Harry Potter and the Young Man’s Mistake
The Illusion of Innocence and the Temptation of Power
PASSIONS AND ILLUSIONS ARE BOTH DANGEROUS AND SEDUCTIVE. BOTH LEAD TO ERRORS IN JUDGMENT, AS DANIEL P. MOLONEY REMINDS US IN THIS ESSAY. BOTH CAN BE VALUABLE TOOLS, BOTH CAN BECOME TRAPS. AND YET, HOW DULL THE WORLD WOULD BE, EITHER THE REAL OR FICTIONAL WORLD, WITHOUT THEM!
I’VE JUST FINISHED Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and I’m worried about Harry. I’m still young enough to enjoy J. K. Rowling’s novels as told from their adolescent hero’s point of view, but I’m also old enough to be able to see beyond that point of view, and my older self is rather worried. I’m not sure it’s a good idea for Harry not to return to Hogwarts for his last year; the decision seems more rash than prudent. I’m also worried that he tried to use the Cruciatus Curse on Severus Snape, as he already had tried to use it on Bellatrix Lestrange in the last pages of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It seems that these curses are Unforgivable in part because they require true malice to be used effectively—at least, that’s what both Lestrange and Snape tell Harry after he tries to torture them. If that’s the case, then these curses require a terrible cruelty of heart, and I’m afraid that Harry’s passionate nature might lead him to become cruel enough to use them. I’m also worried that Harry broke up with Ginny Weasley. There’s something noble and selfless about Harry’s desire to face Lord Voldemort alone so that nobody else will get hurt. But there’s also something dangerous about it, because it exacerbates a weakness in Harry’s character—his young man’s desire to be self-sufficient.
I’m older than Harry, but not as old as Albus Dumbledore, and so I am interested almost as much in Dumbledore’s reflections on aging as I am in Harry’s display of the virtues and defects of youth. And so while I worry about Harry, I also worry that, when I worry about him, I might be making what Dumbledore calls an “old man’s mistake.” I take this phrase from the end of Order of the Phoenix:
“Harry, I owe you an explanation,” said Dumbledore. “An explanation of an old man’s mistakes. For I see now that what I have done, and not done, with regard to you, bears all the hallmarks of the failings of age. Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young . . . and I seem to have forgotten . . . lately.”
An “old man’s mistake,” we subsequently discover, is to try to protect those we love from painful truths and burdensome responsibilities. Dumbledore mentions two of his own such mistakes: he tried to distance himself from Harry in order to protect him from Lord Voldemort, and he refused to tell him about the prophecy concerning him because, as he puts it, “I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth.”
These mistakes are quite significant, for if Dumbledore hadn’t made them, Harry would never have tried to enter the Ministry of Magic, and Sirius Black would not have died trying to save him. If Dumbledore had confided in Harry and trained him in Occlumency himself, Harry might have been able to defend himself from Voldemort’s attempts at possession, and he certainly wouldn’t have been tricked and trapped the way he was. In the fight against Voldemort, it is necessary for Harry Potter to face certain hard realities about the world and his important responsibilities within it. But Dumbledore loved Harry’s innocence too much, and wants to protect that innocence by shielding him from knowledge that would force him to grow up too fast. Dumbledore loved Harry’s childhood innocence too much, and this seemingly minor, otherwise forgivable fault ended up endangering the lives of several people, and costing the life of a loyal friend. Throughout the book, Harry is infected with what seems to be merely an adolescent’s anger at not being treated as an adult. But in what I found to be a surprising turn of events, Harry’s judgment about his own maturity and responsibility is shown to be more right than the usually impeccable Dumbledore’s. Loving too much, and in the wrong way, we learn, is actually a mistake—a vice, even.
I’m trying to sort out my emotions. On the one hand, I want to protect Harry from the dangers that I see lying ahead, dangers that are as much moral as mortal. Yet I don’t want to impede Harry’s growth by making an old man’s mistake. In this, as in many things, I think that I can learn from Dumbledore. And I can also learn from Rowling, whose tremendous success is due in no small part to her unusually keen insight into the personalities and lives of young adults. Her young heroes are believable because she really does understand kids at those ages—even to the point of making fine distinctions between thirteen-year-olds and fourteen-year-olds. And I think that she puts her finger on an aspect of contemporary child-rearing that needs to be reexamined: that adults value the innocence of children more than children do. I also think that she’s right to suggest that sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, it is the children who are right and the adults who are wrong.
