Toynbee’s History as a Search for Truth
History as a humane study is defined by Toynbee as a concern with the lives of civilizational societies in both their internal and external aspects:
“The internal aspect is the articulation of the life of any given society into a series of chapters succeeding one another in time and into a number of communities living side by side. The external aspect is the relation of particular societies with one another, which has likewise to be studied in the two media of time and space.”1
That is the well-known, much debated definition that crystallizes the conception of historical reality as a manifold of civilizational courses. I have quoted it because I want to make it the starting point for reflections on Toynbee’s use of definitions. Only when their use is understood can the question of their validity be raised.
A Study of History, as it lies before us in its completed form, is an inquiry concerning the truth about the order of history. It is an inquiry in the classical sense of a zetema, a search for truth both cognitive and existential. Definitions in the course of a zetema, however, are cognitive resting points which articulate the view of reality that has been gained at the respective stage in the existential advance toward truth. As a consequence, the validity of the definitions has two dimensions.
In the one direction, they must be tested against the data of reality to which they purport to refer; in the other direction, they must be measured by the existential level reached in the search for truth. Moreover, the two dimensions of validity are related to one another, insofar as the question which is a datum of reality depends for its answer on the existential level reached.
What is relevant on a lower level may become irrelevant on a higher level, and vice versa. Hence, the definitions that articulate the view of reality achieved in earlier stages of the zetema are liable to be superseded by definitions reached at higher existential levels.
In an existentially authentic zetema we are faced, therefore, with a series of definitions, the later ones qualifying and superseding the earlier ones; and under no circumstances must they be pitted against one another on the level of a logic of the external world which ignores the logic of existence.
As a matter of fact, the search for truth about the order of history has steadily advanced through the volumes of the Study to higher existential levels and the earlier definitions correspondingly have been modified, if not invalidated, from the newly reached positions.
Stopping Short in the Search for the Love of God
While the retrospective qualifications and invalidations of earlier definitions, inconvenient as they may be for a reader who identifies truth with information, are the inevitable mark of an authentic zetema, the work of Toynbee is beset with a further difficulty of a personal nature. A search for truth is supposed to reach its goal, that is, a view of reality existentially informed by the philia of the sophon in the Platonic sense, or by the intentio animi toward God in the Augustinian sense.
Toynbee does not reach this goal of the love of God, but stops short at a sensitive spiritualist’s and a historical connoisseur’s sympathy with religions. Hence, the zetema had not come to its end when the author wrote his proud Finis at the physical end of his work.2
“Mr. Martin Wright” as Interlocutor
The peculiar lack of finality now has found an extraordinary literary expression insofar as at the climax of the search, in the exploration of the universal churches, “Mr. Martin Wight” is introduced as the partner of a dialogue in which the author speaks his last-but-one word against the intellectually and spiritually superior position of his critic.
I have put “Mr. Martin Wight,” who is a real person,3 in quotation marks in order to signify the function of his criticisms within the zetema that was not completed by Toynbee himself. One is tempted by the idea that “Mr. Martin Wight” might have been a product of Toynbee’s imagination, a figure designed to cast light a few steps ahead on the path, the epanodos, which the author did not choose to ascend further. That would have been a fascinating literary device to invalidate a position that the author had left behind.
But “Mr. Martin Wight” is real, and his introduction in the notes and annexes casts the light that reveals as penultimate the position which Toynbee chooses to make his last one. Nevertheless, it also reveals the author’s awareness that he is indeed engaged in a zetema, even if he balks, like the prisoner in the cave, at the ordeal of light and refuses to let himself be dragged all the way up to its mouth. While the admission of an alter ego in the person of “Martin Wight,” to be sure, is existentially not equivalent to the personal completion of the ascent, it is something like an act of atonement.
For we cannot, when engaged in a search for truth, stop where the view is pleasant and declare a way station to be the summit without betraying the Guide who has brought us thus far. And his critic charges Toynbee unequivocally, and justly, with the hubris of having transformed, in his treatment of the universal churches, the divine mystery of history into the manageable topic of a humane study,4 so manageable indeed that the author can tender advice to the “four living universal religions” on what to do in order to get some peace on earth.
