Science and Traditions: A Nibleyesque Musing

I know I said I'd do something cool for post #201. Turns out it's just another Nibleyesque Musing. Oh well.

The way that Brother Nibley harmonizes science and religion in “Beyond Adam” is very interesting. As a chemistry student and a firm believer in science and the scientific method, I’m always grappling with these same issues in my life. For the most part, my solution has been what I call the “everything and nothing” approach—I seek to learn everything that’s true, believing everything that’s true comes from God, and that once I understand everything, nothing will be in conflict. As Nibley points out, science has an entirely different point from religion, so of course there will be some things that appear to conflict. But both are true frames for viewing the universe, and the real thing includes and supersedes both. Science and religion are both maps that tell us how to get to specific goals, but to insist that a map is reality is clear nonsense.

But back to Nibley’s thoughts on evolution—I liked the idea that a lot of the early destructions of massive numbers of people in the Bible might have had something to do with other forms of human beings. I find it very comforting that Nibley doesn’t feel the need to deny the possibility of evolution or something like unto it. I’ve never felt that there was any need for all this conflict. Why shouldn’t God work through evolution? “My ways are not your ways.” The promise to keep the seed of Enoch through Noah always on the earth makes a lot more sense when you have the idea that there might have been other types of humans to compete with. It also covers a lot of the ideas about giants and such that we read in the Old Testament. Sure, the timing of all this doesn’t seem to fit together quite yet, but I have a firm belief that it will all shake out in the end. Who knows how many things about our perceptions of both science and religion need to be corrected in the end?

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of “How Firm a Foundation! What Makes It So.” Nibley starts out listing the necessary qualities that characterize the true gospel, but then wanders, in typical Nibley fashion, through the idea of consecration and into environmentalism, particularly discussing pollution in Utah. I enjoyed the list of characteristics of the true church: like Nibley, I was amazed that “I had no idea at that time how vast and solid the foundations of the Church really are.

I’m not sure how to phrase what I’m going to say next, so try not to take it too seriously if it’s overly offensive or odd. Although for the greater part of my life I’ve had a very strong testimony of the truth of the gospel and the Church, I’ve always felt a little bashful about the fact that it’s, well, so new. I mean, 170-odd years is really not that long for the existence of a religion, and though we of course claim that we are a restoration of ancient things, the very modern feeling of the Church has always made me feel a bit uncomfortable. I sometimes find myself wishing we had that long line of tradition in the same way as the Catholic Church or even better Judaism. Reading a lot of Nibley has helped me recover a sense of tradition—that Joseph Smith didn’t just make it up in 1830, but that the practices of the Church go far back, especially when it comes to the temple. Perhaps my thirst for tradition will finally be quenched when I go through for myself.

Gender Unity: A Nibleyesque Musing

So, I'll get around to an obligatory conference post eventually today, but I'm restraining myself from writing anything fun until I do the Nibleyesque Musing that was due last week. Unfortunately, the only way I can motivate myself to do it is by posting it on the blog, so you'll just have to bear with me. Hey, it's on gender roles instead of obscure doctrine, so that should be fun.

“Patriarchy and Matriarchy” was an interesting approach to the question of gender equality in the gospel. I’m not sure I agreed exactly with Nibley’s characterization of Adam and Eve. He seems to switch back and forth on who he “blames” for the Fall (assuming it’s something to blame for). He attempts to make Eve a conscientious actor (“It is she who perceives and points out to Adam that they have done the right thing after all.”), a deceptive trickster (“But Eve, who in ancient lore is the one who outwits the serpent and trips him up with his own smartness, defeated this trick by a clever argument.”), and finally an innocent victim (“The first daring step had to be taken, and if in her enthusiasm she let herself be tricked by the persuasive talk of a kindly "brother," it was no fault of hers.”). It seems that Nibley wants to have it all ways at once, to blame Satan, Adam, and Eve each for the fall in successive turns. After all, I suppose all are to “blame,” but I don’t think Nibley does a good job of pulling all three problems together into a coherent vision. Instead, his description of the Fall seems to remain fragmented and confused.

