Christianity
Arnold Tynbee: Christianity and Civilization
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, June 26, 2001
Renowned Historian
Arnold Joseph Toynbee, dubbed the last of the Victorian historians for his grandiose and imperial view of history and the role of religion in it, was hailed as a prophet in the USA when the abridged version of his monumental work A Study of History was published in 1947. Doubtless it was the excessive number of people holding their perverse superstition that still persist in the USA that led to this adulation, because Toynbee had a Christian’s own admiration for the importance of this sorry synthetic cult. He was fond of the phrase “culmination in Christianity”, which in itself would have had the dewy-eyed clappies agog.
The historical progress of religion in this world, as represented by the rise of the higher religions and by their culmination in Christianity, may, and almost certainly will, bring with it, incidentally, an immeasurable improvement in the conditions of human social life on Earth.Christianity and Civilization 1940
This was a man who was not speaking under any delusion of eternal peace and happiness. He was at the centre of British government information services in two world wars in the twentieth century, mainly between Christian countries and in which about 75 million people—mainly Christians, or people with a Christian culture—died. He said this in a lecture during the phony war period of World War II, so perhaps things looked rosier than they might.
Now Toynbee is considered to have his feet firmly in the material world, unlike his rival Oswald Spengler, yet in Christianity and Civilization he can write purely supra-mundane twaddle, introducing soul and spirits like an occultist. The “deliberate aim and its true test” of the historical rise to Christianity “is the opportunity which it brings to individual souls for spiritual progress in this world during the passage from birth to death.” The prayer, “Thy will be done in Earth as it is in Heaven.” is for this spiritual progress, and the prayer, “Thy Kingdom come” will ensure that the salvation is open to all men of good will “pagan as well as Christian, primitive as well as civilized” who make the most of their spiritual opportunities on Earth. It is hard to believe this is a renowned historian’s words and not those of a nickel-in-the-hat, out-on-parole evangelical shyster.
Barbarism
Toynbee reminds us in Christianity and Civilisation that an old and persistent view is that Christianity was the destroyer of the civilization it grew up in. Gibbon thought so. James Frazer did, Julian the Apostate did and Toynbee joins Gibbon in supposing Marcus Aurelius perhaps did too. Ending his also monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Gibbon wrote:
I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.
He began it describing the Roman Empire, Pagan, prosperous and at peace in the age of the Antonines, only a hundred years after Christ. He considered that Rome was at its apex under Marcus Aurelius and thereafter it was a slide downhill. Simultaneously, and by no coincidence, the Christian religion increased its power in the state. Gibbon saw Christianity and barbarism as overthrowing civilization. The barbarism was Christianity!
Toynbee reminds us of this hypothesis because he wants to refute it, claiming, absurdly, but to fit his historic cycles, that the Graeco-Roman civilization stood at its height not in the age of the Antonines in the second century AD and only 300 years before its demise, but in the fifth century before Christ. Toynbee’s refutation of Gibbon has to have the Graeco-Roman civilisation terminally ill as soon as it was born, but with an illness that did not lead to death for another millennium during which astonishing achievements were registered! For Toynbee, Hellenic civic life immediately destroyed itself by turning itself into “an idol to which men paid an exorbitant worship.” The idol on the crucifix was not like this in Toynbee’s eyes. The consequence of exorbitantly worshipping civic life was the death of Rome a millennium later, it seems, and the idol on the crucifix, dominant in people’s minds at the time, had nothing to do with it.
Gibbon refused to have the blinding light of Christianity shone into his face. From the eighteenth century, he looked back to the Antonine peak in the second century, across an open sewer of barbarism between, and the one unmistakable object standing proud in the medieval cesspit of barbarism was the cross of Christianity.
Christianity Preserved Civilization?
