Game of Thrones: Unleavened

[Warning: This post has spoilers for Game of Thrones]

"The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and buried in three measures of flour, until all of it was leavened." - Matt 13:35

This verse keeps coming back to me as I finish the third season DVDs of Game of Thrones. The world of Game of Thrones has no leaven; that is, no individuals formed in terms of the moral horizon of the Gospel. And that for good reason, for it is a world in which the Incarnation never occurred.

The leaven of the Gospel raises an entire culture, not merely the individual lives of believers. The important thing about St. Francis is not how many people he inspired to follow him in his passionate imitation of Christ, but what his example meant for the medieval world as a whole. When St. Francis joyfully rejects all standards of worldly success and failure, sings in his rags and his hunger, supremely happy with nothing but Christ in his heart, it is difficult for everyone, including sinners and unbelievers, to continue to take with absolute seriousness the worldly hopes that previously occupied them. We like to think that atheists introduced skepticism into the world, but actually Christ introduced a skepticism more radical than any atheist skepticism. The atheist, in his denial of God, leaves men where they are, focused on their temporal hopes of gold, glory, power, money, fame and romance (or simple lust). Christ shattered that existential horizon forever, and saints like Francis remind us of the fact.

Except in Game of Thrones. Without Christ, it is a world in which the secular goals of wealth and power remain absolute. It's actually a little worse than that. Even in the pre-Christian world philosophers like Socrates challenged conventional values to the point of driving their fellow citizens to execute them. Socrates never revolutionized a culture the way Christ revolutionized the West, but Game of Thrones doesn't even include a Socratic-like character, or indeed any philosophers worthy of the name. (This is one of the many ways in which it is distinguished from The Lord of the Rings, which includes genuinely philosophical figures like Gandalf who regularly shake men out of their moral complacency.)

The absence of the Gospel, and any authentically philosophical culture, gives Game of Thrones an ethically cramped and oppressive feel. The characters tend to melancholy, trapped in a variety of unhappy lives from which they'd love to be free, but escape from which they cannot conceive. Watching it, I found myself wishing that someone, somewhere, would muster a little moral imagination, sufficient to challenge the existential parameters that keep them prisoners. But this is Plato's Cave without a Socrates, who challenged the shadows from the inside, or a Christ, who shatters them from outside. For those in Game of Thrones, the shadows on the cave wall represent an absolute horizon.

The happiest people in the series are, naturally, those that have found some measure of love and romance. I say naturally because romantic love tends to subvert the scale of values one had previously taken for granted, and creates freedom by making one open to new existential possibilities. Combine this with the tradition of the nobility marrying for political reasons rather than love, and you have the primary engine of plot development in Game of Thrones. Cersei Lannister is matched in a loveless marriage with the drunk and sexually uninterested Robert Baratheon. In frustration she pairs off with her twin brother Jamie, and when Eddard's son Bran is crippled by Jaime after witnessing the incestuous Jaime and Cersei, we have the origin of the war that is the central action in the story. Robb Stark, the King of the North, is pledged to marry a daughter of Walder Frey, but instead marries the woman he loves, Talisa Maegyr, leading to perhaps the most shocking plot development of the series. Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf son in the family of the Stark's primary rivals, loves a prostitute but is forced to marry Sansa Stark, teenage daughter of the slain king Eddard Stark. Jon Snow, bastard son of Eddard, is vowed to the (celibate) order of the Nights Watch, but falls in love with a wildling woman while out on patrol. And on it goes.

But absent any religion or philosophy that gives them a taste of the transcendent, the love-struck in Game of Thrones typically fail to break through the Platonic shadows that define their lives. Tyrion's lover suggests that she and Tyrion elope (in effect) to a far off land, but he cannot get past the mundane question of making a living ("What would I do? Juggle?"), even though he is among the most educated men in King's Landing, and confesses that he finally cannot escape his familial ties ("I am a Lannister").  Jon Snow and his love Ygritte understand that neither Ygritte's wildling tribe nor Jon Snow's Nights Watch are really worthy of their devotion, but they ultimately can find no way to transcend their connections to each, and Ygritte winds up firing arrows into Jon as he returns to his people.

