MetaCatholic

No, not a comment on Shakespeare or patriotism, but a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I said I’d wait a few days after I finished it, and I have. Now, be warned, everything below the picture is full of spoilers and gives the ending away. Read on at your own risk.

These books have grown up with many of their readers, while still remaining accessible to new younger fans. In this book (with the wizarding coming-of-age set at 17) the heroes enter the adult world most fully, while still finishing their growing up. That in itself is an achievement: compared to the Narnia books where children who grew up were excluded from the magical world, here the world grows up with the children.

And what a growing up it has been, for their world has become much darker with each succeeding volume, and this book plunges us right in to the world-domination of Voldemort. The darkness looms over every page: although Rowling still finds room for the humour, it is an increasing rarity. Yet whereas in the first book Voldemort was a shadowy and almost pantomime figure of pure evil, the sixth book took us on a journey of plotting Voldemort’s descent into evil in ways that almost drew Harry’s sympathy. That understanding is acknowledged here, in Harry’s perception of Hogwarts as the first real home for three lonely boys, himself, Snape and Voldemort.

Other figures who do evil show different shades: from book five onwards the corrupting evil of ambition and power structures is demonstrated in Fudge, then Scrimgeour, But above all it shows its face in Dolores Umbridge, whose cruelty returns in full force in scenes in this book. Fudge found a kind of truth in humiliation at the end of book five and the beginning of book six. Scrimgeour seems to redeem himself in meeting his death courageously. Umbridge remains unredeemed, and sunk into a Nazi style bureaucracy which brings all the worst of her flaws to the fore. Percy Weasley, who appeared to be sinking into this corrupting and bureaucratic ambition, finds himself and returns to his family.

On the other side of things is the moral complexity and capacity for evil in good people, mostly focussed on the character of Dumbledore. Dark secrets of his past emerge, and he is no longer simply the embodiment of goodness and wisdom, but a man who, though both good and wise, is also shown to have been tempted by power and ambition from his teenage years. The burnt and scarred hand he received in his quest for the horcruxes (magical objects with a piece of Voldemort’s soul in them) is revealed now not as the result of a noble struggle to destroy the horcrux, but greed for a powerful magical object which temporarily overcame him. Good and evil alike are far less absolute than they were, and human beings much more morally ambiguous.

The story moves between bouts of action and inaction. Largely the action shows Harry, Ron and Hermione at their best, and the inaction at their worst. The size of the task, and their own inadequacies before it lead to bickering, and hopelessness . Even their friendship is tested to breaking point, not by Voldemort, but by themselves. Yet by a mix of luck, courage, persistence and various unexpected help, they keep winning through.

The outcome appears to be heading in one direction only: one that many fans had expected, Harry’s death in combat with Voldemort. Amidst a ferocious last battle at Hogwarts, he comes to believe that this is indeed the last task. Snape’s memories, bequeathed to him in death, and siphoned into the pensieve, reveal it to him. From love of Lily Potter, and endless remorse at her death, Snape has indeed been Dunbledore’s double-agent. In death he makes it known to Harry that Voldemort accidentally imprisoned part of his soul in Harry the night he gave him his scar.

Harry now knows that letting Voldemort kill him will be the only way of destroying this horcrux. Leaving Neville to destroy the other remaining horcrux, Voldemort’s snake, Harry goes to meet Voldemort in the full expectation that by allowing himself to be killed, Voldemort’s power will be broken. Death is the last enemy: for Voldemort it is the one that must be defeated, for Harry the one that must be converted from enemy to friend by embracing it. And so, for the second time in his life, but this time willingly, Harry becomes the victim of Voldemort’s killing spell.

He find himself instead in a ghostly Kings Cross. Dumbledore’s spiritual body explains the final pieces of the puzzle. The curse has in one sense killed Harry as he was conjoined with Voldemort, but it has also ripped that piece of Voldemort’s soul from him. Harry himself was protected from death by the presence of his charmed blood in Voldemort’s reconstituted body, and has the option of returning to finish Voldemort. He does so, but not without trying to save him by urging him to feel remorse for what he has done. Then protected by his own newly acquired power and knowledge, the fruits of his willing sacrifice, he defeats Voldemort whose final attempt at killing simply rebounds upon himself. Rowling brings her saga to a triumphant ending.

Now on the one hand, as I’ve said before, I don’t want to claim Harry Potter for Christianity. The books should be read for what they are and enjoyed as they are. Good stories are pregnant with many meanings, and should not be reduced to expositions. At the same time, in the face of inane comments like this something must be said.