However, I do like Nibley’s final conclusion about apparent gender issues in the gospel. The problem with the Fall, he says, is not that it was a wrong choice. It was that the choice was made by Eve alone, rather than in conjunction with Adam and especially without consultation with God. He goes on to conjecture that the real problem with the matriarchy/patriarchy issue is that it shouldn’t be an issue. We shouldn’t be choosing one or the other, but both and neither. The problem is that we set it up as an issue at all, that our society is so concerned about who should be first. As Nibley explains, “the suffix archy means always to be first in order, whether in time or eminence; the point is that there can only be one first.” The problem is that we insist on trying to find out which gender is superior or better, or trying to find the exact nature of either gender, under the false assumption that one can really exist without the other.

Nibley’s explication of the loss of gender identities in Macbeth clicked an image in my mind of gender identity and struggle as a sort-of circle. At the bottom of the circle, we have those societies who, like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, have lost their gender identity in a quest for power and authority. Here is the raw power sought by either pure patriarchy or matriarchy, complete chaos and domination by one set of principles or the other. Moving up to the middle of the circle, we have a society of opposites: extremely different and polarized gender roles, where we have given up some of our desire for power in order to achieve a more balanced society. Some would think this is the society the Church advocates, with men in the workplace and women in the home, each minding their separate spheres. But what the gospel really calls for is at the top of the circle, where gender becomes both extremely essential and also totally unimportant. As we move to the top of the circle, we move from a society desiring power to a society desiring progress—eternal progression. We give up our desire for absolute agency (being able to make all the choices ourselves) for the greater gift of unified action. Gender at this level becomes infinitely important, because society must be run by a man and woman working and deciding together, but also irrelevant, because of the perfect unity achieved. The two have become so one that both can do everything, and yet nothing, without the other.

(Long time readers may catch the definite allusion to one of my favorite posts on this blog, The Circle: A Theory of Knowledge. Like I say, everything relates to it!)

Amateurs and War: A Nibleyesque Musing

Nibley’s “Day of the Amateur” really expressed well my own views on education. I find it strange that even at BYU there are people going through the motions of getting a university education only for the purpose of obtaining a piece of paper—a “passport” to a better job, as Nibley says. The problem is that the university has two functions: to enrich individuals with a liberal education and to provide the education needed for more advanced jobs. Both of these purposes are important, but they interfere with each other. In job-training mode, the university’s job is to teach content that’s applicable to what individuals will be doing in the work place, but in liberal-education mode, it ought to be teaching methods of thinking and general knowledge. Too much liberal education, and you hear students complaining that there’s no point to what they’re learning, since they’ll never use it again. Too much job training, and the material soon becomes dry and boring, like a checklist. Myself, I see the need for both types of education. As much as I enjoy theoretical concepts, it’s also important to pin things down to how you can actually use them, and vice versa.

I also liked the idea we discussed in class about maintaining amateur enthusiasm and mind-set while still obtaining professional credentials. Keeping up a good attitude can be hard when you begin to study anything seriously. Spend enough time with anything and you’ll start to get bored with it—you realize its flaws, the repetitive tasks you’re going to do over and over. Keeping our enthusiasm about what we do is a huge task, but if we can do it, it does so much for our lives.

Reading about Nibley’s war experiences has really brought into relief my own changing perceptions of war. It’s not that I ever thought war was a good thing, or even okay, but I think that there are fewer justifiable causes for war than I previously thought. What is a justifiable cause for attacking another nation? Clearly not greed or hatred, but what about injustice, cruelty, and wickedness? How far ought we to allow things to do before we feel justified in stepping in? Do we have to wait until their choices start adversely affecting us, or should we help out if innocent people are being destroyed? And aren’t innocent people always being affected? Yet we also have to make some allowances for agency—the wicked have to be allowed to prove they deserve destruction, and that can’t be done without injuring someone else. But how much is too much? When would God approve of us stepping in to stop suffering? I think some of the answer lies in why Nibley never talked about his experience visiting the concentration camp at Dachau. (I really wish he had spoken about it—I’d like to hear Nibley’s reaction to that total loss of human conscience. The brutality there seems to be the only hole in his statements for total pacifism.)

