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of religion in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and other works. Religion, he argues, is distinguished from science and philosophy in being a matter of feeling and “picture thinking,” rather than of rationality and conceptual thought. The object of religion may be called God or Absolute Spirit, but for the religious person such terms are labels for a peculiar object of feeling and imagination, not concepts for rational inquiry. The ultimate goal of the philosophy of religion is to justify the truth of religious feeling by explaining the reality that it taps into—the all-encompassing and dynamic reality of Spirit.104 Each civilization has its own religious picture of the ultimate nature of reality, the divine, the God, the Absolute Spirit. This picture reflects the kind of civilization it is, and the stage of humanity’s self-development that it represents. A scientific-technological civilization that puts Matter in place of Spirit is no exception to this rule.

Hegel traces a developmental pattern in the historical succession of religious beliefs, one that produces in effect a distillation of divinity. In the succession of basic religious orientations, what one religion calls “good” another religion denounces as evil or darkness. But for the final distillation to appear it’s necessary for the human spirit, on its heroic journey to self-fulfillment, to find the balance between these opposites.

Human history begins with the divine in nature, as human beings living off plants and animals in the wild are immersed in the natural world. For such people there is no separation between the divine and the human. Like the spirits of nature, human beings too wield magical power in controlling the world around them by their wishes and in their dreams. This is the childhood of humanity, Hegel says. The mindset of the child, who willingly enters the fantasy of “once upon a time,” is the general outlook of the culture itself. As Yoda remarks in Attack of the Clones, “Truly wonderful the mind of a child.” This is also the general outlook of all the ancient nature-centered cultures of the East, as exemplified in the Daoism of China. Giving expression to this history, Star Wars appropriately culminates with the battle between the monstrosities of the most advanced technological civilization and the slings and arrows of the nature people, the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, who take C-3PO as a god. As a product of the advanced civilization, though, the gentleman droid cannot accept this worship: “It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” 105

In the next major stage of human history, which takes place primarily in the West, no one could mistake a physical object for a god. As human beings develop greater technological powers over nature, together with mighty systems of economic, social, and political power in which a small number of people have immense control over the lives of the majority, the divine is conceived of in the image of the rulers—a power radically separate from and ruling over the world. The progress of such separation between the higher realm of the gods and the lower world of nature and humans culminates in the slave empire of the ancient Romans. This slave state, which subjects all conquered peoples to an order based on the might of the Roman army, reduces everything sacred in life to an object of utility for political purposes. Star Wars, with its portrayal of the slide from Republic to Empire, borrows liberally from this Roman history—while suggesting parallels with our own time.106

To the individual trampled under by the overwhelming machine of deadly imperial force, the divine inevitably recedes to an “unattainable Beyond.” Hegel calls this dark but necessary moment of the journey of mankind “the Unhappy Consciousness.”107 All the childlike magic of life is gone. The Stoic sage of the time of the Roman empire preaches detachment from emotional involvement in the surrounding world, because the individual is thought to be powerless to change matters governed by forces that are wholly outside of our control.