William A. Lindenmuth
Luke Skywalker must make a decision at the end of Return of the Jedi. Will he ignore the utilitarian principle that he must kill his father to save the galaxy, or will he violate the ethical principle against dishonoring and murdering his own father and risk being turned to the dark side by the Emperor? Both are unacceptable to Luke. So he'll have to do something no one had believed possible for thousands of years: turn a Sith to the light side of the Force. Such a maneuver requires a leap of faith, and for that we turn to a man who knew just how hard it was: the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855).
Jedi Masters Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi ask Luke Skywalker to kill his father. They're obsessed with a prophecy that foretold the appearance of a “Chosen One” who would “bring balance to the Force.” The Jedi had believed this meant that Luke's father, Anakin, would “destroy the Sith, not join them.” Anakin's turn to the dark side led to the annihilation of all but a few Jedi.
Luke has an alternative interpretation in the form of a radical idea: to bring balance to the Force without killing his father. But how can this be done? After Yoda's death, Obi-Wan appears to Luke, who feels angry and betrayed. Obi-Wan had told him not that Darth Vader was his father but that he had murdered Luke's father. When Luke first asks how his father died, Obi-Wan dissembles, “A young Jedi named Darth Vader – who was a pupil of mine, until he turned to evil – helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights. He betrayed and murdered your father.” It isn't until he first faces Vader that Luke learns the truth. On Cloud City, Vader wants Luke to join him and complete his training, telling him that it's his destiny to “destroy the Emperor” and that they can “rule the galaxy as father and son.” Darth Vader describes this as the “only way.” Luke's response is to fall off the platform to an uncertain fate.
When Luke sees Obi-Wan after confronting Vader, he's understandably distressed. He interrogates him, “Why didn't you tell me? You told me Vader betrayed and murdered my father.” Obi-Wan explains that Anakin was seduced by the dark side of the Force and when he became Darth Vader, he ceased being Anakin: “the good man who was your father was destroyed.” Luke counters that there is “still good in him,” that Anakin isn't dead. Obi-Wan responds, “He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil.” He claims it is Luke's destiny to face Vader and destroy him. When Luke demurs, Obi-Wan responds, “Then the Emperor has already won.”
Both the Sith and the Jedi believe that “balance” is the eradication of the opposing side, even though Obi-Wan himself says, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” Luke is determined to face Darth Vader and the Emperor, but somehow not turn to the dark side or murder his father. He faces quite a dilemma when he finally confronts them simultaneously.
Abraham, a central figure in the Book of Genesis, was in a similar situation when God asked him to kill his own son. Abraham, whose name means “the father is exalted,” was a biblical patriarch who had a special relationship with God. God promised Abraham that a great nation would be made of him, and a covenant would be formed with him. This would be an exclusive agreement that God would watch over and assist Abraham and all his descendants as long as they obeyed God's laws. God made this arrangement, promising the hundred-year-old Abraham and his ninety-year-old wife Sarah a son to be named Isaac. It was through this son that God was to make Abraham's descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and uphold His covenant.
Sometime later, God suddenly calls Abraham and commands, “Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There offer him up as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you” (Genesis 22:2). How can this be? How can the Lord – in whom Abraham has put all his faith, who gave him a son after a hundred years and promised to make a great nation through him – ask Abraham to kill this beloved son?
Søren Kierkegaard asked these hard questions. Writing in the early nineteenth century, he was bothered by how “easy” philosophers were making faith and Christianity. He believed that the “leap to faith” was, as Gotthold Lessing put it, an “ugly great ditch.” Kierkegaard considered this problem, imagining a number of variations on the events of Genesis 22 and what they mean for ethics and faith. Stressing the separation between reason and faith, Kierkegaard argued forcefully that faith is more important than anything else.1
Let's complete the biblical story. The next morning after God speaks to him, Abraham saddles his donkey and brings Isaac and some servants on the trip to Moriah, telling his wife nothing. After travelling for three days, he tells the servants to wait for them to go and worship. As they head up the mountain, Isaac asks his father where the sheep is for the sacrifice. Abraham replies, “Son, God Himself will provide the sheep for the holocaust.” He then ties Isaac to the altar and raises his knife. At that moment, an angel tells him to stop. Abraham has demonstrated his devotion to God, and the covenant will be fulfilled; Abraham's descendants will be blessed abundantly and made as “countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore … because you obeyed my command” (Genesis 22:18).