Toynbee adopted the view that Christians themselves do—that Christianity preserved civilization. Toynbee says it was a chrysalis between butterfly and butterfly, between the Graeco-Roman butterfly and the post-Renaissance butterfly. It bridged the gap between one civilization and another. Toynbee thought he could see equal examples elsewhere in the history of civilizations, that conformed to the same pattern—Islam, a chrysalis between the ancient civilization of Israel and Iran and the modern Islamic civilization of the Near and Middle East; Hinduism, bridging a gap in the history of civilization in India between the modern Hindu culture and the ancient culture of the Aryans; and the Mahayana form of Buddhism, which now prevails in the Far East, spanning the modern history of the Far East and the history of ancient China. These high religions preserved secular civilization, Toynbee says!
Even “rudimentary” religions served the same purpose. The worship of Tammuz and Ishtar, of Adonis and Astarte, of Attis and Cybele, of Osiris and Isis—declared rudimentary because they are “close to the nature-worship of the Earth and her fruits”—have in every case played the historical role of filling a gap where there was a break in the continuity of secular civilization.
So, it is a law of social history? Toynbee has studied 27 major civilizations in history so has the material available to decide. It is not a law! Behind the Graeco-Roman civilization was a Minoan civilization, but between it and the Graeco-Roman no higher religion spans the gap. Behind the ancient civilization of Aryan India are vestiges of a still more ancient pre-Aryan civilization in the Indus Valley, but here again no higher religion bridges the two. Nor is there any sign of the same phenomenon of religion saving secular civilzation in the New World. Toynbee’s rule applies only to recent history, or rather, it has happened in some prominent examples of mega-religions in the last few millennia, but otherwise it never happened. Could it be simply that mega-religions are less likely to die out because they are so widespread?
Toynbee seems to want us to think that, in recent centuries at least, the history of secular civilzation is governed by the history of religion:
Successive rises and falls of civilizations may be subsidiary to the growth of religion.
Toynbee commences to leave the land of the sane and enter the kingdom of God—the rise and fall of civilizations are “stepping-stones to higher things on the religious plane.” He has in fact adopted the Judaeo-Christian interpretation of history as God’s will, actually citing:
Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.Hebrews 12:6
This has to be an obscenity. Toynbee, speaking during a monstrous war, sees merit in the cruel deaths of millions because God loves us and thinks it is good for us! It helps our souls rise to higher things! And this man is challenging Gibbon for seeing Christianity as itself the main barbarism ever invented by humanity.
He reverts also to the pathetic ramblings of Justin of Samaria in claiming that the flowering of Christianity was foreshadowed in the mythical passions of Tammuz and Adonis and Attis and Osiris, and indeed the Suffering Servant of Isaiah. Toynbee has spent a lifetime studying ancient and modern civilizations and has not progressed a millimetre. In A Study of History, he argued that civilizations experience a spiritual schism as they decay. With spirituality dying for everyone else in the dying civilization, some prophet, typified by Abraham, Moses, the Jewish Prophets, and Christ, preserve it for posterity! By doing so these remarkable men spawn a new civilization.
Thus the call of Abraham followed the materialism of the Babylonians in building the Tower of Babel. The exodus of Moses saved God’s chosen people from the corruption of Egypt. The prophets of the Jews preached repentance from the decadent state they adopted in the Promised Land. The mission of Christ, as the Hellenized world collapsed, was the personal intervention of God to carry the covenant He had made with Israel to the rest of humanity He had, until then, considered vermin. Toynbee believed all the ancient myths of the bible, showing that with decades of comfortable living and plenty of time to study he has never doubted their historicity once, or rather he does in a way that simultaneously accepts them as real enough for him to extend his theory back to Sumer:
I do not know whether Moses and Abraham are historical characters, but I think it can be taken as certain that they represent historical stages of religious experience and Moses’ forefather and forerunner Abraham received his enlightenment and his promise at the dissolution, in the nineteenth or eighteenth century before Christ, of the ancient civilization of Sumer and Akkad—the earliest case, known to us, of a civilization going to ruin.