Wrestling Solid Ground From Sophistic Corruption
The nature of the humane study as a search in the Platonic sense must be recognized when dealing with Toynbee’s definitions. They are resting points in the inquiry, as we have said, liable to be modified when the ascent has enlarged the horizon.
Nevertheless, while their position in the search must be taken into account when gauging their cognitive import, they lose their character as instruments of cognition no more than the paradigms of the best polis in Plato’s Republic lose it because they are the stepping stones in the ascent from the depth of the surrounding corrupt society to the vision of the Agathon.
Especially with regard to the first definition, to which we now must return for a moment, he is clear about its purpose to wrest critically solid ground, in both the cognitive and existential senses, from the sophistic corruption of historiography through nationalism and Western civilizational hubris.
Toynbee as Executor of the New Understanding
As far as the cognitive aspect is concerned, the definition comes at the end of an elaborate exposition of the reasons why civilizations, rather than national states or mankind, are the “intelligible fields of historical study,” the “social atoms”.5 And as far as the existential aspect is concerned, the definition is followed by an analysis of the motives that induce Western historians to construct a unilinear development of human civilization, as well as by an exposition of the dubious intellectual devices used to support the construction.6
About the cognitive validity, in particular, there can be no doubt, for Toynbee’s conception of history at this first stage rests squarely, as does Spengler’s, on the broad empirical basis established by their great predecessor Eduard Meyer. Among the historians of the nineteenth century, Meyer was the first to transfer the categories of the unilinear history of mankind (Antiquity, Middle Age, Modern Period) to a single civilization, the Greco-Roman, as the true unit of history; he was motivated by the expansion of knowledge to civilizations, especially the Babylonian, which were intelligible units of history although they had remained beyond the horizon of the Western unilinear construction.
A revision that had been impending ever since the great break that lies between Bossuet’s and Voltaire’s conceptions of history had now become inevitable under the pressure of rapidly increasing empirical knowledge. At the first stage of his work Toynbee is the executor of this necessity. And whatever modifications the first definition will have to suffer in the further course of the zetema, it will remain valid enough to bar the return to the construction it has superseded.
Toynbee’s Success with the Epistemological Issue
The second stage of the zetema is extremely complex, especially in the cognitive dimension, as evidenced by the fact that it fills five and a half volumes. In order not to get lost in the wilderness of concrete details, I shall isolate the epistemological issue. The humane study is, by definition, concerned with the chapters in the lives of the societies called civilizations. They are members of a species insofar as they reveal regularities in their course from genesis and growth to breakdown and disintegration.
The exploration of these regularities, as well as the construction of adequate type concepts for their description, would encounter no difficulties other than the normal ones in the work of science, if the societies were given in the manner of botanical specimens. Unfortunately they are not because of the nature of historical sources.
The courses of the various societies, whose membership in the species may be assumed, are not equally open to inspection by the historian; and he must proceed, therefore, in practice by establishing the presumed type on occasion of the societies for which the sources flow most richly, that is, for the Greco-Roman and Western civilizations.
Once the type is tentatively established on this limited basis of maximal illumination, it can be used for classifying such data as are available for the course of other civilizations. Moreover, for several of the societies the sources flow so thinly indeed that on their strength alone the society would not even have been recognized as a member of the species.
Hence, the construction of type concepts, which should be based on the civilizational courses, slides over, in the practice of the operation, into the entirely different task of identifying societies as members of the species through the application of the type concepts, developed from the limited basis, to data that are assumed to be fragments of civilizational courses of the same type. This procedure has its hazards. And the question to what extent it has been successful by critical standards is a matter that can be decided in detail only by the specialists in the various historical fields.
I must confine myself to the judgment, without giving reasons for it on this occasion, that Toynbee’s “operations” as he calls them have been surprisingly successful; and that they have been illuminating, as have Spengler’s, even when energetic exceptions will have to be taken in the detail. From Toynbee’s very success in making history a humane study of civilizational courses, however, emerge the problems that mark a second stage insofar as they are incompatible with the first assumption about civilizational societies as the intelligible fields of study.