The Old Man’s Mistake
Adults value innocence in children because they think that innocence is a rare commodity in the adult world. The love of children seems to be pure and full of joy, while the responsibilities of adulthood are full of compromises and muddling through. Children play; adults work. Children have not a care in the world; adults have to worry about children and the world. Children are, in other words, insulated from all that makes being an adult so difficult. So it is no wonder that world-weary adults see the innocence of children as something extremely valuable and worth protecting.
Rowling’s books remind us that children hate it when adults think this way—when, in order to protect their “innocence,” we thwart their explorations and inquiries into the adult world. Children are not under any illusion that their lives are filled with innocence. Kids can be cruel and petty, foul-mouthed and proud, merciless judges and vicious gossipers. They have jealousies and hatreds, cliques and quasi-tribal allegiances that form easily and disband just as easily. From the beginning of their time at Hogwarts, for example, Harry and Draco Malfoy are rivals, and this at first rather shallow dislike only intensifies as they get older—to the point that when Harry is groping for a spell to use against Draco, he uses the one the Half-Blood Prince had designated as “for enemies.”
Children also know that their worst enemies are often themselves. Part of growing up is acquiring the self-control and the moderation that marks virtue, but often children don’t control themselves even when they know that they should. In Order of the Phoenix, Harry takes a swing at Draco after their Quidditch match, and is punished harshly. Harry feels anger at the injustice—Draco deliberately provoked him—but he also knows that his lack of self-control betrayed him. The joy of Draco’s bloody nose was fleeting compared with the punishment of being banned from Quidditch for life. Harry should have known better, but his anger was too strong, and he failed both his friends and himself. The same goes for his failure to practice his Occlumency lessons, and his procrastination during the second task in the Triwizard Tournament. On numerous occasions, Harry kicks himself for not working at something important as hard as he should, out of simple immaturity.
Children see adulthood as something desirable. They want to be given responsibility, and not just the responsibilities (such as taking out the trash) that the adults don’t want. In Order of the Phoenix, Harry is outraged that all the adults are keeping secrets from him, especially after he has proven himself to be brave and clever and able to handle situations that would overwhelm most adults. Rowling is of course depicting what adults will recognize as a certain sort of teenage moodiness, but in her characteristically balanced way she is also sensitive to the reasons for Harry’s anger. Yes, he’s a bundle of hormones raging out of control, but he’s also the central figure in the fight against Voldemort, and he’s right to think that he should be treated as such. Sometimes he’s angry for no real reason, but sometimes he’s angry at what he thinks is the unjust way he’s being treated—and Rowling takes her teenagers seriously enough to acknowledge that they often have a point.
Children know that they lack virtue and that their lives are filled with sin and vice. That’s why they want to grow up. Why, then, do adults try to protect them from adulthood?
There are all sorts of practical reasons we do this. As Rowling makes clear, we often grow up through taking on important responsibilities. We are forced to push our talents to the limits, face our own inadequacies and limitations, juggle different priorities and learn from our mistakes. When he founds Dumbledore’s Army and starts training his classmates, Harry finds that he is good at teaching, and that the other students appreciate being trained to fight their recently risen enemy. For the first time, Harry finds joy not in sports or in juvenile hijinks, but in taking on an important adult responsibility and discharging it well. Likewise, when Draco is given the duty of finding a way to smuggle Death Eaters into Hogwarts, he becomes a much more serious person than before—in previous years, his purpose in life seemed limited to confirming in his own mind that he was superior to Harry. Even Percy Weasley finds tremendous satisfaction in adult responsibilities—being Head Boy and then working in the Ministry.
We’ve all had this experience of performing an important duty well. It typically is one of the most important and memorable moments for us, a rite of passage into maturity, when we first appreciate the intrinsic satisfaction—and fun—of fulfilling a difficult and important task. Adults often look to such moments as giving meaning to their work and to their lives. But, we tell ourselves, there are many responsibilities that are too important to entrust to teenagers. Often, it’s because the tasks are complicated and difficult, and since we don’t want to take the time to explain them fully, we prefer to have someone more experienced take them on. That’s a practical reason for “protecting” kids from the responsibilities of adulthood.
