Hugh Nibley, the patriarch of Mormon Studies, passed away this week. He left an indelible mark on the entire LDS community, not just Mormon scholars, thanks to the many books he authored, the dozens of articles he wrote for LDS magazines, the hundreds of presentations he delivered to a variety of LDS audiences, and the thousands of students he taught during his lengthy tenure at BYU. Among his books was Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless, a collection of previously published essays to which he added a short introduction entitled “An Intellectual Autobiography.” I offer a few short quotes from that account: Nibley, in his own words.

Nibley was born and spent his childhood years in Oregon, which might explain the roots of his strangely un-Mormon environmental streak:

In Portland in 1910 the great rain forests began a few miles from our home on every side, proclaiming in their primal magnificience the kind of world God intended this to be. But the world that men were hewing out of the forest was something else. . . . As we stood on the little platform at Gearhart Beach at the end of our last summer there, the family could hear a lumber company a mile away in the towering woods noisily beginning what was to be the total destruction of the greatest rain forest in the world.

After spending his teenage years in Southern California, he served a mission in Germany:

By bicycle in summer and afoot in winter I went alone (my companions thought I was overdoing it) carrying the gospel to Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist (they were the toughest) villages. The people were still peasants in those days, living in the Middle Ages in their wildly picturesque storybook towns. Surprisingly enough, the work was not entirely unsuccessful . . . . It was a different story when I knocked on the doors of professors and industrialists in the university and factory towns. German Wissenschaft had long since severed all ties with any gospel but its own proud, self-contained positivism; literally they were without a culture and without religion. The hints were clear enough: the infernal machine of our age was made in Germany.

Studying at UCLA and Berkeley but unhappy with his professors, he laid the foundation for what might be called the Legend of the Library:

I decided to put it all together in the stacks [of the UC Berkeley library] beginning at the southwest corner of the ninth level and working down to the northeast corner of the first level, book by book, stopping whenever something significant caught my eye. It took four years . . . .

After beginning an academic career as a young professor at Claremont, World War II whisked him off to Army intelligence, where he was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division. He was at Utah Beach on D-Day.

My business was to know more about the German Army than anyone else and to brief personnel at every level on that meaningful subject both before and during operations. What I saw on every side was the Mahan Principle in full force, that “great secret” of converting life into property–your life for my property . . . . Attached to army groups and various intelligence units during 1945, I took my jeep all over western Europe and beheld the whole thing as a vast business operation.

After the war, his field of ancient studies came alive:

In 1950 the Dead Sea Scrolls began to come out, along with the equally interesting Coptic texts from Nag Hammadi in Egypt, fusing early Judaism and Christianity in a way that conventional churches and scholars found very disturbing but which fitted the Book of Mormon like a glove.

He was continuing to study ancient languages, now Coptic and Egyptian, when the Joseph Smith papyri suddenly reemerged.

The reading of the Abraham apocrypha inevitably led to the discovery that Joseph Smith had given us among other things a perfectly good Book of Enoch which rang up an astonishing number of stunning parallels when I started to compare it with the growing catalogue of newly discovered Enoch manuscripts. But my obsession of the 1970s has been the Temple.

And there his interest remained, really, for the balance of his academic career. His final book, reportedly entitled “One Eternal Round,” is still being edited but should be published within a few years. Like a voice speaking from the dust, perhaps.

When young, Nibley memorized Shakespeare and dreamed of being a poet. No doubt he savored these lines a time or two:

I saw him once. He was a goodly king.
He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.