Harry Potter's Bookshelf (28 page)

If I had to choose the main similarity between Harry and Maria, though, it would be that they are both the spirit aspect in the story triptych of mind, body, and spirit. I’ve already discussed Harry as the Alyosha/Kirk/Frodo of his adventures and the spiritual leader of Hermione, who is the mind, and of Ron, who is the body or the passions (see chapters seven and eight). Maria plays a similar role in
Horse.

Maria, as described in the Merryweather family motto and emblem, is “pure spirit,” the elusive unicorn; Sir Benjamin Merryweather is the lion, a “brave soul,” subject to Maria’s direction in almost everything; and Monsieur Cocq de Noir is the darkness of the unconscious passions. She masters her Merryweather anger, pride, and curiosity, putting off her Voldemort Horcrux, if you will, transcending her persona and ego to be the savior of her small Silverydew world.

Goudge reflects Maria’s unique spiritual capacity in her eyes and the ability she has to see things others cannot. Most notably, of course, her ability to see the little white horse, the unicorn of the Moon Maiden. But she also connects with every principal character and sees their fundamental or potential goodness by looking in their eyes; and they, in turn, recognize who she is by looking into her eyes. Ms. Rowling echoes this linking of eyes and spiritual vision throughout her books.

The overwhelming symbolism of
Deathly Hallows
is not solar and lunar, silver and gold allusions as it is in
Little White Horse
but one of sight and, weirdly, eyeballs. There is Mad-Eye Moody’s disembodied eye that Harry rescues and buries, the “triangular eye” of the Hallows symbol, and the demonic eyes of Tom Riddle, Jr., in the locket Horcrux. There are two other images in
Deathly Hallows
that I want to focus on here because of their literary relevance and their transcendental significance.

The first of these
Deathly Hallows
eye symbols is the green eyes of Harry’s mother, Lily (and Harry himself), and their importance to Severus Snape, especially at his death. As mentioned earlier, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s books
A Little Princess
and
The Secret Garden
feature characters whose eyes are green, “just like their mother’s,” and whose vision or way of seeing things is magical, even what saves them. But these green eyes are not Burnett’s invention. The emphasis on green eyes may well be a reference to Dante’s
Divine Comedy
.

Green eyes, belonging here to Dante’s love, Beatrice, appear at perhaps the most critical moment of Dante’s journey when he has come to the gates of Paradise after being guided through Hell and Purgatory by Virgil. The nymphs there draw him through the River Lethe to wash away his memories and he is granted a vision through the green eyes of his beloved Beatrice, who appears in a chariot drawn by a giant red and gold Griffin (the source of Hogwarts’s “golden Griffin,” or in French “Griffin d’or”).

The Griffin is half eagle (king of heaven) and half lion (king of earth) and is, consequently, a traditional symbol of Christ, the King of Heaven and Earth. Dante has a vision of Christ in Beatrice’s eyes, a vision he experiences as sacramental, after which he enters Paradise. He travels from sphere to sphere there by looking each time again into his beloved’s green eyes for transcendence.

As a result of his devotion to Lily, Snape’s experience with Harry’s eyes—eyes inherited from his mother—carries the same level of spiritual importance. Severus Snape, you recall, had a long-standing love for Lily Evans (later Potter). Once friends, Severus’s fascination with the Dark Arts and his companionship with potential Death Eaters led to a break in their relationship. He continued to love her, and, perversely, even hoped that he could win her affections after the Dark Lord killed James Potter and Lily’s son, Harry. But Snape pledged his life to Dumbledore to protect her from Voldemort and later makes a pledge to protect Harry once Dumbledore tells him that the boy has his mother’s eyes (
Deathly Hallows
, chapter thirty-three). The shape and color of Harry’s eyes trigger remorse or grief in Severus, “what Dumbledore would call love,” the agony that makes him a great Occlumens and double agent, and the love that moves him to sacrifice his public life to protect Lily’s son, the prophesied vanquisher of Lord Voldemort. We see what value these eyes have to Snape in the many times he locks eyes with Harry and most especially in his final request at his death that Harry “Look . . . at . . . me . . . .” (
Deathly Hallows
, chapter thirty-two).

Cleansed of his memories, having sacrificed his all in love and fidelity, Snape’s final vision is of Lily’s green eyes; and we are led to believe that through those eyes, like Dante, he transcends his failings and enters Paradise.
³

Harry’s green eyes and their similarity to his mother’s are mentioned in each book, often more than once, as setups for this giant payoff in the Shrieking Shack at Snape’s demise. As important as Harry’s green eyes is the single eye of Dumbledore that Harry sees twice in
Deathly Hallows
in the shard of the mirror given him by his godfather. This eye acts as both a story frame and a key to what Rowling says is the meaning of the entire series of books.
⁴

The first time Harry sees Dumbledore in the mirror is after he reads the interview with Rita Skeeter in the
Daily Prophet
featuring nasty bits of misinformation about Dumbledore and Harry. He is outraged and sees “a flash of brightest blue” on the mirror shard he is holding. The second time he sees the “brightest blue” of Dumbledore’s gaze, he is trying to escape the cellar of Malfoy Manor and save Hermione from Bellatrix’s torture. He asks Dumbledore for help and Dobby appears to help them escape. Though Dobby is killed in the process, this vision leads to Harry’s renewed faith in Dumbledore. In both instances, Harry’s glimpse of the eye is connected with his faith or loyalty to Dumbledore. But this “eye” in the mirror holds even greater meaning in terms of Harry’s identity and his victory over the Dark Lord.

