Between Icon & Idol
Harry Potter & Imagination’s Symbolic Life
by S. M. Hutchens
J K. Rowling has, like C. S. Lewis in the Chronicles of Narnia, created an exciting story of redemption within the world of modern ugliness and alienation, a world in which a drab and common boy with dismal prospects is revealed as what he has in fact been from birth: someone who counts for something, whose well-intentioned labors count for good and are rewarded with appreciation, understanding, and the hope of greatness.
It is a world in which good and evil stand out in high relief and strong contrast, where the quest for mere power is clearly and forcefully identified as wicked, and good triumphs in the end. More than this, Harry takes his place in the Great-Story-from-Which-All-Stories-Come as the Prince born hidden and in hostile obscurity, who, with his friends and companions, overcomes the powers of evil at the risk of his life. He is a Christ-figure, the sign of his anointing a wound on his brow.
In these stories, however, the Christ-figure is, intolerably to Christians, a witch, whom the law of God says should not be suffered to live. Surely if the witch is to be removed from the real world and its history, neither should he be allowed to thrive in the imagination. This is the problem that faces the morally serious Christian at the threshold of Harry Potter’s world, for he has been clearly warned in his own Scriptures to flee the false Christ, and surely a witch-Christ is a false one. Against this prohibition many of us, I would suppose, have little more to plead in Harry’s favor than our desire to be entertained.
Alternating Reactions
Given these considerations, the unaccomplished task of reviewing the Harry Potter books pressed hard upon me for many months. Looming before me was the question of whether these, and now their cinematographic offspring, should be taken in by Christians and their children. Strong and intelligent arguments have been made on both sides. Let me unburden myself at the outset of the two alternating reactions at the poles of my own dilemma:
The first, and one to which I am more naturally inclined, is that Christians—or their children by the time they are old enough to read Harry Potter—who are so ill-prepared for life in the world that they are afraid these books will inevitably damage the spirit, seem to me culpably weak, impressing me as people who can never make much progress in the faith. They have not put on the armor of God, as they are bid. They are retreating, empty-handed, rather than advancing, sword in hand. Morbidly dependent, their spiritual immune systems are so bad that everything they take into themselves must be sanitized by some religious censor, for they cannot do it themselves.
Christ’s teaching that they are clean but must be washed by him of the dust of everyday traveling is usually incomprehensible to this sort of person, for he is unable to understand the concurrence of purity and the necessity to be purified from the elements of the world that inevitably come to lie on the surface of his being. He is caught in the intolerable position of having to declare things evil (or good) without sufficient evidence, and, unable to separate good from evil where they appear together, believes he cannot look far enough into the life of the world to judge it without falling victim to what he may be obliged to reject.
This makes him not only anti-intellectual, but virtually autistic in his manner of life and thought. He cannot be educated, for education by any reasonable definition requires critical interaction with what is unfriendly to Christianity. This interaction, necessary to the development of moral fiber, requires daily striving in which the life of the spirit is always at risk—and this from youth forward, for God does not withhold temptation from children. But this sort is ill fitted to do battle with evil, since he is too fastidious to cross swords with it. His problem, manifest in fear, sloth, and the unwillingness to engage his critical faculties to the degree necessary to sustain Christian life, is a lack of faith in the power of God to deliver him from evil as he makes his way through the world.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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more on imagination from the online archives
19.10—December 2006
Training Up a Child Requires a Well-Formed Imagination by David Mills
11.5—September/October 1998
Speaking the Truths Only the Imagination May Grasp
An Essay on Myth & 'Real Life' by Stratford Caldecott
more from the online archives
18.2—March 2005
On Conservatism as Vexation, Vanity & Near Impossibility by Graeme Hunter
17.4—May 2004
The Unhappy & Abusive Marriage of Liberalism & Modernism by James Hitchcock
24.6—Nov/Dec 2011
Liberty, Conscience & Autonomy
How the Culture War of the Roaring Twenties Set the Stage for Today’s Catholic & Evangelical Alliance by Barry Hankins
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