But there is also a culture-wide belief that childhood is a time of innocence that needs to be preserved and prolonged, and that to face the burdens of adulthood prematurely is a cause for sadness. I think that Rowling is right to challenge this view.
Sometimes we think this way because we aren’t mature ourselves, or at least, we regard adulthood as something onerous. There’s a side to Arthur Weasley that, rather than discipline Fred and George, would prefer to laugh at their antics. Ludo Bagman seems to wish that he’d never grown up, and Sirius Black feels nostalgia for his own schoolboy days. If adulthood is all joyless responsibility and burdens, then it follows that children should be protected from it as long as possible.
On the other hand, sometimes adults don’t see children as real people in their own right. Children are thought to be extensions of their parents, as several people take Harry to be an extension of James and Lily or as Amos Diggory seems to regard Cedric, or as Vernon and Petunia Dursley regard Dudley. Molly Weasley, whom Rowling depicts with enormous affection, seems nonetheless to be incapable of treating her remarkable children with any sense of perspective. She seems to think adulthood and childhood don’t exist on a continuum, but are entirely separate worlds that should be kept apart until the children reach the legal age of maturity. And even then, she doesn’t really believe her children are adults: It’s amusing that she thinks that Bill and Fleur are too young to marry, when she and Arthur actually eloped at a similar age.
Maturity doesn’t come simply with time and experience; it comes from reflecting on experiences and learning from them. Children form their personalities with every decision they make and every lesson they learn. They aren’t simply born with the personalities of little adults, or magically acquire an adult personality on their eighteenth birthday (or seventeenth, in the wizarding world). And because of this, it is a mistake to forget that they need to be challenged, trusted and given real responsibility. When we look at children we have to always keep in mind that they are works in progress and remind ourselves that they are the most important works entrusted to us.
There’s a third sort of misjudgment we can make about young people: we forget that they are still young. Because we live among other adults, we grow used to their stability of character. Once we get to know an adult, we can safely assume that we won’t have to revise our estimation of him or her much. But we can’t make that assumption about the young, because they change rapidly. They aren’t set in their ways, and can acquire new habits and outlooks quite suddenly. If we aren’t paying close attention, we can lazily assume that the young man before us is the same irresponsible young boy he was a few months ago. And before we know it, he’s angry at us for treating him like someone he no longer is.
So I’ve been trying to understand the old man’s mistake, and I think I disagree with Dumbledore. He says the mistake is made by “fools in love” who love the young too much. Instead, I think, it is the mistake of not loving them at all. Instead of loving the teenager with all the complexities of his or her own still-forming personality, we are infatuated with the idea of “youth,” or with the father in the son or with our memories of our own teenage years, or we assume we know the person we imagine is still there. We fail to love young people as the individuals they are and are becoming, and in the process fail to treat them correctly.
What Youth Cannot Know
If I am to avoid the old man’s mistake, I have to be very careful to take the measure of Harry correctly, to see him as he actually is right now. But even taking the appropriate care, I still worry that Harry is making some mistakes, ones that seem characteristic of the immature young man.
From the vantage of his many years, and from his decades spent at Hogwarts, Dumbledore knows the defects typical of youth. The first of these is the most obvious: The young cannot know how time affects people. Of course, older people are less energetic; they find practical jokes less amusing; they tend to have set ways of doing things and are reluctant to change them. But it’s a truth of simple logic that no young person can know what it is like to be older or to have seen more things happen than he or she has seen. No young person can know what it is like to grow up. On the other hand, older people have seen their classmates change and mature, and know, for example, that a person sometimes changes the ideas and beliefs he or she had as an adolescent. Young people can gain some sense of this through the reminiscence of older people, as we see starting in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban when Harry meets James Potter’s boyhood friend Remus Lupin and learns that his father was a high school prankster. But it is a lesson that is hard to accept until you’ve seen it with your own eyes.
Time is one mystery to the young. In the Department of Mysteries in the Ministry of Magic, researchers study two other mysteries so great that their secrets have yet to be cracked. Nearly Headless Nick tells Harry about one of them:
“I know nothing of the secrets of death, Harry, for I chose my feeble imitation of life instead. I believe learned wizards study the matter in the Department of Mysteries. . . .”
