Prophet of Hope & Fear

A STUDY OF HISTORY, Vols. VII-X (2,685 pp.)--Arnold J. Toynbee--Oxford ($35).

Above the high altar of the Benedictine Abbey of Ampleforth, in Yorkshire, hung a man. He was holding on precariously to the foot of the crucifix, while a voice said: "Amplexus expecta [Cling and wait] !"

Thus Professor Arnold Toynbee once saw himself in a dream. The eminent British historian (who dreams as fluently in Latin as he writes in Greek) tells this nighttime vision in the concluding volumes of his monumental Study of History. While to 20th century psychoanalysts the dream may be a commonplace of troubled souls, it nevertheless sums up Historian Toynbee's ultimate message to Western civilization. The mesage is: hang on, wait and pray.

Coming at the end of a lifetime's work that ranges over all recorded history in dazzling detail, and pronounced at a time of unprecedented crisis, these words may sound like a thundering anticlimax. Yet the mind that formed them, the context in which they are set down and the view of man that lies behind them, all compel utmost attention from Americans, who themselves are now haunted by the feeling that they are precariously hanging on above a menacing chasm of history.

Toynbee to Date. On the morning after the start of World War II, the first six volumes of Toynbee's Study were gathering dust in libraries, their author un known outside a tiny circle. But by 1947 an abridgment had become a bestseller, and today Toynbee is a household word in all the better-informed households. His fame rests on two major achievements:

P:| In an age of historians who consider God irrelevant, Toynbee put God back into history. The end of history, he asserted, is the Kingdom of God, and history is "God revealing Himself."

P: In an age of "antinomian" historians (who are devoted "to the dogma that 'life is just one damned thing after another' "), Toynbee organized history in a pattern. He treated not of nations or races or even "forces," but of civilizations which he saw living and dying in regular cycles. This concept was popularized by Germany's brilliant Historian Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), but where Spengler saw the rise and fall of civilizations inexorably fated, Toynbee believed them subject to man's free will and God's grace.

In Toynbee's image, Western civilization was a climber high up on a rocky cliff. All other civilizations had fallen to their deaths or were lying stagnant on lower ledges. Only the West was still free to continue the climb. According to Toynbee, Western civilization was born out of the dying Roman Empire and the church, had its period of growth in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and probably suffered its fatal breakdown (defined by Toynbee as a failure of self-determination followed by submission to "false idols," such as nationalism) in the period of the 16th and 17th century religious wars. Since then, the West has been in its "time of troubles," marked by recent wars. Invariably, in all past civilizations examined by Toynbee, the next stage had been the forcible establishment of a "universal state," in which the strongest of the warring rivals knocked out all others and for a time enforced peace. Invariably, these universal states rotted away inside their imposing armor. Grown morally feeble, the leaders ("creative minority") no longer responded to the challenges that faced them, the masses ("internal proletariat") lost faith in the leaders, and barbarians waiting outside the walls ("external proletariat") finally conquered the dying civilization. (Today's barbarians, for the most part, are not outside civilization's walls but inside.)

Somewhere late in its time of troubles, but short of the fatal establishment of a universal state, is the point where Toynbee tentatively left the West at the end of Volume VI. And that is the point where he now takes up the story again.

New Vision of History. The concluding volumes of the Study are dominated by a striking assertion: religion is not merely a guide or inspiration to civilization but its very reason for being.

Toynbee rejects the view that religions are "cancers" of civilization (e.g., Gibbon held that rising Christianity sapped the strength of the Roman Empire). He also discards the view, to which he inclined earlier, of religion as mainly a chrysalis for civilization (e.g., the church preserved "a precious germ of life" of the dead Roman civilization). Toynbee now believes that the higher religions do not exist to give birth to civilizations, but that civilizations exist in order to give birth to higher religions. "The birth of a civilization is a catastrophe if it is a regression from a previously established church, while the breakdown of a civilization is not a catastrophe if it is the overture to a church's birth."

Does this mean that the West is doomed, able only to take cold comfort from the hope that out of its grave new religious life will sprout? Not necessarily, says Toynbee: "I do not believe that civilizations have to die . . . Civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills."