We are well short of the drama and passion of Heloise and Abelard here, let alone someone like St. Thomas Aquinas. Born into a noble family, St. Thomas not only renounced his aristocratic privileges, but insisted on joining the Dominicans, a mendicant order of friars. As G.K. Chesterton put it,

Thomas of Aquino wanted to be a Friar. It was a staggering fact to his contemporaries; and it is rather an intriguing fact even to us; for this desire, limited literally and strictly to this statement, was the one practical thing to which his will was clamped with adamantine obstinacy till his death. He would not be an Abbot; he would not be a Monk; he would not even be a Prior or ruler in his own fraternity; he would not be a prominent or important Friar; he would be a Friar. It is as if Napoleon had insisted on remaining a private soldier all his life. Something in this heavy, quiet, cultivated, rather academic gentleman would not be satisfied till he was, by fixed authoritative proclamation and official pronouncement, established and appointed to be a Beggar. (from GKC's St. Thomas Aquinas)

 His resolve survived two years of imprisonment by his own family and various subterfuges designed to corrupt his virtue and his vocation, like an attempted seduction by a prostitute. But, supported by the example of Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit, St. Thomas only became more firmly dismissive of the worldly goals his family had in mind for him. St. Thomas is a wonderful example of a man, inspired by the example of Christ, expressing the freedom that the Gospel makes possible. There is nothing remotely like this in Game of Thrones. The point is not that Game of Thrones is poorly written because the characters are trapped within an existence prescribed for them by their culture. In fact, the reason I am writing this post is because of the excellent job Game of Thrones does in showing what happens to people in a culture that has no window into the transcendent. It shows by contrast just what it is that (true) philosophy and religion bring.

But isn't there religion in the series? There is the Lord of Light, after all, and a priestess that is his prophet, and various characters periodically pray to a variety of gods. All this is, however, a primitive paganism that is merely an expression of the utilitarian purposes of men rather than a window to transcendence. The gods are just another way to get what you want. Stannis Baratheon pays attention to the red priestess because he thinks she, and the Lord of Light she serves, might be useful to him in his efforts to regain the Iron Throne. There is no Gandalf - or Socrates - around to tell him that the gods do not serve men, and when they appear to submit themselves to our purposes, it is only on the way to enslaving us. There is one man who attempts to warn him, an old smuggler and compatriot of Stannis's named Davos Seaworth, and while he correctly senses the danger the red priestess portends, he is not philosophically sophisticated enough to be a match for her. He is certainly in no position to tell Stannis to forget about the gods and instead fear God, the utterly transcendent Creator of the Universe and Ground of Being. Since God created all we are, He would only be frustrating himself were he to frustrate us, so we know God is by nature trustworthy, red priestesses or not. Especially if He condescends to come in the form of a man, and suffer and die at our hands, for our sakes.

One of the distinctive features of Game of Thrones is the level of torture it shows, reaching to the virtually pornographic. The bad people in the series can be very, very bad. This is not disconnected from the fact that the series lacks any serious religion or philosophy. This absence limits the moral range of the characters in the positive direction. But to maintain our interest, the story needs to morally distinguish the players, so we can root for the good guys and cheer the defeat of the bad guys. The best people in the series are not much more than moral mediocrities, since they can see no end beyond the capture or retention of their thrones - the same ends pursued by the villains. The difference between them is the level of ruthlessness and duplicity the villains are willing to use versus the heroes. The bad are portrayed as such vicious, heartless and cruel men that we can't help but root for the alternatives, even if, in a normal state of affairs, we really wouldn't see much reason why we should care if Robb Stark is to become King of the North. But given that the alternatives are men who take various amounts of enjoyment in torture for its own sake, Robb appears pretty good in contrast.

