From Saturday 17 May 2008, items from the G.K. Chesterton Library will be part of an unprecedented exhibition of the Art of GKC in Oxford. The exhibition will be open to the public for two weeks only.

We think of him as a man of letters, a journalist, philosopher-at-large, playwright, detective story writer, apologist, but Gilbert Chesterton as a young man studied painting and drawing at the Slade, part of the University of London. From an early age he showed a huge natural talent. Aidan Mackey, who created the Chesterton Library, has an example of his skill from the age of seven. Other items in the collection include pencil sketches, numerous drawings in the margins of his books, published book illustrations, and a multitude of figures and backdrops from a large toy theatre he made to entertain the local children in Beaconsfield.

Opening times can be found on the new Art Jericho web-site. Do come if you can, and invite others to drop by.

Named after Jericho, the district in Oxford where the building can be found, the new gallery will later host other exhibitions and seminars, slideshows and talks, some in association with the Centre for Faith & Culture, located upstairs in the same building (at 6a King Street).

Acquired last year by the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in New Hampshire to develop its Oxford programme, for the last ten years the Centre has been the custodian of the Chesterton Library, some of that time with the generous support of the G.K. Chesterton Institute at Seton Hall University. Numerous researchers have come to do research in the archive (and no doubt also to try on his hat and sit on his chair, since the collection contains many unique personal items of Chesterton’s on permanent loan from the British Library). Apart from its Chesterton-related work, and the hosting of American students, the Centre edits and publishes the international journal Second Spring, and will soon be launching a book imprint for Thomas More College called “Second Spring Publications”.

UK subscribers can now find Second Spring on the brand-new CTS web-site.

There are well over a billion living Catholics. What do they believe? What is the Catholic Church? In recent years there has been a wave of great apologetic writing, much of it by former Evangelicals, aiming to explain and defend Catholic beliefs, but relatively few of those books are directed at complete outsiders to Christianity. Leonie Caldecott’s new book was commissioned by the secular publishing house Granta as part of a series that aims to introduce the beliefs of different communities to each other. It pays particular attention to those aspects of the faith which make Catholicism distinctive, including the doctrine of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, and the saints, especially Mary.  She also emphasizes the importance to Catholics of a sense of the history of their Church (in both its positive and negative aspects) traceable back to St Peter, the first Pope, and the central role of the Papacy ever since, and she looks at the challenges the faith has to confront in the twenty-first century.

Leonie Caldecott is co-founder of the Centre for Faith and Culture in Oxford, and of the journal Second Spring.

I wonder how frequently these three words are put together. Yet Lent and Easter are about all of them. LITURGY because this is the sacred season at the heart of the Church’s year (more so even than Christmas), in which we prepare for and then celebrate the overcoming of death by our Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross and in the Tomb. On Holy Thursday we celebrate the Last Supper, the first Mass, and on Good Friday the sacrifice which that Mass anticipated. The Easter mysteries are cosmic mysteries, as the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck based on the Book of Revelation hints. The whole of creation is involved, implicated, and transformed by what happens here. Heaven and earth are brought into a new relation.

SEX is involved because Christ’s Passion on the Cross is a ‘nuptial’ act, the act of the cosmic Bridegroom giving his body to and for the Bride, so that she might be made fruitful and bear many children. The male gender of the priest is surely something to do with this, because God is nothing if not sensitive to symbolism.  The mystery of the Mass has the same root as marriage, a mystery of complementarity which is written into the essence of human nature. As I argued in an article called ‘Liturgy and Trinity’, the crisis over sexuality in the Church, brought into the open by the reaction to Humanae Vitae in 1968, ’stems from the mentality that fails to understand the true nature of the “asymmetric” relationship between man and woman. This is the same mentality that fails to understand the relationship between priest and people in the liturgy. This failure may express itself either in a clerical domination of the laity, or in a reversal of that relationship that eliminates all sense of the transcendent. On the one side, we find a poisonous cocktail of clericalism, aestheticism and misogyny. On the other, we observe “politically correct” liturgies devoted to the themes of justice and peace: everyone sitting in a circle, praying for the homeless and passing the consecrated chalice from hand to hand, with the priest improvising parts of the eucharistic prayer in order to make it more relevant and friendly.’

