Toynbee

The Universal State
Saturday January 13, 2007

In A Study of History, Arnold J. Toynbee [April 14, 1889 - October 22, 1975] studies the genesis, growths and breakdowns of world civilizations but ultimately pursues the question of the role of the higher religions in history. Writing in the middle of the 20th century after having witnessed two violent World Wars, Toynbee’s mind regarding the role of religion underwent a sharp metamorphosis from his earlier views, which were more in line with late 19th-century rationalism and optimism. Instead of seeing the reproduction of a civilization “as an end in itself,” he becomes converted to the view that civilizations play a secondary and subordinate role in the history of religion. The best fruit of a “Universal State” such as ancient Rome may have been that its existence made possible the arising of Christianity. That is, the importance of civilizations may lie in their effects upon Religion, and not the other way around. This view was held by the Church Fathers Ambrose and Augustine, and later argued by Bossuet, the French historian. Gibbon’s history of the Roman Empire, which argued that the collapse of Rome was “the triumph of barbarism and religion” – a view certainly not friendly to Christianity – helped to fuel the unfolding rationalism of post-Reformation Western society. Toynbee, looking at all of this from the perspective of the “last generation of Western neo-pagans” – those “rational, unenthusiastic and tolerant” men who were swept away in the cataclysms of the 20th century, finds Gibbon and his heirs mistaken. For the “Universal State” is already symptomatic of spiritual decline.[1] But that such a State should die fruitlessly – for such would its death be, if it were seen as an end in itself-- it would mean that human life was “a tragedy without a catharsis.”Toynbee thus turns his interest from seeing civilizations and their climactic “Universal States” not as ends, but as the means, through their agonies of dissolution, of giving birth to the Higher Religions. Such a view would not have been welcome in the high tide of Western post-Reformation civilization, riding high on its scientific discoveries [2] and in the process of re-instituting “the worship of Leviathan.” He comments that
Westerners of the writer’s generation not only took it for granted that the Christian Church had served its turn in bringing a new civilization to birthin the West; they looked upon this new civilization as having been immature so long as it had remained under Christian auspices; and after having waited with impatience for it to get through its medieval Christian childhood, and having joyfully greeted the repudiation of its Christian origins with which it had celebrated its coming of age, they had focussed their attention on the rise of a Modern Western secular way of life…(p. 446, vol VII)
But what if this secular movement that so elicited their admiration were merely one of “the vain repetitions of the heathens” – “an almost meaningless repetition of something that the Hellenes had done before them, and done supremely well – then the greatest new event in the historical background of a Modern Western Society would be seen to be … very different. The greatest new event would then not be the monotonous rise of yet another secular civilization out of the bosom of the Christian Church in the course of these latter centuries; it would still be the Crucifixion and the Crucifixion’s spiritual consequences.” [Italics mine]Perhaps the “agonies of dissolution” of Two World Wars made people in England and America momentarily receptive to Toynbee’s message -- as indicated by the cover of Time Magazine -- but I think his hope that it might strike a deeper root has gone unfulfilled. Toynbee’s encompassing yet detailed vision of human civilizations has been succeeded by the scrapings of little men and little women, generations of the small-minded, positivists, data-gatherers, pontificators of progress, anti-spiritual and anti-metaphysical to the bone. [3]Yet I think that Toynbee’s canvas is as large and as generous as the view of the world offered by Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, only it is more accessible than the latter because it is oriented towards the known world of history rather than the unknown realm of the occult and the spiritual. Yet both of these large canvasses, had they been received in the spirit in which they were offered, would have had the power to set Western culture upon a new path instead of the terrible hardening of the arteries and suicide of intelligence that are everywhere in evidence today. Fantasy and technology have come to occupy the niche formerly assigned to the operations of intelligence, and almost no subject in the so-called “human affairs” departments – which include everything from diplomacy to painting – has any grounding any more. Such departments of knowledge only exist in the sense of being related to words that once carried with them certain obligations about life and “deportment.” But all “deportment” has been vacated to the status of mere “departments,” and the message about how to live one’s life in these “departments” of knowledge has been lost.The generations of Western mankind have been succeeded by a generation of mayflies, all buzzing fretfully yet with zealous unanimity toward the creation of the Universal State of Incoherence… with the climate, politics, economy, and everything else not far behind. Truly, Toynbee came at a time and with the message of a pearl of great price – the pearl of wisdom gained through suffering. It was a rare, unique, and unrepeatable historical opportunity for Western man to expand, deepen and integrate his intelligence through a Christian re-appropriation of his history.It was an opportunity murdered, missed, lost, squandered, obliterated, buried -- as far as I can tell, for the past five decades in the history of the West, for now, and to all appearances for the foreseeable future. But whether that promise can reawaken remains the centrally important question of our being. This is the challenge buried in our souls and in our history that cries out for response.[1] “…universal states arise after, and not before, the breakdowns of the civilizations to whose bodies social they bring political unity. They are not summers, but ‘Indian Summers,’ masking autumn and presaging winter. In the second place, they are the products of dominant minorities: that is, of once creative minorities that have lost their creative power…Universal States are symptoms of social disintegration, yet at the same time they are attempts to check this disintegration and to defy it.” Pps.3, 4, vol VII][2] “One of Man’s fundamental and perennial errors – an error that is both an intellectual and a moral lapse – is to idolize discoveries of his own making that enhance his power.” P. 468][3] Such ones attacked Toynbee’s work as “metaphysical speculation dressed up as history” – the worst word in the modern vocabulary being, apparently, “metaphysical.”It is interesting that, of Western philosophers contemporary or later than Toynbee, only Ortega y Gasset really heard the message of life, and turned his philosophy to its good account in his essays on “vital reason.” Yet even Ortega was not wholly in Toynbee’s camp. He thought that Toynbee showed too little esteem in being English – and he thought it boded ill for the future of the world that such a man felt no particular partiality for his own people and nation. Kedourie, an economist, attacked Toynbee for not taking responsibility for the retreating British Empire and in failing to uphold democratic values in countries it had once controlled. But in the light of Toynbee’s view of “Universal States” and their imperialism, this criticism seems to beg the question of the very spiritual disintegration that A Study of History was in large part describing. But in a more particular sense, especially in relation to Palestine, this criticism does not seem just. Of Palestine, Toynbee remarked that it was not just a local tragedy, but “a tragedy for the world.” He was very aware of the menace to democratic values represented in the fate of Palestine. Perhaps Toynbee's views on this matter were especially unwelcome in the circles of our culture, which already viewed with distrust his comprehensive view of history, deeply informed by a Christianized intelligence.
Posted by Caryl at 6:08 PM 4 comments 4 comments:
kopylopi said...
Caryl,What are the benefits studying Rudolph Steiner? I ask because I am reading Barfield's Saving the Appearances and would like to try reading Steiner again. However, I am feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of his work and am put off by some of his bizarre theories.
2:25 AM
Caryl said...
Hi Peter-You have asked an important question, and one that would demand a posting, perhaps several, to answer. There is a mass of material in Rudolf Steiner's opus that is off-putting, bizarre, and all but inaccessible to the modern mind. Most of my reading of it, such as it was, occurred in an earlier phase of my life. In the years since I have been actively critical of many parts of it. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, my mind was greatly enriched by the encounter with Anthroposophy. This mental enrichment is a different category of "knowledge" from empirical, factual, true-false or other conventional approaches, and what it does is to build a sort of structure in the soul - a kind of echo-chamber for future growth. It is like a theory of "resonance," or something of the kind - which is very different from the more familiar "correspondence" test of cognition. "Resonance" in fact points to the existence of the etheric body, which is thought to be a supersensible medium of growth underlying the faculties of memory, imagination, regeneration,rejuvenation, healing, etc. Once you begin to sense that Anthroposophy aims to strengthen the etheric body rather than the intellectual faculty, you begin to get a sense for what it is about. Whether Steiner was "successful" or not is a different issue - perhaps he wasn't. But it's the only ball game in town, as far as I can tell - that is, in terms of its understanding of the nature of man and man's "supersensible" organism. But I know exactly what you are saying and feeling. I recommend reading Barfield, as you are doing, and also the priest of the Christian Community, Emil Bock, who wrote "The Three Years" (on the Life of Christ) and many other works on the Old and New Testaments. These two men are the best fruit of anthroposophicalpath and go far in explicating it and making it comprehensible.
8:42 AM
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1:09 PM
John Beck said...
Caryl, hi - thanks for this very interesting commentary. There is a point of connection between AJ Toynbee's crucifixion statement you quote, and an observation of Steiner's. He said that modern science reflected a reaching of the stage of Good Friday, and getting - for now - stuck there.I also feel your description of the effect of studying Steiner is very apt. His whole method was artistic, based on Goethe's legend/parable of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. I finally recognized that Steiner gathered up jewels of insight and made them available for us to put into the river of our pre-conscious mind, out of which a bridge to spiritual experience arises.Just from the quality of what you are sharing, I would say that Steiner succeeded. "Following" him was never the goal, becoming capable of following oneself is the goal.
11:40 AM