And Dumbledore tells him about the other:
“There is a room in the Department of Mysteries,” interrupted Dumbledore, “that is kept locked at all times. It contains a force that is at once more wonderful and more terrible than death, than human intelligence, than forces of nature. It is also, perhaps, the most mysterious of the many subjects for study that reside there. It is the power held within that room that you possess in such quantities and which Voldemort has not at all. That power took you to save Sirius tonight. That power also saved you from possession by Voldemort, because he could not bear to reside in a body so full of the force he detests. In the end, it mattered not that you could not close your mind. It was your heart that saved you.”
Death and love are great mysteries, in part because before them we must all be humble. The first is utterly inscrutable to the living, while the second can be known only by those who surrender to it. Both are mysterious, because neither can be made susceptible to human control, although in the pride of their youth some may try. Indeed, it is here that I worry most about Harry.
The two great mysteries, death and love, are always linked. Death is always a possibility for those we love; loss is part of the risk we take in loving. Love binds us to another person; death rips our beloved from us. Normally, however, we have a long time until death parts us from our beloved. Not Harry. Harry never loved passionately while living with the Dursleys, but at Hogwarts he has made friends, learned about his parents, discovered his godfather and felt important and loved. Then, starting at the moment of his triumph in the Triwizard Tournament, his newly expanded heart starts to hurt: Cedric is killed at his side, and Lord Voldemort returns. Hogwarts is taken over by Dolores Umbridge, and Sirius is killed. Dumbledore takes Harry into his confidence, strengthening the bonds of affection between them as they plot the demise of Voldemort, and then is killed, unexpectedly, before Harry’s eyes.
At the end of Order of the Phoenix, Harry is so numb from the loss of Sirius that he wants to bring him back from the dead. At the end of Half-Blood Prince, Harry’s pain tempts him to stop loving altogether:
And Harry saw very clearly as he sat there under the hot sun how people who cared about him had stood in front of him one by one, his mother, his father, his godfather, and finally Dumbledore, all determined to protect him; but now that was over. He could not let anybody else stand between him and Voldemort; he must abandon forever the illusion that he ought to have lost at the age of one, that the shelter of a parent’s arms meant that nothing could hurt him. . . . The last and greatest of his protectors had died, and he was more alone than he had ever been before.
Harry means to face Voldemort alone, without Ron and Hermione or his other friends. He breaks up with Ginny, and decides to leave Hogwarts, the only place he has ever felt at home. Why does he want to cut himself off from those dearest to him? Because of the young man’s mistake.
In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Dumbledore tells Harry, “To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.” To one who looks at it that way, death is not something traumatic. Dumbledore acknowledges that this must seem incredible to one as young as Harry, but we are left to assume that it is one of the things we learn when we grow up. Sirius makes this point to the Weasley twins after their father is attacked by Voldemort’s giant snake in Order of the Phoenix: “This is why you’re not in the Order—you don’t understand—there are things worth dying for!” Dumbledore tells the same thing to Voldemort later in Order of the Phoenix:
“There is nothing worse than death, Dumbledore!” snarled Voldemort.
“You are quite wrong,” said Dumbledore. . . .
Harry is too young to believe this. Although he doesn’t worry about his own death, he is afraid to lose those he loves.
Indeed, Harry’s understanding of death is not so different from Voldemort’s. To both, death is sheer negation, the loss of those you love. Death deprived Tom Riddle of his mother, and threatens to deprive him of his own life (probably the only thing he truly loves). Harry also sees death as a threat to all he loves. While a mature love, according to Dumbledore, is able to accept personal loss as the beloved’s gain, when Harry loses loved ones, he focuses on how they gave him comfort, companionship and protection—all the things he lacked growing up. In practice Harry doesn’t see death as Dumbledore’s “great adventure”; rather, his love tends to be possessive and self-referential. That’s why he is so certain that Sirius would choose to be a ghost and remain with him.
