On Re-Reading Nibley

I just recently finished a massive re-read of my collection of Hugh Nibley books.  Over the course of my 20s, I had amassed 12 out of the 19 volumes of the legendary LDS scholar's Collected Works.  This last Winter Break my Dad reminded me that, even if spread across a decade's worth of Christmases and Birthdays, that collection still indicated an investment of hundreds of dollars; my conscience piqued, I decided this last New Years that--especially now that I was now finally post-Comps--it was high time I re-read my entire Nibley collection.

Though the wealth of Nibley's knowledge is staggering, nevertheless when one reads his Collected Works all at once and in a row, certain repeated themes begin to foreground themselves, viz:

• Nibley's PhD dissertation at Berkley was on the ancient Coronation and New Years ceremony, which he found to be remarkably consistent all across the Mediterranean and Middle-East.  He much later claimed that the King Benjamin discourse in the Book of Mormon is yet another example of this rite, and that even the Hopi Native American Tribe still practices the ceremony to this day.  This identifies him with the Cambridge Patternist school and as a diffusionist--the belief that all these ancient ceremonies have a common source.  Though the Cambridge School has long gone out of fashion and Nibley lived to see much of his research superseded (often by himself), Nibley never essentially lets go of the thesis to his youthful dissertation, which influences the totality of his decades-long career (be careful what your thesis is, I suppose).
• Closely connected to his unfailing faith in Patternism, is Nibley's unflagging conviction that all of Joseph Smith's writings can be tested against these self-same ancient sources.  He does this first in the '50s and '60s by comparing the Book of Mormon to known Arabic and Hebrew sources and arguing for their close similarities on linguistic and textual grounds; he updates his claims as new documents are found--the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi texts, etc--but he never abandons his initial assumptions.  
• He later applies this same model to the Book of Enoch (claiming that Moses 6 & 7 in the Pearl of Great Price is a mini Book of Enoch), delving deep into the Enoch Apocrypha; then again to the Book of Abraham, which occupied him from the '70s till the end of his life in 2005 (turns out Egyptology is a very difficult field to master).  It is the same method he was using in One Eternal Round, his final book, published posthumously in 2010.
• Clearly there is a thread of monomania that runs through his works, as shown also by the fact that, embedded within his thousands of citations, the same few works keep getting cited over and over, e.g. The Clementine Recognitions, the works of Eduard Meyer (which he read in the original German), Brigham Young in Journal of Discourses, and the plays of Shakespeare.
• On Shakespeare: Nibley once claimed that he initially went to school to become a Shakespeare scholar, but found early English to be derivative, for behind it was the Latin, and behind that the Greek.  All of Nibley's writings display this same tendency to telescope outward back in time, ever seeking the earliest sources of, well, everything; nevertheless, he never abandons his initial love of Shakespeare either, whose quotations litter across his Collected Works--Hamlet primarily, but also MacBeth, the Henry plays, Julius Caesar, and Timon of Athens in particular.
• Though he is possessed of a great and biting wit and engaging personal voice, there is, frankly, a sort of slap-dash, careening approach to his writing style, which does open him up to accusations (both within and without the Church) of sloppy methodology, particularly for his over-reliance on Patternism.  Moreover, his aggressive style of apologetics (one that assumes the best defense is a good offense) has lately fallen out of fashion in Mormon academia, which now prefers a more holistic, self-critical approach--which is probably for the best.  
• Nevertheless, the man really did speak 12 languages fluently, with working knowledge of 25 total; as Henry David Thoreau once said of John Brown, the man cannot be tried by a jury of his peers because he has none.
• He has no patience for those who sought position within the Church, and correspondingly never held high ecclesiastical position himself.  He takes for his personal models the Book of Mormon heroes Ammon (the missionary who turned down the kingship) and Captain Moroni, who "seeks not for power but to pull it down."  He is also fond of quoting Joseph Smith, who said that "great big elders", those ambitious men who believed themselves wiser than he, were the bane of his existence.  This profound suspicion of the ambitious likewise informs his readings of the Fall of the Roman Empire, the Apostasy of the primitive Church, and the excesses of ancient dictators.
• He is possessed of an open and unapologetic contempt for intellectual laziness.  "The Glory of God is intelligence," and therefore a refusal to develop our intelligence is a God-given waste, and waste is sin.  
• His contempt first gets expressed in the '50 and '60s through his virtuoso take-downs of anti-Mormon propaganda (which is what first brought him to prominence within the Church), tearing apart their logical fallacies and shallow research with glee.  
• But beginning in the '70s, he shifts his ire from the anti-Mormons to the Saints themselves, taking us to task with the same viciousness he once reserved for the enemies of Joseph Smith.  He even expresses his gratitude for the anti-Mormons, since they force us to actually study our own scriptures for a change.  He never passes up an opportunity to take a swipe at Mormon anti-intellectualism, and his employer BYU in particular bears the brunt of his contempt.
• But what provoked his ire against his employer, the source of his career?  The same thing that started his career in the first place: the documents.  For if Nibley spends the majority of his time trying to prove that the ancient documents validate LDS scripture, he never loses sight of the question as to whether or not the scriptures actually have something to say (the truest test of all); and for Nibley, what the scriptures have to say, repeatedly and apocalyptically, is that the quest for riches, power, and gain are real evils, Satanic in nature (for Nibley, Satanism has nothing to do with pentagrams or goat's blood).  
• Power and gain for Nibley are not only the ruin of the world but the bane of the Church.  He has zero patience for our current glut of LDS businessmen, Utah Valley get-rich-quick schemes, and BYU business programs.  There has been and remains no blunter critic of Mormon materialism than Hugh Nibley.
• But that is not to say that Nibley is an anti-materialist in the philosophic sense; on the contrary, he is a fierce anti-Platonist, largely laying the blame for the Great Apostasy at the foot of neo-Platonism and its tendency to "spiritualize" and "allegorize" the gospel, refusing to entertain even the possibility of an embodied god, a physical resurrection, or of an expansive cosmos.  For Nibley, all cosmology is religion, and all religion is cosmology, and that is the key for understanding the Egyptians, the primitive Christians, and even the Native Americans.
• Business and the pursuit of wealth for Nibley are not the fruits of hard work, but evidence of an abject refusal on our part to engage in the real hard work of using our minds (he always has the Protestant work ethic square in his cross-hairs).  
• For Nibley, the search for power and gain is a sin as old as Cain and Able, and he cites all of ancient history, the Roman Satirists, the pre-Nicean Church Fathers (Origen and Clement of Alexandria are his favorites), Shakespeare, the Bible, Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and yesterday's newspapers, to prove its evil.  
• Nibley's screeds against wealth and power, more than his apologetics and scholarship, are what have influenced me more than anything else (you can probably blame him for me pursuing a career in the Humanities as opposed to anything remotely lucrative).  They are what I believe will keep him relevant to the Church long after the rest of his scholarship becomes museum pieces.  For his is a message as old as human history, and only grows in dire importance with each new passing Headline.
• But then, for Nibley, the question isn't whether we will heed the warnings of the scriptures in time to prevent our own destruction--we won't, frankly.  Rather, the question is whether we will be prepared for the Judgment of God when the End comes.  Eternity, not nihilism, is what Nibley repeatedly preaches we must prepare for.  What he desires above all else (and the reason why he gets so frustrated with us), is for us to lift our gaze up from the sordid little vanities of this failing world to instead behold the incomprehensible expansiveness of the cosmos.

