Snape as infidel was Re: Kant and Snape and Ethics and Everything

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 150276

> Betsy Hp:
> And suddenly I wonder if this doesn't suggest that Snape may well 
> survive book 7.  Because if Snape *is* supposed to illustrate the 
> struggle to be good in a more comic than tragic way, then doesn't 
> that mean he must live, must learn whatever philosophical fact he's 
> failed to grasp (the impossibility of achieving pure rationality) in 
> order to stay true to the comic story?
> 
> [As a clarification: I'm using comic as the opposite of tragic 
> rather than comic as funny, which might not have been how Pippin was 
> using it, but I'm totally shanghai-ing this idea and running with 
> it. <g>]

Pippin:
Credit for spotting Snape as a comic character should go to
Pip!Squeak  (those plumbing the archives should be aware BTW
that we are not the same person.) She commented that only
a comic character would have been chased away by an enraged
hippogriff.

 I've always hoped Snape would survive, and in a more or less
unreformed state -- I mean, I'd like to see him change his mind 
about Harry, but  in accordance with *his* moral code, not because
he decided his moral code was deficient. 

Snape to me is less a sinner than an infidel -- an unbeliever with
respect to the Gryffindor chivalric ideal which I suspect is Rowling's
stand-in for Christianity and with respect to enlightened methods
of instruction. I would not like to be told that the
only good infidel is a dead infidel, much less a converted one.  Not
by someone who says her message is tolerance, anyway.

Not that Snape is a complete buffoon: that wouldn't be very
tolerant either. I think we're being led to a reversal in which
we cease to take Snape's bullying seriously, but see that his
life and his dignity are as precious as any other sinner's.

Pippin