The Professor's Ark

In a mountain cave near Subiaco, Italy, a tall, white-haired Englishman with gentle eyes stood in silent prayer. The place was Sacro Speco, where, tradition says, St. Benedict spent years as an anchorite. The Englishman was Historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee, and (aloofly in the third person) he now describes what he felt there three years ago: "Here was the primal germ of Western Christendom; and, as the pilgrim read . . . the names of all the lands, stretching away to the ends of the Earth, that had been evangelized by a spiritual impetus issuing from this hallowed spot, he prayed that the spirit which had once created a Western Christian Civilization out of the chaos of the Dark Age might return ..."

In various forms, that prayer reappears throughout all of Toynbee's writings. In an era when most historians, of what Toynbee himself has called the just-one-damn-thing-after-another school, saw religion either as a block to progress or else considered it beside the point, Toynbee gave history not only a pattern but a spiritual end. He reached the conclusion that man's real history is religieus history and that civilizations are really nothing but steppingstones in man's progress to deeper spiritual insight. Yet Toynbee, an Anglican in childhood, always showed himself so ready to range various prophets, gods and philosophers alongside Christ that the question inevitably arose just what kind of Christian he was. That question is more fully answered in his new book, An Historian's Approach to Religion (Oxford; $5), in which he writes about the religious condition of today's world.

Toynbee makes the point that historians share with Christians the sin of selfcenteredness--a result of spiritual pride. He considers it an intellectual as well as a moral error, "because no living creature has a right to act as if it were the center of the Universe."

The Chasm. Measuring man's religions with this rule, Toynbee finds the modern world riven by a gulf even deeper and wider than that between the Communist and non-Communist worlds, namely, the chasm between "the whole Judaic group of ideologies and religions" on the one hand and the "Buddhaic group" (Hinduism, the Mahayana and Hinayana forms of Buddhism) on the other. For the East, like ancient Greece, sees history as cyclical, recurrent, and hence irrelevant, while Christianity, Judaism and Islam see it governed by Intellect and Will, i.e., God. But in assigning history this divine importance, they "have reopened the door to self-centeredness by casting themselves, in rivalry with one another and ignoring the rest of Mankind, for the privileged role of being God's 'Chosen People.' "*

To fill his own prescription for modern man's spiritual queasiness, Professor Toynbee uses almost every bottle in the pharmacopoeia and stirs the mixture well with a Long View. Moloch and Amon-Re, Yahweh, Socrates and Confucius, the hejira of Mohammed and the temptation of Christ turn up in surprising juxtapositions as Toynbee leads mankind from the worship of nature to the worship of Man himself (in the form of tribe, universal state or philosopher) to the worship of "Absolute Reality" in the higher religions. These reach twin peaks for Toynbee in Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism, with its conception of the bodhisatva, or super-saint who, like Gautama Buddha, turns back from the Nirvana he has achieved to re-enter the world of suffering and help men work out their salvation. "The ideal has been put into practice by a Supreme Being; and this means that a human being who tries to do the same will be swimming with the current of Absolute Reality while swimming against the current of his own self-centeredness."

The Syncretic Vision. The Christianity of what Toynbee calls "Late Modern Western Civilization" stopped swimming long ago and has been drifting down the stream of self-centeredness. Only recently have its "public atrocities" reawakened the West to the awful reality of Original Sin. And in the meantime, the non-Western peoples who discarded much of their own culture to adopt the West's technological civilization have unexpectedly found that they bought themselves the West's spiritual crisis as well. Yet Toynbee holds out a historian's hope, based on these very Eastern converts to Western civilization. For they "come trailing some still undiscarded clouds of glory from their own religious heritages . . . These undiscarded elements . . . may work together with the surviving remnant of Western Christianity . . ."

Thus Toynbee's prophetic vision is essentially syncretic--a kind of spiritual

Noah's ark carrying a specimen of every "higher religion."

In this book Toynbee sets his ark on the crest of a dark wave of the future.

Under pressures of population and technology--as Toynbee sees it--human liberty is in for some drastic restrictions, even to state control of the size of families. But, as the religious oppressors of 17th century Christendom were willing "to allow their subjects the apparently harmless vent of applying experimental science to Technology," in history's next chapter Man may be allowed to compensate for his secular restrictions by blowing off steam along spiritual lines. In making this prediction, strangely enough, Toynbee seems to ignore the obvious fact that modern despots know very well that religion is no "harmless vent" but the most explosive of forces.

Jesus Not Unique. Struggling to avoid the sin of self-centeredness, Toynbee assumes a god's-eye-view detachment (he habitually speaks of the present in the past tense) that may be as much a form of spiritual pride as self-centeredness itself. His ultimate message seems a lot closer to Buddha than to Benedict, for a revival of whose spirit Toynbee prayed. Toynbee seems to have little use for the kind of organizing energy that Christianity achieved with Benedict, and he denies that Christianity is the one true religion.

Says Toynbee: Christians must winnow the nonessential chaff (mostly theology) from the wheat of their tradition, must abandon the "chosen people" claim to the uniqueness of their Saviour and their revelation. They must learn to regard all the higher religions as revelations of God. "The spirit of the Indian religions, blowing where it listeth, may perhaps help to winnow a traditional Pharisaism out of Moslem, Christian and Jewish hearts. But the help that God gives is given by Him to those who help themselves; and the spiritual struggle in the more exclusive-minded Judaic half of the world to cure ourselves of our family infirmity [i.e., self-centeredness] seems likely to be the most crucial episode in the next chapter of the history of Mankind."

* Toynbee's attitude toward Judaism is ambivalent. He is highly eloquent about its spiritual and moral values, inevitably sees it as the fount of Christian civilization. But he also deplores its exclusive or "chosen people" attitude, regards its ritual adherence to the Law as an archaic dead end, accuses Zionism of attempting to achieve the Messianic promise of the Jews' return to Israel through force. Toynbee's sentiments--and scholarship--on Judaism are the subject of an angry attack by noted Jewish Author Maurice Samuel (The Professor and the Fossil, Knopf; $4), who believes that Toynbee's vast general categories of civilization and his characterization of Jewish culture as "fossilized relics" fail to explain the extraordinary phenomenon of Jewish survival.

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