In her refusal to water down love to something merely rhetorical or sentimental, Rowling joins some elite philosophical company. Greek philosophers distinguished between three kinds of love: eros, philia, and agape Eros, or erotic love, is the type of love found in romantic relationships. Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, and Harry and Ginny Weasley are good examples of such love. In Western philosophy, the most famous analysis of erotic love is contained in Plato’s Symposium, where Plato seeks to show how crude physical desires can be progressively refined to draw the soul upward to things beautiful and divine. Philia is friendship love. It’s important to see that friendship is indeed a kind of love—rendering poignant and sad Dumbledore’s observation that Voldemort never had a friend or even wanted one. In fact, for ancient Greeks and Romans, friendship was generally believed to be superior to romantic love.5 The third type of love, agape, is universal, self-giving, and unconditional love. When the Gospel writers tell us that “God is love,” it is agape that they have in mind.
Traditional philosophical accounts of love help us make sense of Snape’s complicated character because they emphasize that love is not primarily a feeling but a choice, an act of the will. Ideally, our emotions will be in harmony with what we understand to be the good, but we can act for the good even when our emotions rebel. The fact that Snape continues to have conflicted emotions does not prove that he has not been transformed by love. To the contrary, Snape’s ability to act consistently for the good of others, despite his emotional indifference to or even dislike of these individuals, testifies to the strength of his love for Lily.
The Abandoned Boys
Snape is an intriguing character, in part because he shares origins similar to Voldemort’s and Harry’s. Like Harry and Voldemort, Snape hails from a mixed bloodline, which raises suspicions and hatreds in parts of both the Muggle and the wizard worlds. Desperate to associate himself with his mother’s family, the Princes, and downplay his Muggle ancestry, Snape dubs himself “the Half-Blood Prince.” Having grown up in a home with feuding parents, Snape finds his first real taste of home at Hogwarts—again like Harry and Voldemort—using his magical powers and forming alliances in the wizard world. As Harry observes, he and Voldemort and Snape, “the abandoned boys, had all found home there [at Hogwarts].”6 All three also tended toward Slytherin, with only Harry not ending up there.
Of course, Harry and Voldemort took very different paths. Voldemort opted for power over love, selfishness over altruism, conquest over the vulnerability of friendship and genuine relationships of any sort. In sharp contrast, Harry opened his heart to friends and was willing to sacrifice himself for those he loved. Rather than choosing a fragmented psyche like Voldemort’s, Harry allowed his friends to make him a better person of integrity and wholeness.
Much ink has been devoted to the patterns of good and evil that Harry and Voldemort respectively represent, but what about this third lost boy, that complicated amalgam of darkness and light, Dumbledore’s double agent and killer, Harry’s protector and adversary? What makes Snape tick?
Snape the Occlumens
Snape is a complicated character not simply because he is a double agent, but because his loyalties truly have been divided in the past, and his reason and emotions continue to be divided. Initially, Snape had been a Death Eater; after Snape’s repentance, Dumbledore asks him to play the dangerous role of informant when the Dark Lord returns. To do so, Snape must gain Voldemort’s complete trust. He must betray neither his loyalty to Dumbledore nor his pledge to protect Voldemort’s enemies, especially Harry. His anger at and sometimes hatred of Harry (and others) are real, but equally real are his constant self-risk and courage in fighting Voldemort.
Snape doesn’t choose to protect Harry and the other enemies of Voldemort because of great personal affection for them—the warm fuzzies associated with today’s often watery and superficial notions of “love.” On the contrary, he chooses to act for what he knows to be their good despite strongly disliking many of them. Love that is understood as the desire for the good of the other can be found not only in Rowling’s depictions, but in writers on love who range from Aristotle to Aquinas to M. Scott Peck, despite the cultural and temporal distances among them. They share in common an understanding of love expressed in friendship as willing the good of another for the other’s own sake.7 Over and over, the decision is stark in the Potter books between the option of furthering one’s own apparent good at the expense of others or sacrificing it for the good of others. Love requires self-sacrifice, binds one’s happiness to the good of another, makes one vulnerable to loss and grief, and strengthens one’s commitment to the good.
