Are the Jedi a Religion? (Part Two)

PART ONE

Yoda and Luke, young and sweaty, in Episode V

Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography, describes an encounter with the Dunkers, an German Anabaptist denomination. Like Anabaptists throughout history, the Dunkers were widely criticized as heretics, for devising novel doctrines, which they mostly transmitted orally. Franklin suggested the Dunkers dispel such criticisms by publishing their precepts. The leader rejected these terms, refusing to bind believers in perpetuity to understandings they have right now.

Like millions of Americans, I didn’t encounter this exchange directly; I read it in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. The Dunkers, formally the Schwarzenau Brethren, have evolved into so many separate orders from pressures of doctrinal revision that the group Franklin encountered barely exists anymore. Few Anabaptists published books until the Twentieth Century, when cheap printing and widespread literacy made book-writing downright mandatory.

The comparison between Dunkers and Jedi isn’t obvious in the Original Trilogy. Sure, the Jedi, whom we encounter personally in Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, aren’t doctrinally rigid. Kenobi, in Episode IV, exhorts Luke to let the Force flow through himself, but doesn’t offer concrete beliefs. Only Yoda offers anything resembling doctrines, in Episode V, and even then it’s vague; Yoda speaks in aphorisms pilfered from Buddhist and Abrahamic traditions, not really Scripture.

In the prequels, we get insights into what Jedi actually believe, though like Yoda’s teachings on Dagobah, the Order discusses its beliefs obliquely. We get mentions that Jedi don’t form material attachments, including marriage, and don’t seek revenge. We know the Jedi have a Code, because Obi-Wan tells Anakin his refusal to obey that Code keeps him off the Council. As with much in the prequels, though, exact details are offloaded into ancillary literature.

By Episode VIII, we discover the Jedi have sacred texts, which Luke guards on planet Ahch-To, but has apparently never read. Doctrine has become, for the senescent Jedi, something to protect and defend from entropy, not something which guides his living. Formal, fixed doctrine has become his justification for not engaging with a chaotic galaxy. This perhaps explains why, spoiler alert, Yoda’s embodied ghost destroys the Jedi library at the climax.

Yoda and Luke, aged and transcendent, in Episode VIII

The collision between lived belief, and fixed Code, reflects where it’s originally encountered. Luke learns Jedi principles in places of sweaty organic growth, the Tatooine desert and Dagobah swamps. Obi-Wan and Anakin, however, discover Jedi teachings in the Jedi Temple, built on the Republic’s capital planet and physically attached to the halls of power. Luke studies amid farms and wilderness; Anakin studies surrounded by built environment and compulsory law.

When we first directly encounter the Empire’s capital city-planet, Coruscant, in Timothy Zahn’s 1991 novel Heir to the Empire, we see an entire world-spanning arcology. In direct rip-off of Asimov’s capital-planet Trantor, Coruscant is so thoroughly over-built that lower levels, given entirely to savagery and animalism, lie uncharted beneath the governing upper layers. The Empire’s id and superego, chained together on one planet, forever forbidden to communicate.

The prequels, which place higher premium on continuity and world-building, necessarily describe Jedi belief in far greater detail than other films. This comes across concretely in the prequels’ aggressive use of cities as their principle setting. The Jedi Code demands adherents have strict degrees of self-control, and never, ever indulge their ids—as people dwelling in cities generally must, because close quarters and density require closely policed etiquette.

Throughout the movies, the Skywalker family’s character arc takes center stage. But for Jedi spirituality, Yoda’s development seems most important: in the prequels, he defends doctrinal purity at first and last. Jediism, for city-dwelling Yoda, connected to power, involves accordance with textual accuracy. No wonder, through the prequels, Yoda appears physically younger, but angry, scolding, always demanding greater compliance from Padawans and younglings.

Yoda of Episodes V and VIII, by contrast, has changed his credo. He demands Luke live entirely in the present, conscious of what the Force requires of him right now. I’m reminded of German theologian and Nazi resistor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote that, in Eden, Adam didn’t need to consider right and wrong; he just knew God’s will. All Christianity, for Bonhoeffer, involved restoring this state of perfect understanding, so we can act entirely in the present.

We can understand Jedi belief, therefore, as evolutionary. Inscribed into texts and honored in temples, it became inflexible, unresponsive to a galaxy populated by living beings. Stripped of official standing, forced to practice where people live, it becomes, like Dunker theology, responsive to believers’ changing needs. The Temple is the theology of a dying republic. Dagobah is the theology of living insurgency.

PART THREE