I can do no better, then, than finish with an extended Nibley quote, in one of my all-time favorite passages (and that's a crowded field!):

“What are we afraid of? What do men fear most? Believe it or not, it is joy. Against joy, society erects its most massive bulwarks…It is not hell that men fear most, but heaven…Everything in our society conspires to dampen and control joy. Our sordid little pleasures are carefully channeled and commercialized; our pitiful escapes to alcohol and drugs are a plain admission that we will not allow ourselves to have joy in our right senses. Only little children can face up to it. They have no hidden guilt to admonish cautious behavior or make joy appear unseemly…Why do we insist on taking ourselves so seriously? Because we’re scared to death of being found out...

“…to lend dignity and authority to this pretentious fraud, we have invented the solemn business and drudgery of every day life. To avoid answering questions, we pretend to be very busy–my how busy!  In every conservatory of music, there is the student who practices scales and exercises with dedicated zeal, for 8 or 10 hours a day; or works away for months or years, with terrifying persistence, at a single piece. This is the devoted grind that impresses others with his matchless industry, but don’t be fooled! This drudge is not working at all! He is running away from work. His ferocious application to dull routine is but a dodge to avoid the novel and frightening effort of using his head. And never, never, for all his years of toil, does he become a real musician. (He usually becomes an executive.)

“In the manner of this poor dupe, the whole majestic world goes about its ostentatious enterprises, the important busy work of every day life… Sorrow is a negative thing…to live with it requires only resignation…humanity, in a thousand ways, declares it’s almost unanimous preference for drab and depressing routine.

“If the world is a dark and dreary place, it is because we prefer it that way; for there is nothing in the world that can keep a man from joy if joy is what he wants…It’s altogether too much for us to bear. We must learn by degrees to live with it. It isn’t strange that we are afraid of so strange and overpowering a thing, that we are overawed by the feeling that it is all too good for us; the fact is that it is too good for us! Much too good!…We are not ready yet…we [must] come to support not the burden of great suffering, but the much greater impact of limitless joy.” (Collected Works of Hugh Nibley Vol. 3, The World and the Prophets, pg. 265-267).