When the prison door closes behind Boethius, he does not yet know that the cell walls are almost entirely of his own making. As the lock clicks home, he looks around desperately, blind to the fact that the key is in his own hands. Accused of a crime he did not commit, Boethius descends into despair, believing there is nothing good left in the world. He is wont, like most of us, to view life as good or ill, just or unjust, upon our external conditions. In other words, we believe the secret to happiness is found in fortune. But fortune is not found entirely—maybe not even primarily—in wealth, as we often assume. We all have the survival instinct to create our own fortune, and perhaps the strongest among us can truly will our desires into reality. We grope and fight and push as hard as we can to make our fortune good. And the more we do, the smaller our prison cell becomes.

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In the conclusion of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry discovers Professor Quirrell is not at all a soft-spoken, gentle soul as he first appeared but the very cunningest of villains. This once fumbling, stuttering teacher, he learns, is actually playing host to the soul of Voldemort by allowing the evil sorcerer to take up residence inside his body. After misjudging Quirrell all this time, Harry comes face-to-face—though it may be more accurately said face-to-head with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Harry, incredulous at Quirrell’s betrayal, wonders how his professor could lose his way and abandon his own morality. To which Quirrell qua Voldemort replies, “There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.” In this sentence lies a pithy summation of the struggle between competing interest groups in today’s social discourse.

The language itself comes directly to us from Nietzsche. In Beyond Good and Evil, he critiques the Enlightenment values that re-centered Europe’s epistemological center from religious authority to empirical science. Concepts like self-consciousness, reality, and truth were merely manufactured by those thinkers to give added weight to this re-centering—and, if we buy into beliefs in ideas like knowledge or free will, then it is only proof of the success of the Enlightenment. Real knowledge—and like it real morality—is a Darwinian jungle in which only the strongest are fit to rule. The truly enlightened and emancipated self is one who takes what he can to do what he must. All priests are merely exercising control over the masses, all believers merely sheep. There is, in short, only power and those too weak to wield it.

In an overreaction against this triumphalism seen most vividly in the incarnation of Nazism, pop cultural morality today borrows from Nietzsche’s vision of the world as divided into oppressors and oppressed. But it further errs in ignoring the details of demography, ideology, and circumstance. The postmodern social critic deconstructs all cultural traditions, seeing people and institutions almost exclusively in terms of power; to be an oppressor is to always be morally in the wrong, while to be an oppressed is to always be morally in the right. This reductivist view not only refuses to see a more comprehensive picture of reality, but far worse, it gives ethical justification to the oppressed to rise up and overthrow the oppressor. Yet before he even realizes his victory, the oppressed instantly becomes the oppressor, violating his own moral vision and creating a cruel circle of moral equivalence from which there can be no ethical escape.

Whether or not the oppressed—now oppressor—realizes it, even using his own logic, he has chosen the route of evil. He cannot be happy with his newfound power, according to Boethius, for two reasons. For one, evil is nothing. Not in the Nietzschean sense, but from God’s perspective. If evil is the absence of good, then evil is much like a hole in a sweater. The hole doesn’t truly exist; it is merely the absence of fabric. The absence is felt, as the cold and wet seep through the hole, just as evil is felt. But there is no fabric, and thus, there is no evil. Good exists in that the sweater exists; but evil is simply a leech and lacks substance in itself.

For another, to acquire power is to expand one’s boundaries but to still be bounded. Even if a king builds an empire, he may own his land, but he does not yet own his neighbor’s land. We would say he is unhappy, then, until he annexes what is not his own. Even were he to be successful, he would find another neighbor next door. Thus, as Boethius says, “kings have a larger share of misery than the rest of us” (III.5), ever acquiring but ever more unhappy. The hole continues to grow, but not by adding more fabric or contributing more goodness to the world.

I fear we have strayed far from the Wizarding World in the philosophic chase. But this trail, I believe, comes directly to the point. Magic is an ego-centric act designed to bend the world to our will. Even when Medea reverses the old age of her father-in-law in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VII), she does so because she wants the love of Jason. And she begins her incantations reciting all that she has done and can do, a list of I’s, each action beginning in the self.

That Harry, Dumbledore, and the gang seek the good, it is not because of magic but because of a philosophically Christian worldview that emphasizes the love of one’s neighbor above his destruction. The single difference between the superhero and the supervillain is the moral code, which means more than the strength of their superpowers. Just as the scientist does not do science for its sake alone but for the benefits it may confer mankind or the personal power it may grant him, so, too, power is merely a means to an end—which can be for good or ill.

Quirrell is partially correct, then, that power is amoral and that only the unenlightened fear its benefits. But his perspective blinds him to his own immorality, as it roundly ignores that his thirst for power destroys those over whom he would exercise power. What Augustine defines as distinctive of the earthly city is that “it worships God or gods who may aid it in reigning victoriously and peacefully on earth not through the love of doing good, but through lust of rule” (City of God 15.7). From the consequentialist view, we can see that Quirrell’s and Voldemort’s actions are necessarily destructive to others—not to mention themselves. Their obsession with power, without accounting its attendant results, is evidence that their actions are truly evil. 

By contrast, the sorcerer Nicolas Flamel chooses to abandon the philosopher’s stone and his unnaturally long lifespan out of concern for what others might do with his power. This action, incidentally, foreshadows Harry’s relinquishing of the Elder Wand at the end of the saga; we might say that he has been morally trained to distrust power. Voldemort, while a naturally gifted wizard, is un-disciplined, un-virtuous, and resists authority; his magic is used for acquiring power with the inhuman ambition of avoiding death. While the role of magic in the Wizarding World is ethically encouraged to promote natural and moral harmony in the universe, Voldemort tries to upset the balance in favor of his own ascendance to power. Flamel relinquishes his power and finds peace; Voldemort greedily acquires more and ultimately loses it.

This paradox seems the strongest truth most opposed to our own nature. But this is what I think Jesus means when he tells us that the meek will be the ones who inherit true power, which, St. Paul affirms, is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12.9). The way of the Christ is self-denial.

The key to redemption is surrender.

Like Boethius, we hold the key to our own salvation. But we fear losing what we have built, and so we cling desperately to our empires. And even if we can relinquish control of power, we rarely maintain control over our pleasures.