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Monuments Men
In the film Monuments Men Matt Damon and George Clooney, among others, portrayed the U.S. Army’s efforts in the last year of World War II to secure the thousands of works of art that the Nazis had stolen from private collections, churches, and museums across occupied Europe. However loathsome the Nazis and their thefts of such treasures were, in one regard, not even they can match the outrages currently being carried out by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Armed with sledge hammers and heavy vehicles, ISIS fighters have set about destroying hundreds of artifacts—some religious, some not—from antiquity at museums and archaeological sites in territories currently under their control. They have posted videos on the internet of their destruction of the collections of the Mosul Museum and of monumental works at the ancient sites of Nineveh and Nimrud.
It appears, however, that they mostly destroy only what they cannot carry. In order to raise money ISIS and other warring groups in Syria have looted smaller items for the purpose of selling them on the black market. Clearly their motives are not exclusively financial, though, given the substantial time and effort they devote to the destruction of these cultural treasures.
Theological Policing
Why has ISIS turned to targeting ancient artifacts sitting in museums? These acts of wanton destruction are, of course, but the most recent in a series of heinous deeds that ISIS has perpetrated over the past months, all of which certainly merit charges of barbarism. But the barbarism in question is not merely the result of primitive impulses. It is also the expression of quite non-primitive theological sensibilities. ISIS’ conduct is a form of theological policing aimed at rooting out any trace of idolatry in the lands they have seized.
In his book, Faces in the Clouds, Stewart Guthrie champions an anthropomorphic theory of religion. Guthrie reviews our penchant to impose human faces and forms on nearly everything we apprehend, from advertisers’ portrayals of artifacts (for example, talking cars) to finding those faces in the clouds. Guthrie holds that religion generally—and religious icons especially—are but further manifestations of humans’ anthropomorphic proclivities. Humans, in short, have a powerful inclination to make deities in their own image(s) and find it cognitively challenging not to do so.
In large literate societies, religions of the book, that is, religions that have sacred writings such as the Abrahamic faiths, introduce the possibility of extended theological reflection and, thereby, the possibility of abstract, non-anthropomorphic representations of their Big God(s)—to use Ara Norenzayan’s helpful slogan. Visual representations and anthropomorphic representations in particular but, finally, any material representations of God are theologically suspect, since they impose all too human limitations on the deity. The Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses, after all, include the demand that “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything...“
Defacing Icons
Whether in Islam or Christianity, puritanical readers of such commandments, who leave little space for allegorical, metaphorical, or figurative interpretations of their sacred texts, have tended to exhibit a decidedly iconoclastic bent. I learned this first-hand some years ago when visiting Ely Cathedral in England, which changed hands between Catholics and Puritans multiple times during the religious upheavals of previous centuries. At one point when the cathedral was in the hands of the Puritans, they, just like the contemporary ISIS fighters, proceeded to hammer away the faces of the scores of statues of religious figures adorning the cathedral’s walls. They quite literally defaced the cathedral’s icons.
If Guthrie’s account is on the right track, iconoclastic puritans, such as ISIS and those British Puritans, will never run out of targets for their zealotry.
