The Logos in a Lightsaber: Part III

Why Every Catholic Should Watch the "Star Wars" Trilogies

This post is a continuation of Nico Silva’s ongoing series, “The Logos in a Lightsaber” that began with his May 4th post. His previous entry in the series can be found here.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about Star Wars for this series “The Logos in a Lightsaber.” True to the essence of the franchise: I’ve waited virtually thirty years to continue the saga of my articles.

REASON 5: Star Wars is a Catechism for Christian Virtue

In an age where we aren’t sure what we will be exposed to when we turn on the latest hit streaming show aimed at general audiences, Star Wars doesn’t give much cause for concern. There’s no on-screen nudity or sex scenes to speak of, no morally-concerning romance (save for an unintentionally retconned kiss that later turned out to be incestuous!). But, by and large, Lucas’ films adhere to the standards of family-friendly cinema. True to form, the prequels which came out between 1999 and 2005 continue director George Lucas’ emphasis on keeping his movies “for kids.” Star Wars is not without violence, yet that violence is portrayed in a largely bloodless and sanitized manner like most superhero films today. The first PG-13 rating for one of the films, however, did come out of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith: the sequence of Anakin Skywalker catching fire and burning to crisp in graphic detail probably makes that a film you’d want to wait on exposing younger, more sensitive viewers to.

But I didn’t come here to write about the bare minimum of Christian decency! Star Wars takes things a step further and actually shows virtue and doesn’t just avoid promoting vice.

Since we’ve covered some of the virtues of piety, self-sacrifice, and heroism in earlier posts, I’m going to expound upon one striking virtue present in one of the trilogies that catches many by surprise: the supernatural virtue of celibacy for a higher purpose. Yes, you heard that right, celibacy is highly extolled in the prequel films due to the plot’s emphasis on the eventually fallen-hero, Anakin Skywalker, joining the Jedi Order, which, you might remember, is a religious order of warrior monks devoted to the “ways of the Force.” The Jedi code generally contains much about moral action like: “use the Force to protect, never to attack”, but also a vow of celibacy. The vow is explained by Anakin in the second installment of the prequel trilogy, Attack of the Clones, as: “Attachment is forbidden. Possession is forbidden.” George Lucas, in a book called The Star Wars Archives, expounds upon why his order of space-warrior monks holds to this fundamental tenet, saying:

The Jedi are taken from their families very young. They do not grow attachments because attachment is a path to the “dark side.” You can love people, but you can’t possess them. They are not yours. Accept that they have a fate. Protect them with your lightsaber. But if they die, they were going to die. There’s nothing you can do. All you can do is accept that fact. The key to the darkside is fear. A Jedi must be clean of fear, and fear of loss is the greatest fear of all. That’s the basic premise of Star Wars and the Jedi.

If this smacks of Buddhism’s doctrine of destroying one’s desire for anything in the search of nirvana (a purported state of bliss resulting from self-annihilation of all desire for all things), Star Wars avoids this trap. Catholic teaching holds that it is disordered desires which should be avoided, but God also created various desires for various good things that we should entertain: the desire for love, for community, for glory, for family, etc. When saints in Catholicism renounce family life or material possessions, this is not to annihilate all desire simply, but rather to achieve a desire for higher communion with God and freedom from the occasion of sin. This is precisely what the Jedi do, seeking a simplicity of heart and purity of intention that allows them access to the light side of the Force and freedom from temptations that arise from the fear of losing something through disordered, possessive mindset. Star Wars joins our Catholic faith by contextualizing celibacy as an admirable desire to avoid a vice (disordered possession) so as to achieve a virtue (selflessness and a readiness to serve others).

The whole prequel trilogy virtually contrasts the selfless service of a younger Obi-wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), who faithfully adheres to his vow of celibacy, and compares that exemplar to the tragic downfall of Anakin (Hayden Christensen), who breaks his vow of celibacy and clandestinely marries Senator Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman). On this point, however, the movies deserve to be praised for not entertaining the idea that even a fallen-hero’s romantic arc should languish in the realm of furtive trysts and illicit embraces. The prequel films, to their moral credit, do not suggest any bed-sharing between Anakin and Padme, until the two are married. Anakin desires to have Padme as a wife, not just as a lover. But since evil always takes something good and twists it in a disordered way, the secret nature of Anakin’s marriage leads him to compromise with more than just one aspect of the Jedi’s moral code. His love of Padme leaves him vulnerable to the evil Sith Lord Palpatine (disguised as a benevolent leader of the Republic) and his manipulation of Anakin’s fear of losing Padme with a promise of immortality.

