Star Wars and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series) - Kevin Decker [78]
The essence of sin, Hegel argues, is the belief that one is an isolated individual, an ego separated from the All—all other human beings and the rest of reality.111 In his sense of abandonment Jesus too experienced such a condition of sinfulness. He plumbed the Dark Side of reality to demonstrate “that the human, the finite, the fragile, the weak, the negative are themselves moments of the divine, that they are within God himself, that finitude, negativity, otherness are not outside of God and do not, as otherness, hinder unity with God.”112
If we seriously accept the Christian conception of Jesus as both God and man, then the Christian religion is truly the story of the hero’s journey in which the Son of God descends from his exalted heights into the darkness of an oppressive epoch of earthly life, and so is able to connect the darkness to the light in a renewed balance. Only in this way does God realize himself as God. 113 Just as we understand light only through its opposition to darkness, so God truly appreciates himself as God only by becoming something other than God—a finite human being subject to despair and death. God becomes human in every human being, for, as Hegel’s contemporary William Wordsworth writes, “trailing clouds of glory do we come, From God who is our home.”114
The emerging human ego soon separates itself from this original divinity experienced in childhood—that is, identifies itself as a separate being in opposition to everything else—to the Infinite reality outside of itself. Thus begins the war of the separate human ego with the All, our infinite home becomes the Dark Side of God. Through the Son, which represents every solitary human being, the God within us enters into the darkness of separate, finite, ego-centered existence. The inexorable outcome of this journey finds tragic expression in the solitary despair of Jesus’s cry from the cross.
But if there’s full comprehension of the divine nature of this journey, of the unity of the light with the dark, such a death is the death of death itself, and the return of the Son to the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Then, the empowered individual sees with the very eye of God. Hegel cites with approval the thought of the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (around 1260-1328): “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him: my eye and his eye are the same.” With such a vision, the individual shares in the divine substance: “If God did not exist,” Eckart argues, “nor would I; if I did not exist, nor would he.”115
Hegel thereby shows how both things can be true, as Obi-Wan says: the Force is both “an energy field created by all living things”—it’s our own energy, infinitely magnified for the one who knows how to connect consciously with all living things—as well as the Force that “binds the galaxy together.” For Hegel, Jesus’s crucifixion begins the destruction of the old paradigm of separate human egos at war with one another. It’s the birth of a new kind of community, bound together in the spirit of love. Overcoming ego-separation and re-connecting through love with all living things, the empowered individual actively participates in the God-force, the Spirit, that binds the galaxy together.
The Force of Love
Reality is ultimately “Spirit,” Hegel argues. And Spirit is “‘I’ that is ‘We,’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I.’”116 Our deeper nature is not to be an “I” separate from other “I”s by the confines and distances of our material bodies. Wherever there is one such separate “I” there are others, and each of these egos struggles against the others. Where every “I” asserts