These thinkers also emphasize that strong feelings become morally good or bad when they influence our reason and will, that is, when feelings affect both our understanding of what is good or bad and how we act. Particularly in Snape’s case, love is not primarily found in feelings but in actions. Love changes the course of his beliefs, alliances, and actions; he repents because of love, and he finds redemption by choosing to act for love.8 In short, it is Snape’s love for Lily that primarily motivates the actions leading to his redemption.
Once Dumbledore realizes that Voldemort and Harry can share each other’s thoughts and emotions, he asks Snape to teach Harry Occlumency, a magical technique for sealing “the mind against magical intrusion and influence.”9 Voldemort is remarkably accomplished at gaining access to others’ thoughts and memories, making the detection of lies almost certain. “Only those skilled at Occlumency,” Snape says, “are able to shut down those feelings and memories that contradict the lie, and so utter falsehoods in his presence without detection.”10 As Dumbledore’s double agent, Snape regularly achieves what few manage even once: successfully lying to Voldemort’s face. Snape succeeds not only by intelligence and cunning, revealing enough information to appear to be a valuable informant while withholding the most significant points, but also by sheer magical prowess.
Snape’s skill at Occlumency reveals both his strength and his weakness of character. The successful Occlumens empties personal emotion, something Harry can’t do. Snape fumes, “Fools who wear their hearts proudly on their sleeves, who cannot control their emotions, who wallow in sad memories and allow themselves to be provoked this easily—weak people, in other words—they stand no chance against [Voldemort’s] powers!”11 Snape survives not by giving up his love for Lily the way Voldemort had renounced love and friendship. Rather, Snape conceals his love from Voldemort. Although this ability to hide memories and emotions is crucial to his role as a double agent, it also isolates Snape from friendship. The final chapters of Deathly Hallows reveal the depth of Snape’s sacrifice and courage. As he lays dying from Nagini’s bite, Snape transmits to Harry a flood of memories chronicling both Snape’s love for Lily and his secret protection of Voldemort’s enemies. Snape remains the consummate Occlumens. His memories cannot be taken; they must be offered freely. Only while dying does he permit Harry access to his thoughts and feelings, revealing that Harry is a Horcrux and showing him what must be done to defeat Voldemort.
Snape’s Choice
From childhood, Snape loves Lily Evans, although selfishly at first. He watches her with “undisguised greed,” while dreaming of Hogwarts as an escape from his family and a way of gaining acceptance in the wizarding world, despite his half-Muggle bloodline.12 At Hogwarts, though, he is still an awkward outsider, now fighting with James Potter, for whom everything, especially magic and Quidditch, comes so easily. Worse, Snape knows that James is also in love with Lily.
Snape’s love for Lily begins to redeem him, ever so slowly at first. When Lily is a child, she asks Snape whether it makes a difference being Muggle-born, to which, after hesitating, he answers no. When Lily is a teenager, having refuted Snape’s earlier false belief in the superiority of wizard blood, she defends Snape against James and his friends, only to have the mortified Snape call her a Mudblood. He apologizes, but Lily refuses to def
end him anymore. With the friendship broken, Snape chooses Dark Magic and the Death Eaters. Later, though, he would remember this painful and costly lesson and, as headmaster, rebuke Phineas Nigellus’s portrait for referring to Hermione Granger as a Mudblood.
