Kishkumen wrote:He simply wasn't interested in what the text actually said. He was interested in how useful it could be to his program. I don't know how this formula could possibly translate into good scholarship.
Totally agree. I wish I had put it so succinctly.
Kishkumen wrote:As for how interesting Mormonism could be, I am not fully persuaded that there aren't interesting elements and cultural interactions there. Of course, they are not at all the things Nibley claimed are there, but I do believe that there is enough influence from the Western esoteric tradition to make it inherently interesting.
It is also interesting, in my view, that the fall-back position on the Book of Abraham has become "Hellenistic pseudepigrapha," because the Hellenistic world is the fertile ground in which Western esotericism eventually sprouted up. I think one of the ways one can rescue Mormonism as a topic is to move away from the focus on the personality cult of Joseph Smith.
This is one of the reasons I've always found so many of your posts so interesting. The rhetoric of restoration that had been emphasized in the Church's history only intermittently until the mid twentieth century but is so prominent now is a big of the part of the problem. Mormonism does come out of some very interesting traditions, and I still enjoy learning about these relationships and contemplating occasionally about how Mormonism might look in practice if it were more conscious of them rather than repudiating everything as simply apostate. Even without getting into its hermetic inheritance, I am astonished at how little the Bible is emphasized and taught (and how poorly when it is taught), how centuries of Christian thought—which Mormonism is heir too—are tossed out the window and deemed worthless. All that talk about learning truth from whatever source is just talk. The Church discourages people even from looking into Mormonism's own backyard, let alone the neighbor's yards.
Kishkumen wrote:You are right to pick on the reliance on the truth of the "Gospel" (whatever that means) as a methodology, but I think there is also a measure of self-deprecation in Nibley's denigration of scholars and scholarship. Whether it represents genuine humility is something I can't judge. I have a feeling there was a pride that came from his decision to submit the intellect to the mantle of testimony.
It's possible. I didn't know him and can only go by what is observable at a distance; I'm sure also that my view is colored by my negative reaction to the Nibley cult that I ran into at BYU and the point of my emotional exit from the Church when that occurred. I know that others saw Nibley as a self-mocking paragon of humility who lived a modest lifestyle that was a token of his deep indifference to the applause of the world. The applause of his inductees is another matter, though, because, like the athletes of god in Late Antiquity, only an egomaniac could have such excessive modesty on constant and conspicuous display. After all, no one who deprecates himself as a sign of humility during an interview in a film documentary that is exclusively about himself and that is made and produced by his own family members is really all that self-deprecating. If you don't want the limelight, why would you step into it?
Johannes wrote:Oddly enough, Dumézil crossed my mind too in relation to what Nibley came up with. The difference, I suppose, is that Dumézil's schema was flawed by being too broad and truistic, whereas Nibley's has the opposite problem of being irredeemably idiosyncratic. I hadn't cottoned on to the fact that his meta-claim was that everything had diffused out from Adam and Eve in Missouri. Astonishing.
Martin Bernal was another name that came to mind à propos of Nibley's methodological indiscipline and (in particular) lack of philological rigour in pursuit of a ideological chimaera. The difference being, I suppose, that Bernal was at least trying to fight racism while Nibley was at least indirectly supporting it.
That second paragraph is devastating, Johannes. I hadn't thought of this issue, but it's interesting that Nibley has very little to say about this whole issue. Perhaps he dealt with it in his Abraham books, which I haven't read, but something tells me loyalty to the Church leaders would have prevented him from saying much before 1978 (and the Joseph Smith Papyri book was published in 1975, I think).