Catholic Jedi, Protestant Wizards
A recent visit to Orlando brought home to me how different the respective aesthetic visions of Star Wars and Harry Potter are. A thesis came to me: Jedi are Catholic and Wizards are Protestant.
By which I mean: The narrative, themes, and overall look and feel of George Lucas’s fantasy galaxy are Catholic in nature, while those of J. K. Rowling’s are Protestant. I tossed off the idea on my micro blog, but let me unfold it a bit more here.
Although Star Wars is superficially science fiction, it’s presented from the start as a fairy tale set in the distant past, featuring an orphan, a princess, and an evil empire. Everything centers around the decadence and fall of a long-regnant republic and the rise, in its place, of an empire led by a tyrant. In other words, we’re in Gibbon territory; we’re somewhere in the early medieval period. Moreover, the films are saturated with nostalgia for a lost time of peace and justice when a small religious order was allied to the republican senate. This order selected children from a young age for training and membership, required of them lifelong celibacy, and taught them an intimate relationship with an all-powerful numinous reality that binds all life together. They also gave them swords and called them knights. For a millennium they governed without serious rival, though we should assume they put down untold rebellions(!) in countless corners of the galaxy.
In a sense Lucas is merging the old Roman Republic with the Holy Roman Empire of the middle ages. A thousand years of throne and altar united in service to the common good, led by an elite of religious warriors and celibate servants who minister from a temple down the proverbial street from the senate. Jedi are Roman Catholic.
Whereas Rowling’s wizards and witches belong to the modern or even the postmodern world. Their identity and power are a secret. They, too, form a minority of elites among the wider population of muggles, but they do not rule arm in arm with parliament (even if the prime minister apparently knows about them). In brief, they choose to live anonymously in a disenchanted age, though their very existence is a living contradiction of it. Yet their invisibility cannot, by definition, rise to the level of being a sign of contradiction—except to us readers, who (like them) like disenchanted lives yet (unlike them) continue to disbelieve in magic.
It’s true that the aesthetics of Harry Potter is “high church,” but only in the way that empty cathedrals in Europe are “high church.” Oxford and Cambridge and the aura of boarding schools may feel enchanted, or perhaps enchanting, to American readers, but that says more about us than about them. Does anyone at Hogwarts pray the daily office? Is there a chapel for morning prayer? Does anyone across all seven books pray at all? (I don’t recall mention of eucharistic celebration, but I cede the question to the scholastics of fandom.)
The difference with Tolkien on this point is important: Middle-earth’s religion is everywhere and nowhere because it is another world than ours, and that was his goal—he didn’t want an ecclesiastical hierarchy as a simple mirror image of Europe. Yet Rowling’s world is ostensibly ours plus magic, while religion is nowhere to be seen. This isn’t belied by her personal faith, the theological themes of the story, or the occasional references to Scripture; these rather prove the point. She is telling a Protestant story. Her wizards are secular. No doubt some of them believe in God. But whereas magic is just there, a living and undoubted phenomenon for any student or teacher at Hogwarts, God and religion are options, presenting one among many choices, including unbelief.
Harry Potter thus lives in the wake of the Protestant revolution. He is an autonomous individual adrift in a chaotic, disenchanted, disestablished time. He must choose for himself. The robes and castles are vestiges of a world gone by, never to return. To the extent that they continue to function religiously, they bind together a literally enchanted sub-world—a magical enclave safe, for a time, from the secular world. But after seven years, he has to return to that world and live as though magic doesn’t exist. In a sense, he must live a false identity, and therefore inauthentically. (Paging existentialism.)
By contrast, the Jedi in their heyday and even in their triumphant return to glory are definitionally public figures: they live differently, they dress differently, they speak differently—they hold themselves aloof from the masses. They may occasionally produce failed recruits as well as ronin, but a Jedi in disguise is a Jedi ashamed of himself. He lives as a recluse, in exile, because of some great defeat; his proper nature is to brandish lightsaber and wield authority as if he were born for it. Which, according to the Jedi, he was.
Such, at any rate, is my half-baked theory about why Jedi are medieval Catholics and Wizards are secular Protestants. I’ll now open up the floor for questions.
