The revitalized Lord Voldemort

But while Harry and company recognize the danger posed by the revitalized Lord Voldemort, other powerful figures prefer to live in denial. If Professor Dumbledore, willing to fight evil to the death, is an embodiment of Winston Churchill, then Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge and his sycophantic companion, Dolores Umbridge, represent the Neville Chamberlains of the Hogwarts world. They actually take Chamberlain one step further: Rather than treat with, or attempt to appease, the enemy, they deny his existence. They will not utter his name. Umbridge, in particular, is so vested in her delusion that she is willing to stoop to torture to try to get Harry to recant his first-hand, eye-witness, battle-tested knowledge of Voldemort’s return. If true, the reemergence of Voldemort would tarnish Fudge’s legacy of peace, and thereby permanently interrupt Umbridge’s upward mobility. They remain silent, ultimately imperiling themselves and everyone else.

Lewis recognized the existence of transcendent evil, and the way in which it infects the human spirit. The character of Lord Voldemort is the ultimate representative of the kind of fallenness Lewis describes in The Problem of Pain: “It had turned from God and become its own idol, so that though it could still turn back to God, it could do so only by painful effort, and its inclination was self-ward. Hence pride and ambition, the desire to be lovely in its own eyes and to depress and humiliate all rivals, envy, and restless search for more, and still more, security were now the attitudes that come easiest to it.” But Voldemort is not alone.

Harry, too, understands his own propensity toward evil—wondering aloud if he is becoming bad. That is an excellent question for any of us to ask ourselves. Lewis would argue that such an admission is proof that Harry is not. In Mere Christianity, Lewis describes how good and evil work in the hearts of those heading in either direction: “When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less… Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.”

At its core, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix explores how people react to the unveiling of evil in their midst. We muggles—I mean, humans—are in a very similar predicament. As Lewis notes in The Screwtape Letters, one of the most useful tactics of devils is for them to convince us that they do not exist. Academics all over the West continue to assert that there is no titanic struggle between good and evil in this world, because “good” and “evil” are merely “social constructions” rather than either end of an objective moral continuum. Screwtape would be proud. He tells his demon underling, Wormwood, “In peace we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them.” Recognizing the existence of evil in the world, or even in ourselves, is the first step toward combating it.

Continue: 1 2 3 4 5 6