The Clever Badger One lab accident away from being a super villain

Darth Vader, Sci-Fi, and Religion

Over at Exploring Our Matrix, James McGrath has a short post raising the question "should Darth Vader be forgiven if he repents?"

(James often writes about the relationships between science fiction and religion, and with good reason - there are almost endless opportunities to compare and contrast our notions of religion with those in various sci-fi milieus, and sci-fi gives us a mechanism to explore moral and ethical issues in ways we can't readily do in real life.)     

I think it's a very interesting question, particularly when you start peeling away the layers. 

As the question is posed, I interpret it as asking "can someone be so wicked that forgiveness is impossible"?  (If I'm misinterpreting, hopefully James will let me know.)

James poses some discussion-prompting questions as follow-ups:  Should Vader have stood trial?  Been executed?  Set free?

Before I go any further, I need to lay out a few assumptions:

1. Anyone reading this is assumed to be at least passingly familiar with the life and career of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.
2. For purposes of this post, the Star Wars canon is taken to be the six theatrical films and the Cartoon Network series Clone Wars.  This is mainly because I'm unfamiliar with the materials that make up the expanded canon. 
3. Han shot first.

Now, if we take the original question, "should Darth Vader be forgiven if he repents?" and attempt to answer it from a familiar Christian perspective, the answer would probably be a fairly straightforward "yes".  But that's a boring answer.

To go deeper, we need to look at the follow-ups. 

I grew up Catholic.  A prominent feature of Catholicism is the sacrament of Reconciliation.  It used to be called Confession, which always suggested to me something along the lines of the Spanish Inquisition, complete with tongue pincers and thumbscrews.  The basic Catholic Reconciliation scenario involves a one-to-one chat with a priest, wherein the congregant 'fesses up to his transgressions, the priest says a little prayer and gives the repentant congregant some sort of assignment (such as ten Hail Marys) to perform whilst reflecting upon his sins.¹

The sinner is then declared to be right with God, and can go along his merry way.²

Except that's really not all there is to it. 

There remains the often significant matter of getting right with the folks that were on the bad end of the transgression.  It's becoming more common for priests to include some sort of restitution clause in the post-confession assignment, encouraging people to take personal responsibility for their actions and deal with the consequences of them.

That's where James' other questions come into play.

In the Star Wars mythology, Darth Vader was either directly responsible for or complicit in the deaths of millions, if not billions of people.  He tortured his daughter, maimed his son, encased a guy in metal, and dispatched minions to kill cute, fuzzy little spear-wielding teddy bears.³

If we had someone with that sort of rap sheet in custody, I don't think anyone would try to argue that he should be released - he just has too much to answer for even if he is genuinely remorseful.   I suppose one could argue that he was insane, or "just following orders", but neither of those excuses seem sufficient to let him go free. 

The bottom line is that if we took Darth Vader and dropped him into our world, he could be forgiven for his sins in the religious sense of the term, but that he would still have to accept the secular consequences of his crime - in other words he'd spend the rest of his life in jail or perhaps face execution.⁴

Now, let's look at things from within the Star Wars universe. 

The first thing to consider is that within the Star Wars universe, at least as I've defined the canon for this post, religion doesn't seem to involve anything comparable to a Christian concept of God.  The only mention I can recall is that C-3PO "thanks the maker" on occasion, but since he's a robot, "maker" could just as easily refer to the person who put him together as it could to God. 

The religion, such as it is, of the Star Wars universe appears to be centered on the Force.  The Force, though, seems to be more of an energy field or kind of magic that people seek to understand and control rather than something that people regard as an object of worship.  The Force also seems to lack any sort of agency or intent - it's just kinda there, waiting to be used by people lucky enough to have a high midichlorian count.⁵

The Force, in other words, is morally neutral, and its energy/magic can be brought to bear for good or ill, depending on the intent of the user.  Morality in the Star Wars universe appears to depend not upon some extrinsic objective standard, but rather on that which maintains order and harmony within society.

This makes the question of Vader's repentance and forgiveness more complicated.  Vader didn't "sin" in the sense that he transgressed against the will of the Force and made the Force upset.  Rather, his "sin" was that he elected to use the power of the Force for his own selfish reasons rather than for the betterment of his society as a whole.  In this context, "redemption" means "turning away from the dark side" and using the power for unselfish reasons, and doesn't carry the connotation of "making the Force" happy or otherwise placating it. 

In a similar vein, the Force can't "forgive" Vader.  The Force itself doesn't care how it is used - at the heart of the matter it's just a resource to be utilized.  "Forgiveness" for Vader must be sought from those he hurt - Luke, Leia, all the Jedi younglings he killed, and so on.  Luke forgives him, but there isn't any opportunity for anyone else to.⁶

This leads us to whether Vader would have spent the rest of his life in prison (or faced execution) had he survived.  I think that the situation remains the same as it was when we were considering his fate in our world - he still has an obscene amount of blood on his hands, and he still has an almost unimaginable debt to pay to society.  I don't think there's any compelling reason to absolve him of the responsibility for his actions - that obligation remains regardless of the nature of any possible afterlife. 

From here, it might be interesting to consider the philosophical ramifications  we'd be faced with if we were to encounter a race of intelligent aliens.  I'll take up that topic in a future post.

 -Jay

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¹Many parishes these days have communal services where the intimidating one-on-one chat with the priest is replaced by the priest delivering some prayers and a short homily to the gathered congregants, who personally reflect on their sins. The one-on-one part is then offered as an option. It always seemed to me that the one-on-one approach harkened back to medieval days. It's not much of a stretch to see how a priest who knew the details of the dark affairs of the nobility could use that knowledge as leverage.  Anyway...

²No, there's no sarcasm in this statement. Really. None.

³No sarcasm here, either.  By the way, I always found the responses of Luke and Leia to the knowledge of their paternity to be bizarre.  Luke's response in Episode V seemed remarkably short-lived.  Leia never really even gave any visible response at all.  I would think that learning that your father was one of the most despicable, evil murderers in the galaxy might be more traumatic...

⁴Not much different than any other jailhouse conversion, really.  Personally, I've always found it repulsive that some doctrines claim that someone like, say, Jeffrey Dahmer can be "saved" in prison, while the people that he raped, murdered, and mutilated might not be.

⁵Midichlorians (along with Jar-Jar Binks and Anakin Skywalker as a whiny brat) are a prime example of why George Lucas should not be allowed to write movies anymore. It's not that endosymbiosis is a bad concept in and of itself, but its use here essentially turns the Jedi into accidents of birth rather than dedicated warriors who achieved their skills through years of study and practice.

⁶We don't know, based on the films, whether ordinary people have any sort of consciousness or soul that persists after death, so we don't know if Vader could seek their forgiveness after he died. We are told that the ability of the Jedi to appear as "Force Ghosts" is something that they only recently figured out how to do, so we have a precedent for a concept of soul, but I don't think we have warrant to conclude that Vader could posthumously communicate with all of the people that he was responsible for killing.