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To Be a Jedi: Part 2

© Paul F. McDonald

In the last essay, the fact that some sort of paradigm shift is happening in the very essence of the Force was mentioned. It seems to be crystalizing around Qui-Gon Jinn, and has grand implications for all of the Jedi Order. The notion that when beings become one with the Force they lose their personal identities is largely an Eastern one, for in the countless heavens and hells of those traditions individuality is likewise rubbed clean. Yet as far back as the Greeks, this is not the case in most Western mythologies.

What is perhaps going on in the two Star Wars trilogies is a casting off of the old and a progression into the new. From the novelization of The Phantom Menace, it is known that the Jedi were a very inwardly-looking monastic order in the beginning, as opposed to the more outwardly-oriented roles they play in the golden days of the Old Republic.

In this way, there is yet another parallel with Buddhism, as its old forms in the Theravadan or Hinayanan schools of negating and shrugging off the world in search of enlightenment became more positive and life affirming in the later ones. It is out of the Mahayana school that the concept of the Bodhisattva arose - the one who achieved "nirvana" yet willingly gave up paradise, moving back into the phenomenal world out of love and compassion for all beings. Joseph Campbell wrote of the bodhisattva as one "moving in time" yet "grounded in eternity." When Yoda hears Qui-Gon's voice in the Force, perhaps this is what is happening, with Qui-Gon cast in the role of the first Jedi Bodhisattva.

This can likewise be put in a Christian context, if one believes that the old and the new trilogies can be - at least loosely - paired with the Old and New Testament. The old Order is bound by a rigid Jedi Code, yet perhaps Anakin Skywalker and his son Luke change this, just as St.Paul wrote how Christ redeemed everyone from "the curse of the law." The two trilogies are therefore really charting the transformation of a religion of law to a religion of love.

To be sure, though, to Anakin in Attack of the Clones, religion is already a kind of love, and love a kind of religion.

This idea finds it roots in the West among the troubadours and ministrels of the twelfth century. In his wonderful essay, "The Mythology of Love," Joseph Campbell eloquently describes this unique sort of transference between immanence and transcendence, as well as flesh and spirit. Undeniably, the form given to the love affair of Anakin and Padme Amidala is of this type, being as they are two moths inexplicably drawn together, willing victims of their dual immolation in love's burning flames.

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