Jason T. Eberl
DARK HELMET: No, we can't go in there. Yogurt has the Schwartz. It's far too powerful. SANDURZ: But sir, what about your ring? Don't you have the Schwartz, too? DARK HELMET: Naw, he got the upside, I got the downside. See, there's two sides to every Schwartz. –Spaceballs (1987)
Ever since Obi-Wan Kenobi first introduced the concept of “the Force” to Luke Skywalker in A New Hope, fans have pondered and debated its nature: what exactly is the Force? Why does it have two sides? How are the “light” and “dark” sides related to each other? As is well known, George Lucas invented the Force as a fictional stand-in for the diversity of spiritual metaphysics found in Western and Eastern philosophical and religious worldviews – for instance, the energy of qi in Chinese philosophy or the person of God in monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The depersonalized Chinese concept fits the side of the Force described by Obi-Wan as “an energy field” that Jedi, Sith, and other Force-sensitive beings are able to channel through their minds and bodies to accomplish extraordinary mental and physical feats – such as telekinesis and manipulating the weak-minded.1 The Force, however, is also like a personal God in that it purportedly has a will. Jedi Knights and Masters expend a great deal of time in meditative contemplation attempting to discern the will of the Force for how their individual lives, as well as galactic-scale events, should unfold. As in Earth's major monotheistic religions, there are even prophecies about future events and persons of significance – such as the prophecy referring to Anakin Skywalker as the “Chosen One” who “will bring balance to the Force.”
As we know, though, that particular prophecy wasn't fulfilled in the way the Jedi had hoped it would be, as Obi-Wan expresses in anguish after defeating Anakin on Mustafar: “You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them! Bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness!” Nevertheless, Anakin does eventually fulfill the prophecy, destroying both the Sith Lord Darth Sidious and himself in a final act of personal redemption. In another essay written not so long ago, not so far away, I argued that Anakin could've freely chosen both to turn to the dark side and to bring himself back to the light, despite his prophetic destiny.2 The existence of a God's-eye perspective on the future still leaves Anakin – and later Luke – free to make choices for which they're each morally responsible.
When it comes to freely willed actions for which individuals can be held morally accountable, it isn't only humans like Anakin, Luke, you, or me who may be subject to moral evaluation. If there's a God – or a Force – responsible for willing the universe's unfolding physically and historically, we can also question the sort of moral code such a being is bound by, and whether there are justified reasons for allowing – or, perhaps what may be even worse, willing – horrendous evils that afflict millions of innocent sufferers, from the Holocaust on Earth to the destruction of Alderaan. This concern – known as the problem of evil – raises two kinds of serious doubts about an all-powerful, all-knowing divine being. If evil exists, could such a being exist? And if such a being does exist, should we praise it as essentially good? Various responses to this problem – known as theodicies – have been put forth throughout the history of Western philosophy. We'll examine the theodicy offered by the Christian philosopher and theologian, St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE). While our examination of Augustine's theodicy won't answer all questions regarding the problem of evil,3 it can help us explain the nature of the dark side of the Force to which Anakin succumbed.
Before we can effectively examine the problem of evil and Augustine's response to it, we first need to understand what his view of evil is and how it relates to good. Augustine understands the difference between “good” and “evil” to refer to a real, objective distinction in moral value, but these words don't refer to distinct types of things in the world.5 Rather, Augustine claims that there's only one reality, and that reality is intrinsically good. Evil doesn't exist in itself, but only as a lack of being, of goodness – just as blindness is nothing other than a lack of the power of sight:
For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present – namely, the diseases and wounds – go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist. … Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.6
There are two broad categories of evil in Augustine's view. One is the inevitable by-product of God creating other beings: since no other being can be perfect as God is, every created being must lack some measure of being and goodness. The other type of evil arises out of the bad intentions of conscious, rational beings. This is the basis on which moral responsibility can be assigned to them. Luke says much the same in conversation with his nephew, Jacen Solo:
It's true that the Force is unified; it is one energy, one power. But … the dark side is real, because evil actions are real. Sentience gave rise to the dark side. Does it exist in nature? No. Left to itself, nature maintains the balance. But we've changed that. We are a new order of consciousness that has an impact on all life. The Force now contains light and dark because of what thinking beings have brought to it. That's why balance has become something that must be maintained – because our actions have the power to tip the scales.7
Like Luke, Augustine argues that moral evil – that is, evil done intentionally by a person – is solely the fault of that person. For Augustine, the fault is found in the misuse of a person's God-given free will. We'll examine this theodicy through the lens of two heroic Jedi who fall from grace: Anakin Skywalker and his grandson, Jacen. We'll also see how Augustine's view of the nature and relationship between good and evil opens up the possibility of Anakin's eventual redemption.
