The Moral Implications of Magic: Lord Voldemort (Part II)

 (Part I)

While Harry grows up under the Dursleys, Voldemort lives as a bodiless spirit in the forests of Albania. Then, not long before Harry gets his Hogwarts letter, Voldemort meets Professor Quirrell and convinces him to help steal the Philosopher's Stone. It is a pity that the book does not deal much with the relationship between Quirrell and Voldemort. We only see them interacting at the end when Voldemort has already become the dominant partner in the relationship, with Quirrell agreeing to be possessed by Voldemort and to drink unicorn blood. One imagines Quirrell as someone with low self-esteem, beaten down by a sense that no one respects him. When he first meets Voldemort, he sees Voldemort as a source of dark knowledge that he could use to gain power for himself and get back at everyone who ever looked down upon him. Clearly, Voldemort, lacking a body, needs Quirrell more than Quirrell needs Voldemort. Yet, somehow, Voldemort manages to turn the tables on Quirrell, making Quirrell the dependent one. One imagines Quirrell, afraid of being caught after his failure to rob Gringotts, becoming increasingly desperate and willing to do anything Voldemort says. This would have been particularly interesting to see because Voldemort is supposed to be a master manipulator on par with his power in the dark arts. 

Voldemort's attempt to steal the Philosopher's Stone is thwarted by Dumbledore's use of the Mirror of Erised, which makes it that the stone can only be found by someone who merely wants to find it but not use it. This is the perfect trap for Voldemort. It is Voldemort's own philosophy of power that prevents him from solving the Mirror of Erised and gaining the stone. By contrast, Harry can get the stone precisely because he does not subscribe to Voldemort's philosophy. Like being protected by his mother's sacrifice, this is another power that Voldemort knows not. 

The Philosopher's Stone ends with Voldemort back at square one, having lost Quirrell and still lacking a body. The Chamber of Secrets deals with Tom Riddle's diary, which he turned into a Horcrux. This memory of the young Voldemort is able to manipulate Ginny Weasley to the point that he is able to possess her and eventually force her to go to the Chamber of Secrets to serve as bait to lure Harry into a trap. Riddle, though, because he only understands conventional power, fails to appreciate what he is up against and that he is really walking into another of Dumbledore's traps.  

He assumes that just because Lucius Malfoy has removed Dumbledore from Hogwarts, Dumbledore has been defeated and can no longer help Harry. When Fawkes arrives with the Sorting Hat, Riddle simply doubles down on dismissing Dumbledore: "This is what Dumbledore sends his defender! A songbird and an old hat! Do you feel brave, Harry Potter? Do you feel safe now?" (pg. 316)  

Beyond killing Harry, Riddle is curious about Harry. How is it that he survived Riddle's future self? Even though Harry explains to Riddle that it was his mother's sacrifice that saved him, Riddle fails to appreciate the true significance of that sacrifice and what makes Harry special. 

So your mother died to save you. Yes, that's a powerful countercharm. I can see now ... there is nothing special about you, after all. I wondered, you see. There are strange likenesses between us, after all. Even you must have noticed. Both half-bloods, orphans, raised by Muggles. Probably the only two Parselmouths to come to Hogwarts since the great Slytherin himself. We even look something alike ... but after all, it was merely a lucky chance that saved you from me. (pg. 317)

Riddle needs to dismiss the thought that Harry might be special, but he clearly fears that it is true. He therefore turns to Slytherin's basilisk to kill Harry. He needs to show that it is he, with his power of Slytherin, that is special and not Harry. 

What Riddle fails to see is that Lily sacrificing herself was not merely a countercharm, but something that transcended magic, making Harry special in ways that have nothing to do with his ability to cast spells. This deeper spiritual blindness is mirrored by Riddle's practical blindness. He does not see that a phoenix like Fawkes can blind the basilisk, his tears can heal Harry, and that the Sorting Hat can call forth the Sword of Gryffindor to kill the basilisk. These objects, the practical manifestations of Harry's Gryffindor bravery and loyalty to Dumbledore, are enough to defeat Riddle, proving once again how special Harry really is. 

