Nibley: Footnote faker or not?

[_Kishkumen]

The Huggins link doesn't change my view and is an example of what I've been saying. Nibley is not the kind of sham-scholar who makes things up whole cloth or plagiarizes. Those are easy to spot, and their aims are usually some kind of personal advancement. He is a different kind of sham-scholar, one that is harder to categorize because the aims of his project are so different from those of genuine imposters (bud-ump ching).

I have to admit that what he demonstrated about Nibley's peer-reviewed scholarship did change my view. I can somewhat understand offering the Mormon translation of ancient works for a Mormon readership. And I think this is what he was doing in his Mormon work--recasting the ancient text in a Mormon-friendly language to enhance its applicability--but I have no patience for this kind of thing in work that is presented as straight academic work. It is kind of mind boggling that no one checked his translations, especially when his arguments hinged on them.

I continue to give him credit for actually producing something, unlike any of his self-appointed successors and fawning imitators. He does have a view of Mormonism that has many attractive features, that is vigorously argued, beautifully constructed (as long as you don't look beneath the hood), and frankly better than anything the Church has an offer. This view of Mormonism is really what Nibley is promoting in his writings. Nibley is an apologist in the classical sense because he is creative rather than destructive: he builds an edifice of a Mormonism (the cosmic play that he is always going on). Read Justin Martyr or Clement of Alexandria to get a sense of what I'm talking about and to see how interesting apologetics can be. These guys were not simply attacking critics or reviewing them (a few did that sporadically: Origen on Celsus, for instance) but actually trying to show how their Christianity was an intellectual system and a view of reality that could actually complete with other systems and views. I totally reject the end but I enjoy observing the means. I put Nibley in the category, and probably also B.H. Roberts and now T. Givens.

Thanks for writing this. I agree with it. What I loved about Nibley was doing was his ability to relate Mormonism to the ancient traditions outside of Mormonism in a way that changed how we viewed Mormonism. That expansion of Mormonism beyond its parochial boundaries is a salutary thing. If only more people really embraced Mormonism in Nibley's cosmic view of it, and not simply as the absolute primacy of a few things that Joseph Smith said and wrote in the service of narcissism or venality.

I actually read his dissertation. When I was at BYU and the personality cult that he helped foster was running strong, I was told by his fans (some of whom were professors) about how he'd written it in six weeks. Ok, well, I thought to myself, let's see how good it is. So I ordered the microfilm through interlibrary loan. How good it is: not at all. Yes, he is influenced by a strain of scholarship that still held sway when he wrote with some scholars working on religion and culture in various ancient societies (although Nibley would repeat over the next fifty years that this was some kind of established fact rather than a temporary fad that had pretty much faded by the time Nibley actually started publishing in the 40s). But he has absolutely no concern whatsoever for accuracy. I still remember, more than ten years after reading this thing, how he references the Rig Veda (probably composed in the mid second millennium BCE) on the same page as Adam of Bremen (11th century CE) to support his point about some aspect of an assumed (but never established) pre-historic new year rite. One is an ancient polytheistic text from India, the other the work of a learned Christian in medieval Germany. They are 2,500 to 3,000 years apart and both brought in as evidence for a thesis about...Rome!

He put that crap in his dissertation? LOL!

Yikes. I never read his dissertation.

I suppose the most sympathetic I can be about this is to say that the Indo-Europeanist perspective was still pretty big in the 20th century. Remember, Dumezil's highly dubious book about the tripartite Indo-European origins of Roman religion was first published in 1966.

The fact that so much of his apologetic energy was spent exaggerating and then whining about "the schoolmen" (a favorite phrase of his) and the limits of scholarship says a lot: someone who believes scholarship is just a social exercise for people with low self-esteem is a person who doesn't believe scholarship has much to do with truth.

Over the years I was increasingly put off by his contempt for scholarship and the Romans. He exhibited absolutely no appreciation or understanding of Roman satire. One of my aunts married a Nibleyite (her second marriage) and that guy was similarly a Germanophile and Hellenophile who had nothing but contempt for my career as a Roman historian because, well, Romans.

If you're interested in accuracy, the only accurate thing you can learn from Dr. Nibley is Hugh Nibley's views of Mormonism. Those are intellectually interesting and I can appreciate them as far as they go....