Harry concludes that his love for others will only weaken him and allow others to control him. This is the same way Voldemort views love—as an encumbrance. Harry does not possess Voldemort’s lust for domination, but he needs to be strong enough to overcome Voldemort and he believes that, to be strong enough, he has to be alone. I am not so sure that Harry is right about this. In fact, I’m sure that, if Dumbledore is right, then Harry is dangerously wrong, both about love and about death. For, as Dumbledore has told him on several occasions, the only way he can defeat Lord Voldemort is through love.
An Education in Love
In Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore tells Harry that only a wizard with “uncommon skill and power” can defeat Voldemort:
“But I haven’t got uncommon skill and power,” said Harry, before he could stop himself.
“Yes, you have,” said Dumbledore firmly. “You have a power that Voldemort has never had. You can—”
“I know!” said Harry impatiently. “I can love!” It was only with difficulty that he stopped himself adding, “Big deal!”
“Yes, Harry, you can love,” said Dumbledore. . . . “Which, given everything that has happened to you, is a great and remarkable thing. You are still too young to understand how unusual you are, Harry.”
Harry is too young to appreciate the power of his ability to love. But Dumbledore is convinced that Harry’s heart is the key to everything—so much so that, when he decides to train Harry himself, he does not teach him what one would expect (Hermione guesses that he’ll teach Harry “really advanced magic, probably . . . powerful countercurses . . . anti-jinxes . . . and evasive enchantments generally”). Instead, Dumbledore is more interested in teaching Harry three lessons about the heart.
The first lesson is a negative lesson, about what happened to Voldemort’s character because he did not learn to love. Dumbledore seems to be the only person who calls Voldemort by his real name—he even calls him “Tom” during their fight in Order of the Phoenix—and this reflects his knowledge that there is still a little boy behind the horrible mask. It is part of Dumbledore’s great wisdom to regard Voldemort not as the terrible Lord that others perceive, but as simply a more powerful version of the young Tom Riddle: the orphan who is afraid to die, the secretive boy who doesn’t want to have friends, the proud wizard who believes nothing is beyond his power. When Dumbledore shows Harry the memory of his first meeting with Tom Riddle, he calls attention to several vices that the adult Voldemort retains. The boy Tom Riddle doesn’t want Dumbledore’s help to go to Diagon Alley. While most children who depend on adults for everything have a desire to be self-sufficient, Dumbledore notes that the adult Riddle is still motivated by this childish desire. Likewise, the adult Voldemort still hates his father for giving him his ordinary Muggle name, and wants notoriety, just as children long to be different from others and to stand out. Children, who are weak and ignorant compared to adults, often dream of being more powerful than their peers; the adult Voldemort, just like the boy Riddle, loves to use his powers to attract and control others.
At bottom, then, Dumbledore sees Voldemort as the adult version of a loveless and lonely boy. This keeps him from regarding Voldemort as simply a monster. He calls Voldemort evil, a tyrant, less than human and, most accurately, “a mortal man with a maimed and diminished soul.” He is not so naïve that he thinks Voldemort will ever undergo a conversion and use his powers in the service of humanity. But he also never forgets that Voldemort once was the self-possessed eleven-year-old boy who impressed him at the orphanage. Dumbledore’s insight is that while Tom Riddle grew in power and knowledge, he did not grow in maturity. To become mature is to become humble, to learn to trust and depend on others, and to love. Voldemort’s vices—and thus his weaknesses—are the untempered vices of his youth. They are rooted in pride, which Augustine defined as the love of self to the exclusion of others. This is the first lesson that Dumbledore tries to teach Harry.
Dumbledore also never forgets that Harry is another lonely and wounded orphan, with many of the same vices as the young Riddle. He does not have the same instincts for cruelty and domination as Riddle. But he, too, is proud; he, too, is competitive and wants to be better than others (think of his rivalry with Draco Malfoy or his dreams of winning the Triwizard Tournament). He holds grudges, and doesn’t trust those who are not loyal to him (e.g., Snape). He gets into fights frequently, and has little love for his Muggle relatives. Harry is vaguely aware of his similarities with Voldemort, but Dumbledore is acutely aware of them. He seems to worry that Harry’s pride might lead him to be tempted by the Dark Arts.