Anakin Skywalker awakes from a nightmare; however, as Anakin had told his wife, Padmé, “Jedi don't have nightmares.” Rather, Jedi receive premonitions through the Force. In this case, Anakin foresees Padmé's death in childbirth. Having failed to save his mother after similar premonitions, Anakin vows to Padmé that he won't let his vision become real. To that end, Anakin seeks advice from Master Yoda. But instead of offering him a way to save Padmé, Yoda gives him some unexpected and, for Anakin, unsatisfying counsel: “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.” Anakin's reaction makes it clear that he's not going to follow this advice. Later, he's offered a different perspective by another mentor, Chancellor Palpatine:
| PALPATINE: | Let me help you to know the subtleties of the Force. |
| ANAKIN: | How do you know the ways of the Force? |
| PALPATINE: | My mentor taught me everything about the Force, even the nature of the dark side. |
| ANAKIN: | You know the dark side? |
| PALPATINE: | Anakin, if one is to understand the great mystery, one must study all its aspects, not just the dogmatic narrow view of the Jedi. If you wish to become a complete and wise leader, you must embrace a larger view of the Force. Be careful of the Jedi, Anakin. Only through me can you achieve a power greater than any Jedi. Learn to know the dark side of the Force and you will be able to save your wife from certain death. |
Why is Yoda right and Palpatine wrong? How could it be evil for Anakin to want to save his beloved wife? The first point Augustine would make about Anakin's turn to the dark side is that, while he's certainly been subject to manipulation by Palpatine throughout his mentorship, it's ultimately Anakin's own will that is the source of his moral downfall:
A perverse will is the cause of all evils … what could be the cause of the will before the will itself? Either it is the will itself, in which case the root of all evil is still the will, or else it is not the will, in which case there is no sin. So either the will is the first cause of sin, or no sin is the first cause of sin. And you cannot assign responsibility for a sin to anyone but the sinner; therefore, you cannot rightly assign responsibility except to someone who wills it.8
Consider Augustine's words using this example: when Obi-Wan Kenobi uses a Jedi mind-trick to convince Elan Sleazebaggano that he doesn't want to sell death sticks and should go home and rethink his life, we can't morally praise Elan for following Obi-Wan's advice, because his will was being directly manipulated. Similarly, if Anakin turned to the dark side because Palpatine used a Sith mind-trick on him, we shouldn't hold Anakin morally accountable for all the evil he does as Darth Vader. Anakin, though, isn't weak-minded like Elan, and his will remains free of such direct influence. While Palpatine subtly seduces Anakin, he's only able to have an effect because Anakin's will is open to Palpatine's influence.
Within Augustine's Christian worldview, Palpatine would be analogous to the serpent in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:1–15). While the serpent in that story plays a role in humanity's fall from moral innocence, the ultimate blame lies with Adam and Eve. In this role, Palpatine first offers Anakin recognition of his talents in place of the Jedi Council's continual humbling: “It is upsetting to me to see that the Council doesn't seem to fully appreciate your talents. Don't you wonder why they won't make you a Jedi Master?” Like the serpent, Palpatine plays upon the pride and envy of those tempted to pursue knowledge of good and evil in defiance of God's command. Palpatine's seduction culminates in his offer to help Anakin develop the power to save Padmé: “The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.” Clearly, the Jedi consider such “unnatural abilities” to be immoral, so Anakin must turn to Sith teaching in order to learn them.
Is there anything wrong with Anakin wanting to save Padmé? A man's devotion to his wife and his desire to save her life are in themselves good. But what's wrong here isn't the goal Anakin is attempting to achieve, but the means he employs. Padmé challenges Anakin on this very point after learning from Obi-Wan that he's turned to the dark side and led the slaughter of the Jedi Temple, including younglings:
| PADMÉ: | Anakin, all I want is your love. |
| ANAKIN: | Love won't save you Padmé, only my new powers can do that. |
| PADMÉ: | At what cost? You're a good person don't do this … Anakin, you're breaking my heart! You're going down a path I can't follow! |
Augustine identifies the source of moral evil as “inordinate desire” for “temporal goods”:
So we are now in a position to ask whether evildoing is anything other than neglecting eternal things, which the mind perceives and enjoys by means of itself and which it cannot lose if it loves them; and instead pursuing temporal things … as if they were great and marvelous things. It seems to me that all evil deeds – that is, all sins – fall into this one category.9
We may at first think that the evil depicted in Episode III is essentially the actions Anakin does once he pledges himself to Palpatine. Augustine contends, rather, that what's essentially evil is the inordinate desire – in this case, to save Padmé at any cost – that animates such actions. Although Padmé's life is certainly good, it's nevertheless a good bounded by time's limits: she was born and one day, no matter what Anakin does, she will die.