For in the process of identification and exploration the presumed “social atoms” prove to be no closed monads, nor do they confine their relations to concussions befitting well-rounded atoms. Especially in the time sequence of civilizations, the majority of the later societies are related to earlier ones in various modes of “filiation,” and some of them have offspring in their turn. The field of atoms, thus, is transformed into a genealogy of civilizations, running through three generations from the emergence of the species to the present.
That genealogical structure of the field of civilizations is in itself an intelligible field of study, not identical with any of the societies taken singly. Yet the point might be pressed that it still comes under the “external aspect” included in the first definition. The matter becomes critical, however, when Toynbee considers the mode of affiliation that he names apparentation and affiliation. In some instances societies develop in their stage of disintegration a trinity of symptoms, called the universal state, the universal church, and the heroic age.
The dominant minority of the disintegrating civilization creates in its last effort the universal state, extending over the whole civilizational area and suppressing the further internecine wars among the communities of the society; the internal proletariat releases in this situation its energies into the creation of a universal church; and the external proletariat, boring into the dying civilization, develops the ephemeral institutions and cultural phenomena of its heroic age. That is specifically the complex of symptoms to be found in the disintegration of the Greco-Roman civilization.
The Chrysalis Function of the Universal Church
Of the three phenomena, the universal church, however, transcends the society in which it has arisen insofar as it becomes the transmitter of civilizational heritage through its formative influence on the peoples who are to become the ethnic stock of the affiliated Western society. This service, the “chrysalis function,” as well as the fact that the universal church in the cases of apparentation and affiliation outlasts the society in which it has arisen, definitely points toward the existence of “intelligible fields of study” other than the civilizations themselves.
During the execution of his program in the first six volumes of A Study of History, Toynbee was only dimly aware that in fact he was invalidating the programmatic definitions of the stage. He did not meet the problem with adequate revisions of his concepts and definitions. Nevertheless, at the end of volume 6 he recognized the problem in metaphorical form. The movements beaten by the alternating rhythms of Yin and Yang are not the cycle of a treadmill.
The perpetual turning of a wheel is not a vain repetition if, at each revolution, it is carrying a vehicle that much nearer to its goal.” The civilizations, when they dissolve:
“regularly leave behind them a deposit of universal states and universal churches and barbarian war-bands . . . [W]e shall find reason to believe that these three objects of study are something more than by-products of social disintegration . . . [T]hey must be independent entities with a claim to be studied on their own merits.”
We cannot afford to ignore this new question, for it “holds the key to the meaning of the weaver’s work; and a yearning that tantus labor non sit cassus will not allow us to rest without trying to unlock the secret of this mystery.7
One cannot but be moved when reading these pages. A giant work has been completed. The societies, whose courses are the concern of history according to the programmatic definition, have been successfully explored; and the result is the insight that the wheels of civilization carry a vehicle that is not itself a civilization toward its goal. The whole labor would be wasted unless the study of history be expanded to the “independent entities with a claim to be studied on their own merits,” because they, and not the civilizations, hold the key to the meaning of history.
At the Crossroads: Spengler
In the metaphors of these pages, Toynbee has achieved a new insight in the cognitive sense, because he has reached a new stage in his zetema in the existential sense. For this is the crossroads at which he could have taken the way of Spengler into the tragic experience of civilizations as a spiritually unrelieved, organic rhythm of birth and death, of growth and decay.
When, in universal states and churches, lie recognized something more than by-products of a disintegrating civilization, he was informed by a sensitiveness for the presence of the Spirit in history that is so signally absent in Spengler. Moreover, this sensitiveness must have been sharpened through the labors of his study. For anybody could have told him, by way of intellectual prognostication, and certainly he could have told it himself, that he would arrive at this spiritual crossroads when he conceived history as nothing but a manifold of civilizational courses and their relations.
That sooner or later, when engaged in a study of this kind, he would have to confess himself either an existentialist of the nihilistic variety, or a philosopher and Christian. But apparently this spiritual issue was not as vividly present to him at the beginning of the Study as it was at the end, or he would never have formulated the first definition.