Labels: Anthroposophy, Arnold J. Toynbee, Christianity, Ortega y Gasset



A Study of History. Vol. VII Oxford, 1954.
Chapter Seven: Universal Churches


I have been reading in Arnold J. Toynbee’s magisterial A Study of History and wish to share some thoughts from his Chapter Seven, on “Universal Churches.” He argues that the four higher religions in the world today – Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Mayahana Buddhism – were able to preserve the germ of life from a parent civilization in the process of collapse to the arising of a new one. He notes that in the time of his writing (~1952) all eight extant civilizations had in their background some universal church through which they were affiliated to a civilization of an older generation. After the stage of “Primitive Societies,” he names the “Primary Civilizations” (all derived from primitive societies) as the Egyptiac, Andean, Mayan, Sumeric, Indus Culture, Minoan, and Shang Culture. Secondary civilizations deriving from these are named as the Yucatec, Babylonic, Mexic, First Syriac, Hittite, Indic, Syriac-Hellenic, and Sinic.

The Higher Religions created, adapted, or adopted from the "internal proletariats” (abbreviated “i.p.”; about which more later) of the Secondary Civilizations are the following:
Judaism, Zoroastrianism (i.p. of the Babylonic)
Hinduism (i.p. Indus)
Islam (i.p. Syriac)
Isis-worship, Cybele-worship, Mithraism, Christianity, Manichaeism (all of these from the i.p. of Hellenic Civilization),
Neoplatonism (adapted by i.p. from philosophies of Hellenic dominant minority),
Mayahana (through Hellenic i.p. via philosophy of Indus dominant minority and adopted by Sinic i.p.),
Neo-Taoism (adapted by Sinic i.p. from one of the philosophies of Sinic dominant minority)

The third-generation or Tertiary Civilizations derived from the chrysalis churches constructed by their internal proletariats are primarily:

Hindu (derived from Indic through Hinduism)
Iranic~Arabic (derived from Syriac through Islam)

Western Christian
Orthodox Christian
Orthodox Russian Christian: all these derived from Hellenic through Christianity

Far Eastern, Korea, Japan: derived through Sinic through the Mayahana








Etherealization
Sunday, January 21, 2007



In A Study of History, AJT defines “etherealization” as the transference of words from a secular to a religious meaning and usage, a process which, he notes, may be considered as “a symptom of growth.” Toynbee’s inquiry, commencing with a study into the genesis, growths and breakdowns of world civilizations, leads to the question of the role of the higher religions in history. Writing in the middle of the 20th century after having witnessed two violent World Wars, Toynbee’s mind regarding the role of religion undergoes a sharp metamorphosis from his earlier views, which were more in line with late 19th-century rationalism and optimism. Instead of seeing the reproduction of a civilization “as an end in itself,” he becomes converted to the view that civilizations play a secondary and subordinate role in the history of religion, and that the best fruit of a “Universal State” such as ancient Rome may have been that its existence made possible the arising of Christianity. That is, the importance of civilizations may lie in their effects upon Religion, and not the other way around. This view was held by the Church Fathers Ambrose and Augustine, and later argued by Bossuet, the French historian. Gibbon’s history of the Roman Empire, which argued that the collapse of Rome was “the triumph of barbarism and religion” – a view certainly not friendly to Christianity – helped to fuel the unfolding rationalism of post-Reformation Western society. Toynbee, looking at all of this from the perspective of the “last generation of Western neo-pagans” – those “rational, unenthusiastic and tolerant” men who were swept away in the cataclysms of the 20th century, finds Gibbon and his heirs mistaken. For the “Universal State” is already symptomatic of spiritual decline.[1. “…universal states arise after, and not before, the breakdowns of the civilizations to whose bodies social they bring political unity. They are not summers, but ‘Indian Summers,’ masking autumn and presaging winter. In the second place, they are the products of dominant minorities: that is, of once creative minorities that have lost their creative power…Universal States are symptoms of social disintegration, yet at the same time they are attempts to check this disintegration and to defy it.” Pps.3, 4, vol VII] But that such a State should die fruitlessly – for such would its death be, if it were seen as an end in itself-- it would mean that human life was “a tragedy without a catharsis.”

Toynbee thus turns his interest from seeing civilizations and their climactic “Universal States” not as ends, but as the means, through their agonies of dissolution, of giving birth to the Higher Religions. Such a view would not have been welcome in the high tide of Western post-Reformation civilization, riding high on its scientific discoveries [2. “One of Man’s fundamental and perennial errors – an error that is both an intellectual and a moral lapse – is to idolize discoveries of his own making that enhance his power.” P. 468] and in the process of re-instituting “the worship of Leviathan.” He comments that

Westerners of the writer’s generation not only took it for granted that the
Christian Church had served its turn in bringing a new civilization to birth in theWest; they looked upon this new civilization as having been immature so long as it had remained under Christian auspices; and after having waited with impatience for it to get through its medieval Christian childhood, and having joyfully greeted the repudiation of its Christian origins with which it had celebrated its coming of age, they had focussed their attention on the rise of a Modern Western secular way of life…(p. 446)

But what if this secular movement that so elicited their admiration were merely one of “the vain repetitions of the heathens” – “an almost meaningless repetition of something that the Hellenes had done before them, and done supremely well – then the greatest new event in the historical background of a Modern Western Society would be seen to be … very different. The greatest new event would then not be the monotonous rise of yet another secular civilization out of the bosom of the Christian Church in the course of these latter centuries; it would still be the Crucifixion and the Crucifixion’s spiritual consequences.” [Italics mine]

