The Presence of Hugh Nibley

The verbal bookkeeping that often helps when we discuss complex people is hopelessly ineffective in giving a balanced account of Hugh Nibley. To begin with, on which side of the ledger do we post his glorious absentmindedness? Missed dental appointments may be a liability, but a mind unfettered by circumstance is an asset most of us envy. Characteristics that appear to be contradictions in others turn out to be compliments in Hugh. He is sui generis and therefore not subject to a normal audit.

If analyzing Hugh as a person proves unfruitful, considering him as a presence is an overwhelming experience. Two reasons explain this difficulty. First, a presence may appropriately take on a mythic aura, and the friends and students who have experienced the penumbra surrounding Hugh’s intense scholarly activity have surely been stimulated beyond expectation and have never really lost the glow they first felt. Second, Hugh has never been a model to be followed, and he has not stopped long enough for disciples to line up in back of him. The enduring fact of his presence at BYU has been threat, comfort, goad, and—especially—conscience to his colleagues. Would-be scholars may rationalize away their conscience’s whisperings about imperfect effort. At one time or another, for example, many of us have cooled our intellectual ardor in the present by promises of massive exertion in the future. We find something so impelling, however, about Hugh’s note cards—rubber-banded, boxed, or simply displayed on the lectern—that even the dullest of us becomes flush with scholarly resolve.

Several risks attend regular academic research. For instance, we may choose to analyze such large or complex areas that early evidence of success is not possible; consequently, we may know years of lonely, silent eloquence while research comes to fruition. In other cases, we may experience the frustration of having our best efforts nullified by the work of those who successfully conclude the experiments we have been doing.

While risks attend research in general, no research is so difficult as that undertaken to investigate religious positions. Of course, no researcher begins without bias, regardless of the research field. For religious scholars, however, the temptation to emphasize evidence supporting personal theological belief may be irresistible. The deep emotional reinforcement that commitment to particular doctrines provides will usually seep through the chinks in the most objective prose. The problem is not that such reinforcement occurs. As I noted above, anyone with a hypothesis experiences the same temptation. Religious researchers’ particular temptation, however, is coming to believe that the theological tenets they accept on faith are—after having written about them—the result of research. In such cases, what began modestly as investigation becomes justification, and discussion degenerates into contention. A position may be controversial without being contentious. The controversial scholar is not uncommon, but the contentious scholar is a contradiction in terms. Contentious assertion requires a degree of presumption that is simply incompatible with honest inquiry.

While always acknowledging his religious beliefs, Hugh has avoided theological stances that go beyond the fundamental position of his church. He enjoys the give-and-take of doctrinal debate. In particular, he uses the familiar personal letter as an unusually effective instrument to comment on opposing views. However brisk some of these letters have become—for Hugh cannot resist exploiting an obvious opening—his sense of proportion never fails him. He is always the classical satirist.

As often happens when one person exhibits the qualities that many would have, others have a tendency to equate presence with resource. Hugh has been expected to silence opposition with continuing, stunning discoveries and insights—even though the positions he is expected to support may be no more than the personal whim of those who attempt to use him as a crutch, club, or mantle. A lesser scholar might have retreated into cynicism or into the completely esoteric where the foolish could not follow, but Hugh has patiently corrected, carefully restated—and smiled when his simplest explanation has still been distorted.

Hugh’s insistence on the significance of patterns keeps his scholarship tentative when the key piece to a historical or scriptural puzzle seems to be found. His wry comments about his own fallibility are never simply the graceful disclaimers of arrogance. In fact, his most persistent critics are not so skillful as Hugh himself in identifying and pricking the pretensions that could develop during the course of his work. The reach of his mind is such that the synthesis known in the Book of Mormon as “a compound in one” (2 Ne. 2:11)—a synthesis so difficult for most of us to pull together—is his natural mode. Hugh follows implications that a less discriminating mind would lose in the limbo of fragmentary source and dubious translation, the very materials he must use. What Coleridge called the esemplastic process—the ability to project new entities that combine evidence in different and persuasive ways—distinguishes a Nibley reading and is the bane of those who prefer to echo traditional interpretations.

Hugh’s confidence when presenting a point of view is his compliment to an idea that deserves the most convincing context he can supply for it. No perceptive hearer mistakes this confidence for the assurance of the earnest amateur. Failure to fit necessary patterns will check overstatement, while other scholars will refute, refine, or extend. But a synthesizing concept—that most fragile of human creations—will get its chance to survive under optimal conditions.

I cannot easily gauge the extent of Hugh Nibley’s influence on other faculty members over the years. The affectionate respect with which his colleagues viewed him allowed the singular role he chose to play. We were always proud of him. At the same time, we were not anxious to pull him away from “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” to the modesty that was Provo. Yet his was never a repudiating isolation; he did not achieve his single-mindedness at the cost of rejecting his friends’ interests. Whatever one’s academic concern, it took on freshness and stature under the quickening impulse of a conversation with Hugh. Even the malaise of general faculty meetings was routed by his trenchant—and always sprightly—comment. Furthermore, to fellow faculty members who feared lest humble resources and heavy teaching loads fatally compromised significant research at BYU, Hugh was answer and inspiration. His relentless demand for documents gave impetus to the building of collections that could approximate his expectations—and in so doing raised the aspirations of the entire library.

Few students can talk coherently about their first class from Brother Nibley. For some it was simply a rite of passage, the academic equivalent of a club initiation. For many it was, at best, a brisk blur edged with random flashes of insight. For a few it was an intellectual implosion from which they will never recover. For after we have stood in the presence of our first true scholar, the world loses a bit of its apparent symmetry, revealing the forces that determined its form and inviting an infinite recasting. Never does our agency seem so unlimited—yet the scholarly life is curiously impersonal, almost abstract. We cannot truly know the person who inspires our scholarly activity. We can hardly send a thank-you note to Prometheus. But we can acknowledge the electric force generated when a potentially good mind rubs against a great one.

Hugh has assumed the ultimate hazard of scholarly research—popularizing technical material—without obvious discomposure, and he is equally serene under the critical review of his peers. He has won and kept the confidence of General Authorities of the Church, and he holds the titles of husband and father with distinction. In the easy parlance of today, he has “put it all together.” For as Thomas De Quincey observed:

A great scholar . . . is not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite . . . power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the Angel of the Resurrection, what else were dust from dead men’s bones, into the unity of breathing life.¹