Kierkegaard is in awe of this. He says he can't comprehend this story! “Abraham I cannot understand; in a certain sense I can learn nothing from him except to be amazed.”2 How did Abraham know it was God who asked him to do this? How did he know it wasn't a demon or nightmare? How can God have asked him to do this? How does he know he got the message right? How can God keep His promise if Isaac must die? Has Abraham gone crazy? Kierkegaard writes, “Who strengthened Abraham's arm, who braced up his right arm so it did not sink down powerless! Anyone who looks at this scene is paralyzed.”3
Likewise, both Anakin and Luke experience premonitions of the future that cause them, like the Greek tragic heroes, to hubristically try to prevent them. Han, Leia, and Chewbacca are tortured on Bespin to command Luke's attention and bring him into the Emperor's grasp. Perhaps Palpatine also caused the young Anakin to envision Padmé's death and therefore feel compelled to take her protection into his own hands and solidify his quest for power. The dark side was crouching just around the corner.
Some people might pass over the Abraham story, thinking it just a foolish myth – just as belief in the Force tends to be disregarded as an “ancient religion” to which some still have a “sad devotion” after the virtual extinction of the Jedi. But Abraham is treated as a father by adherents to the major world religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and as a paragon of virtue regarding faith. Kierkegaard thinks the story of Abraham and Isaac, as paralyzing as it is, is fundamental to understanding the human condition, and so he approaches it with “fear and trembling.” It's important to Kierkegaard to try to understand this story, and it will help us understand Luke's situation. Luke stands in the reverse position. He's being asked to destroy his father, and the fate of the galaxy rests on his success. But how can the Force ask this of him? How can it be a holy act to be willing to kill one's own father or son? Kierkegaard asks, “If faith cannot make it a holy act to be willing to murder his son, then let the same judgment be passed on Abraham as on everyone else.”4 If we can't explain Abraham's act through faith, then he's as much a monster as anyone who'd kill his own son, and the same is true of Luke killing his own father.
Kierkegaard imagines a number of ways that this story could've happened. In one version, Abraham pretends it is he, and not God, who wants Isaac killed. In this way he prevents his son from imagining God “a monster” for ordering this sacrifice. An alternate version imagines Abraham going through the task, but losing his faith in the process, never forgiving God for ordering this sacrifice. In yet another, he tells it from Isaac's perspective, where Isaac sees Abraham clenching the knife “in despair,” and Isaac loses faith in God.
Kierkegaard's point is that these are all much more believable and likely stories than the biblical one, which is a marvel: Abraham must simultaneously believe that he'll have to sacrifice Isaac and that he won't. God had promised Abraham descendants through Isaac; God has demanded Isaac's sacrifice. This is a confounding paradox that Kierkegaard thinks can't be explained away. Abraham is both resigned to losing Isaac and full of faith that he'll get to keep him at the same time. It's what Kierkegaard describes as a “double-movement.” The first is a movement of “infinite resignation,” in which Abraham gives up everything: his son, his wife, and his life. It's an ultimate surrendering, in which he becomes a “knight” of infinite resignation, a hero willing to lose everything.
The Jedi are knights in this fashion as well. Yoda doesn't want Anakin trained, as he's formed too deep an attachment to his mother and is accordingly terrified of losing her. “I sense much fear in you,” Yoda tells young Anakin. When he loses his mother, Anakin slaughters the Sand People in revenge, and concentrates all his love and feelings of attachment on Padmé. It's this attachment that Chancellor Palpatine takes advantage of by tying his survival to Padmé's in Anakin's mind. When Anakin begins having premonitions of Padmé's death that echo his mother's, he goes to see Yoda, who counsels him, “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.” Anakin can't comply and thus becomes a prisoner to his fears.
