Indiana Jones and the Danger of Knowledge Without Virtue

Within fifteen minutes of his first onscreen appearance in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones has disarmed a would-be assassin, leapt over a bottomless pit, run through a hail of poison darts, escaped a rolling boulder, fled from a horde of angry natives – and given a lecture on archaeology to a classroom full of university students. The fact that “Dr. Jones” is an academic and an intellectual makes him unique among action heroes. It also illuminates a running theme of the Indiana Jones films, which revolve around a temptation particularly prone to beset academics and intellectuals: the temptation to seek knowledge without virtue, to think that being smart is a substitute for being good. Over the arc of the series, Indy is consistently challenged to grow beyond mere intellectualism, to seek something more than just knowledge – to temper his search for knowledge with the virtues of humility, faith, and love. As St. Paul writes in I Corinthians, “[T]hough I… understand all mysteries and all knowledge… but have not love, I am nothing.”

Raiders of the Lost Ark revolves around the central trio of Indiana Jones, his love interest Marion Ravenwood, and his nemesis René Belloq. To call it a love triangle would not be inaccurate, but it might be misleading. Both men flirt with Marion, but knowledge – not a woman – is their first love. Belloq says as much when he tells Indy:

Archaeology is our religion, yet we have both fallen from the purer faith. Our methods have not differed as much as you pretend. I am a shadowy reflection of you. It would take only a nudge to make you like me, to push you out of the light… You know it’s true.

The accuracy of Belloq’s claims is demonstrated through both men’s relationships with Marion. Belloq attempts to seduce Marion and shields her from the more openly brutal methods of his Nazi conspirators, but when push comes to shove, he only views her as an object to be possessed (“The girl is mine”), and not even the most valuable object at that: the Ark is his first priority.

Although he is the hero of the film, Indy is not too much better. He abandoned Marion after a past romance (in Biblical language, he “knew” her and then moved on) and he repeatedly prioritizes the Ark over her safety. When he stumbles upon her tied up in the Nazi camp, he chooses not to release her because doing so would jeopardize his opportunity to find the Ark first. The same scenario plays out even more pointedly near the film’s climax, when Indy attempts to negotiate Marion’s release by threatening to blow up the Ark with a bazooka. “All I want is the girl,” he claims – but Belloq, knowing his adversary well, calls his bluff:

Okay, Jones, you win! Blow it up. Yes, blow it up! Blow it back to God. All your life has been spent in pursuit of archaeological relics. Inside the Ark are treasures beyond your wildest aspirations. You want to see it open as well as I. Indiana, we are simply passing through history. But this… this is history.

Indy’s love of history outweighs his love for Marion: he cannot bring himself to destroy the Ark. It is important to clarify that Indy’s inability to destroy the Ark is not born from any kind of religious piety, and that Belloq’s interest in it is similarly devoid of reverence. He calls the Ark “a radio for talking to God,” but if he really wanted to talk to God, he might try the local church; his desire to see what is inside the Ark is born from an impious and presumptuous thirst for knowledge. He knows enough to wear the garments of a Hebrew priest, but he has apparently not taken enough heed to his subject to approach the Ark with due humility. The knowledge Belloq seeks is the kind of knowledge that “puffs up,” in St. Paul’s words: knowledge that is concerned with gratifying the curiosity or bolstering the ego of the knower, not motivated by genuine love or care for the thing known.

Similarly, at the outset of his adventure, Indy scoffs: “I don’t believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus pocus. I’m going after a find of incredible historical significance.” Indy frames his search for the Ark in purely material, rational terms – a search for an artifact of historical significance, not religious or spiritual significance. In the end, however, he at least has enough holy fear to back down. Tied to a post with Marion, as Belloq and the Nazis open the Ark, Indy tells her: “Shut your eyes, Marion. Don’t look at it, no matter what happens…” Perhaps Indy, unlike Belloq, is recalling God’s words to Moses in the Book of Exodus: “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live.”

