Kishkumen wrote:On the one hand, I embrace your comparison of Nibley with Graves because I think a lot of what Nibley actually did is quite comparable to Graves. On the other hand, the comparison fails when you consider how he presented himself to others. Nibley played the role of ancient historian and scholar, without any explicit qualifications, unless you consider his denigration of mainstream scholarship as a bizarre kind of inverted qualification. I do have a problem with that. I either know or know of a number of people who went out to pursue the Nibley path only to make the jarring discovery that what he was doing only misleadingly resembled what they were expected to do in their graduate education...
The problem is that we don't arrive at FARMS without the groundwork Nibley laid. How did they not get the message after so many years watching Nibley in action? Did they not understand that they should be writing White Goddess Pt. III instead of No Ma'am That's Not History? Did Nibley not see it as part of his responsibility to clue everyone else in? I have a difficult time tolerating that kind of not-so-benign neglect.
I would agree with that if Nibley were active in 2017. I think it is more understandable in his time. I don't know how Nibley represented himself to others except from what I have read in the biography and his own writings; some of the people I cited (Allegro and Santillana and Gordon) were also professors (and at much, much better schools than BYU was then or now) whose ideas were rather on the fringe, but I think academia was far more tolerant of fringe scholarship then than it is now, so I don't know whether I would start to single out Nibley. John Allegro had some pretty nutso ideas, as did Cyrus Gordon, and I don't think they were always careful with evidence either. Added to all of this, Nibley enjoyed tremendous obscurity but that also meant he really had little understanding of how things had shifted elsewhere.
I certainly am not privy to how he directed his acolytes in terms of a career paths beyond what is published, but my impression is that this was not someone who was tied into academia at all and that his advice and direction wouldn't have been worth much. Should he or they have known that? Perhaps, but I find that most tenured professor's advice today, a time of even more serious seismic shifts, is pretty worthless, and it was quite disheartening in graduate school to see how disengaged they are from the realities younger scholars face. It's not their fault; they just had a different experience.
I recall an introduction to one of the Nibley volumes by S. Ricks in which he said that Nibley had told him to study with Cyrus Gordon. That would have been in the 1970s, and thus laughable. Ricks wisely did not follow Nibley's advice. I recall reading some correspondence online a few years ago between a Mormon Egyptology student (I think it was a young Michael Rhodes) and Nibley from the 1960s or 1970s, and it seemed to me from that that Nibley was quite indifferent to the academic pursuit of Egyptology; it was all about Joseph Smith-ism for him. The student was troubled that he couldn't get some professor to see some point about Egyptology that might be favorable to the Mormon view, and if I recall correctly, he was basically commiserating with Nibley, whose response was something like, "well of course the 'schoolmen' won't be able see it." (I am sorry I can't find a link for that now). Most professors who have been around long enough to get tenured are oblivious to the kinds of pressures and expectations that younger scholars face because those pressures and expectations are always changing (it's not their fault). As you know, the shifts of the 1970s were quite dramatic, as they are today, but there is nothing that I have read in Nibley that suggests he had any idea what was going on; he was about to retire, and he came up at a time when being an eccentric professor who was indifferent to committee assignments was not only possible but tolerated, and when the inability to present a coherent lecture was a sign of ethereal intellectualism rather than of being "unprofessional." That had been a very successful pose for him at a rather obscure place, so what basis did he have to give sound advice? But what student interested in becoming a scholar (rather than a BYU apologist) would ask a professor about to retire where they should go to graduate school, or what the norms of graduate school elsewhere are like? Nibley's professors in graduate school were all born in the 19th century, for Christ's sake.
This is why I mention his personality cult. I think a lot of these guys were simply under a spell that affected (and continues to affect) their scholarly judgment, to the extent they have any. Nibley did nothing to suppress that cult, and that far, he bears some responsibility. But it's not just that Nibley was a powerful personality but that this was all done against the backdrop of Mormonism, where revelation and esoteric knowledge are constitutive of religious experience. So, to a certain degree, I agree that there is some social conditioning behind this, at least for impressionable undergraduates.
Kishkumen wrote:I am not sure most dimly educated Mormons at BYU or in the LDS Church at large really understand the difference there. I also think you overestimate, probably based on your own stellar intellect, how easy it is for the average person to find out what they do not know, when they don't even suspect there is a reason to look. Look at John Hall, for goodness sakes: did he truly understand the boundaries between Nibley's craft and ancient history? I don't think we can treat the scholars who followed Nibley as being completely different from the other Mormons who chose to trust him. The impact of such thorough cultural conditioning and misinformation is devastating.