LOL. Indeed.

One of the things I find most interesting about the criticism of Nibley is what it tells us about the critics themselves. My criticisms are not the same as others' criticisms. I learn something interesting from each of the criticisms I have read. Some of the criticism comes, I think, from a sort of presentist view of scholarship in general. Some people are simply not very nuanced in their thinking. That said, many of these criticisms have validity.

One thing I can say about both Ron and Celestial Kingdom is that they are excellent scholars and very smart guys who have a particularly dark view of Mormonism. In Ron's case it is a theologically driven dark view that would surprise most people who have read his scholarship. But his work is very tight. He is completely unsympathetic to Nibley's methods because his view of what Nibley was defending or advocating is dark, but most of what he is saying appears justified inasmuch as one can't argue with the fact that Nibley was bullshitting (I can accept that as fair). Celestial Kingdom's general cynicism about Joseph Smith may be more of a pose for the sake of thought experiment, but he does come at this from a critic's perspective. (No offense, Celestial Kingdom! I love what you do with your scholarship.)

[_Blixa]

Your whole response is quite interesting to me, Symmachus. I never read much Nibley "back in the day" because I simply wasn't interested. "No "Ma'am" was bad enough. I knew that believers spoke of him with reverence and I remember an undergraduate friend whose sister had countered her doubts with an appeal to Nibley authority.

Then I stumbled upon the world of online discussion of Mormonism around 1999/2000. I was researching something else and in the random manner of hyperlinks found myself reading a website where an earnest young Mormon was listing every celebrity/famous person with a connection to the religion. Reading around some more landed me on RfM and the all-consuming subject of Mormon apologetics: both "classic" (Nibley) and contemporary (DCP). So most of my knowledge of his work was framed by that. What I looked at to familiarize myself struck me as problematic, but what I also quickly realized was that there was less any real kind of encounter with Nibley's oeuvre than there was a crude use of it: "Look what this genius wrote, do you even know half what he does? Well do you?" Besides the shoddy rhetoric, this seemed to me to connect with a kind of Mormon ressentiment in general, a cultural paranoia and inferiority complex. The kind of thing that drove that young man to compile the list of famous Mormon people that kicked off my re-entry into thinking about Mormonism.

Nibley is not the kind of sham-scholar who makes things up whole cloth or plagiarizes. Those are easy to spot, and their aims are usually some kind of personal advancement. He is a different kind of sham-scholar, one that is harder to categorize because the aims of his project are so different from those of genuine imposters (bud-ump ching).

I continue to give him credit for actually producing something, unlike any of his self-appointed successors and fawning imitators. He does have a view of Mormonism that has many attractive features, that is vigorously argued, beautifully constructed (as long as you don't look beneath the hood), and frankly better than anything the Church has an offer. This view of Mormonism is really what Nibley is promoting in his writings. Nibley is an apologist in the classical sense because he is creative rather than destructive: he builds an edifice of a Mormonism (the cosmic play that he is always going on). Read Justin Martyr or Clement of Alexandria to get a sense of what I'm talking about and to see how interesting apologetics can be. These guys were not simply attacking critics or reviewing them (a few did that sporadically: Origen on Celsus, for instance) but actually trying to show how their Christianity was an intellectual system and a view of reality that could actually complete with other systems and views. I totally reject the end but I enjoy observing the means. I put Nibley in the category, and probably also B.H. Roberts and now T. Givens. I would definitely reserve the word "hack" for people like Daniel Peterson and Kerry Muehlestein: these people have absolutely nothing original to say. Never mind that I don't agree with them—I prefer reading and engaging with people I disagree with—but there is no "there" there with them.

I think this is an interesting way to describe his work. In some sense he is sui generis. And this accounts for what is both interesting and creative in his output as well as what is destructive. In this way he strikes me as an awful lot like the man whose legacy he was devoted to legitimating: Joseph Smith. But unlike that frontier autodidact, Nibley had the education and training Smith lacked. (They are of course separated by a wide gap in cultural inheritance: 20thC rationality is an entirely different mental landscape than the one Smith inherited.)

I've read I think most of what he wrote... some of the volumes I know were stuff like lecture notes and sunday school lessons. Why they would publish those or Nibley would consent to that is beyond me; if it was such great scholarship it should have been published long ago, but I think it has more to do with reverence for Nibley than for scholarship.