It must have been particularly hard for Nibley to serve in WWII after having spent his mission teaching the German people. But then again, it should be equally hard for any person to serve in a war against any other people. I watched The Last Samurai a few weeks ago with George. It’s a movie about a Japanese civil war between the forces of modernity and the traditional samurai. During one of the battle scenes, George remarked that the destruction was even sadder because it was Japanese killing Japanese. I sometimes wonder why we think this. Essentially, all war is equally tragic, people killing people. If we are truly trying to be like Christ, we should be seeing every person as he would, and fighting against any of them should be as painful as fighting against our own family.

Come, Let us Reason Together: A Nibleyesque Musing

I have one thing to say for the readings this week: Nibley’s “Beyond Politics” is pure genius! I especially enjoyed Nibley’s elaboration on how God wants us to understand the plan of salvation—how, unlike Satan, He cares to negotiate with us until we understand. “God is willing to discuss things with men as an equal.” So often, the world sees living a religion as necessitating blind faith, willfully ignoring the conflicts we see in the world. But this is so backward from what is real that it’s ridiculous. It’s the philosophies of the world that tell us to accept things as they are, not to ask why, but to simply accept that it is. “That’s just life,” the world tells us. It points out the huge gaping dilemmas, cries how incomprehensible the world is, and retreats back into ignorance. Heavenly Father, on the other hand, wants us to ask why, forces us to look at the tough questions and demand answers.

I think the world sometimes avoids religion because we are, as C.S. Lewis said, afraid that if we actually look for God, we would actually find Him, which means a great deal of responsibility. I’ve had friends come up against problems with the Church that they see as irreconcilable—whether it be why women don’t have the priesthood, why their parents got divorced, or why their loved one had to suffer or die. To me, it seemed that the only reason the problems remained for them is because they refused to demand answers from the source. They continued to seek out worldly philosophies on the subject, which they hoped might explain the problem but which inevitably brought more and more questions into their lives. They had laid down their scriptures and their prayers, which is where they ought to have been seeking their answers all along. When I find seemingly unanswerable questions, it’s often because I’m not looking in the right place for the answers.

Another great corollary of this discussion is that deciding to live a righteous life does not mean that all discussion ceases. As Nibley points out, even in the beginning, there was a counsel in heaven. In the Church, we sometimes portray this key discussion as more of a gathering for a one-way dispensation from God, but I think it’s important to notice the collaborative nature of the word. Nibley casts an interesting light on this: “Satan was not cast out for disagreeing, but for attempting to resort to violence when he found himself outvoted.” I’m not sure that I quite buy it doctrinally, but it certain fits into Nibley’s picture of the universe as an essential collaboration between God and men. After all, we believe our intelligences to be equally eternal with God’s; He’s simply further ahead in the plan than we are. Why shouldn’t we all have had a say in how things work?

In contrast with the godly reasoning Nibley presents in “Beyond Politics,” the worldly philosophies exposed in “The Way of the ‘Intellectuals’” look like the pathetic counterfeits that they are. Rather than equality and plainness of God’s “come, let us reason together,” the figures Nibley describes from the Book of Mormon rely on power, charisma, and elitism to make their points. If you disagree with them, it’s merely your lack of judgment. There’s no room for disputation as there is in the kingdom of God. It’s amazing just how plain the difference is when you put these philosophies side-by-side. It’s one of the reasons I’m glad to be studying at BYU. The “open” liberalism espoused by other colleges is actually more confining than they think—no universal truths mean the stability must be made up by embracing current trends. At BYU, however, being united in the gospel gives us a firm foundation for exploring all areas of truth.

Darkness and Lightness: A Nibleyesque Musing

“To Open the Last Dispensation: Moses Chapter 1” was a very different essay from what I’m used to reading. The comparison between Moses and other apocryphal accounts of confrontations with Satan was certainly interesting, but hard to follow because of the two-column format. It’s interesting to see that the Lord has spoken to men in the same pattern since the beginning of time: they receive a manifestation from God, are tempted by Satan, overcome him, and receive a vision of the eternities as a reward for their faithfulness.

I wonder how this model might be compared to Joseph Smith’s experiences with God. Clearly, the First Vision doesn’t quite fit into this pattern—Joseph is attacked by Satan before receiving a witness from God—but I sense there are some similarities. It really disappoints me when people in recounting the first vision avoid mentioning the evil spirit that nearly overpowered Joseph, as in the Church’s recently released video on the First Vision. For it seems to me that an encounter with evil is almost as important to becoming a prophet as a revelation from God because realizing the reality of Satan is important in being able to adequately warn the people of his tactics. As it says in the Book of Mormon, one of Satan’s greatest weapons in these days is to convince men that he is no devil, for there is none. There is a imminent danger in denying the reality of evil in the world.