Explicit Recognition of the Spiritual Component
Between the publication of volumes 4 through 6 in 1939 and of volumes 7 through 10 in 1954 lie fifteen years and a world war. A theoretical situation that had remained in a state of spiritual awareness, not matched by intellectual penetration, at the end of volume 6 has been articulated by conceptual instruments in volume 7.
The new position is concentrated in the reclassification of societies that constitute intelligible fields of study. At the bottom, as in the first stage of the Study, are the primitive societies that are excluded from the historian’s concern and left to anthropology. At the next level we find the primary civilizations (Egyptian, Sumeric) that have emerged from the primitive stage of society.
The primary civilizations fulfill their destiny in begetting the secondary civilizations (Hellenic, Sinic), who in their turn beget the higher religions (Christianity, Hinduism, Mahayana). The number of intelligible fields of study has increased to four species of society, arranged chronologically and genealogically on “an ascending scale of values.”8
“The Chariot of Religion” is Now History Proper
This reclassification is possible and necessary because the metaphoric vehicle that is carried toward its goal by the wheels of civilizations is now identified as “the chariot of Religion.”9 The “history of Religion”10 is now history proper, and the various societies must be characterized and classified on the scale of values according to their function in the “progress of Religion.”11
Looking back from this last position to the first one, Toynbee himself summarizes the devastating effect of the change:
“Now, however, that our Study has carried us to a point at which the civilizations in their turn, like the parochial states of the Modern Western World at the outset of our investigation, have ceased to constitute intelligible fields of study for us and have forfeited their historical significance except in so far as they minister to the progress of Religion, we find that, from this more illuminating standpoint, the species itself has lost its specific unity.”
“In our new list of societies arranged in a serial order of ascending value, the primary and secondary civilizations appear as separate categories, differentiated from one another and located on different qualitative levels by the difference in value between their respective contributions to the achievement of bringing the higher religions to flower. As for the civilizations of the third generation, they are now right out of the picture.”12
This drastic revision is, however, accompanied by the warning that the earlier thesis of the philosophical equivalence of all civilizations is not abandoned. The thesis “is assuredly true as far as it goes; and it has not played us false so long as we have been dealing with the civilizations themselves, in their geneses, growths, breakdowns, and disintegrations, as the ultimate objects of our inquiry.”13 The results of the first six volumes, thus, remain valid in spite of the change of position.
The work that has begun with the definition of civilizational societies as “the intelligible fields of historical study” ends with the declaration that they are unintelligible. The definition thus is as invalidated as a definition can be. Nevertheless, the execution of the program contained in the definition preserves its validity intact on its own level of operations. I need not elaborate to make it clear that whatever the substantive merits of the new position may be, the conceptual work leaves much to be desired.
What has happened in the course of the inquiry can best be understood through a confrontation of the original plan of the work with the form it has actually assumed. The Study was originally meant to be published in three “batches” of volumes. The first batch was supposed to contain the genesis and growth of civilizations; the second batch their breakdown and disintegration, including the universal states, universal churches, and heroic ages as the most significant symptoms of disintegration; and the last batch was to bring in the contacts between civilizations in space and time, supplemented by three studies on special problems.
This plan of publication corresponded to the definition of history as the human study of civilizations in both their internal and external aspects: The study of civilizational courses was contained in the first two batches; the study of the relation between the societies in the last batch. In fact, however, only the first batch fulfilled the program outlined in the preface to volume 1.
For between 1935, when the preface to the second edition still referred to the same plan, and 1939 occurred the existential advance of the inquiry that induced Toynbee to include in the second batch only such elements of the universal state, the universal church, and the heroic age, as were indispensable to round out the picture of disintegration according to the first plan, and to defer the main treatment of these subjects to the last batch.
The completed Study as a whole, and the last batch of volumes in particular, suffer, therefore, from severe misconstruction, insofar as the plan, as it was conceived on the first existential level, was retained to cover the studies executed on the last existential level. The misconstruction has, in fact, penetrated the subject matter so deeply that one can no longer clearly separate the blocks of the first plan from the studies of the last level.