The Stark family is, in general, the "good family" in the series. And that doesn't mean much more than that they are basically honest, brave, dutiful and take no pleasure in cruelty for its own sake. That is, among the classic Aristotelian four natural virtues, they are temperate, courageous and just. But they lack the crucial fourth virtue, wisdom, which Aristotle tells us is the most important since it underlies all the others (e.g. the courageous man must not only be able to overcome his fears, but be able to distinguish when danger is worth risking and when it is merely foolish). Eddard Stark, the patriarch, imprisoned by the Lannister family, is offered the opportunity to save his daughter in return for his life. One of the "wisemen" of the series, a eunuch named Varys, urges him to take this course. In the event, Eddard gives his confession, but then is immediately executed anyway by the cruel young king Joffrey Lannister. So Eddard not only loses his life, but damages his family's honor and goes down to history as a traitor.

It was Eddard's misfortune that he did not have the counsel of a true wiseman like Socrates or benefit of his experience. Socrates, like Eddard, was offered the opportunity to plead guilty to the charges against him in return for a small fine, but on the principle that he would do no evil to himself, whatever others might do, refused. This principle was developed in Western culture to the general principle that evil may not be done that good might come of it - something the characters in Game of Thrones desperately need to hear, but no one is around to tell them.

I mentioned above that Game of Thrones is well written to the extent that it shows what happens to people in a culture with no vision of the transcendent. There is a question as to whether this an accident or a deliberate intention of the author. I know nothing of the author, so it may very well be his intention, but I suspect it is not. One of the interesting points made by several friends with whom I've discussed the series is that, in their opinion, it is more realistic than The Lord of the Rings in depicting the true moral nature of men, and in particular the way life must have been in the Middle Ages. They base their opinion on the very thing I have been discussing in this post - the moral mediocrity of even the best characters in Game of Thrones. They are impressed by the fact that most of the characters are neither completely good nor completely bad, but are sometimes good and sometimes bad, and they think this reflective of real life.

This isn't quite true, as I discussed above. There are no superlatively good characters in the story, but there are several, like Joffrey Lannister, for whom it is difficult to find any redeeming qualities. The moral range of the story does not extend to extraordinary goodness, but it does extend to extraordinary evil. And this certainly was not true of the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages had its vicious characters surely, but St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Louis, St. Catherine of Siena... these are not fictional characters. The point is not that these individuals never sinned - they surely did and would insist on the fact - but they transcended moral mediocrity through the imitation of Christ, a way of life that reordered their being from the bottom-up, giving them a perspective from which the incessant chasing of thrones and whores looked petty.

I suspect that the reason we might find Game of Thrones more "realistic" is that it effectively reads our contemporary moral exhaustion into a medieval setting. The people in Game of Thrones act more or less like the people around us, and respond as we might respond in their extreme circumstances. Like them, we can see no end beyond the purely secular aims of money, security and women, and we take it for granted that no one else can or ever could. Our one point of moral pride is that we are not as violent or cruel as people once were, and the series plays on that conceit in its emphasis on physical cruelty. And yet, while we can no longer imagine the moral greatness of a medieval saint, we have no problem imagining the moral depravity of a medieval sadist. Perhaps this is the characteristic contemporary manifestation of original sin.

Wizards and Muggles in the Potter series

The Harry Potter series of books has the uncanny feature that its critics (both pro and con) routinely overlook obvious features of the Potter universe. It is as though the series itself casts a spell of blindness on its readers.

Take the relationship between Muggles and Wizards. (Muggles, for the uninitiated, are ordinary folks like you and me who are without magical power. Wizards are able to use magic with the use of a wand.) The Boston Sunday Globe recently featured a lengthy article discussing the allegedly deep religious meaning of the series. The subtitle is "How the boy wizard won over religious critics - and the deeper meaning theologians see in his tale." Along the way, the article has this to say about the place of Muggles in the series:

Some religion scholars seem most interested in the Potter series as social commentary - in particular, they focus on Harry's refusal to take part in the anti-Muggle bias demonstrated by some pure-blood witches and wizards, as well as the hostility toward giants and ghosts and other menacing magical creatures that some characters in the series evince. "One of the overall themes of the Harry Potter series has to do with race and race-based persecution," says Lana A. Whited, a professor of English at Ferrum College in Virginia and the author of "The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter." And Dalton, of Brite Divinity School, takes the argument a step further, suggesting that the series's association of tolerance with the heroic characters is a critique of fundamentalism.