I did encounter something from this part of his work and was surprised as well. The argument was sloppy and depended on huge generalizations, but then again, one often constructs simplifications in class to use as a point of entry for later elaboration. I think, as you pretty much say, Nibley became a kind of brand and these volumes were a way of cementing the brand through "size" if not "weight."

There's some interesting food for thought here. Not entirely about Nibley, though the more I think about it the more the comparison with Joseph Smith seems fruitful (Nibley as the intellectual Joseph Smith?). It's your suggestion of who seems to occupy the creative apologia category today.

[_Blixa]

Over the years I was increasingly put off by his contempt for scholarship and the Romans. He exhibited absolutely no appreciation or understanding of Roman satire. One of my aunts married a Nibleyite (her second marriage) and that guy was similarly a Germanophile and Hellenophile who had nothing but contempt for my career as a Roman historian because, well, Romans.

This explains a lot.

[Guest]

I suppose the most sympathetic I can be about this is to say that the Indo-Europeanist perspective was still pretty big in the 20th century. Remember, Dumezil's highly dubious book about the tripartite Indo-European origins of Roman religion was first published in 1966.

I think that that is an apt comparison. As I'm sure you know, Dumezil's work was criticized from the beginning and also for the same general problem: a preconceived notion is superimposed upon the evidence (twisting and distorting the evidence in the process, like trying to fit the concrete shell of a pyramid on the wire frame of a cube). Dumezil of course was a fascist sympathizer whose political sympathies were uncannily similar to his scholarly reconstructions of Indo-European society.

But one difference from Indo-Europeanists in general is that they at least have a kind of method. People like August Schleicher or more recently Émile Benveniste and even Calvert Watkins were less dubious scholars than Dumezil who had some superficial similarities to Nibley in that they sifted through evidence separated through time and space in order reconstruct earlier and otherwise unretrievable societies. But linguistic analysis is what held those reconstructions together. It wasn't just an impressionistic "X looks like Y" but "both X and Y text contains the same linguistic root or pattern that anyone can observe" and so on.

What I'm getting at is that I don't think Nibley was even a very good practitioner of the scholarship of his time. His dissertation sounds like an Indo-Europeanist project, but you won't find any of those kinds of methods. That was surprising to me because the whole Indo-European project had been such a large part of 19th and early 20th German scholarship which he so admired, and yet Nibley all but ignores it there and in most of his work. There is not even a lot of philology to his work in general. This, among other reasons, makes me very skeptical about the nature of his mythical linguistic ability.

In classics, I think the myth-and-ritual approach was already on its way out early in Nibley's career, but again I think there are key differences. For one thing, scholars like Jane Harrison and Albert Cook had limits that Nibley didn't. They weren't trying to establish a universal pattern common to all humanity across time and space (which Nibley does). The closest I think there is to Nibley is someone you've brought up before, Kish, J.G. Frazer. But another key difference there is that Frazer has a kind a mechanism for explaining it: there is an organic quality to human culture that is analogous to biology, and therefore every human culture will evolve gradually and through set stages. That is suppose to explain the similarities and patterns he observes.

No one obviously accepts that today, but at least it's an explanation instead of a cluster of references poured out on the page, which is what Nibley does. Nibley wailed about and railed against that Darwinian paradigm throughout his career. So, no linguistic analysis, no theory to explain how this goes together other than simply to claim it all demonstrates an archaic year-rite (but how do these sources demonstrate that? Explanation is what scholars are supposed to do!). So what was his explanation? Of course it's not in his dissertation but it is out there in his work all over the place. It's all a series of diffusions from a single source, all apostate versions of the Gospel that goes back to Adam. That's as sophisticated as Nibley's explanation for anything is. Sure, it does make Mormonism look a whole hell of a lot more interesting, but an interesting version of Mormonism (a low bar indeed!) is not a very sound scholarly explanation.

I think a useful thing to do when thinking about how to place Nibley is to look at the scholars he promoted in his writings. There you will find Theodor Gaster mentioned (a fervent hanger-on to the myth-ritualist approach) and Cyrus Gordon (a distant outlier), and let's not forget the frequent mentions of Robert Graves. Graves believed, like Nibley, that revelation was a valid and reliable means to access knowledge. The opening of the "White Goddess" could have been written by Hugh Nibley. In sum, I don't think it is a kind of presentism that is motivating my distaste for Nibley's scholarship. I just think it is not good scholarship even by the standards of its time.