This powerfully seduces Anakin to consider the advantages of the dark side if it allows his wife to cheat her imminent and prophetically foreseen death. It’s a bargain taken straight out of Milton’s Paradise Lost which envisions the fall of Adam motivated by a desire to not live without Eve after she eats of the fruit. Adam knows Eve is going to die after eating the fruit, but he cannot stomach the thought of living without her and chooses to join her in death so as to avoid the loneliness he once experienced before her creation. Anakin follows a similar path of self-destruction and disordered possession, by thwarting Jedi Master Mace Windu’s attempt to arrest and execute Chancellor Palpatine for treason, thus preventing the Jedi Order’s best attempt to preserve the Republic from a tyrannical take-over. Having killed Master Windu before he could assassinate Palpatine, Anakin pledges allegiance to the Sith Lord with the words: “I’ll do whatever you ask. Just help me save Padme’s life. I can’t live without her.” From that moment forward, Anakin effectively imitates a soul given over completely to Satan. He commits heinous crimes that lead to the extermination of 10,000 Jedi across the galaxy and personally slays down a classroom of Jedi children. The sins of Anakin take on an almost ludicrous level of evil so quickly, but Revenge of the Sith frames the descent of Anakin as being “blinded” by the dark side. This is an apt analogy to how sin begets greater sin in a downward, accelerated spiral. It’s also a confirmation of that biblical adage that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).

Anakin falls to the Dark Side

Now, it would be reductive to say: “Anakin’s Fall would’ve been prevented were he faithful to his vow of celibacy” or, what is a more common sentiment among fans, “getting rid of the vow of celibacy to begin with would have developed a healthy romance.” But Anakin’s disposition toward “disordered attachment” manifests itself much earlier. Attack of the Clones makes this clear when, prior to his marriage, a fit of rage overcomes him and he commits his first murders. The cause? He discovers his mother died at the hands of a desert tribe, so he exacts his revenge upon her killers, on the entire village they came from, including its innocent children. Celibacy or not, the dark side manifested itself in Anakin’s disordered and possessive desires, wherever they arose. Like the Catholic Church and the Latin-rite priesthood or celibate life in general, the Jedi also know that the life of a Jedi isn’t for everyone. Only those endowed with force-sensitivity (a proclivity to access the supernatural powers of the Force) are to be taken from willing families as babies to be trained one day as Jedi. In a way, this models how the Church seeks people who are disposed by God to undertake that sacrifice of celibacy/chastity with God’s help, and blesses the rest who wish to marry instead. By this, the Star Wars prequels are a rare example of celibacy portrayed as something undertaken by good people seeking to avoid real evils and not as a caricature of “religious fanaticism” or “dogmatically-constructed shame.” The celibate Jedi are heroes, exemplars of restraint, selfless servants of peace and justice in the galaxy, seeking to harness their own virtue for the greater good.

REASON 6: The Hope of Redemption

Star Wars sticks out like a sore thumb in an era of “cancel culture.” The original movies, as we discussed in earlier posts, go a long way in portraying the evil Empire as a collection of space Nazis, only to show the main villain of that Empire, Darth Vader, returning to the light at the end of his life. Recent installments of Star Wars like the Disney “Sequel” trilogy’s Ben Solo, stand-alone anthology films like Solo, TV shows like Andor and Ahsoka, and cartoons like The Clone Wars and Rebels, continue to present viewers with many more examples of the series’ tradition of villains changing their lives and trying to atone for their pasts. It’s a twisted fact of modernity that the long-promised tolerance that was supposed to follow the recession of religion from public life has instead given way to a world that is less tolerant, less merciful, and unforgiving of human flaws and weakness.

The critically-acclaimed Andor stands in stark relief to its modern Star Wars series counterparts in actually presenting characters who must face interesting moral conundrums and whose interactions have vast consequences upon both each other and the fate of the galaxy in fascinating ways

It is an anti-Gospel world where we are stamped with sins and original sins based on vogue abstractions, ideological transgressions, and subject to mob-like retaliation without any hope of redemption. Star Wars will always stand out as a saga committed to proclaiming the most radical Gospel-standard of mercy: there is no sinner, however great, who is beyond the reach of transformation and forgiveness. In Revenge of the Sith, with her dying breaths, Padme begs Obi-wan to see what she still believes about Anakin: “There is still good in him,” she says before expiring. Here, Padme, who was nearly killed by her former lover, shows an almost divine level of love just like the God who “died for us, while we were yet sinners” (Romans 5:8), the same God who in the beginning created no evil and saw that everything He made was “good.” We need entertainment like Star Wars to call us back to that fundamental belief in the fundamental goodness in which God created us and that seventy times seventy standard of forgiveness.

REASON 7: A Christian Historical mindset

I close out with a brief statement about the way Star Wars portrays history. As I discussed in my first post, the films operate in a deeply religious mode of understanding events in history as “foretold” or “as the Force wills it” or “destined.” Taken as a whole, Star Wars has become a bit cyclical, where a Republic falls, an Empire rises, a new Republic comes, and a new Empire takes its place. That said, however, underlying this galactic history is an understanding that the Force is seeking “balance” and is sending “a Chosen one” to defeat “the Sith.” History in Star Wars, politically speaking, always seems to be fluctuating to and fro, but in the grand scheme of things, the franchise never lets us forget that the light side is ultimately prevailing and just awaiting its moment to defeat evil. Is this not a model of real salvation history in our world? where we see that our Blessed Lord “in the fullness of time” born on earth to redeem the human race? where we see earthly regimes, governments, and kingdoms come and go in human history ever since Christ’s marvelous Incarnation, yet as believers we know that God is ultimately going to prevail? Whatever you choose to watch as a Catholic.

I hope you find these reasons over the last three posts give you much to chew on as you look for something to edify yourself with on your screens. My hope is that it will begin with the words: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

God bless you: And may the Lord (and the Force) be with you!