After dutifully reporting to Voldemort the prophecy he overheard about the child who would challenge the Dark Lord, Snape begs Dumbledore to protect Lily. Dumbledore asks, “Could you not ask for mercy for the mother, in exchange for the son?” Snape assures Dumbledore he has tried, to which Dumbledore responds, “You disgust me. . . . You do not care, then, about the deaths of her husband and child? They can die as long as you get what you want?”13 Snape’s love is not yet pure; he does not love Lily as what Aristotle calls a “second self.”14 Rather, he desires Lily’s good as it relates to him. If he had desired Lily’s good for her own sake, he would want to protect those most precious to her, too. Snape relents, promising “anything” in return for Dumbledore’s protection of the family. After Lily’s murder, Dumbledore asks Snape to act on his love for Lily by protecting her beloved son.
Snape’s romantic love for Lily is tainted with selfishness at first, but his love deepens as he accepts the role Dumbledore proposes. Plato reflects on a similar deepening of love in the Symposium, which presents various characters attempting to describe and praise love. In the Symposium, Socrates’ teacher, Diotima, claims, “Love is wanting to possess the good forever.”15 This “possession” of the good is not the satisfaction of selfish desire in a superficial eros, which values the beloved for what he or she provides to the one who loves, but is instead a relationship to the beloved that draws the one who loves toward the beloved as a free-standing good. Someone who loves seeks “giving birth in beauty,” either to children or to ideas and virtue.16 Love opens itself to the eternal by extending the love of parents to their children or by building virtue and love of what is transcendent in the one who loves. Rowling gives examples of both. Out of love, James and Lily willingly sacrifice themselves for each other and for Harry. Snape’s romantic love for Lily, though unrequited, gradually does “bring to birth” virtue in Snape. After Snape commits himself to fighting Voldemort, the earlier selfishness eventually fades.
Reflecting on the refinement of romantic love in the context of the Christian tradition, Pope Benedict XVI comments that “love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed ‘ecstasy,’ not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving.”17 Snape’s love for Lily pushes him beyond selfish desire and changes him fundamentally. Snape’s ongoing love for Lily, even after her death, spurs him to choose actions that gradually make his love more like hers, turned toward the good of others and capable of self-sacrifice. His love for Lily makes him place himself, like James and Lily, between Voldemort and Harry.
A Work in Progress
Snape’s decision to fight Voldemort and shield Harry remains steadfast, but his character doesn’t change instantly. Here we see the damage of vice and the work of virtue: both are habits, built up over time. Changing one’s feelings and behavior requires vigilance and effort. Demanding that Dumbledore keep his role secret, Snape still rages at his school-day tormentors, seeing in Harry all of James’s arrogance and reveling in Harry’s failures and detentions.18 Harry’s physical resemblance to James blinds Snape to the shared character traits between Harry and his mother. Snape’s patterns of behavior and emotion continue to block friendships, but at least his actions unite him to the cause of those battling Voldemort.
Snape also continues to share, partially, Voldemort’s false assessment that those who guide their actions by love are weak. Snape spits this insult at Harry during Occlumency lessons: Harry is weak because he cannot lock away thoughts and feelings of love. Likewise, when Snape encounters Nymphadora Tonks’s changed Patronus, he sneers, “I think you were better off with the old one.... The new one looks weak.”19 On rare occasions, “a great shock . . . [or] an emotional upheaval” can alter a Patronus.20 Tonks has fallen in love with Remus Lupin (a werewolf), and her Patronus is now a wolf. Presumably, the wolf itself doesn’t “look weak.” Instead, the change is evidence of her love, or, alternately, evidence that love has transformed her. It is this love—particularly of the despised Lupin—that Snape finds weak. But Snape’s own Patronus, a doe, offers eloquent testimony against his assertion. Snape’s love for Lily altered his Patronus to match hers. His strongest defense against magical threats is now an emblem of his beloved and his transformation by love—despite Snape’s ability to block out his emotions and memories.