One might be tempted, when looking at the tables of contents, to decide that the studies on the contacts of civilizations in space and time, as well as the three supplemental studies, belong to the first plan and complete its execution that was broken off at the end of volume 6. In that case one could isolate the studies on the universal states, the universal churches, and the heroic ages from the rest of the Study and consider them an independent work representing Toynbee’s view of history on the last existential level.
The Universal States and the Universal Churches in Volume 7
But a close reading of the text reveals that the last batch of volumes is written in its entirety from the new position; lines that would separate sections of the first plan from the new interpretation can no longer be drawn. As a consequence, neither has the plan of the first level been completed, nor has the last level found an organizational form of its own. What that form might have been can be surmised, if volume 7 be considered a work standing for itself.
Here we find a clear division of subject matter into universal states and universal churches. In the part on universal states the civilizational course is considered under the aspect of its services to the flowering of religions, under such titles as “The Utilization of Provincial Organizations by Churches,” “The Use of Capital Cities as Seminaries for Higher Religions,” “The Roman Army’s Legacy to the Christian Church,” and “Imperial Citizenships and Ecclesiastical Allegiances.”
In the part on universal churches, then, religions are considered under the aspect of their holding the key to the mystery of history. Nevertheless, volume 7 is not intended as an independent work, and one can legitimately extract no more from its construction than an increased understanding of the incision between volumes 6 and 7 of the Study. As a convenience of language we shall in the following reflections refer to volumes 1-6 as the first part, and to volumes 7-10 as the second part of the Study.
A Profane History Followed by a Sacred History
Once the substantive problem of the Study has been discerned behind the veils of misconstruction, the meaning of the zetema and its results come into view. Barring all the qualifications that would be necessary in the light of the preceding reflections we may say succinctly that the first part deals with the history of civilization, while the second part deals with the history of religion; or, if we use the classical terminology, Toynbee has written a profane history followed by a sacred history. The two parts together reflect an Augustinian project of historiography, as distributed over Orosius’s Historia contra Paganos and Saint Augustine’s own De Civitate Dei.
Self-Awareness and the Return of the Augustinian
The return to the Augustinian conception of history is an event of considerable importance; and in view of the misconstruction of the Study we must ask, therefore, whether it was intended by Toynbee at all, and if so, on what level of awareness.
There is some evidence of his awareness to be found in the “Acknowledgments and Thanks” of volume 10, when he speaks of Ibn Khaldun who “gave me a vision of a study of History bursting the bounds of This World and breaking through into an Other World”; and then continues: “Saint Augustine, in his De Civitate Dei, gave me a vision of the relation in which those two worlds stand to one another.”14
This piece of evidence must not be neglected, but neither should it be overrated. In order to find a basis for judgment, let us consider the first and last appearances of the metaphorical vehicle of progress that moves through Toynbee’s study on the wheels of civilization without the horsepower of concepts.
Its first appearance15 is surrounded by a plethora of metaphors and mythical symbols. There is the shuttle on the loom of time that brings into existence a tapestry in which there is manifestly “a progress towards an end;” the chain of challenge-and-response releases the Promethean elan of social growth; the cycle of withdrawal-and-return transforms a personality and enhances its powers; the cycle of reproduction has made possible the evolution of all higher animals up to man; and even the repetitive “music of the spheres” dies down to an undertone in an expanding physical universe.
The sacra necessitas of the cycle must be assumed, therefore, to coexist with an element of freedom in human affairs. Toynbee himself considers his view as a combination of Spengler’s belief in the element of recurrence in human affairs and Einstein’s belief in an element of uniqueness and irreversibility in the movement of the stars. All this, of course, does not sound in any way Augustinian.
On the occasion of its last appearance, the vehicle is accompanied by the symbols of “The Law of God” and the “Laws of Nature.” “‘The Law of God’ reveals the regularity of a single constant aim pursued unwaveringly, in the face of all obstacles and in response to all challenges, by the intelligence and will of a personality,” while the “Laws of Nature” display the “regularity of a recurrent movement.”