Perhaps the “agonies of dissolution” of Two World Wars made people in England and America momentarily receptive to Toynbee’s message, but I think his hope that it might strike a deeper root has gone unfulfilled. Toynbee’s encompassing yet detailed vision of human civilizations has been succeeded by the scrapings of little men and little women, generations of the small-minded, positivists, data-gatherers, pontificators of progress, anti-spiritual and anti-metaphysical to the bone. [3. Such ones attacked Toynbee’s work as “metaphysical speculation dressed up as history” – the worst word in the modern vocabulary being, apparently, “metaphysical.”] Yet I think that Toynbee’s canvas is as large and as generous as the view of the world offered by Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, only it is better and more accessible because it is oriented towards the known world of history rather than the unknown realm of the occult and the spiritual. Yet both of these large canvasses, had they been received in the spirit in which they were offered, would have had the power to set Western culture upon a new path instead of the terrible hardening of the arteries and suicide of intelligence that are everywhere in evidence today. Fantasy and technology have come to occupy the niche formerly assigned to the operations of intelligence, and almost no subject in the so-called “human affairs” departments – which include everything from diplomacy to painting – has any grounding any more. Such departments of knowledge only exist in the sense of being related to words that once carried with them certain obligations about life and “deportment.” But all “deportment” has been vacated to the status of mere “departments,” and the message about how to live one’s life in the “departments” was lost. [4.] It is interesting that, of Western philosophers contemporary or later than Toynbee, only Ortega y Gasset really heard the message of life, and turned his philosophy to its good account in his essays on “vital reason.” Yet even Ortega was not wholly in Toynbee’s camp. He thought that Toynbee showed too little esteem in being English – and he thought it boded ill for the future of the world that such a man felt no particular partiality for his own people and nation. Kedourie, an economist, attacked Toynbee for not taking responsibility for the retreating British Empire and in failing to uphold democratic values in countries it had once controlled. But in the light of Toynbee’s view of “Universal States” and the likely connection of such States with imperialism, this seems to be an instance of the very spiritual disintegration that A Study of History was in large part describing. But the criticism was not just especially in relation to Palestine, which Toynbee remarked was not just a local tragedy, but “a tragedy for the world.” The question that this raises, uncomfortably, is that Toynbee views in general on history, and specifically on Palestine, would not be welcome in a Western culture becoming ever more “judaized.”

The generations of Western mankind have been succeeded by a generation of mayflies, all buzzing fretfully yet with zealous unanimity toward the creation of the Universal State of Incoherence… with the climate, politics, economy, and everything else not far behind. Truly, Toynbee came at a time and with the message of a pearl of great price – the pearl of wisdom gained through suffering. It was of the altogether rare, unique, unrepeatable historical opportunity available to Western man of deepening and integrating his intelligence through a Christian re-appropriation of his history. An opportunity missed, lost, squandered, as far as I can tell

Etherealization

Toynbee uses the word “etherealization” to describe the process of the transference of words from a secular to a religious usage, noting that this is a “symptom of growth.” In this post I want to record some of his examples, noting the secular derivations and the later religious meanings of the words, which we may call the “upslope.” On the “downslope,” the process is reversed: a religious or spiritual meaning loses its aura and sinks into materialization, if not materialism.

First, a brief remark about “etherealization.” “Ethereal” in common usage is associated with faintness or ghostliness, a not-quite-material presence, which is a very English, very empirical way of looking at it. It would be characteristic of the physical-science bent of the English mind to look at it that way – “ethereal” is less palpable, therefore “unreal.” It has a different connotation in the traditional meaning of the word, where “ethereal” is the but adjectival form of “ether,” a Greek-derived word for the heavenly realm – space or the “firmament.” Debate over the existence of an ether in space occupied much the early 20th century physics and astronomy, which culminated with Einstein. Though the debate seemed to have closed down for good – “No, Virginia, there is no ether in space” – in reality this may not be the case, and just what it is when we talk about “ether” remains something like an unwanted relative – the person you know you must invite to the family gathering, but for the life of you, you wish you didn’t have to.


The key to the “ether” is life – at least to the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner, which claims the existence of the etheric realm as the basis of the life-processes in plants, animals, and man. The “etheric body” is not exactly what we mean by a “body,” and it is only perceivable by a clairvoyant. And yet remembrances of this stratum of man’s being haunt us all through history. The halo, the crown, and the headdress are evocations of the “etheric body” which was once perceivable (in a visionary way) as protruding from the head. It is only when this living membrane “contracted” to the sphere of the brain, that mankind could be the possessor of thoughts in the modern (or even pre-modern,) sense.

This stupendous event of compression or contraction is commemorated in the story of Abraham, the First Patriarch, who, it is said, spent his early life in a “cave.” This was a way of sheltering himself from the purview of Nimrod, but the metaphoric connection of cave and brain is recognizable. The skullcap of latter-day Jews also hearkens to this compressive view of the etheric membrane, shrunken into the cranial cavern. This “compression” of the etheric to the brain and the removal of thoughts and feelings from the participatory life in nature has characterized the Jews all throughout their history.

In Steiner’s view of human developmental history, this contraction of the etheric body was a necessity for the arising of an independent life of thought and of the possibility for freedom of individual persons. But the process that Abraham initiated in circa 2000 B.C. has been turned around, today, circa 2000 A.D., to the opposite danger, which is an excessive “retreat” of the etheric into a ghostly intellectualized thinking. The modern West in particular exhibits this fatal danger of loss of vitality in thinking, partly because the science that the West has developed has never resolved its intrinsic conflict regarding its own method of knowing. Is knowledge to be viewed as an “alien” condition – that is, as non-participated, cut off from its life ground, and therefore “objectified,” or is it better understood as a process of participatory rationality, in which knower and known are in a dynamic of mutual relation? The rebels against the “alien” view were first numbered among the Romantic poets, and they have been joined in later years by some historians and even scientists. But the rebels have not yet succeeded in winning a decisive victory, and the Tower of Babel continues to mount. We can recall that before it was a story about language, the Tower of Babel was a story about the will to power and the imposition of a deadening uniformity that suffocates the diverse manifestations of human consciousness. We have that uniformity today in the form of mathematics, statistics, and reductionism – a universal language useful for science, but in the long run perhaps fatal for the sustenance of civilization.