"To Dumbledore and Harry and his friends it didn't matter whether you were Muggle-born, or whether you were a giant," Dalton says, "whereas clearly the Death Eaters, the evil ones, were intolerant of people who were unlike them."

But not all scholars are quite so enthusiastic. Elizabeth Heilman, an associate professor of teacher education at Michigan State University and the editor of "Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter" says that, unlike Hermione, who adopts the cause of the house elves, "you don't see Harry Potter ever taking up a cause for the sake of the downtrodden. He's really a reluctant hero, and I'm not convinced the narrative has him effectively going beyond personal motives."

Now the most obvious characteristic of the relationship between Muggles and Wizards is its basic inequality. We can start with the names. "Muggles" is a name invented by Wizards to indicate ordinary, non-magical people (that is, you and me.) The vast majority of ordinary people have no idea that they are Muggles; they are unaware that a society of magical people has segregated itself into a largely separate world defined over against the ordinary world. This is because Wizards deliberately keep almost all ordinary people ignorant of the existence of Wizards. Nor are ordinary people aware that the border and any interaction between the ordinary and magical worlds is defined and policed by Wizards on terms determined by Wizards. These terms do not permit ordinary people entry into the Wizard world or even knowledge of its existence; should an ordinary person accidentally discover something magical, he has his memory erased (involuntarily) by a Wizard Ministry of Magic specifically charged with the task. Wizards occasionally allow ordinary people knowledge of the Wizard world when it suits their purposes (for example, when they wish help in tracking down criminal Wizards running loose in the ordinary world), but they keep this knowledge within strict limits.

The Wizard world has its own system of justice, courts and prisons. When you travel to Guatemala, you are subject to Guatemalan law, but this is not how it works for Wizards. When Wizards are in the ordinary world, they are subject to Wizard law and not ordinary law. Thus when the aforementioned bad Wizards run amok in the ordinary world, including killing ordinary people, the situation is not resolved by catching the Wizards and trying them before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. No, the equivalent of a Wizard posse tracks down the wayward Wizards and drags them back to the Wizard world for treatment by Wizard justice. What the next of kin of the dead Muggles are supposed to think is a matter of inconvenience to Wizards, but not one that demands that the Wizards tell the truth about what happened. Generally the Wizards hope that the Muggles will attribute the deaths to natural disaster and remain ignorant of the Wizard world.

When the Boston Globe article mentioned above says that Harry Potter refuses to take part in anti-Muggle bias, you might think that Harry resisted the whole Wizard-defined, Wizard-policed distinction between the ordinary and magical worlds. You might think that he objected to the policy of keeping ordinary people ignorant of Wizards, or of involuntarily erasing their memories, or of making Wizards not subject to ordinary law while in the ordinary world. Equality is only possible if everyone is subject to the same law and no one is kept in involuntary ignorance.

But that is not what is meant by "anti-Muggle" bias. The policies I have stated above are fully supported by all Wizards, both "good" and "bad", Dumbledore and Hagrid as well as Voldemort, and by most Harry Potter fans in my experience. When Hagrid, in an early scene from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, attacks the ordinary boy Dudley Dursley with magic in Dudley's own home, the notion that he has done something against ordinary law that might have ordinary legal consequences never occurs to him, Harry Potter, or even to the Harry Potter fans with whom I have discussed this scene. For them, since it is an assault by a Wizard on an ordinary person, it is not anything that might rise to legal categories, at least as far as the Muggle is concerned. Like a slave in the old South, Muggles have no legal standing in the Wizard world, or legal standing with respect to Wizards even in the ordinary world.

What is meant by "anti-Muggle bias" is the fact that sometimes Wizards are born of ordinary parents. When this happens the Wizard is introduced and admitted to Wizard society where, unfortunately, some Wizards hold a bias against Wizards born of non-magical parents, calling them "Mudbloods" and the like. The Mudblood "controversy" has a farcical quality about it, like the "old money" rich holding a bias against "new money" rich. Harry Potter and Dumbledore are insufferable because they are like the "old money" rich that nobly holds no bias against new money, it never occurring to their pure souls that they don't think the servants deserve rights or the vote anymore than do any of the other rich.