Hugh Nibley’s humorous skit on BYU, “Shalamar,” was almost as hilarious today as I’m sure it was back then. The comments about the student’s dress—modest in name only—were dead on to attitudes I see sometimes on campus. I find it frankly amazing that people took themselves lightly enough in that day to be able to put up with Nibley’s cutting humor. Now at BYU, it seems as though we have to worry about everything offending someone; we take everything ten times more seriously than it was meant. One thinks of the recent disaster of the Cougarettes' dance to “Come Thou Fount” which sparked a contentious letter campaign in the reader’s forum of the Daily Universe. In fact, the editorials of the DU are a perfect example of what can happen when we take ourselves more seriously than the gospel. People are always becoming offended, accusing the other side of being the devil even on such non-issues as parking or rolling backpacks.

We all could learn from Nibley’s balance between taking the gospel seriously and laughing at gospel culture. I love watching the skit comedy group on campus, Divine Comedy, but several people I’ve taken to the show have been quite offended by their humor. Particularly, there was a skit about an overzealous return missionary going on a date with a girl which really offended my friend. In the skit, the missionary refused to drink Sprite (“don’t you know they’re owed by Coke?!”) and wanted to have a table facing east (“just in case”). My friend was certain that this was completely blasphemous, making fun of the Word of Wisdom and waiting for the Second Coming. I’m not so certain. These things aren’t doctrines, but cultural practices. One of my favorites is the skit making fun of Sacrament meeting talk clichés and improving upon them. When I watch it, it doesn’t make me pay less attention in Sacrament meeting. Rather, it makes me think of all the conventions we have to keep us occupied, that perhaps prevent the inspiration of the Spirit from getting into our lives. Humor is a way of waking us up, saying, “is this really what you believe, or are you just doing it because everyone else is?” It separates the culture of Mormonism from the doctrines, which allows us to keep our focus on what really matters.

Learning and the Spirit: A Nibleyesque Musing

“Zeal without Knowledge” is without a doubt one of my favorite essays ever. The replacement of true knowledge with blind trust in the Spirit is one of my main concerns for the modern Church. Too many times I have heard people deride the importance of preparing for teaching in the Church because they want to let the Spirit guide the lesson. I think this is not only foolish and lazy, but strictly against the way God and the Spirit work. Undoubtedly, listening to the whisperings of the Holy Ghost is an important part of our belief. We know that man cannot know everything, and that God has many designs for us which we may not anticipate. Thus we must rely on the guidance of the Spirit to lead us in the right paths. However, this does not mean we should rely on the Spirit for things we could and should do ourselves. Just as the Lord says “it is not meet that I should command in all things” (D&C 58:26), it is not meet that we should wait for him to teach us all things. In gathering and synthesizing knowledge, the Lord commands us to actively seek learning, not just to let it passively wash over us.

And though we are to “seek learning . . . also by faith” (D&C 109:7), I believe it will do us little good unless we have the learning sought by study to go along with it. In the process of learning, the Spirit is more of a director than a worker—we must put ourselves fully into the work of gathering and making knowledge, and only then can the Spirit direct us to the insights he would give us. As someone once said, the Lord won't move a parked car. The Lord waits for us to knock, but the process of knocking is not, as Oliver Cowdery found out in D&C 9, merely asking for wisdom and waiting for God to tell us what to do. It is throwing ourselves into the work, constantly listening for the promptings of the Spirit, but at the same time being “anxiously engaged in a good cause, [doing] many things of [our] own free will” (D&C 58:27).

Back to the idea of preparing for Church talks, would not the Spirit be better able to enlighten our minds to new truths if we sat down and put an intensive amount of effort into studying out a doctrine we think we already understand? I think that much of inspiration is lost because we assume we have already sufficiently “treasured up in [our] minds continually the words of life” (D&C 84:85), when in fact it is a process we can never finish. There is an infinite amount of knowledge to be learned out there, and we should not be complacent with the small portion we have obtained. Nibley’s own scholarship is testament to this principle: though he was extremely widely read, he never felt as though he knew sufficient to simply coast along by the Spirit. He continued to seek out more books to read, new ideas and new ways to say them. And throughout all of his study, he maintains the inspiration of the Spirit in his ideas. Just because he was synthesizing his own ideas did not mean he had shut out the ideas of the Spirit, as seems to be the common misconception.