I think this accounts for the second lesson Dumbledore tries to teach Harry in their sessions together: that trust requires abandoning oneself to others. After being so distant from Harry in Order of the Phoenix, Dumbledore opens his heart to Harry, revealing how fond of him he really is, and how proud. I was especially taken by how he revealed his self-doubt and weakness to Harry; at one point during his confession of his old man’s mistake, he “closed his eyes and buried his face in his long-fingered hands . . . [in an] uncharacteristic sign of exhaustion, or sadness.” Dumbledore is a humble man to demonstrate such weakness before an angry teenager. (Phineas Nigellus, for instance, would do no such thing.) In revealing himself so, and in asking for forgiveness, he hopes to win back Harry’s trust. Harry has already proclaimed his loyalty to Dumbledore, particularly as the head of “Dumbledore’s Army.” Later, before Rufus Scrimgeour at the Weasleys’, he again professes his loyalty—agreeing that he’s “Dumbledore’s man through and through.”
But immediately after telling this story to Dumbledore, and provoking the headmaster’s tears, he and Dumbledore get into an argument about the nature of trust. Harry cannot believe that Dumbledore trusts Snape, and Dumbledore is sharp with Harry for refusing to trust his judgment. The argument is not resolved. Later, when Harry learns that Dumbledore also gave the young Tom Riddle the benefit of the doubt in his first years at Hogwarts, Harry thinks to himself, “Here, again, was Dumbledore’s tendency to trust people in spite of overwhelming evidence that they did not deserve it!” Clearly, Harry’s loyalty to Dumbledore does not lead him to trust Dumbledore’s judgment about people. He cannot see any reason to trust Snape, and so he doesn’t trust Dumbledore in matters concerning Snape. This disagreement is significant, because it reflects Harry’s pride, his preference for his own judgment about Snape despite the assurances of Dumbledore. All the members of the Order of the Phoenix, even Sirius, trust Snape because Dumbledore does, yet Harry cannot.
Dumbledore sees this as a key moment in Harry’s formation. Dumbledore is known, and often loved, for his willingness to trust others, to forgive them, to show them mercy, to let them have second chances when others won’t. The importance of trust seems to be a central conviction of his, and he wants to teach it to Harry. So he gives him an assignment. He calls it “a grave responsibility,” and tries to impress on Harry its importance, but he refuses to explain why. I’m referring, of course, to the task of persuading Horace Slughorn to hand over the memory of his conversations with the young Tom Riddle. Harry’s not the only one who doesn’t understand what Dumbledore is up to:
As he closed the study door behind him, [Harry] distinctly heard Phineas Nigellus say, “I can’t see why the boy should be able to do it better than you, Dumbledore.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to, Phineas,” replied Dumbledore, and Fawkes gave another low, musical cry.
We know what happens: Harry makes a couple of feeble attempts to talk to Slughorn, but when he doesn’t meet with quick success, he gets distracted and eventually loses interest. At his next meeting with Dumbledore he realizes that he had not put much effort into this task, and feels embarrassed and ashamed. Dumbledore doesn’t accept any of his excuses, nor does he spare Harry’s feelings. Rather, he makes his disappointment clear to Harry, and then waits in silence for an apology. Eventually, Harry blurts out, “I should have realized you wouldn’t have asked me to do it if it wasn’t really important. . . . I’ll get it from him.” This satisfies Dumbledore, and they move on.
It’s clearly an important scene. But what’s going on here? I think that Dumbledore is trying to teach Harry to trust, even when he doesn’t understand why. Dumbledore could easily have framed this assignment differently. He might have explained Horcruxes, for instance, or suggested that Slughorn’s memory would reveal how to kill Lord Voldemort. Had he done so, Harry would have seen the point of his assignment and been motivated to try harder; he would have made the task his own. But Dumbledore doesn’t just want the memory—that’s where Phineas is mistaken. He wants Harry’s trust. He wants Harry to want the memory just because Dumbledore has asked him to get it. He wants Harry to trust his judgment that this is a very important task, even if he doesn’t understand why. To Dumbledore, real loyalty requires deeds, not just words.
A few pages later, we realize that Harry is not the first student to whom Dumbledore has tried to teach this lesson. In the Pensieve, we witness a scene from Dumbledore’s office from decades before, in which Voldemort sat where Harry sits, and, like Harry, Voldemort expresses skepticism about the importance Dumbledore gives to love. Dumbledore tries, gently but firmly, to provoke Voldemort to examine his conscience, to consider the evil he has done. Dumbledore fails, of course.