Toynbee ridicules the smugness of the 18th and 19th centuries in terms of a Max Beerbohm cartoon (see cut). The Enlightened Dandy is so taken with his perfection that he can conceive of the future only as a gawkier version of himself; the Victorian Bourgeois is so optimistic that he sees the future as a figure fairly bursting with progress. But Toynbee believes that the 20th century's thin, frightened young man who sees only a question mark in the future ("Is he perhaps wondering whether he can even look forward to having any successor of any kind?") may be equally wrong. Doom is no more automatic than progress.

Herodians, Zealots & a Nymph. Toynbee is sure that a universal state--a single, worldwide government run either by Washington or Moscow--has been rendered inevitable ("sooner rather than later") by modern technology. The atom bomb clinched it. The only question is: Will the world state come about by war or peacefully? Toynbee has no illusions that it can be brought about by the U.N., or by any "talismanic blueprint of a federal constitution." His own answer is conditioned by a fascinating historical analysis of how nations try to meet the penetration of foreign civilizations. There are, he says, two constantly recurring patterns of response by "the party at bay against an inhuman enemy within its battered gates." These two responses he calls Zealotism and Herodianism, after the two Jewish parties at the time of Christ, who tried to cope with the inroads of Hellenic civilization.

The Zealots fought the Hellenic aggression by trying to keep out all Hellenic ideas and insisting on old ways and values to the last. The Herodians were as firmly convinced that the only way to stave off the enemy was to borrow enough Hellenism to give the Jews a chance to hold their own. In the end, both methods proved equally futile. Why?

Suppose, says Toynbee, a pixie Lady of the Lake sees her inviolate body of water sullied by "an audacious backwoodsman's canoe." Acting as a Zealot, she will use her supernatural power to freeze the water solid. As a Herodian, she will eventually drain her lake bed dry. But in either case, says Toynbee, she will only transform her lake into a road and let in the "landlubber dry-shod." Roughly translated into the different, present-day situation (in which the West is very far from being "at bay"), the Zealots might advocate stringent repression of all hostile ideas, as well as dropping a few atomic bombs on Russia; the Herodians would favor gradual appeasement. Toynbee would consider both parties an "unmerciful pair of pedants." Both courses would in the end aid the Communists: appeasement obviously by strengthening them, internal repression and atomic war with all its terrors by making democratic life impossible for a long time, regardless of who wins. A smart nymph, according to Toynbee, would work for peaceful coexistence.

The Case for a Detente. This is one interpretation of Amplexus expecta: the West must hang on, using self-restraint, patience, fortitude, tolerance. The U.S. is, in effect, ruler of half the world; Russia, ruler of the other half. Let it stay that way, says Toynbee, in a "pacific partition of the Oikumene (habitable world)." Look for a detente and play for time. (As a precedent, Toynbee cites 600 relatively peaceful years between Rome and Parthia, beginning about 20 B.C.)

Toynbee shares the widespread and dangerously simple view that Soviet Russia is a continuation of old-style imperialism on the world scene, only "cloaked" by Communism. One cause of friction between Russia and the West, says Toynbee, is that they have not "had time to become spiritually intimate" with each other. "What, on both sides, was now needed above all was time to allow a Subconscious Psyche, whose pace was the tortoise's gait, to adjust itself to . . . the technological conjuring tricks of a practical intellect that had been racing ahead of its subconscious yokefellow at the pace of a march hare . . . The two monsters [Russia and the U.S.] might settle down side by side to live and let live . . . gradually become less unlike one another."

In such passages of fantastically wishful thinking, it looks as if Toynbee, an eminent historian when dealing with the distant past, becomes just another minor pundit when dealing with the present. The Herod-Zealot comparison may well be a brilliant flash of historic insight. What Toynbee seemingly fails to realize is that in the present situation, "coexistence" is bound to lead to Herodianism.

If this were Toynbee's whole view of Russia and the West, Americans might well dismiss the learned professor as just another crypto-Herod and tell him to go paddle his "audacious canoe." But there is far more to Toynbee than that. Toynbee never seems to regard coexistence as anything but a temporary expedient to gain time for the pursuit of a long-range solution. In Toynbee's view, the long-range solution to the problem of Communism--as to all other major problems in the world today--is a matter of religion. In general, this view is hardly news in 1954; Toynbee's specific application is.

Communism: Christian Heresy. Toynbee places the present time in the Christian Era, but refers to modern Western civilization as "post-Christian" or "ex-Christian." He uses these phrases to express his belief that the West began to divorce itself from Christianity in the 17th century. He thinks that it is a failure of Christianity that gave Communism its chance.