The movement of faith is a positive belief that somehow, through losing everything, one will gain everything. It's a complete and utter trust in God. This could mean that God will bring Isaac back from the dead, or stop Abraham before he kills him, which is what happens. But Abraham can't go about his task believing this. He can't “pretend” to kill Isaac or hesitate with the knife, as happens in the alternate versions that Kierkegaard imagines. He must be fully and totally committed to his duty. But his duty is also to love and care for his son! While the first movement is resignation, the second is faith, where one gains what one has lost. Abraham now becomes a knight of faith by trusting in God and his promise. Through losing Isaac, he also gains him.
Returning to Luke, he still must defeat Vader. The only way anyone imagines this can happen is if Luke kills him. Why must Luke face Vader? The Rebel attack on Death Star II would destroy Vader and the Emperor, but he must confront them anyway. As Abraham must sacrifice Isaac “For God's sake and his own sake,”5 Luke must confront Vader for his sake and the Force's sake. He can't merely refuse to fight him on the grounds that the Jedi are not aggressive. To do so would be to turn his back on justice, his friends, and the fate of the galaxy. Darth Vader and the Emperor must be stopped, and Luke is the only one who can do it. But, besides the general obligation that we each have not to kill, this injunction applies all the more as a special duty not to kill our family members.
When Luke faces his father on Endor, he confidently reminds Vader that he was “once Anakin Skywalker, my father.” That is the name of Vader's true self, a self he has forgotten. “I know there is good in you,” Luke says. “The Emperor hasn't driven it from you fully.” Luke doesn't believe that Vader will bring him before the Emperor, but he is wrong. Still, when Vader sends Luke to the Emperor, we witness Vader's evident hesitation. At some deep level, Luke has affected him.
There are a number of heroic characters in the Star Wars saga, but one of the most interesting is Han Solo. One of the compelling aspects of his character is that he starts off as a “scoundrel.” He's a smuggler, a rough, uncouth man who's in it for himself. “What good's a reward if you ain't around to use it?” he asks Luke when the Rebels are about to attack the Death Star. He's what Kierkegaard describes as the “aesthetic” man. His motivations are self-preservation and pleasure. Luke tells him, “Take care of yourself, Han. I guess it's what you're best at.”
Luke loses everything shortly after we meet him in A New Hope. He resigns himself to “learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father.” He's thrown into the next stage, what Kierkegaard calls the “ethical.” This is the realm of the hero, the person who follows a moral code and adheres to certain universal principles regardless of the consequences, including the risk of his own life. Han makes the transition from the aesthetic realm to the ethical when he shows up near Yavin out of nowhere, at great personal risk to himself, his partner Chewbacca, and his ship. He clears Luke to take the shot that destroys the Death Star, and they all return in triumph. Leia says about him, “I knew there was more to you than money.” Han again risks himself to save Luke when he goes missing in the freezing terrain of the ice planet Hoth. Kierkegaard's ethical stage also explains the great pains taken to rescue Han from Jabba the Hutt. The risk doesn't matter to the hero, though, as Kierkegaard describes, “The tragic hero relinquishes himself in order to express the universal.”6 Heroes are willing to sacrifice in order to protect something greater than themselves.
Everyone demands of Luke that he use his powers to kill his father, who's been responsible for so much evil. But Luke, sensing the good in his father, has to come up with a radically new plan. He can't kill his father, but he can't allow Vader to live. Luke is already a Knight of Infinite Resignation. He must go beyond if he's to truly defeat the dark side in Vader and his Emperor.