ECONOMICS is involved because the Church’s social teaching has the same root. It is all about love and gift, about our dependence upon each other to cultivate the common goods of the earth. As Pope Benedict stressed in Deus Caritas Est, and willl again in the forthcoming Social Encyclical, it is the task of the lay faithful, animated by charity, to shape a society and social structures that serve the good of the human person. The person is intrinsically related to others and to the natural environment, to past and future generations, and cannot be understood in isolation. Therefore an ecological perspective as well as an economic and political one flows from the Easter liturgy, which ‘fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling’ (Gaudium et Spes, 22).

Here at Second Spring, which is the adopted journal of Thomas More College and its Center for Faith and Culture in Oxford, we are trying to encourage and develop new expressions of the Christian Humanist tradition that lies behind the foundation of the College thirty years ago this year. The latest issue of the journal, issue 9, is devoted to the ‘Genius of Woman‘ and features all women authors. The phrase we used as a title was a favourite of Pope John Paul II, and his ‘new feminism’ is the inspiration of the issue, which started with a conference we ran in Oxford a few years ago as part of a series unpacking the Pope’s legacy.

As Carol Zaleski writes in the Introduction to the issue, ‘What woman wants, according to JPII, is to be truly herself: to live out her specific genius for loving and being loved, to find herself by giving herself to others [as all of us do]. In this issue a group of Catholic women meditate on what this mystery, this genius, this vocation of being woman is all about. As they make clear, the “genius of woman” is not a mere gallantry on John Paul’s part, nor a self-eulogism on our own, but a concrete and practical idea full of implications for the way individual women negotiate the demands of daily life.’

The issue is more tightly focused than we usually have been on one specific theme, but it explores that theme as usual in the spirit of creative fidelity to the Catholic and Christian humanist tradition, of which the philosopher-pope was an eminent representative. We hope you enjoy it, and we would encourage you to engage with us in a discussion of the theme elsewhere on our web site. There are many divisions within the Church, and that between feminists and anti-feminists is one of them. Our approach is to try to avoid polemic and division, not by compromise on any significant issue, since we do have our own editorial line, but by looking for the truth that transcends and the friendship that unites people who may, at the level of ideas, be quite opposed.

In a very different context, in his Moto Propriu relaxing restrictions on the use of the 1962 Missal, Pope Benedict XVI has expressed this spirit most succinctly as follows:

‘I now come to the positive reason which motivated my decision to issue this Motu Proprio updating that of 1988. It is a matter of coming to an interior reconciliation in the heart of the Church. Looking back over the past, to the divisions which in the course of the centuries have rent the Body of Christ, one continually has the impression that, at critical moments when divisions were coming about, not enough was done by the Church’s leaders to maintain or regain reconciliation and unity. One has the impression that omissions on the part of the Church have had their share of blame for the fact that these divisions were able to harden. This glance at the past imposes an obligation on us today: to make every effort to unable for all those who truly desire unity to remain in that unity or to attain it anew. I think of a sentence in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, where Paul writes: “Our mouth is open to you, Corinthians; our heart is wide. You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted in your own affections. In return … widen your hearts also!” (2 Cor 6:11-13). Paul was certainly speaking in another context, but his exhortation can and must touch us too, precisely on this subject. Let us generously open our hearts and make room for everything that the faith itself allows.’

A personal God governs the stars

What was the star the wise men saw in the East? (The story can be found at Matt. 2:1-12.) Some say it was the symbolically highly appropriate conjunction of Jupiter and Venus (Kingship and Love) on 17 June in 2 BC, when Jesus may have been two years old. The dates work less well if Jesus was born in 6 BC and Herod died two years after that, as the standard chronology suggests. Besides, how do we explain the part of the account that says the star ‘went before them’ and ‘came to rest over the place where the child was’? It seems that Matthew was less interested in astrology than in showing the fulfilment of ancient prophecies and correspondences - a theme that runs right through his Gospel. Jesus was the new Moses, the new David. So the phrase ‘went before them’ is meant to recall the book of Exodus, when in order to lead the Israelites out of Egypt the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night ‘went before them’ to ‘lead them along the way’ to the Red Sea (Ex. 13:17-22). This pillar is the manifestation of the Lord’s presence, an angel sent to guide the people. Matthew is telling us that the ’star of Bethlehem’ is essentially an angel. Immediately afterwards, in Matthew’s account, Joseph is asked to take the Holy Family into Egypt to keep them safe from Herod. This reinforces the association with Exodus. Thus the child Jesus is kept safe, for a time, in Egypt, just as Moses was kept safe by the Egyptian princess from that other ‘massacre of the infants’ initiated by Pharaoh, until the time came for him to take up his destiny. And then again, immediately after the return of the Holy Family from Egypt in Matthew’s account, we find the preaching of John the Baptist, and the baptism of Jesus in the waters of Jordan, the new ‘crossing of the Red Sea’, signifying the way in which the mature Jesus will lead his people through the sacrament of Baptism to their liberation from sin and death.