Snape’s Patronus reflects Aristotle’s notion of the beloved as a second self; it is both a magical extension of himself and a manifestation of his love for Lily. Similarly, Harry is protected by the love of his parents: his Patronus is James’s stag, and Lily’s self-sacrificial love literally becomes part of his body, protecting him from Voldemort. In contrast, Voldemort protects himself by making Horcruxes. In love, one entrusts part of one’s soul to another, in a fashion: a friend shares another’s joys and sorrows and acts for his good, even when sacrifice is required. Friendship strengthens the soul’s integrity: friends become better people by acting for the other’s good and building virtue. In short, loving makes us more fully human. But Voldemort entrusts his soul to objects, which cannot share his joys and sorrows or require anything of him. With the Horcruxes, Voldemort has eight “selves,” but each division of his soul makes Voldemort less human.
Snape can act courageously not because his previous beliefs and emotions have been thoroughly purged, but because he deliberately chooses to act according to love—in the sense of doing what’s best for the other. Here, Harry’s and Snape’s courage are similar because, for each, an act of the will is required to forgo what he wants and consciously choose self-sacrifice instead. Harry shows that love conquers death by freely sacrificing himself. Rather than simply reacting (even virtuously), Harry chooses consciously. Harry observes how much easier a death chosen in the moment—like throwing himself in front of a curse, as his parents did—would have been.21 Similarly, Snape hasn’t made his sacrifice for good in a single dramatic act.22 He has consciously chosen for years the perilous balancing act of protecting Harry while masquerading as a Death Eater. This task is all the more difficult (and clearly an act of will) because Snape acts primarily for the love of Lily, not of Harry. He wills Harry’s good for the mother’s sake, but he acts to protect Harry nonetheless.
Finally, love is the key to Snape’s redemption because it allows him to feel remorse, an emotion he shares with Harry but not with Voldemort. Evil acts damage the soul, but remorse can begin to knit it together, heal it, and make it whole. Snape’s remorse does not in itself eradicate years of resentment; the difference is that he doesn’t allow anger and hatred to decide his actions. Despite these feelings, he can choose to act for the good. These actions are a testament both to his love for Lily and to the substance of his redemption. Snape’s love and remorse are manifest not primarily in his emotional states but in his ongoing acts of the will to pursue the good of another.
Harry shows remorse in forgiving Snape, purifying himself as well. Throughout the series, Snape and Harry wage a private battle, marked by guarded suspicion and outright loathing. After Sirius’s death, Harry blames Snape for goading Sirius into rushing to the fight at the Ministry: “Snape had placed himself forever and irrevocably beyond the possibility of Harry’s forgiveness by his attitude toward Sirius.”23 In the final scenes of Deathly Hallows, however, we see that Harry has forgiven Snape. Years later, Harry tells his middle child, “Albus Severus . . . you were named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew.”24 Harry and Ginny name their children for people who fought Voldemort and chose to sacrifice their own good for that of others—James, Lily, Dumbledore, and Snape.
Love does not transform easily or immediately. But what we s
ee in Severus Snape is that love can radically transform a life. Snape doesn’t get the girl, but his deep love for Lily changes his beliefs and actions. This love motivates Snape to persevere in his dangerous and lonely role of double agent. Through love, Snape is capable of self-sacrifice, like Lily—and Harry.
NOTES
1 Order of the Phoenix, p. 833.
2 Half-Blood Prince, p. 615.
3 Ibid., p. 616.
4 It is also possible, of course, that Dumbledore attained “ironclad” proof of Snape’s loyalty through Legilimency (perhaps with Snape’s consent).
5 Aristotle, for example, devotes about a fifth of the Nicomachean Ethics, his great work on human happiness and fulfillment, to the topic of friendship.
6 Deathly Hallows, p. 697.
7 Aristotle states, “[T]hose who desire the good of their friends for the friends’ sake are most truly friends, because each loves the other for what he is, and not for any incidental quality,” Nicomachean Ethics, 1156b10. Thomas Aquinas cites Aristotle explicitly when he claims, “to love is to will the good of another,” Summa Theologica, I-II, 26, 4 ad. In a similar vein, the late M. Scott Peck defines love as the “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” See M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 81.
The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles Page 7