When Luke rushes off to Bespin to save his friends, Obi-Wan and Yoda urge him not to go. Luke retorts, “But I can help them! I feel the Force.” Obi-Wan reprimands him, telling Luke that he can't control the Force and will be vulnerable to the dark side. Yoda reminds him of his “failure at the cave.” After a training session in which Yoda teaches Luke that the Force is never to be used for attack, Luke senses something is wrong. Yoda tells him there's a nearby cave that “is strong with the dark side of the Force” into which Luke must go. What's in the cave is “only what you take with you.” Luke begins strapping his utility belt on, but Yoda tells him, “Your weapons – you will not need them.” Luke gives him a sidelong glance and straps them on anyway. Within the cave, an apparition of Darth Vader suddenly approaches and Luke extends his lightsaber. Vader mirrors him. There's a brief clash, then Luke beheads Vader. As Vader's head comes to a rest on the ground, the mask explodes, revealing Luke's visage underneath.
What exactly is Luke's failure? Was it that he brought his weapons in after Yoda told him not to? Was it that he resorted to violence and struck first? Was it that he's simply too tempted by the dark side and needs more discipline and training? Was it that he brought the “idea” of Vader in with him that caused him to materialize? It's at least a subtle foreshadowing that Luke is related to Vader, and that's why he sees himself in the mask. Much of a hero's arc is devoted to destroying the elements that connect them to the villain. His Aunt Beru had told her husband that Luke “has too much of his father in him,” to which Owen replies, “That's what I'm afraid of.”
Luke believes that convincing his father to return to the light side would be easier. He isn't prepared to face Vader and the Emperor together, and he thinks that he can turn Vader before being brought before the Emperor. Yoda's message must be ringing in Luke's ears: “Only a fully-trained Jedi Knight with the Force as his ally will conquer Vader and his Emperor.” Luke knows he has to defeat them both, but he can't join the dark side and doesn't want to kill his father. What he learns and doesn't expect is that the Emperor wins if Vader kills Luke, but also if Luke kills his father. The Emperor never refers to Darth Vader as Anakin in front of Luke, but always as his father. Darth Sidious relishes his perceived ownership of the Skywalkers: “You, like your father, are now mine.” Luke killing and replacing Vader with himself would continue Darth Sidious's habit of recruiting ever stronger apprentices.
Luke also thinks the joint sneak attack on the shield generator and the Death Star will succeed, but the Emperor tells him that it was all a trap of his design. He mocks, tempts, and threatens Luke, cajoling and goading him to fight. One of the final straws is the revelation that the Death Star is a “fully armed and operational battle station,” which begins to fire on the Alliance fleet. Luke breaks down and crosses swords with Vader. He continually tries to stop the physical fight and keep the battle on the light side of Anakin against the dark side of Darth Vader: “I feel the good in you, the conflict,” Luke tells him. Luke doesn't believe his father will kill him: “You couldn't kill me before and I don't believe you'll destroy me now.” Vader lures Luke with the chance to save his friends if he turns. Luke's feelings flare at this and “betray him,” revealing to Vader that Luke has a twin sister. When Vader threatens her, Luke loses control and launches a full-force attack on Vader, savagely swinging at him until he floors him and chops off his hand.
As with Abraham, Luke's “temptation is the ethical itself, which would hold him back from doing God's will.”7 Luke wants to kill Vader and, in many ways, it's the “right” thing to do. We think our fear is that Luke will turn to the dark side or die at Vader's hand. But what we really fear is that he'll do what Yoda and Obi-Wan demand of him: kill his father. The Emperor wins either way: Vader kills Luke – problem solved – or Luke kills Vader and takes his place at the Emperor's side. The Emperor believes he's engineered events so that he'll remain victorious regardless of the outcome. This is what the Emperor means when he says, “Young fool. Only now, at the end, do you understand.” Luke realizes the only way that he can win is by surrendering everything. He can't murder his father and he can't join the dark side. In the same act, Abraham raises his blade while Luke casts his aside, but the meaning is the same. Luke can destroy Vader and yet simultaneously save his father, while Abraham symbolically sacrifices Isaac and God keeps his word.
