I.
When I began this series many months ago, I did not intend to offer any focused critique of any existing fantasy works; nor did I intend to offer (beyond my initial thoughts on God in fantasy) anything like a prescription for how to approach religion in writing. I am suggesting things one might imagine and, in so doing, criticizing certain failures of imagination, not saying what anyone ought to do. I have, therefore, effectively treated authorial choices as morally neutral.
I still think this is basically the right proceeding for this kind of essay. However, a conversation with a friend has led me to think that one might say more about the limits an author might wish to impose upon his own writing of fantasy. The topic was the morality of Rowling's Harry Potter series, and, specifically, of its spiritual content. This was a matter of particular concern among Christian readers when the books first became popular; and, though I think active criticism has largely died down with the publication of Deathly Hallows, my friend, a devout Evangelical, offered a variation on the usual complaint. The concern was, put in various ways, that the content of Harry Potter is too "occult" or "magical" to be safe; that it may encourage (perhaps, has in fact encouraged) readers to dabble in esoteric practices and so imperil their souls; that it, in some hidden way, corrupts the mind and draws people away from God.
To this objection, I offered the obvious counters: although theologically confused, Rowling is a professed Christian, and her profession must inform any reading of the work; Rowling most likely saw the magic as mere fantasy, and most readers probably do likewise; and many do in fact find within the books valuable theological or moral themes, so claiming that they are inherently wicked is unlikely to succeed. In short, his reading is bad as a reading: it does not correspond to fact, or distorts certain facts out of proportion, and it confuses the literary for the real.
II.
Despite the force of these counters, I still feel a certain weight behind my friend's argument. Reading is, after all, a moral act, and books, like conversations, can shape a person's character. Some books are harmful, if not to everyone, then to people of certain temperaments or at certain moments of weakness. One would not (to choose a few extreme cases) give a copy of Mein Kampf to a person who suspects an all-pervading Jewish conspiracy, or an ancient Egyptian book of curses to a young person hungry for arcane knowledge or power. Even if one thinks the curses so much hookum, the desire for control and esoteric insight is itself vicious. Though the book might not have the same influence on the mind of a scholar of ancient religion, it is unlikely to do him any good, either: the book is evil in itself, because it is made by an evil person with evil intentions; reason and the distance of time and belief can, however, lessen its effect.
The difficulty, of course, for the Christian is that things such as curses might well be real. I say "might be," because circumspection is needed. It is common among modern Evangelicals influenced by the Pentecostalist and Charismatic movements to credit virtually every personal or social evil to the hidden work of demons, and to construe any pretension to occult power as a proof of the malignant presence of the Devil. This seems to me unwarranted. As others have put it, "The Catholic Church admits in principle the possibility of interference in the course of nature by spirits other than God, whether good or evil, but never without God's permission. As to the frequency of such interference especially by malignant agencies at the request of man, she observes the utmost reserve." Most Protestants, I think, would agree.
That there are demons and they can exercise malign influence is manifest from the Gospels; that the power of Christ is incomparably greater is even clearer, and we have few to no examples of successful magic in Scripture (perhaps the summoning of the ghost of Samuel by the witch of Endor, but, if Samuel appeared at all, that must have been the result of a special divine miracle, as a judgment on Saul). In the New Testament, the sorcerers Simon Magus, Elymas, and the sons of Sceva are rendered at once powerless and ridiculous by the Holy Spirit, and I can think of no curse--except the curse of God himself--that is shown to hold even temporary power over the people of God. Balaam was not even able to pronounce such a curse.
Still, there are demons, and there are people who try to invoke them. There is, moreover, the whole morass of myth, esoteric doctrine, and arcane rituals that makes up the world's occult traditions; what little of this I have encountered has seemed either banal or bunk, but some who have dabbled in it--such as the young C.S. Lewis, when he had grown wiser--do sternly warn against its allure, and I must think them right.
The problem with my friend's approach is that "the occult," defined in this broader sense, may well be found in all kinds of places. There are passing allusions to astrology, alchemy, and so on in Lewis's Narnia books; That Hideous Strength, in turn, works in part through the elemental qualities of the planets (on whose falsehood Lewis was, of course, clear), and envisions Merlin as a practitioner of a kind of relational magic in a world once animist. In part, of course, Lewis is just playing with the medieval ideas of which he was a professional student; in part, perhaps, his work showed the influence of his dear friends Owen Barfield, the Anthroposophist, and of Charles Williams, at once (it is said) a devout Anglican and a devotee of arcane, Hermetic and Rosicrucian philosophies.
However, except for a few wishful witches and his more breathless online critics, few would be likely to see either of Lewis's speculative series as an engine for advancing occult lore, let alone magical practice. These are subordinate elements within Lewis's Christian vision--less important, perhaps, than a more general Romanticism, and still less than what is often called his "Platonism." He also warns the reader against trying to dabble in magic: even for Merlin, as Ransom says, it was not entirely safe or healthy, and it is now "utterly unlawful."
The chief literary purpose Merlin's magical approach to the world plays is, to my reading, first to offer to the reader one of the obvious alternatives to the brutally rationalistic materialism that is the main target of the book's criticisms, as of the popular-philosophical Abolition of Man, and then to show that the Christian relationship to nature (embodied in the paradisaical Elwin Ransom) rises above even an animistic paganism. Ransom does not wield nature or commune with its spirits; he is Man, dealing kindly with the animals, living in the presence of angels, and trusting in the power of God alone.
III.