But before going on to the meanings in language liberated through the process of “etherealization,” I would just add that the etheric realm is by no means confined to the process of generating thoughts or new meanings from words. Living processes, that is, forms of the etheric, underlie the faculties of memory and imagination as well. Their biological dimension in regeneration, rejuvenation, growth, and embryonic development, are now presenting themselves to the eye of science as externalized objects (or what could be called “objectified processes”) subject to manipulation. Modern-day ethics flails about these realities with limited success in curbing them but without seizing on the central issue, which is that the deadening materialization of human thought is now grasping into these dynamic processes as if unconsciously seeking to fulfill what it lacks. Being thus a form of “wish-fulfillment” rather than of moral growth, this modern technique is predatory and destructive. But if approached in a spirit of complementarity or marriage, the life-liberated consciousness of man could meet life’s unfolding stages more fruitfully – even “procreatively.” The unfolding stages of life would then be recognized as symbolizing definite stages of intellectual and spiritual growth in mankind, and their vulnerability would evoke a chivalrous spirit of protectiveness rather than the vindictive strain that has accompanied science like an undercurrent from its beginnings. [2]

The real discovery and perhaps even the harnessing of etheric forces awaits a more spiritualized thinking, a thinking in participation with life and not, as we have come to expect and dread, a thinking that is alienated from, and striving against, life. [3] Our time calls for a new Abraham, but one who will recapitulate the achievements of the first Abraham in reverse. That is, the “new Abraham” must embody a participatory rather than a separated rationality. Human thinking needs a regenerative act. It needs to acquire life-characteristics consciously. This will be very difficult, for it is a moral, not solely a cognitive task. Why? Because the “moral” is always embodied in particular circumstances, that is, the mores, the customs or ways of a particular part of mankind. These customs, habits, cultures, events and particular histories are what enable us to achieve thinking in the first place, and they presuppose and elicit our participation, yet modern science as it has come to be practiced today discourages this participatory outlook. A regenerative act of human thinking will mean a different view of science as well.

The particularity of words is a good place to start the discussion of “etherealization,” for in the process of the acquisition of a new meaning, or the liberation of a meaning to a religious or spiritual dimension, we are watching the historic occasion of the mind regenerating itself. It is man acquiring a new dimension of himself, and this is why Toynbee calls the process a “symptom of growth” – although I do not sense that he possessed an exact knowledge of the etheric process underlying the “symptom.”
Here are some words and their developments of meaning:
Ecclesia – in Athens, a general assembly of a citizen body meeting to transact political (as opposed to judicial) business. In Christian usage it came to mean both a local Christian community and the Church Universal.
Laity- archair Greek laos, for people, as distinct from those in authority
Clergy – Gk. kleros, “lot,” as e.g. an allotted share of an inherited estate – Christians adopted it to mean “the portion of the Christian community that God had allotted to Himself to serve in his professional priesthood.”
‘Orders’ –(ordines) politically privileged classes in the Roman State, e.g. ordo senatorius, ordo equestris
Overseers – episkopoi – Spartan State for members appointed to supreme executive office by election but who served as constitutional despots during their term of office
Scriptura - vocabulary of roman inland revenus, a tax payable for the right to graze cattle on certain public lands
Testaments – diathekai, Gk and L. testamenta, -- thought of as equivalent of legal instruments which God had declared in two installments
Ascetic – Gk. askesis, physical training of athletes
Anchorites – Gk. anachoresis – withdrawal from productive economic activity as protest against heavy taxations
Solitaries, monks, monachoi – a creative contradiction, a society of solitaries. In previous Latin usage the word meant something combining the meanings of a quarter sessions and a chamber of commerce
Liturgy – Gk. leutourgia – ‘public service,’ when originally informal proceedings had crystallized into a ritual
Holy Communion – L. sacramentum, a pagan Roman rite in which a new recruit was ‘sworn in’ to the Roman Army. In the Latin Church this dual meaning, sacrament and military oath, was present from the beginning. In the Greek, koinonia (L. communio) both signified participation, but first and foremost membership in a political community
Transgression – Gk. parabasis, term of art in Attic drama meaning the parade of the chorus from one side of the theater to the other. In Christian language, a figurative ‘side-step’ in the spiritual sense of sin

In the downslope, meanings regress from a religious to a secular significance:

Cleric – to “clerk,” one who engages in minor office work (England) or store salesperson (US)
Communion- “waged in ever grosser terms for an ever more material stake.” In 14th c. Bohemia, the issue was Communion for both clergy and laity. By the 20th century it came to be associated with the struggle for economic equality in the adoption of the term ‘Communism.’
Conversion – no longer of souls but of coal, hydropower and oil. To a financier, conversion means the rate of interest on a loan to a lower rate than originally guaranteed. To a detective – the misappropriation of funds, “which distinctly indicated that funds were the commodity in which Modern Western Man had reinvested the treasure his Christian forebears had once placed in his soul.”
Salvation – salvage, rescue of junk; salve, an ointment; saved, savings – money deposited in a bank.
The older Latin meaning of Salvator was ‘conservator,’ for which our usages ‘a conservative estimate’ or ‘a conservative figure’ bear some faint lineage. But, Toynbee continues, “it would be difficult to whitewash the meaning of ‘conservative’ in 20th century politics – that is, a supporter of the political party devoted to defence of material vested interests.”

The “liberation” of meaning is also to be found in other fields. To take a random example, Kepler used the term ‘focus,’ [foci] from the Latin for ‘hearth’ or ‘fireplace,’ for the orientating points of his ellipses. The development of meaning through analogy and metaphor is a huge area of language and thought.

[1] See earlier post on research of Don Hotson and Dirac’s equations, “Rediscovering the Moral Law, Part III,” Oct 6, 2006.

[2] Once the religious factor was dismissed (i.e. awe at the divine handiwork of Nature) man could indulge simultaneously his resentment of Nature’s powers with his equal covetousness to acquire them.

[3]The field of modern economic thinking is the prime example of the suppression of the etheric or life-forces. See my review of John McMurtry’s Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy, in an earlier post, “The New Sabbatarianism, Part Two” (December 2, 2006).


Dissing Toynbee
February 8, 2007

Comments on H.R. Trevor-Roper’s “Arnold Toynbee’s Millennium,” Encounter, June, 1957.

The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote a long dismissive piece on Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History for Encounter Magazine in June, 1957. This article may have done more to sink Toynbee’s reputation than any other critical notice, and as it is a window into the world we have today, it seemed to me of interest to discuss it.

First of all, I should say I have not read all of Toynbee’s twelve volumes, so I am at a disadvantage in commenting on Trevor-Roper’s criticisms. On the other hand, it is difficult to ascertain just what T-R’s criticisms consist of. He begins by asserting that Toynbee’s opus “has not been well received by professional historians,” with almost every chapter of it “shot to pieces by the experts,” but that he does not intend to discuss its historical truth or falsehood, its empirical validity or invalidity. We are thus given to understand that Toynbee has errors, but not just what those errors are. He finds it an interesting phenomenon of the time, and notes that Toynbee’s opus is popular with the masses – “as a dollar-earner, we are told, it ranks second only to whisky.”

The main charge that T-R levels against Toynbee is that Toynbee does not believe in rationalism. “In spite of its Hellenic training, his mind is fundamentally anti-rational and antiliberal.” Well and good. But it would have been more honest if T-R had stated more forthrightly, “I do not like it.” Instead, he charges Toynbee with an “obscurantist” message – which he likens, in a later passage, to Belloc and Chesterton. Chesterton “obscurantist” ? One may dislike Chesterton’s message – and if one is not Christian or Catholic, one will probably not like it – but it impossible to read Chesterton without getting his message. Chesterton is anything but “obscurantist.” My point is that T-R dislikes Toynbee, Belloc, and Chesterton, and he probably dislikes Christianity – although he doesn’t actually say so. But instead of owning to his dislike, he climbs a little platform called “rationalism” and from there, throws stones at Toynbee and the defenders of Christianity.