Nibley has some interesting perspectives on man’s relationship to nature in “Subduing the Earth.” I’ve often wondered exactly what was meant by the command to “subdue the earth and have dominion over it.” I like Nibley’s picture of man as a gracious lord or host over the earth, responsible for ensuring the comfort and improvement of everything in it. I’m still not certain how I feel about his idea that respect for life means we shouldn’t eat meat. Since we believe all things were created spiritually before they were created physically, it seems an arbitrary distinction to draw the line between using plants but not animals. If animals can be said to be equally valuable with man, why not plants with animals? And then again, why use rocks and minerals, which also have a spiritual creation of a sort? I’m not sure that valuing and respecting life means ignoring its usefulness. It’s an issue I have still to work out in my own thoughts, and Nibley has certainly caused me to think about it more.

New Perspectives: A Nibleyesque Musing

So, every Friday for my Hugh Nibley class, we're supposed to ramble for one page on what we thought of the readings. You know I'm all for stealing homework for blogposts, so you may see a few of these this semester. But hey, it's Hugh Nibley, so it's for your own good!

Some very interesting readings this week—“Treasures in the Heavens” was, of course, astounding. It was interesting to me to see how Nibley treats things I would normally think of as abstract philosophies as concrete facts. As an English major, I often wonder how important the abstract concepts we discuss in class are because they seem so detached from what constitutes the majority of our lives. But Nibley makes no apologies for the fact that his ideas are big and seemingly unconnected to the mundanities of day-to-day life. He’s not concerned with forcing you to realize why his theories are relevant to you—if you don’t understand the importance of them, then perhaps you aren’t ready to read Nibley.

The idea of heaven being more concrete and real than this life also matched up with what I’m reading in CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce. Heaven is not going to be less real than this life, but more. We are here to prepare to experience that level of reality and power that we could not have managed without a body. I guess the reason we think of heaven as so spiritual and insubstantial is because we have difficulty imagining anything more concrete than this reality.

I really liked Nibley’s “An Intellectual Autobiography” on a couple of different levels. First, it was just a great piece of creative non-fiction. As a writer, I admire Nibley’s style in this piece: he doesn’t allow us to get bogged down in the details of his life, giving us just enough to move us through his intellectual journey without confusion. He makes everything fresh and humorous. Second, I really enjoy the idea of giving an intellectual autobiography. Isn’t that the story we’d rather tell—the story of how we grew as a person—rather than the dates, facts, and figures that normally occupy so much of a biography?

Finally, one particular passage really struck me, the one where Nibley talks about working through the entire nine floors of the Berkeley stacks. The idea is so very appealing that I’ve begun to think about trying to do this myself with the BYU library. It’s definitely a crazy project, but it would be so rewarding. Think of how much you could learn about interests you didn’t know you had just by browsing through the stacks of an entire library! Not to mention the bragging rights . . . .

“Educating the Saints” was one of the Nibley articles that I had read before. However, I saw it in a new light this time. I just completed a paper on early Mormon ideas about rhetoric and education. The section where Nibley explains Brigham Young’s lack of eloquence was very relevant to the paper I was writing. The early saints really cared very little for ideas about formal education; they unabashedly shared the truth as they found it and sought more, not worrying about clever phraseology or the opinions of the intellectual elite.

I wonder if we could not use a lot more of that, even at BYU. Sometimes it feels like, even in the undergrad years, there’s such a push to get enough accomplishments to fill out a good resume (or, as Nibley says, stand at attention at the end of an obituary). When you ask people what they are learning at school, they inevitably list classes and activities rather than ideas, which strikes me as sad. The university is very display oriented, so much so that when I mentioned that I am “learning just to learn” to a classmate, he didn’t know what I meant and expressed an extreme distrust for any supposedly higher motive in education: “I’m in it to get the grade so I can get into grad school.” Learning seems to be lost on the learned.