In his encyclical letter Spe Salvi, on Hope, Pope Benedict quotes St Gregory Nazianzen. “He says that at the very moment when the Magi, guided by the star, adored Christ the new king, astrology came to an end, because the stars were now moving in the orbit determined by Christ.” This means that “within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus has revealed himself as Love.”

The staff at Second Spring wish all our readers a happy and blessed new year!

The Pope’s Spe Salvi shows us Christ, the good shepherd, the true philosopher, who ‘tells us who man truly is and what a man must do in order to be truly human.’ He shows us ‘the way beyond death; only someone able to do this is a true teacher of life.’ The Pope integrates spirituality with metaphysics in his extraordinary analysis of how faith is truly the ’substance’ of what we hope for, in the sense of a real basis for a new existence.

In this Information Age, the Pope reminds us that the Gospel is not mere ‘information’ that can be filed away, any more than the sacrament of Baptism is just a way of inducting someone into a society where they can carry on being as they were before. Faith gives eternal life. But, he asks, do we want that eternal life? ‘In some way we want life itself, true life, untouched even by death; yet at the same time we do not know the thing towards which we feel driven. We cannot stop reaching out for it, and yet we know that all we can experience or accomplish is not what we yearn for. This unknown “thing” is the true “hope” which drives us, and at the same time the fact that it is unknown is the cause of all forms of despair and also of all efforts, whether positive or destructive, directed towards worldly authenticity and human authenticity. The term “eternal life” is intended to give a name to this known “unknown.”

‘Inevitably it is an inadequate term that creates confusion. “Eternal,” in fact, suggests to us the idea of something interminable, and this frightens us; “life” makes us think of the life that we know and love and do not want to lose, even though very often it brings more toil than satisfaction, so that while on the one hand we desire it, on the other hand we do not want it. To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality - this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time - “the before and after” - no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy.’

Life in this full sense is the opposite of self-centred or self-enclosed. It ‘presupposes that we escape from the prison of our “I,” because only in the openness of this universal subject does our gaze open out to the source of joy, to love itself - to God.’ Yet the Pope is aware that the opposite impression is often given. He asks: ‘how did we come to conceive the Christian project as a selfish search for salvation which rejects the idea of serving others?’ In order to answer this question, he has to analyse the foundations of the modern age, and the process by which faith in God was replaced by faith in progress.

What better way to begin the new year than by studying this wonderful encyclical!

‘It is important to know that I can always continue to hope, even if in my own life, or the historical period in which I am living, there seems to be nothing left to hope for. Only the great certitude of hope that my own life and history in general, despite all failures, are held firm by the indestructible power of Love, and that this gives them their meaning and importance, only this kind of hope can then give the courage to act and to persevere… We can open ourselves and the world and allow God to enter: we can open ourselves to truth, to love, to what is good…. We can free our life and the world from the poisons and contaminations that could destroy the present and the future. We can uncover the sources of creation and keep them unsullied, and in this way we can make a right use of creation, which comes to us as a gift, according to its intrinsic requirements and ultimate purpose. This makes sense even if outwardly we achieve nothing or seem powerless in the face of overwhelming hostile forces.’

Stratford Caldecott

HAPPY CHRISTMAS FROM STRATFORD AND LEONIE CALDECOTT

The Nativity is the bringing forth of the secret that Mary has cherished within her for nine months - the face that God has fashioned for himself in the womb of the world. This is nothing less than a re-making of the world, for the world as it existed before was perishing, falling into nothingness, whereas now it is united through this tiny child with the divine life of the Trinity.

Into relation with this child all people and things are being drawn, and in this relationship they will pass through death into a new existence. The seed of this life began to grow in the earth’s soil at the Annunciation, but now it shows itself above ground, at Epiphany it will be acknowledged by the Wise, and on the Cross it will spread its branches over the earth.