As for anti-rationalism: there is a difference between anti-rationalism and what I find in Toynbee, which might be called “integralism." The soul has many parts, and reason or rationalism has a place, but not pride of place. But that reason or rationalism should have a “place” is an idea inherently distasteful to the modernist mind-set of Trevor-Roper.[Milton’s Satan expresses this view of placeless, timeless, discarnate and ungrounded Reason when he enters Hell to take possession of it: “… and thou profoundest Hell/Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings/A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.” Paradise Lost, I, 251-3] But the second point to be noted about the modernist reason is, when it is not viewed like a Satanic machine – that is, not dependent upon the personal or the circumstantial, it can be deployed as a useful accusation to mask likes and dislikes. Trevor-Roper calls reason that which he likes, and he calls unreason or anti-rationalism that which he dislikes. For example, he accuses Toynbee of being “moved by a detestation of human reason and all its works.” This is a little hard to believe. Toynbee states at the outset of his investigations that he wants to bring forth an empirical study of the phenomenon of “human civilizations,” and he spends a great deal of time discussing the problem of how you can go about studying the empirical facts of something which has been known to occur only twenty-one times, or of which there are only seven living cases and fourteen extinct ones to be found - civilization having only been in existence for some 6,000 years. This is his thesis, which he presents through rational argument, narrative, example, illustration, description and the demonstration of concrete instances. In arguing this thesis – in a clear, though admittedly at times complex prose style - he discusses the laws of statistics, historical sources, theories of primitive or pre-civilizational man, sociality, race, environment, the views of scientists regarding the age of the earth and the cosmos – and all of this (hardly an exhaustive list of his “incidental” or supporting topics) merely in the first volume before he actually turns to discussing societies. This is “antirational”?

Evidently, T-R considers the vast foundation of Toynbee’s learning to be merely the normal acquirements of an Englishman of his time and class, and thus hardly meriting comment. Is this merely a historical blind spot or does it point to a deeper failure to grasp what is comprehended in the spiritual nature of man? An anthropologist once remarked that humanity is but one generation removed from barbarism The spiritual nature of man is the crux of Toynbee’s thesis, and goes far in explaining why civilization is a rare fruit on the human tree, and why it is perpetually in danger of being lost. My sense of Toynbee thus far is not that he welcomed the prospect of the defeat of Western civilization (his “messianic defeatism,” according to T-R) so much as he realized its uncertainty – its fragility. Sub specie eternitatis is, after all, only the consciousness of shipwreck. [Ortega y Gasset: “I am only interested in the thoughts of shipwrecked men.” A religious – as distinguished from a philosophical or even historical cast of mind.]

If nothing else, Toynbee’s emphasis on the importance of religion to civilization ought to serve as a warning to the danger that reason faces when reason becomes All in All. When Reason becomes God, it soon degenerates to Unreason and further into a crusading zeal for Destruction. We are seeing this dynamic play out today, with horrifying consequences.

All of this, of course, lies far into the future, at least where Trevor-Roper was concerned – though perhaps not too far. It seems to me a historian, like any student of human affairs, ought to examine first his own presuppositions and ask whether his own rationalism is reasonable, and secondly, whether his rationalism is merely a mask for his likes and dislikes. And on this point again Toynbee, who in one of his later volumes devotes quite a bit of discussion to the new researches of C.G. Jung and psychology, seems more integral – more developed and open than his critic. See, for example, the discussion in Volume Seven – “… for the Subconscious, not the Intellect, is the organ through which Man lives his spiritual life for good or evil. It is the fount of Poetry, Music, and the Visual Arts, and the channel through which the Soul is in communion with God when it does not steel itself against God’s influence…” pp500 et seq. It is not only that Hugh Trevor-Roper could not have written this. He appears unable even to appreciate it. And “appreciation” too is also an important part of the story of a reasonable rationalism, attesting to the capacity of reason to throw light onto hitherto neglected aspects of its comprehension, and thus setting out possibilities for future growth.

Toynbee may not have understood that the idea of the Subconscious from psychology would metamorphose into new dogmas of determinism – that it was not altogether the liberating idea it may have initially appeared to him to be. Nevertheless, Toynbee’s quest is keyed to the search for the whole man, the wholeness of the person who is more than an intellect wired to a body. It is only the human being in his wholeness who can create and sustain a civilization. In this sense Toynbee’s interest in what were, for his time, new discoveries in the field of psychology is understandable. They seemed to promise a way toward the whole in an era in which the Western mind was ferociously closing down all its options of being except the one offered by a monotonously intellective rationalism.

It is true that Toynbee and Trevor-Roper inhabit different universes. Toynbee is on a spiritual quest, and because his mind is oriented spiritually, he is not impressed by the things in which Trevor-Roper takes such pride – such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, modern science and modern rationalist civilization. Toynbee always looks above and below; Trevor-Roper looks straight ahead, and thus to Trevor-Roper, Toynbee’s attitude toward Western civilization was one of “messianic defeatism.” But blinders that serve a horse ill-serve man – though men of these latter days often conceive of themselves as beasts – though never beasts of burden but rather beasts of conquest. [3. A perhaps ironic culmination of Darwinianism.]

These are two different kinds of men: the man of the distance and the man of the age, and the tensions between these two different human types have long been a theme of history and myth and perhaps even politics – Cain and Abel, Prometheus and Epimetheus, liberal and conservative. [4. Toynbee’s work is rich with allusion and reflection on Greek mythology. In V. IX, pps 149 et seq he makes much Atlas and Anteaus. – the “Atlantean stance and the Antaean rebound”. Atlas has to hold up the weight of the Heavens upon his shoulders; Antaeus could not be defeated so long as he was able to evade his enemy’s grasp and touch the earth once again with his feet. Toynbee’s finds in these two contrary movements great meaning for the historical fate of civilizations responding to challenge. The danger of the Atlantean stance is to rigidify into “mimesis” and obsession. The Antaean rebound enables new beginnings, the reappropriation of culture from the depths.] This leads up to our final point.

Trevor-Roper’s essay is twenty pages long, and exactly half of it argues that Toynbee believed himself to be the Messiah of a new civilization that would arise in the decomposing heap of Western civilization. Since I have not read the tenth volume of A Study of History, in which according to T-R Toynbee reveals himself as said Messiah, I will wait to reserve judgment. But I think Trevor-Roper’s charge here is interesting for what it says about the psychology of “mass man” – the type of man of our time who resents the exceptional man, even the idea of superiority. I would go so far as to say that if even Toynbee thought of himself as a sort of new historic type – thus violating one of our most cherished beliefs, that of equality – that it is not in how he saw himself that is the issue, but how he saw everything else. The twelve volumes of A Study of History seem to me to justify the view that Toynbee was an exceptional soul. He is vastly learned, knowledgeable in several languages, in religion, mythology, literature, conversant with the science of his day, and attentive to a vast range of details of human societies in a cosmopolitan range of races, cultures, and circumstances. Given the generosity of his vision of civilization and his steadfast loyalty to the Christian – and Protestant – religion in which he was raised, I’d say that even a Toynbee claiming to be a Messiah is a better bargain than Trevor-Roper as a critic. Toynbee’s faults need to be measured against his striving to comprehend the supernatural in the context of the historical. His day is yet to come. Trevor-Roper’s day is over.