The situation is all the more ridiculous in the case of Hermione Granger, the advocate of the "cause of house elves" mentioned in the article above. What is fascinating about Hermione is that, alone among the three major characters, very little mention is made of her parents. Harry Potter's parents are dead but he makes retrospective acquaintance with them and discovery of their characters is a major part of the plot. Ron Weasley, Harry's other best friend besides Hermione, has Wizard parents who are significant characters in the action of the story. But Hermione's parents are barely mentioned in the thousands of pages of text.

The reason Hermione's parents are absent from the plot is that they are ordinary people, and therefore subject to all the general restrictions Wizards place on Muggles. They cannot visit or know anything about the Wizard world, except for the inevitable knowledge that there is a Wizard world and their daughter attends a school in it. Imagine a school that invited your daughter to attend, but told you that you could never visit, or know what goes on there, or even know how your daughter gets there. Nor can you ask for a demonstration of what your daughter learned at school, since Wizards are forbidden (normally) from using magic in the ordinary world. Your job is to write the check and demur from asking any inconvenient questions.

The archetype of "good Muggles", the Grangers know their place and dutifully send Hermione off to Hogwarts every year with no questions asked. Hermione reminds one of the college kid who agonizes over the fate of Tibet while ignoring her house-bound grandmother. It would have made a much more interesting story if the "elf rights" silliness were dropped and the Grangers given a more prominent role. Instead of spending every summer with Harry and his self-pity, why not a summer with Hermione exploring the pernicious rules the Wizards have set up with respect to Muggles? Does Hermione struggle with the fact that Wizard law does not permit her to tell her parents all the fantastic, life-threatening adventures she has had at Hogwarts? Or of the fact that she is at the top of her class and what it means? Suppose Mrs. Granger is a weak old woman who can barely do the housework. Is Hermione tempted to use magic to assist her in violation of the Wizard law? Wouldn't Hermione be a far more interesting character if the focus was on her decision to challenge Wizard law by using magic to assist her ordinary parents? This would make Hermione more genuinely Christ-like than any of the putatively Christ-like characters in Harry Potter, but more on that later.

Good Muggles, like good servants, do what they are told and do their job in the background, seen and heard as little as possible. Even the British Prime Minister is treated in peremptory fashion. The Wizard Minister of Magic (more or less the Wizard equivalent of a Prime Minister) occasionally needs to talk to the ordinary Prime Minister. He does so by magically appearing, unannounced and uninvited, in the Prime Minister's office. The idea that the Prime Minister is not at the beck and call of the Minister of Magic, and that the latter should get an appointment like anyone else, naturally never occurs to Wizards. The Minister of Magic tells the Prime Minister only the minimum of information necessary and generally leaves him in state of puzzlement. The Prime Minister has no way to call the Minister of Magic should he discover the need; communication is always a one-way street from Wizards to Muggles.

"Bad Muggles" get uppity and do not accept the place assigned to them by Wizards. They are seen and heard way too much. The most prominent bad Muggles are the Dursleys, Harry's relatives and the ordinary family in which Harry Potter is raised. The Dursleys are involved with the story because Harry Potter is dropped on their doorstep as an infant by Dumbledore, with written instructions concerning what they are supposed to do with him. Again, the notion that the Dursleys might have some say in their involvement with Wizards, or that their taking in Harry should be a matter of negotiation, is not one that occurs to Dumbledore. He has decided that the Dursleys are the best place for Harry to be raised and that is the end of it. The Dursleys place is to do what they are told without question, and like it.