Just as Voldemort's attempt to kill baby Harry not only failed, but created the danger that Voldemort was trying to avoid, so too does Riddle's attempt to kill Harry here create the weapon to ultimately defeat the Horcruxes. Harry is able to use a basilisk fang to destroy the diary. By sending the basilisk against the Sword of Gryffindor, Riddle allows the sword to absorb the snake's poison, giving it the ability to destroy Horcruxes in the future.      

Voldemort next appears in The Goblet of Fire when Peter Pettigrew and Barty Crouch Jr. join him. Like Quirrell, these are people who turned to Voldemort out of an imagined sense of their own inferiority and not being appreciated by those they looked up to. Pettigrew felt that James, Lupin, and Sirius merely tolerated him, and Barty felt unloved by his father. With the Philosopher's Stone destroyed, Voldemort now wishes to use Harry's blood to refashion his old body. Still thinking of Lily's sacrifice in conventional terms, Voldemort calculates that using Harry's blood will allow him to touch Harry. What he does not consider is the possibility that there may be unforeseen consequences in further connecting himself to Harry. This is because Voldemort does not connect Lily's sacrifice to a higher moral order in the universe. As such, he fails to realize that he cannot simply manipulate it for his own ends as if it were simply a morally neutral form of technology. 

Upon capturing Harry and using his blood, it is not enough for Voldemort to kill Harry the boy. Voldemort needs to fight Harry in front of his Death Eaters to destroy the notion that Harry was ever anything special. Even after all these years, Voldemort is caught by this petty jealousy where he needs to feel uniquely special and is threatened by the possibility that Harry might be more special than him. Voldemort fails to properly evaluate Harry as a dueling opponent. Harry's power lies not in his ability to cast spells to counter the Unforgivable Curses, but in his willingness to resist Voldemort even under hopeless circumstances and his connection to Voldemort that Voldemort himself accidentally created. 

Because of the connection between Harry and Voldemort, manifested in Harry's scar, Harry was chosen by the brother wand to Voldemort's. This leads to the Priori Incantatum effect when the spells from the two wands connect. Voldemort's wand starts producing ghosts of the people he has killed, allowing Harry to escape. Voldemort's willingness to kill people to further his drive for power creates the obstacles to hinder that same drive for power. Furthermore, Voldemort has unwittingly strengthened Harry's wand, giving it the power to perform spells on its own. Voldemort believes that, now that he has been resurrected, his victory is inevitable, but the stage is merely being set for his eventual defeat. 

(To be continued ...)   

      

The Moral Implications of Magic: Lord Voldemort (Part I)

 

Contains spoilers for the Harry Potter series. 

In the previous post, I wrote about why magic is so closely intertwined with the struggle of good versus evil. If magic is real, you can either turn to evil and see magic as a form of power disconnected to any moral questions, or you can turn to good and recognize that, behind the magic, lies a higher moral authority. I would like to further examine this idea through the lens of Lord Voldemort, the villain of the Harry Potter series. 

Voldemort's philosophy is stated by Professor Quirrell at the end of Philosopher's Stone:

I met [Voldemort] when I traveled around the world. A foolish young man I was then, full of ridiculous ideas about good and evil. Lord Voldemort showed me how wrong I was. There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it. (pg. 291)

Voldemort consistently interprets events in the series from the perspective of power while ignoring the moral authority behind that power. Every opportunity to reconsider what he is doing simply confirms to him that he is right and there really is no moral law beyond power.  

As Tom Riddle, Voldemort first learns about magic when Dumbledore invites him to attend Hogwarts. For Voldemort, his ability to perform magic is the proof that he is special and not merely the orphan Tom Riddle. He, therefore, wants to be the most special wizard of all. Tom Riddle, named after his Muggle father, could never be special. Instead Riddle fashions the name of Lord Voldemort and even then wants the name to be so feared that wizards would not even call him by any name, but simply "You Know Who." There is no sense that he has been given a special gift that he never deserved and therefore has obligations to those not so generously gifted.  

Because Voldemort needs to be uniquely special, he is incapable of love. To love someone means to believe that they are special. This would take away from Voldemort's own sense of being special. By contrast, Voldemort embraces having underlings. The more Deatheaters he has to venerate him, the more special he becomes. It helps that most of the death eaters are members of the wizarding pureblood aristocracy. If even the wizarding elites bow before Voldemort, that shows his greatness.  