Para-doxa
Sunday, March 4, 2007



My nephew, Henry Johnston, a senior at Grove City College, has posted an interesting reflection on "The New Physics" (March 1, 2007) on his new blog, Reroute To Remain a.k.a. Wings Are Burning.


"I have been thinking recently about the implications of the New Physics (that which has come about in the 20th century) in the realm of philosophy. Of course physics and philosophy are really just two sides of the same coin, and have no business being separated. In a recent discussion over a certain theological point with an acquaintance of mine, I invoked the findings of modern physics in countering his argument. He stared at me blankly. For him, theological Truth sits in one little box and scientific Truth sits in another, and never the two shall meet. Modern physics, however, is confirming the cliché that 'it's all connected.' I am finding that this new paradigm is guiding my thought more and more…"

Henry brings up the point that the findings in quantum physics, that the position and momentum of a subparticle cannot be determined simultaneously was, from the standpoint of classical Newtonian physics, nonsensical or paradoxical. It would seem to undermine the most cherished claim of science, which is to discover and confirm predictable patterns in nature. Unpredictability in nature confronts science with the terrifying possibility that perhaps its methodology is not the infallible key to control that it is cracked up to be.

My purpose in this post is not to explore this particular issue, but rather to zigzag to a larger question relating to the nature of paradoxes. Skeat’s Etymological dictionary defines paradox as "that which is contrary to received opinion; strange, but true." From the Greek, para, beside + doxa, opinion or notion, from dokein, to seem. We may contrast "paradox" to "orthodox," that is, "of the right faith," from orthos, upright, right, true. Skeat’s links the Greek orthos to a cognate in Latin, arduus, meaning "high," from whence we must get arduous.

Orthodoxy is indeed an arduous path for many, especially when it concerns religion. But paradoxy is also difficult, perhaps for different reasons. Orthodoxy appears to be inherently more "sociable," having to do with our membership in a believing community. Paradoxy, on the other hand, suggests that kind of uncertainty inheres to existence itself through our thinking. Paradoxy prods us not to think too much of our own thinking; orthodoxy relieves us – not from thinking – but from thinking that thinking will bring salvation.

Perhaps I have just tricked myself – or you, dear reader. I have just said that, in effect, there is not much difference between the paradox and the orthodox. This is not exactly what I intended to say. What I intend to argue is that the orthodox, -- "rightly understood" – is the true home, haven, and goal of the paradox. The purpose of the orthodox is to free us for the paradox. The purpose of the paradox is to enable us to understand the orthodox.

What a muddle! I assure you, dear reader, that despite this inauspicious beginning, that I have a goal in mind, and a purpose for this post, which goal and purpose will ultimately have a bearing on both science and religion – perhaps even to E=mc2, the Uncertainty Principle, and the Virgin Birth. Well, maybe not E=mc2 . That may be more even I can manage! But at least to the other two. But let us start with the third of these propositions, the Virgin Birth.
Readers of this site should know by now of my fervent admiration of the work of Arnold J. Toynbee, historian, and of my desire to do all that I can to further his work, elevate his reputation, and encourage people to undertake reading his unabridged Study of History –a massive work of 12 volumes which in my opinion is the most spiritually prescient work of the 20th century and the true flower of the modern Western consciousness. Indeed, the eclipse if not sinking of Toynbee’s reputation is symptomatic of a West that has lost its bearings, its heroes, and sense of purpose. In A Study of History, the threads of all of human history and civilization were joined together into a coherent view of what constitutes human purpose and destiny. But joined-up threads do not yet make the fabric. Threads have to be pulled through the needle’s eye – the ever-difficult task of focussing vision to argument. The task involves the soul as well as the intellect, and that is what we experience as "depth." "Depth" is both personal and universal, particular and historical – the large understanding reflected in the glance of a detail.
Depth is what we are missing today in the life of Western societies. Our life today is merely intellectual – which is to say, shallow and propagandistic. But not even Toynbee was able to maintain this quality of depth in everything that he wrote. In his autobiographical book, Experiences (1969) Toynbee wrote an essay on Religion – "What I Believe and What I Disbelieve." It was for him a way of setting the record straight – that he was, despite his high estimation of religion all through A Study of History – a modern Western "agnostic." He writes – "When I was an undergraduate an Oxford I became an agnostic, and at first I concluded, from my loss of traditional Christian orthodox belief, that religion itself was an unimportant illusion. Now, more than half a century later, I am still an agnostic, as the sequel will show, but I have come to hold that religion is concerned with a reality, and that this reality is supremely important."
This essay is interesting from many points of view, but the section "My inability to pass the tests of religious orthodoxy," is curiously static – although perhaps the same could be said of some of the tenets of orthodoxy that Toynbee was unable to accept. Consider what he says of the Virgin Birth – "I reject[ed] the doctrine of the Virgin Birth because I could not reconcile it with an already established belief of mine in ‘the uniformity of Nature.’"
Given the purely physical facts of purely physical reproduction and a purely physical Nature, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth sounds absurd. It is, at the very least, a paradox – Virgin Birth, Virgin Mother.
I would like to suggest that the doctrine of Virgin Birth is a type of formulaic paradox – which, just because it was so paradoxical, had to find a home within orthodoxy if orthodoxy was to remain dynamic. Christianity, in fact, may be a religion of "formulaic paradoxes" precisely because of the momentous nature of its teaching: that is, the spiritual or the symbolical becoming actually historical. Christianity as a whole is a "Virgin Birth" in this sense.
But to begin to understand the precise doctrine of the "Virgin Birth" it is necessary to take yet another step.
We live on the physical plane; we speak and think on the symbolical plane. These two realities are so intertwined that we do not give them much thought, and the tendency of modern society for the past several hundred years has been increasingly to "collapse" the awareness of the symbolical plane into the literal dimension. We forget that, in every examination of the facts of the physical world, we are wielding symbolic concepts, judgments, living or dead metaphors, habits, assumptions and presuppositions.
The awareness of the symbolic dimension in which we think, speak, and understand, was certainly present to a much greater degree among the medieval and earlier societies. The human participation factor was part of the game. Yet it was not called the "human participation factor" – in the dry language of modern abstract thought. Rather, the world was a dynamically interconnected enterprise of spiritual agency or agencies, and human beings participated in this dynamic nexus by virtue of their cognizing consciousness. It was a world "within and without" – as the Book of Revelation puts it – and the withinness and withoutness were not so clearly marked as they are in post-Cartesian times. Thus, in the New Testament, pneuma means both "wind" (without) and "breath" (within). The dynamic principle was perceived – but it took form in both the outer as well as the inner world. The "spirit," which is yet a third meaning of this word, encompasses both the inner and outer meanings – "it goes where it wills." The Holy Spirit moves in the heart as in the world - in the inwardness of man and in the outwardness of events.
But to return to the Virgin Birth: I think that this doctrine can be accepted as "literally true" only in the symbolic, participated sense of reality. Whereas, if one sees the world in purely literal and physical terms, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth could not be understood except in a symbolic sense.
This gloss on the doctrine of the Virgin Birth may not be exactly orthodox in the strictly Catholic sense of the word – or it may be slightly to the paradoxical side of that orthodoxy. For I too understand in some sense the "agnosticism" which Toynbee confesses to be his default position. I was raised in anything but a religious environment, and the conversion to Catholicism would not have been predicted – to use that word – for one of my background. Yet, for me, accepting the truth of the Virgin Birth in its literal meaning has not been an obstacle for me – because my understanding of the world is highly charged with symbolism and participation. I have always been highly aware of words, and of the uses and senses we put to them, as well of their histories and connotations and the social and intellectual circumstances in which they came to birth, and thus I never could glide over the significance of using words to "get to" the literal truth of anything. "Literal truth" in that sense becomes a mere superstition, which is being entangled up in words without being aware of it – that is, without being aware of our own participation in them. Superstition, after all, is only the most enduring form of determinism – the view of the world with no freedom.
Science will devolve into mere superstition in the end unless scientists return to a sober study of philosophy and perhaps as well to the use of real, as distinguished from mathematical, language. There are already many dangerous signs that this regression into fatalism is occurring. The "Uncertainty Principle" may have been an early sign that modern science sensed this danger of fatalism – but in characteristically modern (i.e. nonparticipated) terms this insight was confined to the behavior of particles in the "outer" world. But of itself I do not think this is enough. The retreat into a mathematized, as distinguished from a real and participated, world, is a luxury we can no longer afford, because the effects of the mathematized science on the real and participated world have become acute, destructive and deleterious. But it only the real and participated world, and all of us who live in it, who can put some limits to the "will to power" which has become the trademark of modern science. The relationship between the will-to-power and the regression to fatalism have not been sufficiently explored – Lord Acton’s famous saying, "Power tends to corrupt" notwithstanding.
It was Toynbee’s great purpose in A Study of History to remind Western man of his religion and thus renew the possibility for new beginnings from within. It was thus he hoped to forestall what he saw as signs of sclerosis and fatalism in Western society. True, in his autobiographical essay he missed seeing the participatory-dynamic hidden within religious orthodoxy-paradoxy. But Toynbee’s failure in this instance should not cause us to allow his achievements to sink into oblivion. If anything, it should spur us to attempt to complete what even in twelve volumes he was unable to say.
We need to re-dynamize ourselves – by remembering the paradoxy in orthodoxy.
Posted by Caryl at 1:07 PM 3 comments 3 comments:
PCJ said...
We’ve talked about this before --- Ortega’s comment about Toynbee:"It seems as if in the heart of this man doubts have started to ferment about whether or not it makes sense to keep on being English. As these doubts cannot be attributed to trivial matters, or to topical or superficial causes, such as, for example, membership in the Communist party; and as, in addition, we find something similar in the hearts of the best Englishmen, we have the impression of having touched lightly one of the most delicate and perhaps most decisive facts of our age. We have to approach and understand with great respect this hidden spiritual state, ... because in it lies nothing less than a great secret about the future for all of us."Do you think that this comment is accurate, fair ? If it is accurate, then only with difficulty can one see Toynbee as anything but a symptom of a problem --- which problem I suppose would have to be labeled ‘‘demoralization of the European peoples.’’
6:42 AM
Caryl said...
Hi Pauley - What an honor to hear from you!I was aware of Ortega's judgment on Toynbee, and I discussed it with no less an authority than John Lukacs - who himself does not seem to be altogether pro-Toynbee. However, he said he thought Ortega's statements about Toynbee were "unfair."I don't think that Toynbee contributed to the "demoralization" of the West. People have criticized him on a number of issues. He became, in later life, a kind of "Green" - and attracted to Buddhism. He criticized the US for the Vietnam war. He criticized materialism and racism. Granted, some of these notions have been later misused, but I think that,whatever faults Toynbee may have had, the relative neglect of his work speaks much more to the demoralization of the West than what was actually in the work. A Study of History is a kind of large-minded poetic epic, in prose, of history - and Western society has become increasingly anti-poetic and small-minded in its attitudes.Toynbee is a great adventure. So, in this instance, I think Ortega may have been somewhat premature in his judgments. But this is the only instance I know of where Ortega y Gasset was possibly less than great.
5:02 PM
Henry Johnston said...
I think this is an extremely insightful post, one that I have been thinking about for a while now. I have wanted to comment, but frankly haven't been sure I have correctly oriented myself to what is being said here. I sense in the argument Caryl has laid out an important analysis of the categories we have been using in the post Cartesian world. If I understand correctly, Toynbee's dilemma of faith revolves around the modern tendency to attempt to analyze everything in terms of the physical plane even though the very mode in which our thought processes work cannot be separated from the symbolic. Perhaps therein lies the contradiction; thought which has to be symbolic in nature is using this very characteristic to discount the symbolic. I would love to hear more comments on this as well as a fuller explanation of the implications of this gloss on orthodoxy. This line of thinking appeals to me because I find myself sympathetic to Toynbee's seemingly reluctant agnosticism. I have for a long time been thinking that I am somehow missing something in my either/or categories.
5:19 PM