Toynbee's argument: technology had created the means to abolish poverty. No longer was it morally right for "a small fraction of Mankind" alone to enjoy "the fruits of Civilization." But the West failed to pay "the huge interim payment on account of social justice" owing to the poor. It was in response to this failure that Marx, a Western man, produced Das Kapital, a "Christian heresy" designed to offset a Christian failure.

For the Russian Communists, says Toynbee, Marxism was made to order. On grounds of social justice, they were able to appeal to men of good will everywhere. "In thus denouncing the children of a Modern Western 'ascendancy' for their failure to pay a moral debt . . . Communism was proclaiming in a challengingly loud un-Christian voice a commandment of Christ's which, on the Christian Church's lips, had sunk to a discreetly inaudible whisper repeated by churchmen under their breath; and, if Marxism was nevertheless a heresy from a truly Christian point of view, this was because, like most other heresies in their day, it had taken up arms on behalf of one grievously neglected Christian truth to the still more grievous neglect of this one Christian truth's Christian setting."

It is important for the West to pay this "moral debt" by solving the economic problems of backward people, says Toynbee; however, it will not do any good unless it is done unselfishly, "through a spontaneous outburst of love."

Homunculus & Leviathan. In the long run, thinks Toynbee, Communism will prove inadequate as a substitute religion, because it offers "a stone for bread." But in the short run its appeal might be more effective than the West's, particularly among the "peasants" of Asia and Africa, whose voice may well decide the future. The West has erred because it has chosen to fight Communism chiefly with Communism's own materialist weapons. In fact, paradoxically, it is materialist Communism which now preaches its own gospel with a fervor recalling "Holy Russia," while the U.S. stresses material prosperity. Toynbee is sure that a "decisive majority of all living men and women" would in the end side with the U.S. Nevertheless: "'Holy Russia' [is] a more rousing war cry than 'Happy America.' "

Both Communism and Western liberalism, says Toynbee, worship not God but man. It is a contest "between two incompatible versions of the cult of a human idol." Liberalism worships the individual as symbolized by Homunculus, Communism worships "the collective human beast" as symbolized by Leviathan. As long as the battle is fought on these terms, the Communists will keep winning. Western democracy must base its appeal on more than freedom, more than prosperity, more than the right to vote and to strike; it must base its appeal on religion. Only thus can democracy "recondition" its paralyzed weapons and "turn the tables on [the] Communist assailants." Then "the idol Leviathan might still be triumphantly defied and defeated by souls contending for the liberty of Conscience and risking martyrdom for the glory of God . . . The grace of God [might] bring about this miracle in ex-Christian Western hearts genuinely smitten with contrition . . ."

But Which Religion? Americans, who have always believed in freedom under God, will not be surprised by Toynbee's insistence that, in order to win, the West must have religion on its banners and in its heart. The lengths to which Toynbee carries the matter will antagonize liberals who believe that freedom and human dignity are great goods (and mighty weapons) independent of religion. But the real question posed by Toynbee's plea for religion is: Which one?

Arnold Toynbee calls himself a Christian. His works are drenched with Christian symbolism, terminology and theology. He often seems to speak with deep Christian fervor. Yet his beliefs fit into no Christian orthodoxy. He is not a Christian in any strict sense of the word.

To Toynbee, all the "higher religions," i.e., Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, are simply separate ways to the City of God. Toynbee sees the prophets of other religions as precursors of Christ, and their sufferings "Stations of the Cross in anticipation of the Crucifixion." But he does not explicitly accept Christ's divinity. Toynbee also sees Christianity as the "climax of a continuous upward movement of spiritual progress" and thinks that "a 20th century historian might venture to predict that Christianity's transfiguring effect on the World up to date would be outshone by its continuing operation in the future." But he does not accept Christianity as the only true religion. To do so, he believes, is a "sin." If to be a Christian is to believe that Christianity "possesses a monopoly of the Divine Light . . . then I am not entitled to call myself a Christian." Since finishing the Study, Toynbee has expressed himself even more strongly. Said he: "If all the religions in the world were to disappear except Christianity and Buddhism, I would not be able to make a choice between them. In this part of the world, of course, it would be more convenient to keep Christianity, but convenience aside, there would be no choice between them for me."

