Up@dawn 2.0

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Harry Potter and the Philosophy of Love

One of the absolute biggest themes in Harry Potter, aside from basic good verses evil, is the theme of Love. Love is the beginning and the end to the entire series, and it is Love that saves the day in the end. It is Love that saves Harry time and time again, from his parents sacrificing themselves to save their only son in the beginning, to Harry saving the entire Wizarding, and even Muggle, world from Voldemort's reign of terror and destruction, to Severus Snape, and even Harry, growing in Love and gaining redemption from Love.

Greek philosophers took the very general word 'love' and broke it down into three specific and different words for love: eros, referring to romantic love, is analyzed in Plato's Symposium as a way to 'show how crude physical desires can... draw the soul upward to things beautiful and divine'(55); philia, the love one would experience in friendships, which, say authors of this chapter, David and Catherine Deavel, ' was generally believed to be superior to romantic love'; and finally, agape, the strongest and most powerful form of love, the unconditional, self-sacrificing love. David and Catherine Deavel mention "When the Gospel writers tell us that 'God is love,' it is agape that they have in mind"(55). It may be eros love that binds Snape to Lily Evans Potter emotionally at first, but once the love of his life is murdered in cold blood, his eros love slowly but surely transforms into agape love, and it is this powerful love for Lily that drives Snape to do everything in his power to protect the most precious thing to her, her son for whom she willingly sacrificed herself.
As David and Catherine Deavel mention a couple of times, the love Snape experiences, this agape love, is not the "warm fuzzies" most people think of when 'love' is mentioned. This is the kind of love that puts himself at constant risk in order to protect the people fighting Voldemort. For example, Snape hates Harry because he sees Harry as being everything that James was. However, despite this intense hatred for Harry, this agape love allows Snape to "choose to act for what he knows to be their[the Order, Harry, etc.] good despite strongly disliking many of them". The Deavels say that "Love requires self-sacrifice, binds one's happiness to the good of another, makes one vulnerable to loss and grief, and strengthens one's commitment to the good".

Through Love, the stronger and more superior to eros love but not quite as powerful as the unconditional agape love, both Harry and Snape become perfect in love and are redeemed in their Love and makes them both "more fully human" as the Deavels say, while Voldemort, who has never known or understood or even cared to comprehend this philial Love, and therefore does not just remain un-redeemed, but becomes less human as well. David and Catherine Deavel point out that in a way, "In love, one entrusts one's soul to another... a friend shares another's joys and sorrows and acts for his good... Friendship strengthens the soul's integrity...". It is love that makes us as human beings more fully human. By giving part of yourself or your soul to another, that part of your soul can continue to live and thrive and grow into something better and stronger, making us better and stronger, too. Voldemort has never understood this concept, and so tries to make himself stronger by (literally) giving his soul to inanimate objects, or creating Horcruxes, which not only divides and weakens his soul, but those pieces of himself stagnate: they cannot grow and change, they are simply stuck. These divisions in his soul make him less human, and Rowling even shows this to her audience by describing him as having more snake-like features rather than more human characteristics. However, if Voldemort had chosen, he could have potentially gained redemption just as Harry and Snape did. Through the feeling of intense remorse, he could have put the pieces of his soul back together again and become fully human. However, this remorse is only the result of knowing and comprehending such a powerful concept as love, which for me proves that the Dark Lord is truly the weakest and most incapable wizard of all, because in unable to grasp and handle the most powerful magic of all: Love.

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