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.

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