Merely identifying the presence of an occult motif (or, more properly, one shared with occult thinkers or texts) does not, therefore, exhaust the real import of a work of fiction. Moreover, though the magical themes of a book like That Hideous Strength could work an unhealthy influence on some minds, that is, I think, a danger brought to the book, not one that the author intended, or that most readers are likely to encounter. However, there are books whose portrayal of magic is much more pervasive, and much closer to actual magical practice.
Here, Harry Potter is not an obvious example: the magic is, quite simply, ridiculous, and put as much to benign use as malignant. It is not, and is not meant to be construed as, magic or witchcraft as it has actually been practiced in our world: it is a kind of talent used by the innately gifted, not an arcane property of the world to be conjured by the initiate. Nevertheless, the magic of Harry Potter, taken seriously, does raise a number of problems.
First, what is the relationship of "wizardry" to real-world magic, as condemned in Scripture, found in a multitude of ancient texts, or allegedly practiced by the witches of the early-modern trials? This, I gather, is largely side-stepped, and understandably so: probably Rowling does believe magic to be so much fantasy, and didn't want to get into the issue. However, the problem remains, and it leads swiftly to a second and larger difficulty, the opposition between Wizards and Muggles.
The basic counter to arguments like my friend's is that the magic is a mere literary device. However, the wizards are still removed, like actual magicians purport to be, from the common herd. If they are not all arrogant, the art itself could well be accused of arrogance. Rowling, to her credit, does much to puncture this, showing the best wizards, people like the Weasleys, to be genuinely fascinated with the muggle world, squarely condemning the blood purists, and underscoring the humanity of the wizards themselves. Nevertheless, the magician remains a breed unto himself, both more interesting (as Gene Veith has pointed out, in one of the shrewder Christian criticisms of Harry Potter) than the muggle and able to work arts parallel to the arts of the real magician (I say "parallel," of course, as I do not suppose that her wizards' astrology or potions, e.g., are more than loosely inspired by the sort of thing found in magical manuscripts).
The key point is this: between these two things, there is a danger that the distinction between "literary" and "real" magic will collapse, that Rowling's wizards will be found, upon close examination, simply to be real-world magicians, re-imagined as harmless (and perhaps even Christian) persons of gifts but not character other to our own.
IV.
I doubt Rowling ever intended anyone to think this deeply about her magicians, who are far more whimsical than the often morbid Christian critiques have made them. I do not doubt, moreover, that the average reader would simply tell me to lighten up and stop taking a middle-grade-to-young-adult series so seriously. What I am about to say, therefore, is not really a criticism of works such as hers; it is instead a warning to people who think systematically about fiction (as I try to do), and who are less able to approach such things lightly and innocently.
Just as the Christian is bound always to tell the truth about God--even in, perhaps, imagining a fantasy setting in which God is not known--he is also bound to tell the truth about sin and righteousness, about good and evil, about the servants and the enemies of God. Reading is a moral act, and so is writing. The one who reads merely for diversion likely does so innocently enough, even when reading books that are not altogether good; but that is not obviously true of the careful reader, and still less of the writer, who must dwell on and labor over his work.
One might imagine a fantasy world in which, as I suggested in the last post, garlic and virgins and clothes of gold ward off demons; I doubt, however, that one could innocently depict such a thing as really efficacious, even in a fantasy world. That is not to close off description of peoples with beliefs very different from our own, or from the truth. A work of historical fiction or fantasy (some of Kay's novels come to mind) that did not portray something like the rituals and beliefs of the Chinese or Romans or Aztecs or whoever it may be would be simply dishonest about its subject. There is, moreover, no need that I can see for the author to comment explicitly on the proceeding--that the characters believe it is enough, and any mature reader can see that we are not expected to agree. The novelist is, after all, acting something like the anthropologist, describing and repeating without interposing his own judgment. Something similar probably applies in a story set in a world explicitly distanced from our own, by style, setting, language, or people.
However, it is quite another thing from this to show a world in which magic really does work, and no distance opens up between the reader and the magical act. The reader of the historical fantasy knows that he is reading something set in a quasi-historical world, with beliefs different from any we would hold to. The reader of the ordinary fantasy, by contrast, is imagining a world in which magic works, tout court, and that is not something that the Christian can countenance, except with great care--he must, in effect, be showing a magic that is not "our" magic at all. A demon who could be warded off with garlic would not be a real demon, any more than a god who ruled over a single planet would be the real God.
V.
In the final sum, I suppose, I don't quite believe in fiction, in the lie purely for entertainment (and I recognize that this may be a failure in me as reader). "Magic" is a literary device, in many stories; but it is something that should not be glorified in anything like its real-world form, any more than adultery or theft or the worship of idols ought to be. Some stories will, therefore, lie simply beyond the pale. I see no bright line, however, and I suspect, again, that some stories are harmful for some readers and innocent enough for others.
Harry Potter is an example. Empirically, it is simply not true that all or even most readers have begun to dabble in magic for themselves (where is the enormous explosion of interest in such practices?), though some larger number may have gone on to read fantasy of a more morbid kind. The obvious successors to Harry Potter by sheer number of sales are actually dystopian young adult novels--The Hunger Games, Divergent, and so on--or perhaps A Song of Ice and Fire, which features a good deal of magic, yet in a world profoundly different from our own and, apparently, atheistic in its metaphysics.
Still, there are, I suspect, personalities that ought not read something like Harry Potter, and everyone who reads any book needs moral as well as imaginative formation. The person who reads a certain kind of fantasy book, knowing that magic is wrong and believing that this kind of "magic" has nothing to do with the actual thing, may do so without harm; the person, on the other hand, who hungers for spiritual things and turns first to this, does so to his peril.
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