In the image of Madonna and Child is represented the drama of the human personality, coming to birth in the meeting of two gazes and of two smiles, the mother’s smile kindling the child’s, the child’s spontaneous smile evoking this sign of love from the enfolding cosmos.

The text is an extract from a meditation on the Rosary from www.secondspring.co.uk (mystagogy section).
The picture is a Maronite icon borrowed from www.maronite-heritage.com
And for Christmas reading we recommend the blog by Fr Mark Kirby at http://vultus.stblogs.org.

Meanwhile the long-awaited ninth issue of Second Spring, “The Genius of Woman”, is available from Thomas More College.

If you scroll down you will find comments on topics such as ecology, bioethics and chimeras, Harry Potter, and the intensifying dialogue with Islam in the wake of Regensburg. (You can read the latest about the reception of the recent Islamic Message to Christian Leaders and present attempts to launch a constructive dialogue, here.) If you want a forum to discuss the reform of the Liturgy, or the meaning of life, or the Sufi influences on Led Zeppelin, go to our Events and Conversation pages.

An event I was happy to be able to attend recently was the seventh annual MERIOL TREVOR lecture, given this year by Fr Shay Cullen of the Columban Missionaries, under the auspices of the Catholic Chaplain in Bath, William McLoughlin OSM. Miss Trevor was a prolific biographer and novelist, best known for her important two-volume biography of John Henry Newman, and a series of historical fantasies based in an imaginary country called Letzenstein currently being published by Bethlehem Books, available in the UK through Family Publications. Her novel The Rose Round helped to inspire our girl’s group of the same name, and Meriol was a supporter of Second Spring during her last years of life. As a lover of children, she would have been delighted with the recent Lecture in her honour.

Since 1969, Fr Cullen has been fighting sex slavery and child abuse in the Philippines, where he discovered multitudes of women and children enslaved in subhuman conditions, living on the streets or in prison, suffering the most appalling treatment. Through the PREDA foundation, he and his team have rescued thousands from drugs, brothels and prisons, offering them a safe refuge with therapy and training that enables them to re-enter society with dignity. What they have achieved is truly remarkable, and they deserve every support.

In his newspaper column, Father Shay writes: “Christian love means sharing our wealth, and it is a love that that will conquer greed, selfishness, injustice and enslavement. It is that love that asks no payment, seeks no reward, other than to serve and not to be served. It is to liberate the poor and the oppressed, free the enslaved and the imprisoned and it never compromises with evil or injustice, it will not tolerate abuse, never turn away from human suffering or any cover up, any child or woman abuse or exploitation. It is this love of the poor and the enslaved that carried and sustained the early human rights campaigners that saw slavery as a contradiction of everything that Christianity stood for and moved by unshakable moral convictions ran the first human rights campaign to abolish slavery. This is what we need all the more today to confront the modern slavery that is an affront to the human race.

“Slavery today is the same as it always was, its human beings being reduced to a commodity, deprived of freedom, working for nothing, exploited for profit, owned like an animal, forced to grovel. And worst of all it is the slavery of children in the organized sex industry, a billion dollar business.”

The text of Fr Cullen’s Lecture is available on the PREDA web-site. Next year’s Meriol Trevor Lecture will be given by Dr Michael Waldstein. Details will be announced nearer the time.

An important 5-year study by the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) has just been published on the state of the global environment. Written by 390 scientists and reviewed by 1000 more, it argues that the real situation is approaching the catastrophic - not just in terms of climate change, but also species extinction, food supplies, energy consumption, and the availability of fresh water. This kind of doom-mongering drives many people into a rage, and it is true that we have heard dire warnings in the past which failed to come true. Nevertheless, we cannot simply look at the past for consolation. Our situation is unprecedented in so many ways that it would be foolish to pretend we can continue as we are. This year is the first in human history when more people lives in cities than in rural areas. Many thousands of species are becoming extinct each year. The UN report coincides with growing concern in the UK over our expanding population due largely to immigration, which may necessitate building the equivalent to two new cities the size of London by 2050 on top of existing countryside.

Whether or not the rumour is true that Pope Benedict is to issue a social encyclical with a strong emphasis on the environment, it is certainly the case that in this, as in much else, he has picked up the baton from John Paul II and is running with it. Pope John Paul introduced ecology firmly into the Catholic agenda, vociferously from at least the time of Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), although he began with his very first encyclical in 1979, which referred to pollution due to industrialization. Roman Catholic support for measures to protect biodiversity should be uncontroversial after numerous public and authoritative statements by John Paul II underlining the importance of careful stewardship of the earth’s natural resources, including the rich diversity of species and their delicate ecosystems. These statements and others have been integrated into the relevant sections of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church.