Conversely, God and love for God are eternally good and the source of a human being's perfect (i.e., complete and abiding) happiness. If a person possesses love for God, he can't lose that love or the happiness that comes along with it, unless he wills to do so. Loving God means willing in accord with God's will. Unfortunately, according to Augustine, the “original sin” of humanity as told in the story of the Garden of Eden was to give in to the serpent's temptation and turn away from God in defiance of God's will for humanity. Similarly, Yoda and the other great Jedi Masters strive to discern the will of the Force and to find peace and joy by acting in communion with the Force. Anakin, however, pridefully seeks his own vision of happiness in defiance of the will of the Force and the lesson Yoda attempts to teach him about ordering his desires.
Anakin wants the power to save Padmé. He's clinging to a good that'll always be subject to potential loss. This leads, according to Augustine and Yoda, not only to committing evil deeds out of fear of losing those goods, but also to an anguished life:
All wicked people, just like good people, desire to live without fear. The difference is that the good, in desiring this, turn their love away from things that cannot be possessed without the fear of losing them. The wicked, on the other hand, try to get rid of anything that prevents them from enjoying such things securely. Thus the wicked lead a criminal life, which would be better called death.10
Augustine's recommendation to turn our love away from transitory goods also includes our beloved friends and family. Scripturally, Augustine finds a basis for his view in Christ's exhortation, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). Although the word “hate” seems rather harsh, Augustine understands Christ's teaching to refer to one's love for friends and family, and even his own life, as subordinate to love for God – the eternal good. Augustine came to this realization through his own self-reflection concerning the paralyzing grief he felt after the death of a dear friend.11 Grief, for him, is a torment for the “wicked”; those who've focused their love on God, on the other hand, won't suffer at the death of a loved one. Yoda gives the same advice to Anakin: “Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not.”
Now, when Augustine says that “the wicked lead a criminal life, which would be better called death,” he isn't condemning such people from a moral “high ground.” Instead, his view is based on his psychological analysis of how a person whose moral character is inclined toward inordinate desire – a vice that Augustine terms cupidity (cupiditas) – suffers from an embattled soul:
In the meantime cupidity carries out a reign of terror, buffeting the whole human soul and life with storms coming from every direction. Fear attacks from one side and desire from the other; from one side, anxiety; from the other, an empty and deceptive happiness; from one side, the agony of losing what one loved; from the other, the passion to acquire what one did not have; from one side, the pain of an injury received; from the other, the burning desire to avenge it.12
Anakin's anguished cry upon learning of Padmé's death, as well as his hatred for Obi-Wan as he lay dismembered on the burning sands of Mustafar, evidence the wisdom expressed by Yoda when he first meets Anakin and discerns his fear of losing his mother: “Fear is a path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.” Not only does Anakin, as Vader, cause tremendous suffering to others, but also he himself suffers the tragic results of his own inordinate desires.
Anakin's grandson, Jacen Solo, isn't driven to the dark side by the fear of losing someone he loves. Jacen realizes this when he time-drifts through the Force to Anakin's purging of the Jedi Temple and senses his grandfather's roiling emotions.13 On the contrary, faced with an ancient Sith prophecy seemingly about himself, Jacen is willing to “immortalize his love” by killing her for the sake of peace and justice in the galaxy. He believes his selflessness in pursuing what seems to him to be his moral duty will protect him from becoming evil – even as he becomes the Sith Lord Darth Caedus.14 In the end, Jacen does kill someone he loves – Mara Jade Skywalker – and also suffers the loss of respect and admiration from his apprentice, Ben, Mara and Luke's son. The prophecy is finally fulfilled, though, when he irrevocably loses the love of his own daughter, Allana. While Anakin's love for his children is what ultimately redeems him, Jacen's willingness to sacrifice this primordial love places him beyond redemption.15
Augustine believes that love, when directed toward God, is an eternal good. Unlike the inordinate love of temporal goods characterizing the vice of cupidity, Augustine ranks the virtue of love directed toward God – which he terms charity (caritas) – as the highest of all virtues, even more so than faith in God or hope for eternal life:
For when we ask whether someone is a good man, we are not asking what he believes, or hopes, but what he loves. Now, beyond all doubt, he who loves aright believes and hopes rightly. Likewise, he who does not love believes in vain, even if what he believes is true; he hopes in vain, even if what he hopes for is generally agreed to pertain to true happiness, unless he believes and hopes for this: that he may through prayer obtain the gift of love.16
While love for God is paramount in Augustine's view, it also extends to other persons, since God loves them as well. There's thus nothing wrong with Anakin loving Padmé, or Jacen loving Tenel Ka and Allana, so long as that love is rightly ordered.