It's always about Mormonism; even his ostensibly secular projects (and there really were very few) were actually covert ways to work out his theories about Mormonism's relationship with antiquity or some of aspect of that purported relationship.

By the way, the essay in which Nibley misquotes Justin Martyr was published in "BYU Studies." I'm not sure their peer review process, particularly in its early years in the 1960s, would have been able to check his translations thoroughly. They certainly wouldn't have been incentivized to do that when an article by Dr. Nibley showed up!

Over the years I was increasingly put off by his contempt for scholarship and the Romans. He exhibited absolutely no appreciation or understanding of Roman satire. One of my aunts married a Nibleyite (her second marriage) and that guy was similarly a Germanophile and Hellenophile who had nothing but contempt for my career as a Roman historian because, well, Romans.

The thing I find about Nibley is that no one who has a solid knowledge of any subject he wrote on agrees with him when he writes about their subject. As you pointed out elsewhere, he dabbled in so many different fields that he was bound to slip up or give a superficial treatment. I suspect it's more than slip-ups, and that the believers who know about X, Y, and Z might see that Nibley is just wrong about X, Y and Z, but then s/he assumes that that is forgivable because Nibley's expertise was really in subjects A, B, C, and D. But then experts in A, B, C, and D, while they think that Nibley is off his rocker in these areas, that is ok, because after all he is really an expert in X, Y, and Z! One of my professors at BYU who taught Semitic languages thought that Nibley's expertise was originally in classics, but then one of my classics professors (no longer at BYU, admittedly and never a committed Nibleyite) thought that Nibley's expertise was in Semitic languages.

As for Nibley himself: the Gospel is true, scholars are just fallible people who didn't have friends in elementary school, so why bother with the details when we know the answer already and already have the right explanation?

What I looked at to familiarize myself struck me as problematic, but what I also quickly realized was that there was less any real kind of encounter with Nibley's oeuvre than there was a crude use of it: "Look what this genius wrote, do you even know half what he does? Well do you?" Besides the shoddy rhetoric, this seemed to me to connect with a kind of Mormon ressentiment in general, a cultural paranoia and inferiority complex. The kind of thing that drove that young man to compile the list of famous Mormon people that kicked off my re-entry into thinking about Mormonism.

I do think you're right about the anxiety Mormons had (still have?). In the mid twentieth century, official Utah Mormonism put itself in a difficult spot: it began promoting the literalist Book of Mormon and other scripture more than it ever had at the very moment that scholarly knowledge about antiquity was exploding. In the 19th century and early 20th century, you could say what you wanted about antiquity for the most part, but now people knew more about the ancient world than they ever had before. And along with new discoveries, the explosion in access to higher education and the ease and cheapness of popularizing scholarship meant that that knowledge was more accessible than ever. The internet has exponentially accelerated that. Along comes Hugh Nibley, though, and you have this guy who seems to know just so much (all those languages!), and he was a literalist believer with total allegiance to the Church leadership. If such a smart person believes the Book of Mormon is true, then it must be. It helped that nobody with the tools to engage Nibley bothered to (but what's the incentive?).

I don't think there is much evidence that the Church (the institution) every formally pressured Nibley the way that Martha Beck alleges. To me that suggests the things about the Church's leadership culture that I don't think are so. But I do wonder if Nibley felt pressure from his own position: with his cult following at BYU and people depending on his books as security blankets for their literalist Mormonism, not defending the Book of Abraham might send the wrong message to them (as well as the famous but still anonymous lady in Parowan ). Even if they didn't read or understand them—and if they did, what a view of Mormonism they would get—at the very least, they were written by a really smart guy who knows lots and lots of words.

In some sense he is sui generis. And this accounts for what is both interesting and creative in his output as well as what is destructive. In this way he strikes me as an awful lot like the man whose legacy he was devoted to legitimating: Joseph Smith...though the more I think about it the more the comparison with Joseph Smith seems fruitful (Nibley as the intellectual Joseph Smith?). It's your suggestion of who seems to occupy the creative apologia category today.