This is the negative movement, the abandoning of all things: his friends, his cause, his life, his hopes – everything. As Kierkegaard speaks of Abraham, “[O]nly in this moment when his act is in absolute contradiction to his feelings, only then does he sacrifice Isaac.”8 Likewise for Luke, killing Vader is exactly what he wants to do. Darth Vader represents everything that Luke hates about the galaxy, and when he threatens Leia, it's the last straw. There's no composure here: Luke explodes at Vader, slashing and wailing on him until he beats him into submission, chopping off his hand just as Vader had done to him. He's seething, the pent-up rage bursting out of him as he pounds away, flecks of spit glistening on his open, panting mouth. He hates Vader, as in the moment before, ethically, Abraham “hates Isaac.”9 Luke's hatred has made him powerful. But if he strikes down either Vader or the Emperor “with all his fury,” his “journey toward the dark side will be complete!” Earlier, Yoda teaches Luke that “a Jedi uses the force for knowledge and defense – never for attack.”
Luke looks at Vader's smoking stump and then at his own mechanical hand. His eyes widen as he makes the connection that he's following in his father's path. Luke inhales deeply to calm and steel himself for what he's about to do. Yoda teaches him that he will know “the good side from the bad” when he is “calm, at peace, passive.” He doesn't repeat the past. Determined, in the most difficult moment of his life, when he has more right to anger and revenge than anyone, he chooses faith instead. He trusts in the Force, even in the darkest place. “Never. I'll never turn to the Dark Side. You failed, your Highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” He doesn't repeat his father's mistake. The Emperor said that Luke's “compassion will be his undoing.” Instead, it's what saves him – and Anakin. As Kierkegaard describes, “The knight will then have the power to concentrate the whole substance of his life and the meaning of actuality into one single desire.”10 Luke's desire is to get his father back.
Luke overcomes Vader in the lightsaber duel through anger, fear, and aggression. These are the exact things Yoda tells Luke to avoid, as “the dark side are they. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.” But Luke isn't dominated by them, nor do they determine his fate. Both the Sith and the Jedi try to kill all of the other side. They don't want the other to exist. When Obi-Wan interprets the prophecy of the “Chosen One,” he says it is “to destroy the Sith” in order to “bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness.”
But this isn't balance. Only Luke sees the good in his father, and he's also the only one who possesses the composure to control his feelings and retract his lightsaber after defeating Vader. Unlike the young Anakin, Luke is able to resist the Emperor's temptations of power, revenge, and justice. By contrast, consider how Sidious manipulates Anakin to kill the unarmed (and dismembered) Count Dooku.
Luke realizes that killing Vader will not bring balance to the Force. He can't do what is demanded of him: he must do something more. “The knight of faith relinquishes the universal in order to become the single individual.”11 Luke somehow has faith that there's still good in his father, all evidence aside, and that they'll save one another. Discarding the lightsaber, Luke expresses both resignation and faith. He abandons everything he's fought for, while at the same time embracing it. He becomes a Jedi Knight of faith in this amazing act. While the Emperor tortures him with Sith lightning, he also accomplishes something no one ever thought possible: he turns a Sith good.
Clearly Vader sees his son suffering when the Emperor is electrocuting him, but it was Luke's casting aside his saber that made it possible. It isn't through mere sympathy that Anakin saves his son. Rather, Luke's commitment to the Force brings Anakin back. Darth Vader is willing to kill Luke: but what's amazing is Luke's ability not to do the same. Luke defeats Vader in the duel, but saves him in not ending it the way everyone has been telling him to. As Kierkegaard says, “it is only by faith that one gets to Abraham, not by murder.”12 It's only by faith that Luke gets to Anakin, not through killing him. “I've got to save you!” Luke says to his dying father. “You already have, Luke,” Anakin replies.
Luke is warned by Yoda not to underestimate the powers of the Emperor, “or suffer your father's fate you will.” Ironically, it's the Emperor who underestimates the power of the light side of the Force, having misplaced his faith in the dark side, as Yoda had forewarned him back in their duel on Coruscant. In the end, balance has been restored.