haired old men with beards and robes and staffs, mysterious, remote, unapproachable, who serve to guide and mentor the heroes. Harry Potter, by contrast, is a wizard-in-training who is in many crucial respects the peer of many of his avid young readers, a boy with the same problems and interests that they have.
7. Finally, Tolkien and Lewis devote no narrative space to the process by which their magical specialists acquire their magical prowess. Although study may be assumed as part of the back story, the wizard appears as a finished product with powers in place, and the reader is not in the least encouraged to think about or dwell on the process of acquiring prowess in magic. In the Harry Potter books, by contrast, Harry’s acquisition of mastery over magical forces at the Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft is a central organizing principle in the story-arc of the series as a whole.
J. K. Rowling has repeatedly said that, like most people nowadays, she doesn’t believe in magic (see the end of this CNN interview). Yet also like most people, Rowling doesn’t share Tolkien’s and Lewis’ moral caution about attempted magic in the real world. As far as she’s concerned, the only caveat about magic in the real world is that it doesn’t work.
End Greydanus quote. He expounds on each point in more detail in the full article.
To his seven hedges above, I would add that a major criticism of Christians who oppose the books is that Rowling makes no reference to the Christian God in the books (other than “Thank God”).
As Greydanus noted, Tolkien was careful to completely remove Middle Earth from our world and moreover set his story in a time that predated Christian salvation history; Eru Ilúvatar (Tolkien’s Elvish name for God) is not mentioned directly in The Hobbit or LotR, but is in The Silmarillion (perhaps The Silmarillion is what Snyder and Baehr were thinking of when they hoped Rowling would provide a Christian explanation for the HP books in her proposed encyclopedia).
Lewis believed pagan myths prefigured the True Christian Myth (as did Tolkien), and in Narnia he included a dizzying variety of beings from fairy tales and pagan myths. But Aslan, who clearly represents Jesus Christ, is the creator of and ultimate authority in Narnia on all levels (physical, spiritual, magical), so while Lewis includes pagan gods and goddesses like Pomona and Bacchus in the Chronicles, they are not there as the equals of Aslan but as his subordinates and inferiors.
As Peter T. Chattaway wrote in an article in Canadian Christianity: “To be sure, Lewis ‘baptized’ these pagan elements, by situating them in a context where Aslan, the Christ-like creator of Narnia, is firmly in control. When the dance with the maenads comes to an end, Susan says, “I wouldn’t have felt very safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we’d met them without Aslan.” Lucy replies, “I should think not.”"
http://www.canadianchristianity.com/cgi-bin/na.cgi?bc/bccn/1205/16narnia
So anyway, I’m fascinated by this topic, and I’d love to know Rowling’s reasons for including the Christian imagery that she did and no more. And given that these books are translated into umpteen languages and read all over the world, I would love someday for a scholar to pull together a survey of responses and interpretations of this series in countries where Christianity is and is not the dominant religion.
Black Angus
09.18.07 at 7:51 pm
I’ve been pondering for a while why many Christians baulk not just at HP, but the arts in general. It seems to me that being ‘artistic’ (in whatever form that takes) is expressing an important aspect of what it means to bear the image of God.
Before the universe was created God knew what he wanted to produce and brought it into being just by saying so. And it was very good. And we marvel at his artistry every day.
Now we cannot do that - but we can do something like it. An artist visualises what she wants to produce: a painting, music, ceramics, a novel, and then brings it into being. It might not turn out exactly the way she visualised it, but she has produced something beautiful that wasn’t there before.
In atheistic/materialistic societies (think Nazi Germany or Soviet Union) the state-approved art was grimly realistic. It had to express the way things are. Emphasis was on strength and duty. Never imagination. Imagination was forbidden because it speaks of the transcendant. Materialists can only manipulate what is here.
Good art, fiction included, points us beyond the way things are. Or should I say points us to how things really are. Or how things are meant to be. The best kind of art points us towards God. Fantasy fiction (when it is done well) helps us step outside reality for a time so we can then see reality in a clearer light.
So even in the medium Rowling has chosen to express her art she has done a very Christian thing. She has brought into being something that wasn’t there before. And by calling us outside the reality we’re used to she has reminded us of what is really real (?): the virtues of sacrifice, love and choosing what is right even when it is difficult; the wonder of a friendship so strong it lays down its life for its friends.
korg20000bc
09.20.07 at 7:40 am
Great comment Black Angus.
You are right, Christians should be at the forefront of art and artistic endeavours. Imagination seems to be broken in many Christians or, at least, held in great distrust as a tool in which Satan can somehow get at them. I’m certain imagination is misused by nearly everyone alive but it it is a God-given ability that we should be using and enjoying.
Matthew