Dallin H. Oaks
“I have known Hugh Nibley for over fifty years. He was my teacher at BYU in the winter of 1954. I can’t remember why I took Hugh Nibley’s “Rise of the Western Church to 600 A.D.,” but its impact on my intellectual horizons was enormous. Professor Nibley was the first eccentric I ever met, and his example gave me a lifelong appreciation for the wonderfully diverse way our Creator distributed talents and spiritual gifts. As I experienced his incredible brilliance and knowledge, I also observed his humble indifference to appearance and other worldly things. He sometimes came to class with trousers and a coat that did not match, and he often wore the two-buckle combat boots that were standard issue to the foot soldiers of World War II, then recently concluded. As I came to know him better in later years, I realized that he was the epitome of the Book of Mormon teaching, “Do not spend money for that which is of no worth, nor . . . labor for that which cannot satisfy” (2 Nephi 9:51).”
Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Hugh Nibley Observed, edited by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Shirley S. Ricks, and Stephen T. Whitlock. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/hugh-nibley-observed/.
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About the Interpreter Foundation Book Chapter Reprint Series
The purpose of this reprint series is to make individual chapters from books published by The Interpreter Foundation more accessible to readers. Although in some instances the formatting and pagination may have been changed, the content of this chapter, like others in this reprint series, is identical to what appeared in its original book publication. It has not been updated to incorporate research that has appeared subsequently nor to reflect the current practice of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to use the full name of the Church and to avoid terms such as “Mormon” and “LDS.”
