In
Memoriam: Hugh Winder Nibley (1910-2005)
By
Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin
The
death of Hugh Nibley last Thursday,
roughly a month short of his ninety-fifth birthday, marks
the passing of an era. While he was not a General Authority,
Professor Nibley’s status in the
intellectual history of Mormonism can reasonably be compared
with that of Orson Pratt, James E. Talmage, B. H. Roberts, or John A. Widtsoe.
With a career spanning half a century and thousands of published
pages, Professor Nibley in some ways single-handedly transformed the way many
Latter-day Saints read their scriptures. He is important
not merely for his own prolific writing, but for having, as
it were, founded an entire school of Mormon
studies – a school that approaches the doctrines and
sacred texts of Mormonism from the vantage point of the ancient
world out of which they claim to come.
The
Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (or FARMS),
for example, can be viewed in many ways as a legacy of Hugh
Nibley. Most if not all of those
who founded it and who have led it and prominently participated
with it freely acknowledge the immense influence he has had
upon them. Even those who disagree with Nibley’s ideas cannot deny his enormous impact on Mormon thought.
Professor
Nibley’s language skills were legendary. Sometimes, he would
answer questions from students by quoting, at length, from
a Wagnerian opera in German or from one of the Homeric poems
in its original Greek. One year, he continually lamented
that a class he was teaching in Middle Egyptian was progressing
too slowly; we later learned that a similar class being taught
at an Ivy League university that same semester was using the
same textbook – at half the speed.
Professor
Nibley’s memory was prodigious. One of us once resolved,
with a fellow undergraduate friend, to commit as much classical
poetry to memory as possible. (We were young.) Our first
choice, for no particular reason, was a piece by John Milton,
entitled “Lycidas.” We were sitting
in the Ancient Studies reading room at BYU, late at night.
We had devoted considerable time to our task, and now were
trying to test ourselves by reciting the poem. About midway
into it, I (Daniel Peterson) was stuck and could not summon
up the next line. But Professor Nibley
had come into the room a minute or two earlier to check a
Greek dictionary and, when he realized that I was floundering,
unhesitatingly recited the next half dozen lines of the poem
on his way out the door. It was enough to make one
despair.
Professor
Nibley was famous for his wit. Constantly requested to autograph
books, for example, he seems never to have signed a book the
same way twice, and his written comments were almost always
funny and almost always self-deprecating: “This book is biodegradable.
–H. Nibley.” “H. Nibley,
Demon Scribbler.” At a dinner in Dr. Nibley’s honor some years ago, an attorney was relating a
story in which his legal training had helped him do something
useful for the Church. “I’m not a lawyer for nothing!” he
concluded. Without even a second’s hesitation, Professor
Nibley responded, “No lawyer is!”
His writing sparkles with humor. Books such as Sounding
Brass and The Mythmakers make very serious points
but, we can testify from personal experience, can also bring
tears of uproarious laughter to their readers.
Reflecting the transitory nature of all scholarship, some
of Professor Nibley’s books have
stood the test of time better than others. But his real importance
lies in his impact on his students and readers – many of whom
encountered him only through his books. Professor Nibley
had the rare gift, not of telling his students what they should
know, but of inspiring them to learn for themselves. He did
not teach new ideas about the meaning of scripture; he transformed
our very understanding of the nature of scripture and of how
and why we should read scripture. To engage his work is to
enter an intellectual hurricane, a hurricane that cuts a path
through all of human religious and intellectual history but
which always keeps its calm eye centered on the core of the
Gospel. Though many might feel a sense of discipleship towards
Professor Nibley, he would always
have insisted that he was merely pointing others to the path
of discipleship to the only true Master.
Most
importantly, Hugh Nibley was blessed
with a deep but simple faith. He was not writing to convince
himself or anyone else that the Gospel was true and that Joseph
Smith was a prophet. He already knew such things, in a more
fundamental way than the ever-shifting tides of scholarship
could hope to provide. His image as an intellectual’s intellectual,
omnivorously well-read, may have obscured for some his remarkable
spirituality. But, for those who came to know him well, it
was powerfully evident. An early near-death experience represented
a life-changing event for him, and he was always open to spiritual
promptings and to the miraculous. He once famously quipped,
“I would rather be a doorkeeper in the House of the Lord than
mingle with the top brass in the tents of the wicked.” Remarkably,
for a man of such prodigious intellect and achievement, he
really meant it. For Hugh Nibley,
scholarship was not a means to self-aggrandizement – as it
is so often practiced in the academy. Rather, scholarship
was an act of consecration and devotion.
For
an engaging and aptly named biography of Hugh Nibley,
see Boyd Jay Petersen, Hugh Nibley: A
Consecrated Life (Salt Lake City: Kofford Books,
2002) ISBN: 1589580206.
References
to some of Professor Nibley’s major
works can be found at:
http://farmsresearch.com/publications/nibleyworks.php
http://farms.byu.edu/publications/
nibley.php?selection=nibley&cat=nibley
A
complete bibliography of Professor Nibley’s
writing through 1990 was prepared by Louis C. Midgley
and appeared as “Hugh Winder Nibley:
Bibliography and Register” in John M. Lundquist and Stephen
D. Ricks (eds.), By Study and Also by Faith: Essays in
Honor of Hugh W. Nibley on the Occasion
of his Eightieth Birthday (Salt Lake City: Deseret
Book and FARMS, 1990), pp. xv-lxxxvii.