For the first time, Voldemort smiled. . . . “The old argument,” he said softly. “But nothing I have seen in the world has supported your famous pronouncements that love is more powerful than my kind of magic, Dumbledore.” [emphasis added]
Voldemort trusts his own judgment, not Dumbledore’s greater experience. Their difference of opinion over love leads them to conclude that they have nothing more to say to each other. Voldemort is filled with rage at being thwarted, but Dumbledore has a different reaction to their final parting of ways: “a great sadness filled his face.” Dumbledore has lost the heart of his student for good, and he wishes things were different. It seems that he still loves Tom Riddle, even though they are explicitly enemies.
Harry witnesses this scene, but he doesn’t seem to realize the parallels between Voldemort’s encounter with Dumbledore and his own. Nothing that Harry has seen has supported Dumbledore’s famous pronouncements either. So there’s only one way Dumbledore can prepare Harry to give enough importance to love—he has to teach him to believe in what he has not experienced himself. He has to trust Dumbledore, blindly. This is the second lesson. I’m worried that Harry doesn’t get it.
Dumbledore tries to teach Harry a third lesson in their meetings together, a lesson about the importance of friendship. In the Weasleys’ spider-filled broomstick shed, he urges Harry to tell everything about Trelawney’s prophecy to Hermione and Ron. Harry is startled at this suggestion, but Dumbledore insists. “You do them a disservice by not confiding something this important to them. . . . You need your friends, Harry,” he warns. Harry’s instinct is to keep this prophecy to himself. Dumbledore ventures two reasons why:
“I didn’t want—”
“—to worry or frighten them?” said Dumbledore, surveying Harry over the top of his half-moon spectacles. “Or perhaps to confess that you yourself are worried and frightened?”
Dumbledore is probably right on both counts.
This is the second time Harry has isolated himself out of a dramatic sense of self-sacrifice, and the second time Dumbledore has had to stop him. In Order of the Phoenix, Harry resolves to return to the Dursleys’ house because he thinks he is being possessed by Voldemort and that to “cut himself off from other wizards entirely” is the only way to protect his friends. Or at least, that’s his ostensible reason. As Phineas Nigellus recognizes, however, Harry also seems to take pleasure in feeling sorry for himself; he even feels “a savage pleasure that he was giving the others the opportunity to keep talking about him, as they were bound to be doing.” Phineas’ speech to Harry is right on the money:
“This is precisely why I loathed being a teacher. Young people are so infernally convinced that they are absolutely right about everything. Has it not occurred to you, my poor puffed-up popinjay, that there might be an excellent reason why the headmaster of Hogwarts is not confiding every detail of his plans to you? Have you never paused, while feeling hard-done-by, to note that following Dumbledore’s orders has never yet led you into harm? No. No, like all young people, you are quite sure that you alone feel and think, you alone recognize danger, you alone are the only one clever enough to realize what the Dark Lord might be planning. . . . ”
Sirius describes Phineas as the “least popular headmaster Hogwarts ever had,” and here we can see why. Yet I don’t think Dumbledore would disagree with his assessment of young men in general and, at this moment, of Harry in particular. Harry is wallowing in self-pity, and it takes his friends to rescue him. Our friends bring us out of ourselves. They can often provide perspective when we are sad or, if nothing else, support. After this scene, for instance, Ginny brings Harry out of his self-pity by reminding him that she actually has been possessed by Voldemort (in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) and her experience was nothing like his. Harry is brought up short by this, both because Ginny makes a good point, and because he had forgotten that Ginny and he were linked in this way.
Dumbledore knows that having friends is often the best way to insure against self-love. Self-absorbed people don’t have friends but rather admirers, cronies, servants, allies or something else: Gilderoy Lockhart, despite his legions of fans, doesn’t have a single person with whom he can be honest. Slughorn doesn’t have any friends, but rather former students whom he collects. Draco doesn’t really have friends, it seems—that’s why he’s crying to Moaning Myrtle in the bathroom. Nor, as Dumbledore frequently mentions, does Tom Riddle have (or want) any friends. Harry grew up without friends, and knows that he can survive on his own. This gives him the strength to do unpopular things that he thinks are right. But Harry’s background also tricks him into thinking that he doesn’t need the companionship of people he loves. This is yet another young person’s mistake.