In choosing Rowling as the reigning dreamer of our era, we have chosen a writer who dreams of a secular, bureaucratized, all-too-human sorcery, in which psychology and technology have superseded the sacred

Some people want things to be too obvious. I don’t recall God getting a mention in Lord of the Rings, either, but nobody has ever slammed it for secularism. And one of the problems for me in Philip Pullman’s otherwise enjoyable trilogy is the hammer-on-the-head lack of subtlety in his portrayal of the Authority and the Church. Rowling’s work is, I think, open to different interpretations. But not only are the themes of self-sacrifice (illustrated by Lily and Harry above all) and redemption (Snape, Kreacher, Percy) by both love and remorse at the heart of the book’s portrayal of the defeat of evil, in this last book Rowling includes some more interestingly specific references.

Most interesting of all is the attention given to the headstones in the churchyard at Godric’s Hollow. On the Dumbledore family tomb is inscribed: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matt 6:21). This serves in so many ways as a comment not only on Dumbledore’s situation, but in some way defines a major theme of the books. On the Potter family tomb is the quotation (already mentioned above) “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Cor 15:26). Again, this is a theme that re-emerges in several ways. The ensuing discussion between Harry and Hermione underscores this. In one sense it is exactly what Voldemort has always thought as he sought to master death. In another it is the willingness to enter into a life beyond death, and therefore to prepared to lay down one’s own life for another, making death not an enemy but a friend, to accept that it cannot be mastered, and that fear of death can destroy life. Finally, on that note, is it just a happy coincidence that the chapter where Harry stands between life and death is called “Kings Cross”?

Those Christian resonances are just that: resonances. The power of the book is in the storytelling, the creation of a whole fascinating world, characters one cares about, and the provision of a place in which to discover oneself imaginatively in the contest between good and evil, and what it means to grow wise in a morally complex world. Rowling provides that in spades.

(See the Introduction to this series, Article I, update)

The second of the Anglican articles is the first of three on the Son, and like that on God it seeks to locate Anglican theology in the mainstream classical tradition.

II. Of the Word or Son of God, which was made very Man
The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took Man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance: so that two whole and perfect Natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, were joined together in one Person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, very God, and very Man; who truly suffered, was crucified, dead and buried, to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men.

There’s both a clear borrowing (as there often is in the articles) from the Augsburg Confession, but also some interesting differences:

Also they teach that the Word, that is, the Son of God, did assume the human nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary, so that there are two natures, the divine and the human, inseparably enjoined in one Person, one Christ, true God and true man, who was born of the Virgin Mary, truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, that He might reconcile the Father unto us, and be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men

The Anglican article places a greater stress on the eternal begetting of the Son, and his consubstantial being with the Father before borrowing the latter part of the Lutheran wording. It also comes second, whereas in the Lutheran form, an article on original sin comes between that on God, and that on Christ. There is, I think, something important in this concentrating on the Trinity before moving too quickly to the ordo salutis. The Son is defined by who he is in relationship to the Father before he is known in relationship to the human situation. The doctrine of the Trinity is about God and God is not just about us. There is a basis here for strong resistance to any Feuerbachian projectionism, or any non-realist perspective; God is God, irrespective of any “us” to whom he might be our God.

The article is undoubtedly right to link incarnation and atonement, but I do find myself running into problems with the way in which it does so. Is it really appropriate to say “to reconcile his Father to us”? Among the stronger Pauline statements are these (all NRSV) which are very much about us being reconciled to God:

• Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood (Rom 3:24-25 – even if ἱλαστήριον is read as propitiation, it doesn’t change the status of God as initiator))
• For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. (Rom 5:10)
• All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. (2 Cor 5:18-19)
• through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Col 1:20)

The predominant direction of reconciliation, is of our being reconciled to God, by God, through Christ, and not of God being reconciled to us. The language of the article is, at best, careless, and such language gives an unfortunate apparent authority to some versions of atonement theory that divide God’s work from Christ’s. (Equally, the fuller statement of the BCP’s prayer of consecration gets the emphasis right by locating the initiative in God’s “tender mercy”.)

This correction, however, should not detract from the main thrust of the article, which emphasizes the incarnation of the eternal Son as the undergirding presupposition of any reconciliation or atonement. In full accord with the classical tradition: Christ’s Work depends on his Person. Unless he is fully God, he cannot bring us to God, unless he is fully human he cannot bring us to God.

Nor, because he is both the God who has made all, and the brother of all who share his flesh and blood, can there be any limited atonement. This sacrifice is “not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men.” Neither state of sinfulness nor actual sin lies outside the scope of God’s work in Christ, precisely because the focus of belief is God the Son, and not the human predicament.

When our ideas about atonement focus too much on either the problem of sin, or the mechanism of salvation, they are not only likely to go wrong, but they may become sources of distortion (like limited atonement) or shibboleths of doctrine (like penal substitution – see Peter Kirk’s various discussion). When, like this article, they focus on the identity of the Saviour, then their scope is enlarged, and our confidence is placed in the one who brings us to God, and not our grasp of any mechanism by which we might get there.