On the other hand, some of them should have known better once they left BYU, and I think there is choice involved, not only social conditioning. Unlike Nibley, Hall was trained at a top graduate school under a tremendous scholar, and long, long after the comparativist approach had come to be seen for what it was. He didn't pick up on that? Given how he treats the opening of John 1, it seems not. Or, comfortable in his retirement, he doesn't care. Rhodes went to Brown for Egyptology, but given the choice between scholarship and the literalist Book of Abraham, he took the latter. The fact is, people who are interested primarily in scholarship become scholars and are likely to be disillusioned by Nibley, and people who aren't, don't, and instead remain devotees. For these old FARMSians, scholarship was just a pretext for esoteric Mormonism, academia merely the setting. I am not gonna see John Gee as a victim. I can only wish to be such a well-funded victim.
Yeah, I don't think this statement or the comparison with Nibley withstand careful scrutiny. First of all, resistance rhetoric does not need to take the form of "Rome sucks." Secondly, your comparison with Nibley is practically a refutation of the rebuttal you are attempting. If Nibley's vision of a socialist Zion is not a response to the Mormon embrace of Americanism on some level, then I don't know what you would take it to be. As someone who sat through his classes, has read his works, and knows something of what the contrast of Zion and Babylon meant in Nibley's treatment of it, I am really taken aback that you would say this.
Perhaps. I wasn't alive when he taught classes, but "response" is not the word I'd use because it implies too much about causation and removes any agency from Hugh Nibley. I take Nibley's vision of Zion (I reject the reference to socialism) as indicative of his extreme literalist Mormonism first and foremost, and liberal Mormons read him selectively, because his vision of Zion was intimately bound up with an archaic Mormon millenarianism that, by his own account, he imbibed form his grandmother. It was once, as you know, a very common strain of thought in Mormonism and a hold-over from the 19th century. Mormon liberals seem not to appreciate that Nibley's social views are rooted more in the Journal of Discourses than anything else: that is what he actually quotes most frequently in Approaching Zion and his social writings, but you will search in vain for any socialist political philosophers. If Nibley had any intellectual connection to that stuff, he did a marvelous job of hiding it.
Of course his social views must be understood as responses to his social context and not some other social context, but his social context does not explain the thrust of Hugh Nibley's interpretation of Mormonism at all. Lehi in the Desert and The Message of the Joseph Smith papyri, which are much more representative of his work than Approaching Zion, have nothing to do with post-war American imperialism or consumer society in Utah and everything to do with his imagined mono-culture whose remnants are visible in ancient Egypt, the Hopis, and Mormonism. The best way to understand what something or someone is responding to is to look at their response; Nibley in his writing is above all concerned with the truth of Mormonism as he saw it and its connection to the ancient past as he imagined it; American imperialism and materialism concerns him only insofar as they touch on his views of Mormonism. There is a reason you could fit his social views, which are not very developed or even coherent, into one volume.
By the same token, I don't think gnosticism is explainable as a response to the failures of Roman imperial ideology (whatever that means). To say otherwise without some evidence is to impose a preexisting model, not to derive understanding from the texts we have.
Religious resistance against Rome was a thing, and it permeates the prophecy and other sacred writings of the eastern half of the Roman world from the Hellenistic period through the Roman Empire. It is baffling to me that you would suggest that this is some kind of post-Vietnam thing. That is utter nonsense.
You are attributing to me what I did not say; or rather, what I did not mean to say: a key phrase I inadvertently left out in my comment was "scholarly interest in...is post-Vietnam" and I did not mean to suggest that no one in history had ever resisted power before the 1960s. But do I think the emphasis on political resistance in scholarship correlates very strongly with the particular preoccupations of baby boomers. Sometimes those preoccupations lead to genuine discoveries, other times they overreach. By comparison, you won't find many scholars who tow an imperialist line these days, whereas you don't have to go very far to find that sort of thing before World War 2 (e.g. the whole idea of Romanization, belatedly called into question, comes from Haverfield in the heyday of British imperialism). I don't see why it's controversial to say that scholars are embedded in their own contexts and tend to ask questions of the past that are asked in their own present. (That goes for Nibley too: his context, post WWII Utah Mormonism, was the beginning of the dominance of literalism in Mormon intellectual and ecclesiastical life; he is of a piece with Bruce R. McConkie). I just get nervous when they apply the same answers to the past as they find in the present.
Obviously resistance to power structures of all kinds occurred in religious contexts and assumed religious forms. The question I addressed was whether gnosticism is one of those contexts and forms, and that is where I think this preoccupation goes to far. There is no evidence for it. It need not take the form of "Rome sucks" but it needs to take some recognizable form; otherwise we're have no way of knowing whether we're just making it up. If it were such a concern, we would expect something there.