Imagine if Harry actually does try to face Voldemort without Ron, Hermione, the Weasleys, the Order of the Phoenix or any of the rest of his friends and allies at Hogwarts. He might begin with noble ideals, but his mission is one of vengeance, and he is looking for those he hates. Wouldn’t it be tempting for him to dip into the Dark Arts, looking for weapons that could help him kill Voldemort? How useful are his skills at defense against the Dark Arts for his goal of attacking his enemies? He needs curses, not countercurses. He has already tried to use the Cruciatus Curse on Bellatrix Lestrange and on Snape, and the Sectumsempra on Draco. What’s to keep him from going further? The Sorting Hat saw that he would make a great Slytherin, which means he probably has the talent for the Dark Arts. Yes, Harry would have to cultivate his hatred, because you can’t curse somebody without malice, but why shouldn’t he feel malice toward Snape, Bellatrix, Wormtail, the Malfoys, and the rest of the Death Eaters, not to mention Voldemort? It would be very easy for Harry to become a rather accomplished practitioner of the Dark Arts, I would think, were he not around those who love him. Dumbledore even so much as tells him this:
“Harry, despite your privileged insight into Voldemort’s world . . . you have never been seduced by the Dark Arts, never, even for a second, shown the slightest desire to become one of Voldemort’s followers! . . . You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!” said Dumbledore loudly. “The only protection that can possibly work against the lure of power like Voldemort’s!”
If we turn Dumbledore’s last statement around, we can see that were Harry to stop loving, he would lose his protection against the allure of the Dark Arts. This is what Dumbledore believes to be at stake.
There seem to be two reasons that people enter the service of Lord Voldemort: either they are bigoted against those who aren’t wizards, as the Malfoys and the Lestranges are, or they desire power and control over others and gradually forget how to love. As Professor Quirrell sums up the second point of view: “Lord Voldemort showed me how wrong I was. There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it. . . .” Harry is not a bigot, but he might be persuaded that he needs more power, and this might lead him to the Dark Arts.
So this is why I am worried about Harry. If Dumbledore’s philosophy is correct, then it is essential that Harry learn to trust and continue to love. Harry has been marked by love, and protected by love, and has even fallen in love. But he also has been hurt by love, and might not want to be hurt again. As he has grown, he has developed a strong tendency to trust only himself, and it seems likely that Dumbledore’s lesson on the nature of trust—a lesson Harry found difficult to learn in the first place—was undone by the headmaster’s death at the hands of the man he trusted. And unlike Dumbledore, who can love his enemies and forgive those who betray him, Harry does not seem open to mercy. I think there is a real risk that Harry will not listen to his mentor, and in avenging Dumbledore become everything Dumbledore warned him against: Rowling has made the parallels between Harry and Voldemort too strong for this danger not to be real.
If Harry is to keep his heart pure, he will need to be surrounded by people who won’t let him withdraw into himself, and who can warn him against the mistakes typical of youth. So I’m encouraged that he will begin the summer surrounded by his adopted family at the wedding between Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour. And I’m even more heartened that Ron and Hermione know they have to stick close to Harry, to keep him from “protecting” them by slipping off by himself. They love him, but in this matter they don’t—and shouldn’t—trust him.
I am not sure that Harry’s friends will be of much practical help in the fight against Voldemort. I expect that Harry will eventually face him alone. But if we trust in Dumbledore’s philosophy, then we should also trust in the power of friendship to protect Harry’s heart, which we know is the real key to victory, even if Harry doesn’t believe it. In which case, if I am to trust Dumbledore, then I should also trust Ron and Hermione’s friendship. As long as they are worrying about Harry, I don’t have to.
DANIEL P. MOLONEY has a B.A. in religious studies from Yale and a doctorate in philosophy from Notre Dame. He has taught in the Department of Philosophy at Notre Dame and the Politics Department at Princeton. A former editor at First Things, he has written for First Things, Wall Street Journal, National Review, Crisis and American Prospect, among other publications. He is also a contributor to BenBella’s Smart Pop anthology on Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. He now lives in Rome, preparing for his next great adventure.