That's a compelling way to view it. Every time I would read Nibley talk about Joseph Smith, I wondered why his Joseph was so different from mine. Nibley would write things about this broad and expansive drama of the cosmos of which we are all a part and which no one in history but Joseph Smith has had the boldness to offer the world. But actually Joseph Smith's interests to me always seemed totally parochial and specific to his own needs and immediate contexts (all those revelations about one-time affairs in early Mormonism, or some guy's mission to here or there, etc.). Nibley would talk about Joseph Smith's interest in languages, but the fragments of Joseph Smith's linguistic bravura seemed more like a kind of braggadocio (see here, for instance), the flip side of which is anxiety coming from an sense of intellectual inferiority, which is evident elsewhere in Joseph Smith. But your observation makes me think that Nibley is really rewriting himself in Joseph Smith—which of course validates the view of Mormonism that Nibley is pushing.

[_CaliforniaKid]

Celestial Kingdom's general cynicism about Joseph Smith may be more of a pose for the sake of thought experiment, but he does come at this from a critic's perspective. (No offense, Celestial Kingdom! I love what you do with your scholarship.)

It's less of a pose than you think. I've got 160 pages written on my future bestseller: Mormon Bandits: The Incredible True Story of How America's Most Respectable Church Began as a Criminal Front. (Not even joking. )

[_Symmachus]

It's less of a pose than you think. I've got 160 pages written on my future bestseller: Mormon Bandits: The Incredible True Story of How America's Most Respectable Church Began as a Criminal Front. (Not even joking. )

Family—Isn't it about crime?

[_Kishkumen]

It's less of a pose than you think. I've got 160 pages written on my future bestseller: Mormon Bandits: The Incredible True Story of How America's Most Respectable Church Began as a Criminal Front. (Not even joking. )

Now you have me salivating! Well, good. I am glad someone is going to do it. I think there is something to be said for this approach, and I am eager to read your argument. Now get that dissertation done! (Done well, because it is another topic I am deeply interested in.)

[_Kishkumen]

But linguistic analysis is what held those reconstructions together. It wasn't just an impressionistic "X looks like Y" but "both X and Y text contains the same linguistic root or pattern that anyone can observe" and so on.

Very true.

What I'm getting at is that I don't think Nibley was even a very good practitioner of the scholarship of his time... There is not even a lot of philology to his work in general. This, among other reasons, makes me very skeptical about the nature of his mythical linguistic ability.

I don't doubt that he had a pretty prodigious memory and an ability to pick up languages. But that doesn't mean he had mastered any of them. And, anyway, it is difficult to tell because he was strategically altering the translations to fit his own narrative. So, I am not as suspicious of his linguistic ability as I am of his philological ability and ethics. 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.

It's all a series of diffusions from a single source, all apostate versions of the Gospel that goes back to Adam. That's as sophisticated as Nibley's explanation for anything is. Sure, it does make Mormonism look a whole hell of a lot more interesting, but an interesting version of Mormonism (a low bar indeed!) is not a very sound scholarly explanation.

Unfortunately, that is the essence of his method. It is all a grand diffusion and decay from the Ur-religion of Adam. 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.

In sum, I don't think it is a kind of presentism that is motivating my distaste for Nibley's scholarship. I just think it is not good scholarship even by the standards of its time.

Although I wasn't accusing you of being presentist in your take on Nibley, I do appreciate all you have discussed in this post.

By the way, the essay in which Nibley misquotes Justin Martyr was published in "BYU Studies." I'm not sure their peer review process, particularly in its early years in the 1960s, would have been able to check his translations thoroughly. They certainly wouldn't have been incentivized to do that when an article by Dr. Nibley showed up!

Oh, it wasn't the Justin Martyr I was talking about, or, at least, that I meant to indicate. It was Shepherd of Hermas. See http://www.utlm.org/newsletters/no110.htm#p16

As for Nibley himself: the Gospel is true, scholars are just fallible people who didn't have friends in elementary school, so why bother with the details when we know the answer already and already have the right explanation?

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.

[_Johannes]

Excellent, this is still going....

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.

[_Johannes]

It is also interesting, in my view, that the fall-back position on the Book of Abraham has become "Hellenistic pseudepigrapha,"

This interests me.

Whose theory is this?