Sometimes the conservation movement has been associated with anti-Christian ideologies, or with organizations that advocate forced reduction of the human population as the best way of alleviating pressure on the environment. The arguments concerning population are complex, and are examined by one of our advisers, Maria Sophia Aguirre, here. But one fundamental principle always remains true: that God’s creation has inherent value, and our human bodies are not isolated or self-sufficient but part of a vast, delicately balanced system. The way we treat humanity is not unrelated to the way we think of and treat the rest of this system and its various elements.

Pope Benedict too has been speaking on many occasions recently about the need for an ‘alliance between man and the earth’ before our degradation of the environment becomes unstoppable. The Church is obviously in no position to judge or interpret the scientific data on climate change, but when a large body of scientific opinion declares the problem serious, Catholic leaders should be willing to listen, and even to adopt the precautionary principle that, when the risks from doing nothing might be so great (amounting to planetary catastrophe) it would foolish and irresponsible not to do something to avert them. The Pope has asked everyone to adopt ‘a way of living, models of production and consumption marked by respect for creation and the need for sustainable development of peoples, keeping in mind the universal distribution of goods, as is so often mentioned in the Church’s social doctrine.’ Here, as elsewhere, the implications of Catholic teaching are more radical than is often recognized. More research is needed to work out these implications, and more action is required to put that teaching into practice.

In these connection, I want to mention the John Paul II Institute for Theology and Environmental Studies, founded and directed by Dr Constance Lasher and now a project of the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in NH, alongside Second Spring. If Catholics are to take this subject seriously, they need to engage with it along the lines suggested by the Institute.

The genetic chimeras and human-animal hybrids whose creation in the laboratory was recently approved by the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority in Britain (claiming that the public is now ‘at ease’ with the idea provided it is done in the aid of medical research), are not quite the Chimaera imagined by Homer and Hesiod, a creature fearful, great, swift-footed and strong, who had three heads, one of a grim-eyed lion; in her hinderpart, a dragon; and in her middle, a goat, breathing forth a fearful blast of blazing fire. Nor are they likely to resemble the Sphinx as visualized by Gustave Moreau. In another way - as the product of human science, rather than mythopoeic imagination - they are even scarier: the harbingers of a new wave of genetic manipulation, producing (and killing) creatures that are part human and part animal.

At the head of this column I could have posted the well-known photograph of a mouse with a human ear growing out of its back… except I couldn’t bring myself to do so, it looked so disgusting, poor thing. Such experiments, done in the name of medicine, indicate the extent to which all sense of the dignity and mystery of biological life has been lost. Animals - including human beings - are regarded as nothing more than machines, to be mended when broken, cannibalized for spare parts, or reconstructed into something else.

If such hybrids are close enough to human to be useful in research, are they not too close for us to treat them this way? Dr Helen Watt, the Director of the Linacre Centre for Health Care Ethics, advising the English Catholic Bishops, writes that: ‘We cannot safely assume that this procedure will not create a real, though damaged, human embryo, who will have no human parents, and whose quasi-mother is a non-human animal. This is a further offence to the embryo whom we plan to destroy, in that its very humanity will be called into question. Even if there were no risk of creating a genuine human embryo, it is a form of reproductive perversion to use a human nucleus to substitute in this way for animal reproductive material. The unique dignity of the human species, for which life and reproduction have a special meaning, needs to be safeguarded.’

* More information on this subject from Scientific American:
‘Irving Weissman of Stanford University and his colleagues pioneered these chimera experiments in 1988 when they created mice with fully human immune systems for the study of AIDS. Later, the Stanford group and StemCells, Inc., which Weissman co-founded, also transplanted human stem cells into the brains of newborn mice as preliminary models for neural research. And working with foetal sheep, Esmail Zanjani of the University of Nevada at Reno has created adult animals with human cells integrated throughout their body.

‘No one knows what the consequences will be as the proportion of human cells in an animal increases. Weissman and others, for example, have envisioned one day making a mouse with fully “humanised” brain tissue. The lawyer developmental programme and tiny size of this chimerical mouse fairly guarantee that its mental capacities would not differ greatly from those of normal mice. But what if human cells were instead put in the foetus of a chimpanzee? The birth of something less beastly could not be ruled out.

