Dumbledore In The Garden Of Gethsemane

One thing that always bugged me about the Harry Potter series was the flippant way that death was treated by the series as a whole, but especially by Dumbledore. Voldemort’s fear of death seemed the only reasonably human and natural attitude in the face of death. Of course, trying to attain immortality by ones own murderous efforts is not good. But Voldemort’s basic repugnance towards death is perfectly understandable. Not so much Dumbledor’s constant belittling and mocking of Voldemort’s fear of death. “It’s only the unknown that we fear in death”, “to the well-organized mind, death is just the next great adventure” (well-organized, huh?).

It’s wasn’t just Dumbledore though. The omnipresent presence of ghosts in the hallways (and bathrooms) of Hogwartz, the Death-Day parties, the head master paintings, the veil of death in the ministry of magic, all these things–often through crudity and the ridiculous or comic– attempted to tame death and make it innocuous. “Well, that’s Christian isn’t it?” I can imagine someone asking. Not really. To see why, we need to go to the Garden of Gethsemane.

That’s where Jesus agony in the garden took place. That agony–to refresh everyone’s memory–was in response to Jesus impending death. According to the Gospels, Jesus soul was troubled in the face of others’ death as well, such as the death of Lazarus. But it was with the prospect of his own death that Jesus sweat tears of blood and pleaded with the Father that, if possible, that particular cup be spared him. The reason this is important is because Jesus reaction to death is the truly human one. In fact, it was Jesus’ agony in the garden that proved that Jesus truly had a human will. In the debates about whether or not Jesus had two wills, a human will and a divine will, theologians like Maximus the Confessor saw in this episode in the garden the proof of Jesus’ two wills. In other words, nothing is more human than Jesus’ reaction of fear and dread in the face of death. The Harry Potter character whose reaction to death most resembled Jesus’, was Voldemort–the epitome of evil.

The character whose attitude to death least resembled Jesus’ attitude is Dumbledore. So here is the problem. Knowing what we know about Dumbledore’s manliness regarding death, and his turning his nose down at Voldemort’s running away from death, we can only conclude that if Dumbledore had been in the garden that night of Jesus’ agony, he would have mocked and belittled Jesus the same way he did Voldemort. He would have shook his head in disgust at the sight of Jesus laying there on the ground weeping at the approach of death. “Dont’ you know”, he might of said, “that to the well organized mind, death is but the next great adventure”?

It’s on the Mount of Olives that we see just how much opposition there is on this point between Jesus and Dumbledore. Jesus represents the appropriate human response to death, while Dumbledore represents the HP series as whole and its not-so-human presentation of death. This contrast is important to see because death is one of the primary themes of the series, and many Catholic commentators have claimed that it is a Christian one. When seen through the lens of the Garden of Gethsemane, it doesn’t exactly look like it. But who cares? What difference does it make?

Well, for orthodox Christianity death is evil. It’s an intrusion into God’s creation and his will for human beings. When Jesus, or anyone fears death, he is giving witness that death truly is an evil, because thats how we react to evil. We don’t like it, we avoid, we run from it, we fear it. Jesus agony in the garden was a great testimony that death is truly the enemy of man and the enemy of God. But the message of Dumbledore, who is the wisdom figure of Harry Potter, is that this reaction is foolish. But if its foolish, than death must not really be evil. It’s can’t really be our enemy. Indeed the message of Harry Potter seems to be that death is natural, good, fun (next great adventure and all that), and necessary to our true spiritual development.

That’s the worldview of some religious systems, but it’s alien to Christianity whose hope is in the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus really defeated death, because death really is an enemy. Resurrection is not life after death, its the overturning of death itself. There’s a huge difference. It’s the difference between building hospitals to heal the sick, and creepy spiritualities that would have us hurry along the path of death–that next great adventure. Even though our hope is in resurrection, Christians still avoid death, while people like Dumbledore go in for euthanasia, assisted suicide and dehydrating people to death.

Those who are masters of death in a Harry Potter sense, can arrange for their deaths at the hands of a friend like Dumbledore did with Snape. Why not? Are we not supposed to embrace death like a long lost friend and go off into the sunset like good buddies–arm in arm? Isn’t that what Judas and Jesus did in the gnostic gospel of Judas?

Creepy.

But what about the passage on the tombstone? “The last enemy to be destroyed is death”. In this passage, St. Paul is referring to the resurrection. The resurrection is an anti-death notion, it implies that death really is our enemy. Unfortunately, Hermione redefines it to mean merely living after death. She thus psychologizes the meaning of “enemy” in that passage so that it merely means being afraid of death or running away from it. In other words, an orthodox Christian view of death is turned into the gnostic view of death of Dumbledore and Deathly Hallows.