To maintain control over his Deatheaters, Voldemort needs to direct their hatred against, giving them purpose. Since the wizarding pure bloods tend to hate Muggle-borns, people  not born into elite wizarding families, they becomes Voldemort's target. Muggle-borns are people who, on the surface, are just like Voldemort, growing up as Muggles. He refuses to accept the idea that anyone could be given the gift of magic as that would mean that magic does not really make you special. Instead he sees his magic as coming from Salazar Slytherin and seeks out Slytherin's basilisk underneath Hogwarts castle, using his ability as a parselmouth. If he is Slytherin's heir than he deserves his power and has the right to use it against others. Voldemort hopes that being the heir of Slytherin with the power to refashion Hogwarts according to Slytherin's design, with no Muggle-borns, would establish him as a wizard on par with the founders of Hogwarts, forcing everyone to acknowledge his greatness.  

Voldemort is stopped, though, by Dumbledore, a wizard who combines incredible power with a mysterious lack of interest in its pursuit. Because Dumbledore honestly does not want power, he is immune to the young Voldemort's flattery and manipulation. From the beginning, Dumbledore sees Voldemort for what he is, someone with power uncoupled from morality. Long before Voldemort's nose falls away, Dumbledore sees Voldemort not as a young god, but as a monster. Voldemort refuses to even consider why someone like Dumbledore might turn away from power, being content to remain a schoolteacher, or how it could be that Dumbledore could still become so powerful despite rejecting dark magic. Instead, he insists that Dumbledore is a weak fool who allows his sentiments about love to hold him back from the unbridled pursuit of power. 

The problem of a life devoted to becoming the most powerful wizard who ever lived is that, no matter how strong a spell caster you become, there is still death. Instead of accepting death and living his life preparing for a final judgment, Voldemort's solution is to pursue Horcruxes. He splits his soul into different parts and puts the pieces into physical objects. In the Horcrux spell, Voldemort sees a form of magic so powerful as to conquer death. What he misses is the fact that the existence of Horcruxes demonstrate that the soul also exists and that it has a value so beyond conventional magic that one should not be willing to damage it for any amount of power. 

Since Voldemort does not believe in the power of love, he is unprepared for how Regulus Black would turn against him when he decides to leave Kreacher to die as part of setting up the chamber to house the locket Horcrux. This is important because Regulus' defiance against Voldemort is going to prefigure the defiance of Severus Snape and ultimately that of Lily Potter. Why should Regulus care about a mere house-elf like Kreacher? Why should Regulus be willing to sacrifice his life when Voldemort could give him a life of riches and power? Since Voldemort believes in nothing but power, he can never seriously consider such questions.  

If there is anything that should have alerted Voldemort to a higher power it is the existence of prophecy. Snape informs him of Trelawney's prophecy about a child who will come to challenge him. Instead of accepting the limits of his magic, Voldemort attempts to kill baby Harry and falls into the prophecy's trap. In order to satisfy Snape's request to spare Lily, he asks her to step aside and allow him to kill Harry. This allows Lily to sacrifice herself for Harry. Voldemort's Avada Kedavra curse backfires and his body is destroyed. Whatever power lies behind the prophecy is powerful enough to defeat Voldemort with only an unarmed mother and a baby. What Voldemort, though, sees is that his Horcruxes have proven to be more powerful than even death. As such, despite the setback, Voldemort thinks that his pursuit of power has been proven correct. All he needs now to do is wait for his opportunity to get his body back and he will seize control over the wizarding world and kill Harry Potter. From Voldemort's perspective, Harry is not really special at all but the fortunate beneficiary of chance. By killing Harry, everyone will see that it was Voldemort who was always the special one and fear him as the greatest dark lord ever.     

(To be continued ...)

The Moral Implications of Magic: Why Fantasy Needs Good and Evil

 

Essential to the genre of fantasy is the battle between good and evil. This does not mean that fantasy is simplistic in its morality. As Lewis noted in his review of Lord of the Rings, the characters, even Gollum, cannot be reduced to being either wholly good or evil even as good and evil are real forces that people must choose between. The challenge lies precisely in the fact that the characters are mixtures of these forces and the fight is less about defeating Sauron and his orcs, but the evil within.   