So a sign of a depraved moral character would be found in a person who lacks an appropriate love for others. In his quest to bring peace and justice to the galaxy – a noble goal in itself but, as the history of both the Star Wars galaxy and our own shows, one that's fleetingly transient17 – Jacen tragically sacrifices “an ordinary man's precious connection to other beings – love, trust, and intimacy. He could never recover any of it.”18 At the moment of surrender to his dark fate, Jacen's “heart – irrelevant, fragile, expendable – broke.”19 Anakin inordinately desires his beloved's life, and this leads him to a life of tremendous evil. In the end, though, he hasn't lost the capacity to love in a proper fashion, and thus, as Padmé, and later Luke, both sense, “There is still good in him.”
The moral corruption that was the consequence of Anakin's inordinate desire to save Padmé doesn't end with her death. Encased forever in life-sustaining armor, Anakin has evidently surrendered to the dark side, despairing of any possible redemption for himself. As his apprentice, Shira Brie/Lumiya, describes him, “Vader wasn't a galaxy-conquering psychopath. He was a sad man whose one love in life had died, and whose one anchor to the world of the living was, yes, a galaxy-conquering madman.”20 Vader himself confesses to Luke on Endor, “It is too late for me, son.”
Augustine considers a human being's will to be free when it's oriented toward the objective source of happiness – what's eternally good, God. Conversely, when a person desires temporal goods inordinately, he willingly enslaves himself to those inferior goods and his desire for them: “Nothing can make the mind a slave to inordinate desire except its own will.”21 Freedom to do evil, according to Augustine, isn't true freedom, and our desire for temporal goods should always be subordinated to our desire for the eternal good.
But Anakin also seems to enjoy the power the dark side provides him as he mercilessly Force-chokes incompetent Imperial officers or those whose lack of faith in the Force he finds “disturbing.”22 Augustine sees that those who cling to temporal goods also tend to fail to moderate their desires in accord with eternal justice. In other words, the more a person is able to gain the power to fulfill his desires, the less inclined he is to restrain himself out of regard for the needs or interests of anyone else.23 Anakin, gaining power alongside Chancellor Palpatine, no longer moderates his desire for power and control; he even goes so far as to tempt Padmé, and later Luke, to help him overthrow Palpatine: “I am more powerful than the Chancellor. I can overthrow him. And together, you and I can rule the galaxy, make things the way we want them to be!” In short, moral corruption begets ever more moral corruption – or, as Yoda puts it to Luke, “If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan's apprentice.”
Even if we grant all of Augustine's claims, the problem of evil still remains: why did God give moral agents freedom of will if God knows that most of us will misuse it at some point and, in doing so in some cases, bring horrendous suffering to others?25
Augustine's answer is that free will is something good insofar as it allows us to be oriented toward a loving relationship with God and, by extension, other persons. Like other goods, however, it can be misused. Augustine draws an analogy to the use of one's body:
Consider what a great good a body is missing if it has no hands. And yet people use their hands wrongly in committing violent or shameful acts … many people use their eyes to do many evil things and press them into the service of inordinate desire; and yet you realize what a great good is missing in a face that has no eyes. … So just as you approve of these good things in the body and praise the one who gave them [i.e., God], disregarding those who use them wrongly, you should admit that free will, without which no one can live rightly, is a good and divine gift. You should condemn those who misuse this good rather than saying that he who gave it should not have given it.26
The prosthetics of Vader's life-supporting armor provide Anakin's electronic “eyes” and mechanical “hands,” which he may use to wield a lightsaber either in defense of innocent aliens or to slay Jedi who escaped Order 66. Anakin's body isn't what's evil, but rather his misuse of it. Analogously, each individual human being is morally responsible for the use of his own free will, which Augustine insists must be aimed at the eternal good – God – and not misused in pursuit of earthly objects of desire we might mistakenly believe will lead us to happiness: “Everyone wills to be happy but not everyone can be; for not everyone has the will to live rightly, which must accompany the will to live happily.”27
Jacen shows this kind of understanding of the Force when expressing concern about how his brother, Anakin Solo, seems to be misusing the Force to satisfy his “personal hunger for glory. … The Force is a method of serenity and truth, not an outward-projecting tool to be used to further any single person's perception of good.”28 Anakin later comes to realize that there may be something to reality more fundamental than the Force, “something of which the Force was a manifestation, an emanation – a tool. … The Force was the servant of that truth.”29
For Augustine, this more fundamental truth is God, whose gift of free will – which is a great good in itself – is essential to leading us toward loving union with God. Augustine defines evil, not as a thing in itself, but as the misuse of one's free will. Similarly, the dark side of the Force doesn't refer to any part or aspect of the Force – which is itself entirely good – but instead to its willful misuse. Free will and the Force thus have the potential to be used for good or evil – as former Jedi, Vergere, warns the Yuuzhan Vong priestess, Elan: “The Force is a sword with two edges, mistress. Cut one way and vanquish. But be careless on the backswing, or allow your mind to wander, and you risk undoing all you've accomplished. … Such power should be reserved for those with the strength to heft the sword and the wisdom to know when to wield it.”30