“It’s beautiful!” Belloq cries as he gazes presumptuously into the Ark – his last words before his head explodes, a fitting fate for a man who has lived his life lording his brain over others. Indy, in contrast – motivated, at least in part, by his love for Marion – closes his eyes and accepts a limitation on his knowledge. Even in the last scene, though, after the Ark has been taken by the bureaucratic representatives of the United States government, Marion practically has to drag Indy away as he looks longingly back at the secrets he cannot know.

In the franchise’s third entry, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, we learn where Indy got his priorities from: his father, Henry Jones, Sr., whose obsession with the Holy Grail overrode his parental duties. Just as Indy prioritized the Ark over his love for Marion, his father prioritized the Grail over his love for Indy. We see their relationship in microcosm when Henry, mistaking Indy for an intruding Nazi, smashes a priceless Ming vase over his head. In the comic exchange that ensues, Henry is distraught over the fact that he might have broken a precious artifact – and pointedly unfazed by the fact that he just bludgeoned his own son. Later, Indy berates him: “What you taught me was that I was less important to you than people who’d been dead for five hundred years in another country.”

Ironically, Indy practices the very same relationally detached intellectualism that he resents his father for. He describes his father snidely: “He’s a teacher of medieval literature – the one the students hope they don’t get.” However, just like his father, Indy cares for his subject, but not his students: his lectures clearly fail to engage them, and he neglects to grade their papers before slipping out of office hours through an open window.

There is a crucial difference between Indy’s search for knowledge and Henry’s, though. Indy’s search for knowledge is impersonal. He tells his students, “Archaeology is the search for fact, not truth.” Henry’s obsession with knowledge, though, is tempered by his Christian faith, which makes it personal. He is introduced praying over an ancient manuscript: “May He who illuminated this illuminate me.” Facts are impersonal, but the Truth is a person. In contrast to Indy’s claim about archaeology being the search for fact, not truth, Henry chides: “The quest for the Grail is not archaeology. It’s a race against evil.” The moral and spiritual dimensions of Henry’s quest for truth take him further than Indy’s thirst for facts. Faith goes beyond a mere reliance on reason to a personal knowledge of the Truth and, accordingly, to humility rather than presumption. This is the meaning of the first test that guards the path to the Grail: those who don’t kneel will lose their heads.

In contrast to the Joneses, two of The Last Crusade’s three villains are unintellectual. Like Indy prioritizing the Ark over Marion and Henry prioritizing the Ming vase over Indy, Walter Donovan “would sell [his] mother for an Etruscan vase”, and tries to sell Indy’s father for the Holy Grail, but he does not have a genuine passion for the history represented by the artifacts he hoards, and his cluelessness about the Grail (“I’m no historian”) ultimately dooms him. Elsewhere, Henry berates the Nazi General Vogel for being a “goose-stepping moron” who “should try reading books instead of burning them.”

Dr. Elsa Schneider, however, is a tragic villain because her motives more nearly align with Indy and his father. Like Belloq, she tries to persuade Indy that they are akin: “You would have done the same,” she tells him when he criticizes her for colluding with the Nazis in her quest for the Grail. Elsa thinks of her alliance with the Nazis as a necessary evil, but weeps over the burning of books at a Hitler rally: her love of knowledge is, to some extent, genuine.

Nonetheless, Henry ultimately judges that Elsa “never believed in the Grail… She thought she’d found a prize.” Elsa knows plenty of facts about the Grail (more than Donovan, certainly), but she does not believe in it – or, we must assume, the One who drank from it. Elsa’s fate is apt, then: she dies when she reaches for the Grail instead of taking Indy’s hand, reaching for an object instead of a person. Indy, who also tends to prioritize facts over faith, nearly dies in exactly the same way. He is only saved when his relationship with his father is mended and he takes Henry’s hand. Henry’s desire for “Illumination” is finally satisfied not by mere possession of an impersonal object but by personal connection – with his son, and also with the Grail Knight.