Yet where is the evidence that gnosticism is primarily or even partly a response to Roman power or a discourse of resistance? And what about the fact that gnosticism in various forms was quite international? Was it also a response to Parthian and then Sasanian imperial ideologies? And if so in both cases, why does it take the forms it does? There is something very interesting about the examples of religious resistance that you mention: their rhetoric of resistance is quite transparent. That is not so with gnosticism. Not at all.
It seems to me that the view you expressed is a secular variation on E. R. Dodds' discredited thesis about spiritual malaise as the backdrop to the religious transformations of the third and fourth centuries. It sounds nice, there's just no evidence for it and it's ultimately psychological speculation. Not only that, it is completely antithetical to the primary assumptions of gnostic texts. These were people whose magical practices and formulas were meant to facilitate escape from the world, not to engage with it. I cannot see how the desire to escape the world is also a strategy for engaging with that world. It makes no sense.
This is not just a modern perspective; the indifference of gnostic-learning Christians to the Roman persecution and their willingness to go along with whatever the Roman authorities wanted (because they were indifferent to the pretensions of Roman power) is something that really incensed the fans of martyrdom like Tertullian. Christians of all stripes had great faith in the transformative power of their Christianity on a social level as well as an individual one (perhaps more so).
Again, strange, strange reading of the evidence. I am surprised that you take this at face value and try to compare this to quite literate "Gnostics" in Egypt in the Late Roman Empire who knew enough to engage Neoplatonists and Hermetics. That they would think about Roman power in the sort of oblivious way you see Synesius impressionistically portraying is a very odd conclusion to draw, in my opinion.
I'm just making a point about the limits of Roman imperial messages into most people's lives, which as you know, were lived in small orbit, and what they got of Roman imperial ideology they got from local elites. But not all elites were interested in Roman power (e.g. Paulinus of Nola), and not all who were literate were elite (e.g. Origen and Epictetus, as well as a whole line of Neoplatonists beginning with Ammonius Saccas and probably Plotinus himself). None of this is controversial. I don't think gnostics were oblivious, just indifferent.
Please tell me how Menander Rhetor fits into your assessment of the complete irrelevance of Roman propaganda to most educated people in antiquity. If propaganda were so irrelevant, then there would be no point in having propagandists.
I think you misread me or I have not stated my view effectively. The messages of Roman imperial propaganda are what we have, but the performance of those messages was what really counted, not the content. I have actually spent a great deal of time with this stuff (Mendander Rhetor, Themistius, Himerius, the panegyrics from Gaul, fragments of Symmachus, Libanius, Julian's panegyrics of Constantius, and so on), and if you have read any of this, as I'm sure you have, the most glaring characteristic is how stereotyped it all is. Indeed, it is so stereotyped, that you can just follow some basic formulas—and that is what Menander Rhetor gives you. The ideological content of Roman propaganda, with roots as far back as Augustus and even earlier, comprises a fairly narrow repertoire, and what there is is pretty vapid. They are all restitutor orbis and so on, even on the coinage. It was really the display of power that was affective, and that is something that happened only when the imperial entourage came to town. In the absence of mass media, what else would you expect? Yet historians do not have any real access to that (though I'm sure you know Sabine MacCormack's book on this, which attempts, quite brilliantly, to recreate some of that display). So yes, the propagandists who composed these things took their task seriously, but I think few others did; and I think many historians read these things far too literally when they read them without that performative context in mind.
Now, one of things I have been working on is to treat these as a kind of coded-language, but what I have begun to realize is that a lot of these messages are intra-elite (the message his horizontal), not from the imperial government downward. A lot of the messages encoded in the fragments of a panegyric of Symmachus, for example, are really the pretensions of a representative of the senatorial aristocrats at Rome and were intended for courtiers in the court of Valentinian—other panegyrists. In other words, other propagandists. Your statement that "If propaganda were so irrelevant, then there would be no point in having propagandists," is inaccurate because it misses the point of ancient and much modern propaganda. Like LDS general conference talks or a modern political rally, these are not gestures of mass persuasion but attempts to unite a relatively homogeneous group around a common identity through a group experience. In the case of Rome: people with power, with access to power, and with pretensions to power. That is not a very large set of people. And I don't share your assumption that all literate people constituted a segment of society with enough shared features that we can treat them interchangeably. I doubt any of the monks who had been reading and copying the texts later buried outside Nag Hammadi had ever heard of Menander Rhetor any more than the writer of Mark's gospel was familiar with Aristotle's Rhetoric.
I'm sure we could argue about the function and reception of Roman imperial propaganda all day, and I'd welcome that in another context, but it is hard for me to imagine how gnosticism develops as a response to any of it, as well as why the compilers of gnostic texts then went to such great lengths to conceal this essential quality.