SunKatabasis: The Vertical Dimension of Chiasm and Love in Goblet of Fire
| This is a follow-up to the Chiasm and Love Post I did recently. The Greek word I have in the title, sunkatabasis, basically means "with descension, " or "condescension." One of the big beginnings of the use of the word as a basic in Christian theology is Saint Irenaeus. Basically, it involves two stages, katabasis and anabasis (this is all course material from Dr. Scott Hahn.) The Greek preposition "kata" means "down from" (or can mean, of communication/writing, "according to") and the preposition "ana" means "above" or leading up (hence an "analogy" is a "ana-logos" or a word that "leads up" to a higher meaning or thing symbolized.) I will eventually have to do more research into the "basis" (ie find it's "basis" :) ... did I mention that puns are distinctly human too?), but basically in Irenaeus these two stages are the descent in the Incarnation and the re-ascent in the Ascension (in which Christ brings humanity back up with Him to the Father), with the Cross and Resurrection between them. Which makes a chiasm with the descent into Hell in the middle, and on either side of of Cross and Resurrection you would also have additional stages of, respectively: hidden life/public ministry (which begins, in Saint Matthew's Gospel with the 40 days fast in the wilderness) and the 40 days between the Resurrection and Ascension (you could also add in the conception of Christ by the Spirit in Mary on the front end and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost on the return end if you wanted) In other words, when you view sunkatabasis as a forward progression it is the chiastic "X" formula but with the motion of the individual legs being vertically oriented rather than horizontally. God descends into history in the Incarnation and brings humanity back up to heaven with Him ... just as Harry descended to the lake bottom. Clearing Up Possible Structural Confusions: GOF as a 4 part Chiasm. I have tracked down these other posts I have written on this basic material. -The 4th Task and the 4th Cup -4 Elements in 3 Tasks -Riddles Part 4: The Spider I wanted to put links up to them and maybe clarify what I think is the structure of book 4 because I was thinking that I might have been a bit sloppy and presented some confusion between this idea of the lake task as central and other things I said in these posts that might have led to the idea that the maze task is central. If I am right about an idea of 4 tasks in book 4, the second task (lake-bottom) and third task (maze) would be the center of the chiasm, as a pair. The fourth "task," then, (paired off against the first tri-wizard tourney task) is unique as the crucible of pain/trial (involving its own internal "descent and re-ascent pattern" in the form of "descending into the land of the dead, the graveyard, as John Granger notes in his book) ... just as the fourth cup in the 4 cups thought on the Eucharist is that drunk on the cross itself. At this level the graveyard is the culmination of GOF as a self-contained book because it is the culminating element of the chiasm specific to the book, as opposed to the series as a whole as a chiasm, of which the lake bottom is the center. However the chiasm specific to the book is also functioning centrally in the series chiasm (If you understood all that ... I recommend heavy therapy- I'm not sure I understood it all. But seriously, it does sort of make sense in my head and I do have a gut feeling that it somehow accurately describes what is going on on the structural level, but the reader is more than welcome to file it under "ummm ... someday that might makes sense to me, but for now ... moving right along") The Point? I just had to ask myself, "what's your basic thrust as regards Harry Potter specifically in all this?" And I think it is just to sort of point to the congruity between what I have been talking about, as the chiasm of the series and the lake-bottom as the Agape love center of that chiasm, with the central and basic Christian story of Salvation History (the sunkatabasis, or Salvation through "condescension" in the Incarnation, death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ.) |
Comments on "SunKatabasis: The Vertical Dimension of Chiasm and Love in Goblet of Fire"
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Anonymous said ... (August 13, 2006 6:37 PM)
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Merlin said ... (August 13, 2006 9:53 PM)
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post a commentI've printed out all your chiasm work to read. It looks very interesting, and I'd love to know how this works with Book 4 as the center since Rowling put so much emphasis on GF as the center of the series. She said something about the Goblet representing the Cup of Destiny as a key theme.
Well, some of my stuff concerns "missing links," meaning medeival literary instantiations of which I do not have actual knowledge from study, as of yet, as Granger does of the alchemy texts, but I am interested to find out if they exist and their
(for instance, a professor of mine states the traditional relationship of Grace and nature as being that the standard forumla of "Grace builds on nature" occurs without leaving nature basically un-affected [as in Pelagianisam and Neo-Pelagianism] OR having Grace completely deconstruct nature and reconstruct something incongruous with the original nature, which is the traditional set of "boundaries" for the though, and his "summary" of the relationship is that it is 3fold: Grace heals, perfects and elevates nature. I ask this professor in an email if this particular 3fold fomrulation was his own formulation
of whathe sees in the Tradition, or if he got it from somebdoy specific and he said it was his own. The reasonI asked him is that I see this formulation operating in 3 main instances of courtly love in LOTR, building on the medeival idea of courtly love as symbolic of Grace. I know Tolkien was more into philosophy and theology in his later life when he wrote LOTR, versus philology when he began working in his early years on the material that eventually became the Silmarillion, but I was trying to find if there was a specific historical locus for the formula in medeival philosophy or theology, and what would have clinched it even more on the level of "proof" would have been to find a medieval literay instantiation ... I have neither, but the fact that Tolkien's use of courtly love seems to fit that formulation so well, and that he was noted for delving into theology and philosophy by the time he wrote LOTR, to me lends weight to this particular profs formulation being an adequate and accurate one for what is in the Tradition as far as how Grace builds on nature without thinking of that in either Pelagian terms or deconstructionist ones)
But I see 4 cups in GOF: The Goblet as some sort of "calling," the penseive as some sort of "revelatory," the triwizard cup itself as recognition or the final evidence that one has lived up to the calling of the Goblet, and the inverted cup of the Phoenix song dome as the crucible in which natural level "proving of medal" in the tournament (or maybe rather of "cunning") is trandformed into the supernatural or higher realm through the major battle between Good and Evil.
I know the stuff is there in Biblical theology, in the four cup structure of the Jewish Caburrah and Seder meals, which are the context for the instituion of the Eucharist, or Lords Supper (and the theory being that the Institution in the upper room stopped at the 3rd cup, which was called the "cup of blessing," which is the language Saint Paul uses, and that the 4th cup was drunk on the Cross on the hysop branch), and that the medeival imaginatino was wholly wrapped up in the Eucharist (the Grail material especially) ... and I think it has made it through into Rowling through her being steeped
in the medeival tradition via her studies in classics ... but I do not have, as of yet, a concrete textual tradition of a literary instantiation of the 4 cup structure, which would provide more certainty.