‘The intermingling of tissues could also make it easier for infectious animal diseases to move into humans. Diseases that hop species barriers can be particularly devastating because the immune systems of their new hosts are so unprepared for them (the flu pandemic of 1918 is widely believed to have sprung from an avian influenza virus).

‘There are currently no international standard governing chimera experiments. Canada’s Assisted Human Reproduction Act of 2004 banned human-animal chimeras. The US has no formal restrictions, but Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas proposed legislation in March that would outlaw several kinds of chimeras, including ones with substantial human brain tissue. Some institutions that supply human stem cells set their own additional limits about what experiments are permissible.’Within the US, at least, greater uniformity may emerge from general guidelines on stem cell use recommended in late April by the National Academy of Sciences. The NAS recommended that chimeras involving most animal species generally be permitted. It urged a ban on any use of human cells in other primates, however, as well as the introduction of animal cells into human blastocysts. It also warned against allowing human-animal chimeras to breed: some human cells might have managed to infiltrate the animals’ testes and ovaries. Breeding those animals could theoretically lead to the horrible (and in most cases, assuredly fatal) result of a human embryo growing inside an animal mother.’

This quotation from St Paul (1 Cor. 15:26) is the epitaph that Harry Potter reads on the grave of his parents, and a kind of motto for the seventh and last of the Potter novels by J.K. Rowling that was published at the end of July. The books have divided Christian and literary opinion but have by now entranced several generations of children. As everyone knows, the books have been staggeringly successful. Now that the seventh is complete we can see more clearly what JKR has achieved in this meticulously planned and carefully executed series. They are about death and the desire for immortality, human virtue and the nature of evil, and in the end the victory goes to courage, self-sacrifice and love.

The idea that she has been trying to seduce children into the occult is ludicrous. Rowling is a Christian, and an admirer of C.S. Lewis. It may well be that when she chose as the motto of Hogwarts School the phrase ‘Never tickle a sleeping dragon’ (Draco dormiens numquam titillandus), she had in mind Lewis’s famous remark that stories of this kind can ’steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.’ It seems that Rowling may have felt that Lewis ‘tickled’ those dragons a bit too much, and she was determined to be even more careful.

One writer on Harry Potter, John Granger, seems to have accurately discerned the deeper structure and intention of the series - indeed, many of his predictions concerning the seventh book have come true. He also shows why the books have been so popular. One of his important insights is that Rowling uses symbolism drawn from Christian alchemy to express the journey of the human soul - Harry’s transformation in Christ. As Rowling herself said in 1998, ‘I’ve never wanted to be a witch, but an alchemist, now that’s a different matter.’ Granger explains that alchemy - as understood by Shakespeare, Blake, Milton and C.S. Lewis - is not ’stupid chemistry’ (let alone anti-Christian magic) but ‘the art of the transmutation of the soul.’ The outward work on metals and chemicals was merely a reflection of the inward work of purification, the ‘Great Work’ represented in the series by the seven years of Harry’s education at Hogwarts.

So if you want to find Christianity in Harry Potter, you have to look deeper than the surface of the text. Harry’s friends Ron and Hermione correspond to Sulphur and Mercury, which together work on Harry’s ‘Lead’ to transform him into Gold by the end of the series. The ‘Golden Snitch’ that the ‘Seeker’ (Harry) has to capture in the seven-a-side game of Quidditch is another symbol of the same process (the image of the Snitch on the cover of Granger’s book is from a 1613 alchemical text). Harry’s ‘patronus’ (a silver Stag that appears in order to protect him) is a common medieval symbol of Christ.

Follow the links, read Granger, and you will begin to appreciate just how clever J.K. Rowling has been in weaving her tapestry of archetypes. In a sense, the literary quality of the prose is irrelevant here. Plot, wordplay, character development, relationships, symbolism, are more important, and they are the real reason the books have such an extraordinary effect on readers. There is room for disagreement about whether she succeeds in bringing the series to a satisfying conclusion, but criticism will miss much of the point if it does not take alchemical symbolism into account.

For a recent interview with Rowling that talks about her Christian faith see here. On the “gay Dumbledore” issue see here.  For an article by Michael Ward in Touchstone magazine on the hidden “astrological” code in C.S. Lewis’s seven Chronicles of Narnia see here.