Henry and the Grail Knight are united by their Christian faith. Both are introduced meditating over Christian manuscripts, and when the Grail Knight raises his hand to Henry in farewell as the temple collapses, it is like an encounter of kindred spirits across time – an encounter with history as a living reality, not a bare fact. The Grail, then, becomes not a historical-archaeological prize but a means of mystical, personal communion: the father, the son, and the Knight all drink the water of life from the same cup.

These themes come full circle in the oft-maligned fourth entry, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Though he can still hold his own in a fight, the aged Indy has become a stuffy, relationally detached intellectual, just like his father. He has his own estranged son, the anti-intellectual Mutt Williams, who – upon learning what Indy does for a living – scoffs, “Oh, you’re a teacher. That’s going to be a big help.” Mutt is obsessed with combing his hair, which is to say that he takes great care of how his head looks on the outside but pays little attention to what is going on inside. While the academic Indy has retreated into the life of the mind, Mutt has quit several “fancy prep schools”; while Indy’s first love is history, Mutt’s heart is given wholly to his motorcycle.

In the end, the two need each other. Mutt is all practical knowledge with no theoretical knowledge: he needs the help of Dr. Indiana Jones. At the same time, Indy’s academic persona is challenged by the adventure Mutt takes him on. At one point, he embarks enthusiastically on a long-winded explanation of the difference between quicksand and a dry sand pit – while he and Marion are sinking into a dry sand pit. “For Pete’s sake, Jones, we’re not in school!” she interrupts, bringing Indy back to the pressing needs of the moment. In The Last Crusade, Indy told his students, “90% of all archaeology is done in the library.” In The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, though, Indy – careening through the campus library on Mutt’s motorcycle – tells a student, “If you want to be a good archaeologist, you’ve got to get out of the library!”

Once again, Indy’s thirst for knowledge is darkly reflected in the film’s villain. Although the Soviet Colonel Doctor Irina Spalko is introduced trampling on some artifacts, she is entirely defined by knowledge. She introduces herself to Indy with the following résumé: “Three times I have received Order of Lenin. Also medal as Hero of Socialist Labor. And why? Because I know things… And what I do not know, I find out.” Though she is hardly a conventional academic, Spalko – not unlike Indy – defines herself by her knowledge.

It is apt, then, that the titular Crystal Skull is, precisely, a head detached from a body. It “stimulates an undeveloped part of the human brain,” and Spalko wants to research it for purposes of psychic warfare – to have “power over the mind of man” – to “peer across the world and know the enemy’s secrets” – to, in a disconcerting attack on Indy’s own vocation, “Make your teachers teach the true version of history.” More than the Ark or the Grail, the Crystal Skull is a symbol of pure knowledge, and especially the search for knowledge gone awry. Oxley, one of Indy’s colleagues from the world of academia, goes insane because he looks too deeply into its eyes in his obsessive pursuit of knowledge. Oxley’s mania turns him into an outsized parody of an academic, who speaks exclusively in dead languages and erudite quotations from John Milton and T.S. Eliot.

Just like Belloq and Elsa, Spalko’s thirst for knowledge is precisely what leads to her demise. “Tell me everything you know,” she demands of the aliens at the end of the adventure. “I want to know everything. I want to know.” Like Belloq, she stares too fixedly, too presumptuously, into a source of knowledge that is beyond her human capacity – and just like Belloq, she dies when her head – the seat of her reason – explodes.

To avoid Spalko’s fate, Indy must get his head out of the clouds and reconnect with his family. After Indy and Mutt reconcile as father and son, the film concludes with the marriage of Indy and Marion – not merely romance, like the end of Raiders, but a Christian marriage, which means the true and sacramental union of two distinct persons, bound together in a relationship of love, a relationship of mutual personal knowledge. They are, not accidentally, married in a church. In Biblical language, a husband “knows” his wife – a kind of knowledge that, perhaps, is ultimately more important than any amount of scholarship. Even the end of The Dial of Destiny evokes this reality, that knowing a human soul is the only true love and the highest form of knowing in human life.

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