Mormondom mourns unique man of letters

In a white-shirt culture where nonconformity, while not officially outlawed, is accepted about as well as sticking chewing gum on the underside of the coffee table, he was refreshingly out of step. It would be hard to argue that anyone, in the 174-year history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ever defended the faith more fiercely, and yet he never met a church convention he wasn't liable to throw on its ear.

Hugh Nibley, who died last Thursday just one month shy of his 95th birthday, was a truly unique character in a Mormon landscape that doesn't have all that many.

He was a celebrated scholar who knew more than a dozen languages and authored 15 books, but he refused to embrace fame and riches. (He never moved out of the house he and his wife, Phyllis, bought in Provo in 1953.)

He never held high church office but may have studied Mormonism more than any man alive.

He drove a Jeep onto the beach at Normandy on D-Day to help win World War II, but he hated war and protested against it.

As a teacher at BYU he lectured nonstop, never taking the time to learn his students' names, and yet his students followed him as loyally as German shepherds. ("Being in his class and trying to take notes was like visiting Niagara Falls and trying to catch its falling waters in a teacup," wrote one former student, Robert W. Donigan, Class of '64.)

And politically, he was a Utah County anomaly. ("He's interested in everything," his wife once exclaimed in a magazine interview, "and so am I. And besides that, we're Democrats.")

---

The only time I was privileged to speak to the great man was in the summer of 2000, a few days before the Deseret News celebrated its 150th birthday. I was calling a number of well-known Utahns to get their reflections on one of the Mountain West's oldest newspapers, started by LDS pioneers soon after they settled in Utah.

Finding him was easy. His number in Provo was listed. I told him what I wanted and he said, "I'd be happy to give you a comment, but we don't take the paper."

---

There is a sad touch of irony that Hugh Nibley's passing comes so close to the recent news from his daughter Martha, about the publication of her book, "Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith," in which she accuses her father of sexual abuse when she was 5. Martha's late-in-life recollection of the purported abuse was reportedly summoned via hypnosis (and, I might add in a personal aside, bears a curious similarity to sexual material in the recent bestselling book, "The DaVinci Code").