The Tears of Things
March 10, 2007



This post is a continuation of the dialogue that has begun on this website and continued, at a tangent, on my nephew’s website, http://wingsareburning.blogspot.com/ in reference to what could be called “the general will to life among Western Euro people.” The dialogue was sparked by Henry’s post “The Seeking of Asylum,” in which he writes: “I wish to speak about the propensity of the brightest and most capable young people of my generation to seek their place overseas and in other cultures.” He concludes that: “Perhaps the distant cultures are a refuge from the guilt-mongering, anti-vitality, anti-masculine, anti-culture nature of our present country. After all, we live in the most unnatural of conditions right now, where men are disparaged or simply poked fun at (have you seen how almost every single television commercial depicts men?), where white people are under a self-inflicted, suicidal attack from their own treasonous elite. It is perhaps the only culture where we are told to feel guilt at the circumstances surrounding the very founding of our country. Our folklore is scorned or forgotten. It seems that in the context of this homogenization/demoralization, we are being compelled to do what no human can ever do; namely live without a history, community, or sense or strength. And it is from this most unnatural circumstance that our youth flee. In a strange irony of the modern world, the adoption of an utterly alien culture is the only way to have an identity which we can be proud of, and communities that are not denigrated.”

Paul (my brother and Henry’s Dad) commented by picking up a conversation that had previously been unwinding on this site in reference to Toynbee: “There is so much in it to comment upon that I hardly know where to start. I’m tempted to drag out yet again Ortega’s comment about Arnold Toynbee ---- ‘It seems as if in the heart of this man doubts have started to ferment about whether or not it makes sense to keep on being English......’ and further on ‘... we have to approach and understand with great respect this hidden spiritual state, ... because in it lies nothing less than a great secret about the future for all of us.’ I asked Caryl about this, and she replied: ‘I was aware of Ortega's judgment on Toynbee, and I discussed it with no less an authority than John Lukacs - who himself does not seem to be altogether pro-Toynbee. However, he said he thought Ortega's statements about Toynbee were ‘unfair.’”

In this post I want to talk about a few aspects of Toynbee’s biography that may have given Ortega y Gasset the sense that in Toynbee’s work there was percolating a spiritual undertone of “demoralization,” specifically in relation to “being English.” While I do not agree with Ortega’s specific charge, I do think that there are currents in the Toynbee phenomenon taken as a whole – the life and the work - which raise questions about being Western and modern – and what being Western and modern means in relation to Christianity. These questions may be subtle, but I think they are also important, and perhaps by addressing them we can get another handle on the questions raised by Henry’s post.