As much as J.K. Rowling invites the reader to despise the Dursleys by making them mean, stupid, petty, vindictive and - worst of all - fat, I admit to taking an instant liking to Vernon Dursley, Harry's uncle. Virtually alone among ordinary people, Vernon refuses to kowtow to Wizards. When Hagrid shows up shortly after Harry's tenth birthday, demanding that Harry be turned over to him, Vernon refuses, leading to the magical incident with Dudley I mentioned above. Ordinary justice is, of course, on Vernon's side, since he is the de facto father of Harry (and by the Wizards' own choice, not his own!) and therefore has the right, not to mention the responsibility, to make decisions about Harry's future. Vernon doesn't like Wizards and thinks Hogwarts is a waste of time. The book presents Vernon as small-minded but, then, it is the prerogative of a parent to be small-minded. Dumbledore should have thought of this possibility before dumping Harry on Vernon, but then it never occurred to Dumbledore that Vernon might not simply submit to orders issued by Wizards. My respect for Vernon only increased as the series went on, as he consistently refuses to play the "nice Muggle" no matter how much the Wizards intimidate him with magic. The more Rowling insists that he is lacking in any virtue, the more I root for him to stick it to the Wizards.

The Globe article goes on to discuss the comparison of Harry and Dumbledore to Jesus Christ:

Eisenstadt sees Dumbledore and Harry, in different ways, as Christ figures - perhaps Harry representing the human Jesus, and Dumbledore the divine. And she posits that the New Testament depiction of elements of the Jewish community is represented by the goblins (unappealing bankers) and the Ministry of Magic (legalistic and small-minded).

Since we are casting parts for the New Testament, what part are the Muggles assigned? This brings up a basic problem with viewing the Potter series through a Christian lens. The New Testament has no place for the division of humanity into separate worlds based on talent or natural ability. It has no parallel to a self-segregated world of "extraordinary people" who live an existence deliberately disconnected from the "ordinary" mass of humanity. This is Gnosticism, not Christianity. In fact, we might say that Christ came in part to challenge such distinctions. But, supposing that such division can be sustained in Christian terms, what would be a legitimately Christian relationship between the magically endowed Wizards and ordinary Muggles? Hagrid gives a tissue-thin rationalization for why Wizards do not use their power to assist Muggles - "they [Muggles] would always be wanting magical solutions to their problems." Thank goodness that Christ did not have such an opinion with respect to his own miraculous power. Christ came precisely to use his power to serve the poor, humble and unknown, even though He knew it would cause him to be overwhelmed with crowds wanting miraculous solutions to their problems.

The Harry Potter series departs from the mainstream tradition of Christian-inspired literature by making Harry himself magical. Generally the hero of the Christian story is an ordinary fellow who encounters magic as a form of grace; as Cinderella is not magical but is graced by a fairy Godmother, or Snow White and Rose Red discover a prince hidden in the form of a bear. The heroic Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings are as unmagical as they could possibly be - the perfect Muggles. But they encounter grace through the magic of Gandalf and the elvish queen Galadriel.

The Hobbits imitate Christ the way Mary did; not by exercising a miraculous power that they do not possess, but by acting with a faith, love and humility that allows the grace of God to work through them.

Since Harry Potter, unlike Frodo Baggins, Cinderella, Jack from the Beanstalk, Mary or St. Francis of Assisi, is born with extraordinary magical power, for him to imitate Christ means something different than what it means for Frodo to imitate Christ. He must put his magical power to the service of the poor, humble and ordinary. But Harry never uses that power to challenge the pernicious distinction between Muggles and Wizards the way Christ used His miraculous power to give voice to the poor and forgotten and to challenge the rules of the Pharisees. Harry accepts the conventions of the world as given to him by the Wizard authorities; whatever "Christian" impulses he might have are restricted to the extraordinary world of Wizards and do not extend to the broader world of Muggles. At best, Harry is a good pagan who does not think Wizards should abuse Muggles, but it never occurs to him that the extraordinary (Wizards) are actually called on to serve the humble (Muggles), the way the magical Gandalf served the ordinary Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings. It never occurs to Harry that the real problem with the Ministry of Magic is not that it prevents him from terrorizing Dudley Dursley with magic, but that it prevents him from helping ordinary folks like the Granger parents. The Christian "inversion of values", by which the talented and superior do not live for themselves ala Aristotle, but are called to serve the plain and ordinary, is the obligation Christ revealed to the world; any series that does not recognize this obligation can't claim to possess a Christian sensibility. But the possibility of this inversion never occurs to any Wizard in the Harry Potter series, from the evil Voldemort through to the good Dumbledore.