PROVO, Utah
— Hugh Nibley approaches a lonely house. He is alone. The house is
deserted. It is night. Others will come later to this house, but for
now it is up to him. He takes his flashlight and enters the structure
— engulfed by the shadows.
This is how Daniel C. Peterson sees Hugh Nibley — a man exploring. And
time is running out. "He explores it room by room, making preliminary
notes as to their contents and the general floor plan," Peterson said.
Later, a larger group comes along. They have better lights.
They have more time. Their survey is systematic and more exhaustive.
They have Nibley's notes to guide them to the most interesting and
useful things. "Their work will sometimes correct that of the first
discoverer and occasionally even supersede it in certain respects,"
Peterson said as he continued the analogy. "But it turns out that he's
really been quite good, and, without him, they might never have known
that there was a house at all."
__IMAGE1__ Peterson spoke at BYU on Thursday, Feb. 4, as part of the Neal A.
Maxwell Institute's weekly lecture series honoring the centennial of
the late professor Hugh W. Nibley's birth. He talked about Nibley's
role as an apologist and how he impacted people's lives.
For example, he spoke about Hugh Nibley's impact on him when he was a student at BYU.
Peterson
was a young mathematics major with a life-sized poster of Albert
Einstein on his wall and was "determined to be a cosmologist." But like
many students at BYU, he ended up changing his major. He decided to
study Greek — until he heard a lecture by Hugh Nibley.
"He advised us to drop whatever we were doing in order to study
Arabic," Peterson said. Peterson's current position as a professor of
Islamic studies and Arabic at BYU demonstrates the impact of that
lecture.
Nibley's apologetic works had a similar impact on many people.
"Apologetics has nothing to do with apologizing in the modern sense,"
Peterson said. "It's not about saying, 'We're so sorry that we believe
these things.'" He said that apologetics is simply a word that means
"arguing in a more or less sustained way for or against any position —
whether it be the truth of Mormonism or the superiority of atheism, the
legitimacy of the United States' intervention in Iraq or the immorality
of American foreign policy."
This is especially the case, according to Peterson, when the apology
(read "defense") is made against criticisms. St. Justin Martyr, St.
Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis engaged
in apologetics. Mormonism had its historic apologists as well with
Elders Parley and Orson Pratt, President John Taylor, Elder B. H.
Roberts and Elder John A. Widstoe. "Which brings us pretty much to the
period of Hugh Nibley,"
Nibley's first defensive apologetic work was a response to
the secular biography of Joseph Smith by Fawn Brodie titled, "No Man
Knows My History." Nibley set the satiric tone of his response with the
mocking title, "No Ma'am, That's Not History."
"He made his case with devastating humor, even scorn," Peterson said.
__IMAGE2__ For example, Nibley quotes Brodie writing this about Joseph Smith: "He
stood proudly before his men, betraying nothing of the tumult and
anxiety racking him within." Nibley then wryly comments, "Since he
betrayed nothing by look, word, or gesture of his inner feelings, we
take the liberty to report that he was really thinking of a fishing
trip made on his seventh birthday; there is no evidence for this, but
of course his thoughts were perfectly concealed, you know."
Another example: Brodie wrote about how when Joseph Smith faced his
wife Emma for the last time, "he knew that she thought him a coward."
Nibley then comments, "So Brodie knows that Emma knew that Joseph knew what Emma thought! Is this history?"
Nibley's book was dismissed by Brodie as "flippant and shallow." Other
historians called it "rather outrageous" or "slapstick." But members of
the church enjoyed it. "Nibley's critique of Brodie was, in my view,
right on target," Peterson said.
Other similar satirical defenses followed, such as "The Myth Makers,"
about critics of Joseph Smith, and "Sounding Brass," about critics of
Brigham Young. Peterson read these books: "I laughed until the tears
ran down my face. And I'm not exaggerating."
There has been a tradition of satirical responses to critics beginning
with Parley P. Pratt in 1844. Nibley, however, never considered the
responses light-minded. "Humor is not light-minded," Nibley said,
according to Peterson. "There is nothing light-minded about the
incisive use of satire ... what really is light-minded is kitsch —
delight in shallow trivia and the viewing of serious or tragic events
with complacency or indifference. To be obsessed with styles, fashions
and fads is true light-mindedness."
Nibley's best-known apologetic works, however, are not necessarily
defenses against an obvious attack. Instead is more of a case of "the
best defense is a good offense," according to Peterson.
In books and articles, Nibley looked at the Book of Mormon as a genuine
ancient artifact. "Lehi in the Desert," "The World of the Jaredites,"
"An Approach to the Book of Mormon," "Since Cumorah" and more took an
affirmative approach. His culminating work on the Book of Abraham,
however, was of a more defensive apologetics.
His apologetic works were not an attempt to shore up his own faith.
Peterson noted Nibley's strong and "childlike" faith. "But there were
and are other people without such knowledge," said Peterson, "or (who
are) wavering in their convictions."
One such person was Peterson's own father, who was not a member of the
LDS Church. For years his father had association with the church
because of his Mormon wife, but he did not believe.
Then he read an apologetic work by Hugh Nibley.
Peterson said reading Nibley made his father ask himself, "Is it possible that this could actually be true?"
Peterson baptized his father on the night he was set apart as a Mormon missionary to Switzerland.
Nibley's fearless apologetic writing did not give faith, but allowed
faith to grow. For Peterson, that is a "huge impact" on his own family,
for which there are no apologies.
The next weekly lecture about Hugh Nibley will be at BYU in the Harold
B. Lee Library auditorium at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 11. Terry Ball, a professor of Ancient Scripture and the Dean of Religious Education at
BYU, will present on "Nibley and the Environment." The lectures are
free, open to the public — but space is limited.
E-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com