How can such a weaselly character have received such adulation? None of these prophets were what they seem, if they lived at all, or even stood for a type. They were all inventions with the very aim of labelling people as wicked but savable by good behaviour. They were inventions of the then rulers, the Persian shahs, to keep people lawful! Toynbee cannot get that far because his own religion stands in the way:
These men of sorrows were precursors of Christ; and the sufferings through which they won their enlightenment were Stations of the Cross in anticipation of the Crucifixion. That is, no doubt, a very old idea, but it is also an ever new one.
It is a new one only in the sense that people like Toynbee keep on saying it. This address must have been given from a pulpit not from a lectern.
Civilizations, the Handmaids of Religion?
Toynbee wants to see religion rising monotonically throughout history while civilization loops through cycles of suffering so that God knows we are good. “Civilizations are the handmaids of religion,” or the midwives perhaps: “Civilizations will have fulfilled their function when once they have brought a mature higher religion to birth.”
Toynbee is speaking to us when Hitler and Stalin seemed to be in alliance and everyone waited to see whether Hitler would turn east or west. Standing against these totalitarian countries were the western democracies, mostly already subdued, or not yet openly committed. What does Toynbee, the liberal professor say in these circumstances?
Democracy… has certainly been half emptied of meaning by being divorced from its Christian context and secularized.
The solution, he suggests, is that we should believe Christianity as well as practice it, because practice without belief is empty. It is a remarkable thing that these preachers, lay or professional, can never see fault in the great religion itself. The fault is always that we do not have enough of it in some respect, and Toynbee, faced with the fact that we had as much as humanity could bear of this mostrosity for a thousand years, wants to persuade us that its faults lay back in Greek times, not in more recent ones. It is like the politicians who always blame the previous government of the opposition for their own present administration’s failings. But here Toynbee wants to put it on the grand scale he is used to in his studies. Christianity is not barbaric, it merely suffered from the failings of the previous government, a thousand years before!
For Toynbee, the modern world is a vain repetition of the failed Romano-Greek world. It is not new at all. Great thinkers had nothing to do with extracting us from the mire of theological claptrap that western human beings had been caught in for a millennium. Democracy and science and modern scientific achievements should not be admired. All of it is a “meaningless repetition of something that the Greeks and Romans did before us.” What is important is still the Crucifixion and its spiritual consequences. Why? Because on a cosmic timescale it is a very recent event. Toynbee does not doubt that it was indeed an event that once happened, but wants us to forget that Jesus was not thinking on the timescale of the stars but in decades at the most.
Toynbee continues with his aim of persuading us that history proves that Christianity is eternal. Religion is not subservient to civilization. The truth is the other way round. Civilization is the means and religion is the end. So, a civilization may break down and break up, but the replacement of one higher religion by another will not be a necessary consequence. If our secular Western civilization perishes, Christianity will endure and grow in wisdom and stature as the result of a fresh experience of secular catastrophe. The fact that the western civilization is world wide will help Christianity to spread even further, thus achieving its historical destiny as he sees it—Christianity as the spiritual heir of all religions and the Christian Church as the social heir of all others. Quite what Toynbee means by “Church,” in the singular, when there are thousands of them all opposed to something in the others, is a mystery.
The Kingdom of Heaven, the Culmination?
Ultimately, Toynbee rejects that the “kingdom of heaven” will be the “culmination” of the evolution of life “on earth,” though it seems as though that would be the logical consequence of his risings and fallings of civilizations. One reason is that human personality has an innate capacity for evil as well as for good, so, evil, as well as of good, will be born into the world afresh with every child, and will never be wholly ruled out as long as that child remains alive. Toynbee is telling us that human beings carry God’s curse of original sin, so we have to put up with it, even within the Church.
