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By Root 385 0

Epictetus advises: “If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.”108 The Stoic recommends acquiescence to external powers in the belief that whatever inscrutable plans the gods have orchestrated for humanity, there must be good in them. But the Skeptic delights in refuting such beliefs as infantile by pointing to the empirical testimony of hard realities. There’s no all-powerful Force that masters the universe, including the power of the Emperor himself. There’s only my own cunning, and the power of a good blaster, as the rebel Han Solo says.

We therefore see two opposite forms of religion in early world history. From the earliest societies and the East, there is the divine as an all-pervading natural force capable of emerging in the most unexpected objects, as in the Ewoks’ vision of a divine C-3PO. From the beginnings of Western civilizations the contrary concept emerges of an external divinity that supposedly controls all, yet dwindles to being an “unattainable Beyond.” If there is to be a distillation of the essence of religion as the core of a new myth for our time, it must combine these two opposite conceptions of the divine. Just such a synthesis, Hegel argues, is represented by the “Consummate Religion” of Christianity with its story of a God who becomes a human babe, grows up with a family, enters upon his mission, and accomplishes this mission only by dying the ignominious death on Mount Calvary of a criminal nailed to a cross.109

What is this mission? To teach a people plunged in the darkness of a world ruled by pitiless physical force that God is not a menacing power ruling over us, but the deepest inner reality of each person. It’s the inner Holy Spirit that binds us all together in a powerful unity that is the irresistible Force by which we can resist and overcome all inner darkness and every outer unjust form of rule. Thus, at the peak of the imperial power of Rome, intrepid bands of Christian rebels, believing that divine Force has merged with the human spirit, began the long climb from a world of Empire whose principle is that only one person is completely free, the Emperor, to a world whose dominant inspiration is that all should be free to rule themselves. Hegel calls this evolution of the state from tyranny to freedom “the march of God in the world.”110 Similarly, defenders of liberty can justly say, in the language of Star Wars, that the Force is with us. It is with us—a people united in the spirit of creative freedom and mutual love. For this is the nature of Spirit, according to Hegel. It’s the Force that runs through us all together. It’s truly understood only when we overcome the darkness that we ourselves cast by our separation from one another, our egotism—only when we learn the ultimate and unconquerable power of love.

Anakin Skywalker as the Chosen One

Anakin’s mother, Shmi, tells Qui-Gon in The Phantom Menace that her gifted son was conceived without a father. “He is the chosen one,” the child of prophecy, Qui-Gon later tells the Jedi Council. The same prophecy that foretells the growth of the Dark Side also tells of “the one who will bring balance to the Force.” All these echoes of Hegel’s Consummate Religion of Christianity, from prophecy to Virgin Birth to a mission of liberation from darkness, set up certain natural expectations. And yet Anakin is no clone of the Christian Savior as Jesus is conventionally understood. Upsetting the standard Christian paradigm, the prophesied savior of Star Wars becomes the archetype of modern villainy, the evil Lord Darth Vader, a machine as much as a man, whose every breath sounds with menace. And yet the prophecy is fulfilled. Anakin-Vader indeed brings balance to the Force, striking down the Emperor, and then dying in the loving embrace of his son.

Giving reason to this reversal of conventional Christianity, Hegel is sharply critical of a theology according to which Jesus is the sinless savior whose mission is to redeem a humanity sunk in darkness.