Star Wars has revealed the real reason Anakin Skywalker never left the Jedi Order: fear. Anakin Skywalker may have liked to consider himself the ultimate Jedi warrior but, in truth, he was never really a good fit for the Jedi Order. He joined them at an unusually old age, a nine-year-old inducted at a time when few students were brought into the Jedi if they were over five. The Jedi Council initially rejected the idea of inducting Anakin into the Order, with particularly Master Yoda against training Anakin, concerned at the fear he sensed roiling within the boy's heart.
Anakin proved himself both powerful and skilled in the use of the Force, and he was knighted at the beginning of the Clone Wars. But, though the Jedi Council didn't know it, he was actually living a double life; Anakin secretly married his beloved Padmé at around the same time, and he kept his relationship a guarded secret. Some of those who were closest to him, such as Obi-Wan, suspected the truth, but none challenged Anakin on it, allowing him to live in this state of hypocrisy. This, naturally, raises the curious question of just why Anakin never left the Jedi in the first place.
Lucasfilm has recently published an official biography of the Skywalker family, Skywalker: A Family At War by Kristin Baver, and it explores Anakin's motivation in fascinating detail. Baver suggests that Anakin Skywalker was always driven by fear and that he was simply not strong enough to walk away from the Jedi. "The Jedi Order had been his life," the book notes. "The Jedi had freed him from slavery and offered him a home. Despite all the reasons he had to follow Ahsoka, abandoning the Jedi felt like a terrible mistake. He owed them too much." It seems Anakin simply could not imagine what his life would be like without the structure and support of his Jedi family, and he was quite simply too afraid to let them go.
This is a fascinating fresh insight into the heart of Anakin Skywalker, essentially suggesting he was caught between two equal and opposite attachments; to Padmé on the one hand, and to his Jedi family on the other. Anakin could not envision living a fulfilled life without either of these and so he remained caught in a state of tension, with each attachment pulling him in a different direction. "Fear is the path to the dark side," Master Yoda taught in The Empire Strikes Back. "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." This was certainly true of Anakin, because gradually his competing fears turned to anger and frustration, ultimately boiling over in brutal violence against the Jedi he had considered his family.
The tragic irony is that Anakin's apprentice Ahsoka left the Jedi and Anakin could not. When Ahsoka grew disillusioned with the Jedi she left proving, unlike her master, her sense of will was greater than her attachments. But Anakin could not follow his apprentice, simply because already he was a slave to his fear. Master Yoda had sensed fear within Anakin Skywalker when he was first brought before the Jedi Council, and that fear was indeed his undoing, and his main weakness throughout the Star Wars saga.