The Church itself consists of the sacrifice of the mass and the hierarchy, and here Toynbee at least uses his authority to say what many Christians refuse to accept, that the mass is a latter-day adaptation of the “worship of the fertility of the earth and her fruits.” The hierarchy of the Church is simply the hierarchy of the Roman imperial civil service, that the Church self-consciously imitated as part of its scheme to achieve state power. Even supposing the Church ever won world wide acceptance, God would still be applying his rule of “chastening” and “scourging” those he “received” so we will be back in the situation of the Dark Ages, because the aim of the Church is to do God’s will and when there is “chastening” and “scourging” to be done for God, then the Church will do it! Nevertheless, “the victorious Church Militant on Earth will be a province of the Kingdom of God,” so we had better all watch out.
Toynbee finishes his sermon talking about progress. If the higher religions are rising monotonically, unlike civilizations, what evidence of it is there? On a few occasions, Toynbee does enlighten us, and here he does by telling us that “spirit” is to be understood as “personality.” Doubtless, being a Greek scholar, he is reading soul as psyche. Spiritual progress is therefore individual progress. Yet the Christian understands as individual progress, the selfish concept of personal salvation, so spiritual progress would seem to be anti-social, being selfish. Toynbee asks: “Are spiritual and social values antithetical and inimical to each other?”
To answer this Toynbee again embarks on a sea of speculative nonsense, aimed purely at putting a scholarly gloss on Christian drivel. Seemingly forgetting that he has defined spirit as personality he now tells us that personality is spirit, and spirit implies spiritual relationships. Understand? God is spirit and seeking God is a social act. Since Christ is God, we must all sacrifice ourselves for our fellow humans. Toynbee has now returned to the belief of the original Christian martyrs, some of whom were determined to be eaten by lions in the sure faith that that was what God wanted them to do. For the same reason modern Moslems blow themselves up with Semtex.
Of course, he dilutes the word “sacrifice” to mean “service” to other humans, to make his arguments applicable—a typical Christian ploy. Utterly ignoring Christian precedent, something Toynbee is happy to blame on to the Greeks, Toynbee tells us “the spiritual progress of individual souls in this life will bring with it much more social progress than could be attained in any other way.” Why then did it not begin sooner, when the Church had social control?
End of the World
The answer is that unredeemed human nature cannot change while human life on Earth goes on. Toynbee has here again returned to the beliefs of the earliest gentile Christians. If he is the example of the modern Christian, then Christian ideas have not changed in 2000 years. He awaits the end of the world, just as Roman Christians did, the very reason why the Roman authorities “chastised” and “scourged” them thus obeying God’s will. He can say:
The establishment of the best possible human society in this world, in the Christian belief, is not the true purpose, though it is an almost certain by-product of a pursuit of the true purpose.
How is it possible for Toynbee to argue the case that Christianity is socially progressive but that Christians like him can hardly wait for the world to end? Apparently, it is all a question of selfish individual salvation after all. That is all that spiritual progress is.
Increasing spiritual opportunity for souls in their passages through life on Earth, [offers] assuredly an inexhaustible possibility of progress in this world.
Toynbee tells us that the “possibilities, provided by God, of learning through suffering in this world have always afforded a sufficient means of salvation to every soul that has made the best of the spiritual opportunity offered to it here, however small that opportunity may have been. ”
That poses another question for him to answer.
If men on Earth have not had to wait for the advent of the higher religions, culminating in Christianity, in order to qualify, in their life on Earth, for eventually attaining, after death, the state of eternal felicity in the other world, then what difference has the advent on Earth of the higher religions, and of Christianity itself, really made?
His answer is that the illumination of the soul by the higher religions “culminating” in Christianity is more intense than the earlier form of illumination. So, in the end, God is unjust anyway, despite this long sermon of Toynbee’s. He tells us “a Pagan soul, no less than a Christian soul, has ultimate salvation within its reach” but the Christian soul gets more irradiation. At least it will not be as bad as a bundle of lighted faggots around your feet, or even the torments of Toynbee’s sermonizing.