The first thing to note is how frequently in his letters, and also in The Study of History, Toynbee alludes to the First World War and the fact that half of his classmates and school fellows lost their lives in that conflagration. Toynbee’s own exemption from military service was owing to an episode of dysentery he had contracted while travelling abroad. There was in Toynbee a strain of “survivor’s guilt,” of which he seemed to be aware, and which was later exacerbated during his divorce from Rosalind Murray. In a bad moment, she had accused him, on another issue, of “cowardice” – but it seemed to touch upon this former one.

Toynbee had been much in love with the aristocratic Rosalind, the daughter of Gilbert Murray, the classicist. Perhaps he had indeed treated her too much as a “goddess” – as his father-in-law once told him. Three sons were born of their union – Tony, Philip and Lawrence. Toynbee was not a “hands-on” father – if not absent, he was frequently absorbed by his work. His son Philip later wrote in a memoir: “[Toynbee] simply had no understanding of children and young people, and no great interest in them either. My two brothers and I attracted his attention largely as nuisances. How clearly, even today, I can see his head poking out of the window of his study, his face a mask of nervous irritation, as he sternly reproved us for making too much noise.” The oldest son, Tony, shot himself “in a fit of pique,” and died a few days later on 15 March 1939. Philip was devastated and considered putting an end to his own life as well. But after a youthful fling with Communism he settled down eventually into a writing career. Both sons married and produced, between the two of them, eleven grandchildren – all girls with the exception of one male grandchild.

Lawrence, the youngest, had always been Rosalind’s favorite. When she converted to Catholicism in 1932, she brought Lawrence with her into the fold. Lawrence was educated at Ampleforth Abbey, a Benedictine establishment. While visiting Ampleforth in 1936, Toynbee met Fr. Columba Cary-Elwes, a monk with whom he carried on a correspondence lasting for 39 years. These letters, gathered into the volume An Historian’s Conscience: The Correspondence of Arnold J. Toynbee and Columba Cary-Elwes, Monk of Ampleforth, (Beacon Press, 1986) form an illuminating record of this time – full of upheavals both historical and spiritual. And by no means are all the “illuminations” those of Toynbee himself. Fr. Columba’s side of the correspondence illuminate some of the weaknesses in Toynbee’s philosophy as well. This loyal son of the Church was unable to convert Toynbee to Catholic Christianity but his penetrating comments helped to ensure a strong Catholic “presence” in The Study of History.

In 1937 Toynbee stated his mission: “I am trying to digest a large lump of modern knowledge and understanding of the material world which has grown up (so vigorously but yet so lopsidedly and without deep roots) during the last 250 years, and to re-place it in the Christian setting from which it has broken out.”

Fr. Columba was a great admirer of The Study of History, comparing it both to the Civitate Dei of St. Augustine and the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. But, he wrote – “You have not yet made the deepest synthesis of all – that between faith and reason, and the message will be blurred.” He believed that modern humanity was “too smug” in not baptizing science as St. Thomas baptized Aristotle. He disagreed with Toynbee on the matter of “assertiveness.” Toynbee had written that “Wherever one sees self-assertiveness, one can be sure one is not in God’s presence.” Fr. Columba pointed out that “a Truth may be asserted for its own sake, or because it is your Truth. In the latter case you have pride, in the former not.” Not to assert Truth, in fact, is to “fail in charity” – for “good diffuses itself.”

Fr. Columba’s learned to appreciate Toynbee’s “ecumenical” approach to religion, but he also noted: “You are trying to be fair to all religions. One tends on those occasions to be unfair to one’s own (family) (religion).” Toynbee acknowledged the justice of this remark – “What you say about leaning over backwards from one’s own religion in trying to be fair to the others is very true.” In 1959 Toynbee confessed that the “uniqueness” of Christianity was, for him, the stumbling-block. In a revealing comment, he once wrote that “Our spiritual vocabulary is entirely analogical (e.g. spirit = breath). This is why I believe the different descriptions refer to identical experiences.” This remark puts me in mind of something Owen Barfield once said about language - in connection with translation, what is of interest is the slightly different thing that is said. For example, tree, arbre, Baum, all refer to the same thing, but are they really the same? Where the Englishman sees primarily the trunk, the Frenchman emphasizes the boughs and the German sees the root. It is the same with spiritual language, only in this case there can be no “identical experiences” if spiritual reality concerns spiritual Beings.

Something of this notion comes through in Fr. Columba’s reply, when he pointed out that the language used to describe spiritual reality refers to different “levels.” The question of the different “levels of Being” may essentially demarcate the Protestant from the Catholic sensibility. Rosalind Toynbee, in her book written after her conversion about her agnostic father, The Good Pagan’s Failure, “… attributed the triumph of barbarism and egalitarianism in the late 1930’s to the abandonment of the Catholic view of the human and celestial hierarchy.”

Toynbee occupied a middle ground – or perhaps a no-man’s land – between a secular-academic world that criticized him for his view of faith and religious imagery (Pieter Geyl, the Dutch historian, wrote: “God became man in Christ is to him the veritable sense of history”; the views of Hugh Trevor-Roper have been previously described in an earlier post) and a Catholic sensibility which may have felt at times that Toynbee’s religion amounted to no more than “an eradicable belief in his own religiousness.”) (The quote is from George Gissing’s description of an Englishman’s religion; cited by Maurice Samuels, The Professor and the Fossil (1956). Toynbee’s book did not win many friends among the Jewish community because he believed that Judaism was a “fossilized” religion.)

Perhaps it is owing to the fact that The Study of History occupied a kind of “nebulous” area, failing to commit itself wholly to one side or another, that Toynbee himself finally saw his work as “really a myth about the meaning of history.” Yet it is just in the sense of “mythology” that I find Toynbee’s History so appealing. For what kind of mythology will become possible for mankind in the modern, modernist, and postmodern dispensation? What kind of zest for life or raison d’être is possible for us, who have lost all of our “naïve beliefs” and unself-conscious hopes and strivings?

In this respect, Toynbee’s encounter with Henry Luce is revealing. Toynbee’s work was initially highly favored by Luce and Time Magazine. But the two men had their differences. Luce said: “Toynbee regarded America as simply a peripheral part of European civilization. I regarded America as a special dispensation – under Providence – and I said so. My spiritual pastors shake their heads about this view of mine. They say it tends to idolatry – to idolatry of a nation. I knew well the dangers of that sin. But I say we must have courage to face objective facts under Providence.”

So I want to conclude with two remarks. I think that Toynbee did have conflicts about being a man, a father, a Christian, and about rationalism, science, and maybe even “being English.” But believing in being what one is – English or American – is a danger when this self-belief is disconnected from the kind of “pastoral counsel” that Henry Luce alluded to. I think that Ortega criticized Toynbee’s weakening of self-belief without seeing how The Study of History was an attempt to counterbalance and to overcome it. The Study of History is in fact an enormous attempt at “pastoral counsel” by reminding Western mankind of its origins and also, about the nature of the historical enterprise itself. The mythos comprises the poetic language – and scholarly bulk – of the work itself. The lesson is lacrimae rerum - the “tears of things.” It is this lesson which we Americans, in our reckless march to Empire, seem unable to hear.