Tolkien's surprisingly nuanced understanding of evil is rooted in Tolkien's Augustinian worldview where evil is not an independent power, but a corruption of the good. There are two implications of this. One, the Devil was created good by God only to fall. Two, the Devil is fundamentally uncreative. He can take those things created good by God and corrupt them. Similarly, Sauron was created good before being seduced by Morgoth. Even Sauron's ability to create the rings of power was rooted in that element of good within him. Otherwise, he never would have been able to deceive the elves, who, contrary to the Rings of Power show, could never be accused of being fools.  

This fact that Sauron is fallen good rather than purely evil, creates the fundamental threat of Lord of the Rings. Worse than Sauron taking over Middle Earth is the possibility that someone (whether Frodo, Aragorn, Boromir or even Gandalf) will take up the ring to fight Sauron and become dark lords themselves. If Sauron was simply evil and not fallen, we would never take this threat seriously. To reinforce this danger, we have the character of Saruman the White, who was good for millennia only to fall in the years leading up to the story. If Saruman, Gandalf's superior on the White Council, could fall than even Gandalf is not safe from the ring's corruption. Ultimately, it is not Sauron who is the primary villain, but the ring and, by extension, the very people who are tempted to use it.   

Evil's importance to fantasy is inseparably tied to magic. To accept the existence of magic means to see it through one of two conflicting perspectives. To be evil means to see magic as power that some people can wield to place themselves above others, not just physically, but also morally. To be good means to see that magic indicates the existence of a higher power who created magic and to whom even the magic user must submit to. In the best of fantasy, while the dark lord may be out there to serve as the catalyst for the plot, the real struggle will be within the hero. Characters will fall or be redeemed based on what magic ends up meaning to them.

An example of the evil perspective can be seen in Glaucon's argument about the Ring of Gyges in Plato's Republic. In Glaucon's telling, morality is something that weak people invent. Anyone with power, say a magic ring that could turn them invisible, would quickly cast off all moral restraints and commit adultery and even murder. In the real world it is easy to see how political power can render people empathetically tone deaf. It is not hard to imagine a world with even greater power divides, such as between those with magic and those without, leading to magic users seeing non-magic users as animals to be killed for sport. 

This view can also be seen in the character of Uncle Andrew in Lewis' Magician's Nephew. Andrew tricks Polly into teleporting into another world and then blackmails Digory into going after her to rescue her. In his defense, he declares:

I am the great scholar, the magician, the adept, who is doing the experiment. Of course I need subject to do it on. Bless my soul, you'll be telling me next that I ought to have asked the guinea-pigs' permission before I used them! (pg. 23)

Digory has the same facts as his uncle, but sees the moral truth beyond them. He, therefore, responds:

I didn't' believe in Magic till to-day. I see now it's real. Well if it is, I suppose all the old fairy tales are more or less true. And you're simply  a wicked, cruel magician like the ones in the stories. Well, I've never read a story in which people of that sort weren't paid out in the end, and I bet you will be. And serve you right. (pg. 24) 

The existence of magic baptizes Digory's imagination so that he can no longer accept materialism, but, unlike his uncle, what he sees is not power that he can use to place himself over others. Instead, he comes to know a moral order that is as real as any physical object.  

While Uncle Andrew is a dilatant magician, playing around with things that he does not understand, Digory soon find himself dealing with the far more dangerous Queen Jadis, who destroyed her entire world. She feels no guilt about this. but declares:. "I was the queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will." (pg. 61) 

To be clear, Jadis, at this point, lacks the malice to be truly irredeemably evil. Instead, she comes across as more of a spoiled child. One imagines that she could still be saved if she could only have some sense smacked into her. The point of no return for Jadis is when she eats the apple and attempts to convince Digory to do the same. She is motivated by the desire to gain an even greater level of power for herself, mainly immortality. Digory is tempted by his desire to save his dying mother. What holds Digory back is that, by this point, he has come to know not just an abstract moral law, but the person of Aslan, who has commanded him to not eat the apple. Digory chooses to remain a normal boy, who will grow old and die but still have a relationship with Aslan. Jadis, seeing only power, chooses to become the White Witch. She may be immortal and destined to rule Narnia for a hundred years, making it forever winter and never Christmas, but she is forever beyond redemption.