Toynbee believes that even a "post-Christian" West may yet be saved by Christianity, but not as it is embodied in the existing churches. In fact, a return to orthodoxy would be merely a false and temporary refuge. Instead, Toynbee suggests a kind of spontaneous rally of faith, possibly even the emergence of a new spiritual species. In the distant future, he foresees a kind of blending of all the higher religions--"a terrestrial Communion of Saints who would be free from sin . . . because each soul . . . would be cooperating with God at the cost of sore spiritual travail."

If such a beatific vision seems too remote from history to some readers, Toynbee earnestly replies that "a goal can often best be reached by aiming at a more ambitious goal beyond it," and that "spiritual progress will incidentally bring mundane progress in its train."

The Technician. The ten-volume Study is a huge and complex structure. It is almost a kind of separate literary civilization, with a life of its own. Toynbee, now 65, started to write the concluding volumes in 1947, after a seven-year stint with the British Foreign Office, and with the help of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Working on the history half days (he is also director of studies at the Royal Institute of Foreign Affairs), Toynbee wrote in longhand with a fountain pen, following a penciled outline he had made in 1927. He also drew on 15 notebooks he had filled with thoughts and quotations over the years, but he kept more of his universe of facts filed in his head. The manuscript that he finally delivered to his publishers in five suitcases does not make easy reading, but reading it is a major intellectual adventure.

The baffling ease with which Toynbee glides over the millenniums, from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy to the U.S. Civil War to Carthage's "wooden curtain" of ships to Persian headgear to the Nestorian Uighur Turkish secretaries of the Mongols to the Tokugawa regime in Japan to the Argonauts to Kon-Tiki to the Prankish Lex Salica to U.S. television, gives the reader a heady sense of omniscience and omnipresence. Toynbee is at his most fascinating and most expert as a technician of civilization. When he ex plains a civilization's functioning, he evokes the kind of satisfaction that goes with learning the workings of a complex machine, except that Toynbee's big machines are powered by mankind and subject to the tragedies of blood, the triumphs, agonies and ironies of history. Toynbee's knowledge of the machinery is unmatched--the cities, armies, ruling classes, police forces, bureaucracies, churches, cliques. In his hands, civilizations become curiously human, not merely in the trite sense that they seem young or old, fresh or tired, but in that they seem to parallel human psychology; they try to evade death, fool themselves about their fate, are egocentric or lovelorn or fear-haunted or resigned.

No summary can suggest Toynbee's range. But his study of renaissances, those recurring attempts of civilizations to recapture their lost youth, is a good example. Charlemagne tried to snatch back features of Hellenism, and Timur Lenk tried to raise the ghost of the Cairene 'Abbasid Caliphate, neither with success. In literature, 15th century Humanism tried to revive the writing of Latin verse only to see the "vulgar" and more virile Western literature sweep Europe. Toynbee includes the Crusades among the "renaissances" that failed, a deplorable attempt to reach "religious goals by military short cuts." In effect, Toynbee is saying that to stay healthy, a civilization must plot its own course, quotes with approval the ghost of Achilles from the Odyssey: "I would rather be a wretched peasant on the land, abouring as a serf with a poor, portionless man for my master, than be sovereign ord of all the legions of the shades of the dead and departed."

The Law of God. For all of Toynbee's faults--his frequent vagueness, his overlong view that sometimes makes him shortsighted on contemporary problems--the Study remains by far the most audacious and imaginative view of man's time on earth yet undertaken by any historian.

Few readers will accept--or read--all of Toynbee; many will reject a great deal. But if the West, clinging to its steep cliff, wants a heartening message, one can be found in this "post-Christian" English historian. It is in the other, larger meaning of Amplexus expecta--that the West must cling to God, to a life that is always dangerous, and to man's constant, painful duty to choose between good and evil.

An example must be sought in Christ, says Toynbee, "not of shrinking from the suffering inherent in Human Nature, but of accepting it for the sake of saving human beings"; and in the bodhisattva (a future Buddha) whose characteristic virtue was "his fortitude in withstanding a perpetual temptation to desert his self-assigned post in a world of painful action in order to take the short cut to oblivion that lay perpetually open to him . . . Western Man's task [is] to school himself to 'living dangerously.' "

Beyond the "law of nature" of the scientists, the "laws of history" of the Marxists and Spenglerians, the "economic" and man-made laws worshiped by most modern historians, Western Man must submit once more to the Law of God. "In appealing to the Law of God, a human soul has to abandon certainty in order to embrace Hope and Fear . . . A human soul is apt to find in this what it brings to it . . . The Law of God is freedom itself, under a more illuminating name."

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