Both concepts can be held simultaneously. The courses of civilizations, with their breakdowns and disintegrations, are transcended:
“in the cumulative spiritual progress of Religion through learning by suffering. This cumulative progress of Religion–which is the spiritually highest kind of experience and endeavor within the range of Man on Earth–is a progress in the provision for Man, in his passage through This World, of means of illumination and grace for helping the pilgrim, while still engaged on his earthly pilgrimage, to attain a closer communion with God and to become less unlike Him.”16
That language sounds closer to Saint Augustine’s conception of the Church as the flash of eternity into time–but obviously it is not quite the same.
Denying the Possibility of Valid Theology
If now we use the two aggregates of symbols, which belong respectively to the second and third stages of the zetema, and try to formulate a judgment, we can do it best in terms of the tension between the immanent logic of the zetema and Toynbee’s unwillingness to pursue his search to the end.
By its immanent logic the search would lead Toynbee to a position, resembling the Augustinian, however differently he would have to articulate it in the light of our vastly increased contemporary knowledge in matters both historical and philosophical. And if we compare the first and last appearances of the famous vehicle, we can recognize, in the change of the symbolic atmosphere the pressure of the search.
Toynbee, however, is unwilling to give way; and under the prodding of “Mr. Martin Wight’s” criticisms he becomes explicit on his reason–at least the overt one: His knowledge as a historian had not only shown that all attempts to formulate spiritual truth in intellectual terms had ended in failure, but convinced him that the feat could not be accomplished at all.
Even if it were psychologically feasible, by agreement, to discard the classic theology of the four living higher religions and to substitute for it a newfangled theology expressed in terms, not of an Hellenic or an Indic philosophy, but of a Modern Western Science, a successful achievement of this tour de force would merely be a repetition of a previous error which would invite the same nemesis.
And in retrospect from his Finis, written June 15, 1951, he continues:
“A scientifically formulated theology (if such could be conceived) would be as unsatisfying and as ephemeral as the philosophically formulated theology that was hanging like a millstone round the necks of Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and Muslims in the year a.d. 1952.”17
A Dilettantism That Could Have Been Overcome
When “Mr. Martin Wight” then prods him further and argues that, if he wishes to communicate in matters concerning truth, he cannot escape his formulations being “the proper work of Reason,” he replies that he can escape following the example of Plato. For Plato
“. . . yokes Reason and Intuition to his winged chariot side by side, without ever trying to disguise either of them in any trappings that belong to the other. In my belief it is because he drives this pair of horses in double harness that he succeeds in flying so high. I appeal to Plato’s example.”18
At this point the debate must cease. For here we are facing, on the part of Toynbee, a dilettantism with regard to questions of reason and revelation, philosophy and religion, metaphysics and theology, intuition and science, as well as communication, that could easily be overcome by anybody who wanted to overcome it.
Toynbee’s Underlying Difficulty
The situation on the level of overt argument points to the more deeply seated difficulty that Toynbee is sensitive to the word of God insofar as it has become historically tangible in dogmatic symbols and ecclesiastic institutions, but that he does not hear the word as spoken to him personally.
It would be tactless and completely out of place to touch upon this personal problem if Toynbee himself had not placed it before the public by concluding his Study with the now famous prayer that begins:
“Christe, audi nos.”
“Christ Tammuz, Christ Adonis, Christ Osiris, Christ Balder, hear us, by whatsoever name we bless Thee for suffering death for our salvation.”19
This public prayer rises, not from man to God, but from the united religions to their historical symbols. The imperfections of the work, thus, originate in the unwillingness to complete the zetema in spite of a clear knowledge what its end would have to be. What could have become a study of history along Augustinian lines has ended with a misconstruction. For history of religion is no more a historia sacra than the historical language symbols are the spiritual word spoken by God to man.
Notes
1. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934-1961), 1:46.
2. Ibid., 10:144.
3. Ibid., 238.
4. Ibid., 7:745
5. Ibid., 1:17-50.
6. Ibid., 149-71.
7. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934-1961), 6:324-26.
8. Ibid., 7:448.
9. Ibid., 423.
10. Ibid., 420.
11. Ibid., 449.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934-1961),10:236.
15. Ibid., 4:34-38.
16. Ibid., 9:174.
17. Ibid., 7:494-95.
18. Ibid., 501.
19. Ibid., 10:143.
This excerpt is from Published Essays: 1953-65 (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 11) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000)
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