As discussed in chapter eight, Christians believe that reality is the creation of God’s Word or
Logos.
Jesus of Nazareth was the historical incarnation of this
Logos
as perfect humanity. Christians believe it is through him and the sacraments of his Church that human beings consciously commune with the fabric and substance of reality, the
Logos.

The prologue of the gospel according to John describes this
Logos
this way:

This last verse cuts right to the heart of Harry’s story and our experience of it. Jesus explains to the Pharisees that as
Logos
and God, “I am the light of the world: he that fol loweth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” The
Logos
principle that creates all things is light, life, and, most important for this discussion, the “true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Every person has a
Logos
within them that is their light. Jesus calls this light our “eye ” in the Sermon on the Mount verses immediately after the verse on Ariana Dumbledore’s tombstone:

When Harry Potter looks into his godfather’s mirror, consequently, and sees an “eye” where his “I” (his own image) should be, we shouldn’t be surprised. As a story symbol for the
Logos
quality in us all, Harry is the seeing eye. As we increasingly identify with Harry as the story continues, and as we are sucked into his perspective, we begin to read and experience the story through the luminous eye of the heart in each of us. Our spiritual faculty, in other words, is awakened, engaged, and to some degree illumined or cleansed by Harry’s inner victory and cathartic defeat of the Dark Lord.

This
Logos,
which “lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” is our mind and conscience as well as our spiritual faculty. The
Logos
recognizes itself in each created thing. In other words, it is both the knowing subject and the known object—our minds are the place where they meet. To know the fabric of reality and the substance of all existence, to commune with what is real beyond the surface, in the Christian view, then, means fostering the light, life, and love within us that is this
Logos
. Believe it or not, that is largely the message of Ms. Rowling’s
Harry Potter
stories.

Think about Harry’s conversation with Dumbledore at King’s Cross, especially their final exchange (
Deathly Hallows
, chapter thirty-five). The author has admitted quite openly that this exchange is perhaps
the
critical part of the book for understanding her work:

According to Dumbledore, the entire conversation at King’s Cross “happens inside [Harry’s] head.” He also insists via a rhetorical question that this experience has been “real.” Ms. Rowling’s putting her finger on this exchange as essential brings up the questions of how this is possible and what Dumbledore means by “real.”

When Harry asks, “Is this real?” the word “real” means something we have understood from information we have acquired via our physical senses or pictured and abstracted out of that information. Harry asks the question “is this real?” because his experience at what he thinks of as King’s Cross Station (but which looks nothing like it!) has been in several important ways
unreal
. From the cloudy vapor becoming his surroundings and items he wants to his having a lively chat with a radiant, certifiably solid, and brilliant dead man aren’t the stuff of energy and matter quantities or even the magical curriculum at Hogwarts. The trick is, if it’s not “real” the way both Muggles and Magical folk think things can be real, what else can it be? Given Harry’s track record at Hogwarts in being stunned by how little he understood of what was really going on, it’s little wonder he asks the equivalent of “Did this really happen or have I mistaken what’s only happening in my thinking for reality
again
?”

Dumbledore’s response reveals that he thinks Harry has created a false dichotomy. There is
another
option to account for his experience rather than just either scientific knowledge or delusional opinion, either objective or subjective thinking. Harry, like the rest of us, is a de facto materialist. If he cannot touch, see, smell, taste, or hear it, he thinks it is less real than something he can know by sense perception. Because abstraction, thinking, feeling, fancy, imaginings, and dreams—the things that “happen in our heads”—are immaterial by definition, they are not dependable ways of knowing the hard and therefore “real” facts.

Prejudices, limited views, unfounded speculation, and private animosity can distort our thinking, so, like Harry, we don’t count “inside our head” experience as
real.
Harry asks Dumbledore the skeptic’s question and gives Dumbledore the empiricist’s only two options: namely, objective “real” knowledge and subjective “unreal” knowledge. Dumbledore’s answer asserts there is another answer—a union or conjunction between “what is real” and “what is happening in our heads” beyond sense perception.

Ron Weasley asks Harry incredulously when he pulls Harry out of the pool in the Forest of Dean—and again when he is disappointed that Harry decides to forsake the Elder Wand—“Are—you—
mental
?” But if we understand that Dumbledore is telling Harry that what happens inside your head is, indeed,
real, then
yes, we must concur that Harry is
mental
. The unity of existence as
Logos
means we all—Muggles, wizards, all created things—are
mental
.

C. S. Lewis said this was one of the most important things he learned from his friend Owen Barfield, that “the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic
Logos
.”
⁶
Lewis discusses this idea most directly in his essay “The Seeing Eye,” which argues that conscience is “continuous with” the unity of existence.
⁷
His story version of the
Logos
reality beneath the surface, the “inside that is bigger than the outside,” is much more well known because it appears at the climax of the Narnia novel
The Last Battle.
There King Tirian has been driven into a stable by the wicked Calormenes. Once there, he is surprised to find himself in Paradise: