The Challenge

That implacable educator, History, at last assigned a lesson that even the duller members of the class could grasp. Britain, its Government had announced, no longer possessed the resources to continue its comparatively puny military aid to Greece. India had all but left the Empire. Burma and Malaya were going. South Africa was tugging at the tether. In the citadel itself were hunger, cold and socialism.

History was moving with 20th Century acceleration. Americans, who between boyhood and manhood had seen the collapse of four mighty states (the Russian and Austrian empires, Germany and France), heard the news almost with awe. For they grasped the fact that this was no merely political or military crisis; it was a crisis in Western civilization itself. It meant that the U.S. must take over from Britain the job of trying to solve the problem of contemporary history. The U.S. must, in Britain's place, consciously become what she had been, in reluctant fact, since the beginning of World War II: the champion of the remnant of Christian civilization against the forces that threatened it.

But most Americans had no more idea that there is a problem of history than that there is a problem of evil. And they had been so busy creating the world's first great technology that they had little more notion than the Indians they had supplanted what a civilization is or what to do with one.

The Historian. The one man in the world probably best equipped to tell them was in the U.S. last week. Professor Arnold Joseph Toynbee, cultural legate from a Britain in crisis to a U.S. at the crossroads, was delivering six lectures ("Encounters between Civilizations") to the history-haunted young women of Bryn Mawr College. So many students and visitors (one woman drove from Minneapolis to hear Toynbee) crammed the 1,000-seat lecture hall that people had to be turned away.

But outside of intellectual circles, Professor Toynbee's name was known to few Americans. Even fewer had read his monumental work in progress, modestly titled A Study of History,/--- of which six volumes (with a possible three more to come) have appeared at intervals since 1934. Yet A Study of History was the most provocative work of historical theory written in England since Karl Marx's Capital.

For Professor Toynbee, while avoiding the sins that beset Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West--"baffling immensity and enigmatic gloom"--had met the German philosopher's requirement for the writing of 20th Century history: Toynbee had found history Ptolemaic and left it Copernican. He had found historical thinking nation-centered, as before Copernicus astronomical thinking had been geocentric. The nation (Greece, Rome, Japan, the U.S.) was the common unit of history. Toynbee believed that not nations but civilizations were the "intelligible fields of study."

If Toynbee's repudiation of the nation as history's central fact was Copernican, it also had an Einsteinian effect. For the relations of civilizations could not be investigated without introducing a new space-time factor into the study of history. Where, before, there had been nations, dramatizing their buzzing brevity upon the linear scale of history, there were, from Toynbee's vantage point, vertical progressions of human effort. Where there had been a plane, there was now chasmic depth, the all but unimaginable tract of time.

Toynbee had introduced into the theory of history two other ideas of far-reaching consequence:

1) To the theory of Spengler (whom Toynbee, nevertheless, calls "a man of genius") that civilizations are tragic organisms, growing inexorably toward predetermined dooms, Toynbee advanced a dryly lucid counter-proposition: civilizations are not things-in-themselves, but simply the relations that exist between men living in a given society at a given moment of history.

2) He shattered the frozen patterns of historical determinism and materialism by again asserting God as an active force in history. His assertion, implicit throughout the 3,488 pages of A Study of History, implied another: the goal of history, however dimly sensed in human terms, is the Kingdom of God. That aspiration redeems history from being a futile tragedy of blood.

Hence the saying of Toynbee admirers that the writing of history must be dated B.T. and A.T.--Before Toynbee and After Toynbee.

The Man. Arnold Toynbee was born (1889) in London toward the end of one of the world's rare Golden Ages (the Victorian).

His family tree was an exfoliation of the eager 19th Century British mind. His uncle, Arnold Toynbee, economist, author of The Industrial Revolution, and possessor of a restless social conscience, died when he was only 31. But he so impressed his contemporaries that they named Toynbee Hall, first of London's East End social settlements, in his honor. Toynbee's father was a social worker. Toynbee's mother was one of the first British women to receive a college degree.* The Golden Age shed its westering light over young Toynbee in the guise of a thorough classical training at Balliol, the most intellectual of Oxford's colleges.

But all men, including the historian, are a part of history. Europe's Iron Age, closing over Toynbee while he was studying at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, taught him that history is also the present. It was the eve of the Balkan wars. In dingy Greek cafes, Toynbee heard something he had never heard at Balliol--discussion of the foreign policy of Sir Edward Grey.

In Greece, he had been in the grave of one dead civilization--the Hellenic. Then he went on a walking trip in Crete (walking is still Toynbee's chief recreation) through an even more cryptic graveyard. Minoan civilization is vivacious and inscrutable, and, with its underground vaults, its Minotaur legend, its statues of snake goddesses and bullfighting maidens, slightly sinister. What disaster overwhelmed by fire some 1.400 years B.C. the mighty palace of Cnossos? No one knows, for the traces of the flames, still visible upon the stones, are like the Cretan inscriptions--indecipherable. But the doom of this first great thalassocracy (sea power) haunts men's minds like a shriek arrested through the centuries. It haunted Toynbee. Then one day he came upon the ruins of another thalassocracy--a Venetian doge's palace. For Venice had once held the gorgeous East in fee largely through its military occupation of the island of Crete.

The Thalassocrat. There dawned upon the history-sensitive mind of young Toynbee that, as a citizen of the world's No. 1 naval power, he too was a thalassocrat. There was borne in upon him, if not the outlines of his grand design, a presentiment that, in historic time, these three thalassocracies (Crete, Venice, Britain) had more in common than the members of the Triple Entente, were more contemporary than King and Kaiser. And he felt a foreboding of their common fate.

But politics is the present tense of history. The future theoretician of civilizations served his apprenticeship to practical politics by editing a Government pamphlet for Lord Bryce and (during World War I) by working in various intelligence sections of the Foreign Office. (Toynbee speaks five languages; thinks almost as readily in classic Greek as in English.) Then, in 1918, Hindenburg's dinosauric war machine threatened to crush the British drive in France. The Field Marshal failed to break through, but he gave the genesis of A Study of History a new turn. Feverishly in those days Toynbee read and reread Thucydides, finding, as others have found since, that the history of The Peloponnesian War threw more light than any contemporary commentary on the struggles of our times.

At close range, Toynbee had watched the waging of war. As an adviser to the British delegation at the Versailles peace conference,* he finished his education in the history of his own time by watching the powers wage peace. He had seen a war, which cost 85 million dead and settled almost nothing, end in a peace which settled little but the inevitability of another war. Toynbee rounded out his knowledge of the modern world by serving as a newspaper correspondent in the Turko-Greek War and by making a trip to India, Japan and China, returning through Siberia and Russia. He also made several trips to the U.S.

In 1922, Toynbee jotted down, on half a sheet of writing paper, his plan for A Study of History. He estimated calmly that the project would run to some two million words and that he might, the vicissitudes of civilization permitting, finish it in his old age. Meanwhile, he earned a living as director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and research professor of international history at the University of London.

The Cliffhangers. A Study of History is dominated by an image of genius. The view is of the chasm of precipitous time. On its sheer rock walls, as the eye of the spectator adjusts itself to the somber light of human history, are seen the bodies of climbers. Some, prone and inert, lie on the ledges to which they have hurtled to death. Some dangle, arrested, over the void as they cling by their fingernails to cliffs too steep for their exhausted strength to scale. Above these, a few still strain upward in a convulsive effort to attain a height hidden from them as well as from the spectator.

These agonists are the personifications of the human societies we call civilizations, in their upward impulse from the pit of primitive times. Downward, beyond the extreme range of vision, plunges a depth measured by 300,000 unenlightened years --the time required for the lowest climber to reach, from primitive to civilized man, the lowest visible ledge. The others have been climbing, at one stage or another, for the 6,000 years of discernible history.

Of the myriads who may have attempted the ascent, Professor Toynbee distinguishes 26 civilizations. Of these there are only five active survivors: 1) Western civilization (Western Europe, the British Commonwealth, the U.S., Latin America); 2) Orthodox Christian civilization (Russia and the Orthodox sections of southeastern Europe); 3) Islamic civilization; 4) Hindu civilization; 5) Far Eastern civilization (China, Korea, Japan). Of these five, four show signs of imminent exhaustion, and the fifth, Western civilization, is breathing heavily.

Those dangling, immobile, from the cliffs are the Eskimos, the Polynesians, the Nomads--the arrested civilizations. Among the debris on the ledges are the bodies of the Sumeric, Babylonic, Egyptiac, Hellenic, Mexic and eleven other extinct societies. This is the image; and its evocation of the "infinitely multiple ordeal of man" is made bearable by Professor Toynbee's unifying insistence: history is not predetermined. Man may still choose to climb or not to climb.

How, then, did these climbers come to be upon the cliffs at all? Why do these men suffer this millennial death by inches? Toynbee's answer to the problem of causation is illumined by a daring dialectic. "The play," he says, "opens with a perfect state of Yin [the Sinic term for the state of perfect passivity opposed to which is Yang, the state of ordeal and creativity]."

God, in short, is bound to passivity by the perfection of what He has created. Further progress is impossible. Says Toynbee: ". . . The impulse or motive which makes a perfect Yin-state pass over into a new Yang-activity comes from an intrusion of the Devil into the universe of God. . . .

"In the language of mythology, when one of God's creatures is tempted by the Devil, God Himself is thereby given the opportunity to recreate the World. By the stroke of the Adversary's trident, all the fountains of the great deep are broken up. The Devil's intervention has accomplished that transition from Yin [passivity] to Yang [creativity] . . . for which God has been yearning ever since His Yin-state became complete, but which it was impossible for God to accomplish by Himself, out of His own perfection. And the Devil has done more for God than this; for, when once Yin has passed over into Yang, not the Devil himself can prevent God from completing His fresh act of creation by passing over again from Yang to Yin on a higher level. . . . Thus the Devil is bound to lose the wager, not because he has been cheated by God, but because he has overreached himself."

In this sense, the answer to the problem of history is the answer to the problem of evil. This is the philosophic crux of that act of creation which in the birth of civilizations Toynbee calls Challenge and Response.

The Theory. Toynbee's theory of history is a dialectic. That is, it reports the challenge of something (in this case, communities of men) by an exterior force. If the response to the initial challenge is successful, the success involves new challenges, new responses. If the new responses are not successful, the community breaks down, thereby liberating new creative forces--but on a higher plane, which has been reached by the society during the long developmental ordeal of responding to its challenges.

No attempt to simplify Toynbee's theory can communicate the scope of his historic purpose, the flexibility (amounting to wariness) of his cautious, scholarly mind, the grasp of his erudition, the profusion of historical comparison, contrast, allusion and quiet humor with which he weaves and vivifies his argument. Nevertheless, even grossly simplified, his main design, as on the reverse of a great tapestry, comes through.

Toynbee begins his investigation far down in the pit of history, when the Ice Age ground Europe beneath a creeping glacier. The plains of North Africa and the Middle East (now deserts) were then fertile, supporting a thick population of hunters and their prey--aurochs, oryx, etc. Among these hunters lived the progenitors of one of those broken bodies on the rock ledges of time--the Egyptiac civilization. Later, the ice retreated. The plains turned into deserts. The game fled. The hunters, too, had to retreat.

Some of them, says Toynbee, migrated to the moist Sudan, where their descendants probably survive as the primitive tribes of Shilluk and Dinka. But others, responding to the challenge of desiccation, resolved to change their lives completely. The valley of the Nile was then an all but inaccessible jungle of rank reeds, the lair of hippopotamuses and crocodiles. To live at all under such conditions required an effort beyond any that such men had ever made. Through the centuries, they drained the swamps, felled the reeds, diked the Nile, laid out fields. This response, Toynbee believes, was the genesis of Egyptian civilization--a response so powerful that its career, some 4,000 years, outlasted that of any civilization known to man.

Sumeric civilization was a similar response to a similar challenge. But not all challenges are the same. Minoan and Hellenic civilizations were responses to the challenge of the sea. Mayan civilization was a response to the challenge of the exuberant tropical forests.

Toynbee's title for one of his chapters on challenge and response is three Greek words which mean: "The beautiful is difficult." But some challenges are too difficult. That is the meaning of those bodies dangling over space from the rock wall. For the Eskimos, the challenge of Arctic life left no energy for further change. The Polynesians failed because they responded to the challenge of the sea with no instrument better than a canoe. The energy of the Nomads was consumed in providing pasture for their herds.

Two ideas have dominated historical thinking in our time: Environment and Race. Race is not the decisive factor, says Toynbee, for men of many races have successfully met their challenges in different ways. It is not environment that makes societies of men what they are. It is the response men make to challenges that determines what they may be.

The Creative Minority. For not all challenges are environmental. There are human challenges. These occur when a civilization is faced with death and a section of the old society secedes from, the morbid body to help form a new civilization. Young civilizations emerge vigorous from the old. But, like men, their very energy bears within itself the seeds of its decay. This pathological progress is the drama of A Study of History.

Toynbee finds that the pathology repeats itself in somewhat similar forms in nearly all civilizations. At first, the civilization is led by "a creative minority." The masses, stimulated by the common challenge that has called the society into being, and by the creative leadership that has guided its response, follow without undue questioning. But response to a challenge calls forth a further challenge. Thus the challenge of overpopulation on a thin soil, to which the Athenians responded by taking to the sea as a commercial empire, called forth a new challenge resulting from Athens' new relations with its vassals and with Sparta.

Nor does successful response to one challenge presuppose success in response to the next. On the contrary, one success tends to make the responder self-satisfied. He comes to believe that the successful response to Challenge I is inevitably the successful response to Challenge II. (Usually it is not.) The elasticity of thought and effort, which is essential to successful response, is lost. The forms (government, culture, habit) in which the successful response has been made tend to freeze and impose themselves on the solution of the new challenge, for which they are wholly unsuited. The creative minority ceases to be creative.

The Universal State. At that point the internal proletariat ("a social element which is in but not of any given society") no longer follows the lead of the no longer creative minority which, threatened by the internal proletariat, becomes a dominant minority, ruling by force. A "time of troubles" ensues--a time of internal struggle and foreign wars, which more & more take the form of world wars. This period is terminated only when one nation, among its distracted fellows, delivers a knockout blow to all its rivals and becomes a "universal state." Rome, having knocked out Carthage and Macedonia, thus became the universal state of Hellenic civilization.

The Universal Church. Universal states, which look strong, are one of history's great illusions. In the past, Toynbee finds, a universal state is almost invariably a symptom that the civilization it represents is far gone in decline. This symptom is almost always accompanied by another: the emergence among the internal proletariat of a "universal church." Christianity was the universal church of Hellenic civilization, Islam of Syriac civilization, Mahayanian Buddhism of Sinic civilization.

The downfall of the universal state is characterized by "schism in the body social," which in turn reflects a "schism in the soul" of the mortally sick society. "The schism in the body social ... is an experience which is collective and therefore superficial. Its significance lies in its being the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual rift."

In this disintegrative process, the manners of the external proletariat become freer, those of the dominant minority more vulgar. But, as in Western civilization today, the equivalents of chewing gum and jazz become the common cultural bond of all classes. The division between proletariat and dominant minority tends to disappear as both are lapped and welded in one indiscriminate vulgarity.

Then the saviors appear. For the creative spark, though it has died out of the dominant minority, still exists in other men. "Such saviors will be of diverse types. . . . There will be would-be saviors of a disintegrating society who . . . will lead forlorn hopes in an endeavor to convert the rout into a fresh advance. These would-be saviors will be men of the dominant minority, and their common characteristic will be their ultimate failure to save. But there will be also saviors from a disintegrating society. . . . The savior-archaist [Gandhi and his spinning wheel] will try to reconstruct an imaginary past; the savior-futurist [Lenin] will attempt a leap into an imagined future. The savior who points the way to detachment will present himself as a philosopher taking cover behind the mask of a king; the savior who points the way to transfiguration will appear as a god incarnate in a man."

Only one transfiguring Savior has ever appeared in human history: Christ--the highest symbol of man's triumph through ordeal and death.

Western Civilization. If the topmost climber from the pit of the past could take time from his desperate effort to save himself by climbing higher, he would see below a paralyzing panorama of desolation. Must he join it too? How much longer can he keep going? What is the state of Western civilization? How firm is its grip upon the rocks which can kill more easily than they can help his ascent?

Our civilization, says Toynbee, is in its time of troubles (he dates them from the wars of the Reformation), perhaps toward the end of them. He finds bleak comfort in the thought that as yet no universal state has been imposed despite Napoleon's attempt, and two attempts by the Germans. But from the vast design and complex achievement of A Study of History one hopeful meaning stands out: not materialist but psychic factors are the decisive forces of history. The action takes place within the amphitheater of the world and the flux of time; the real drama unfolds within the mind of man. It is determined by his responses to the challenges of life; and since his capacity for response is infinitely varied, no civilization, including our own, is inexorably doomed. Under God, man, being the equal of his fate, is the measure of his own aspiration.

Says Toynbee (near the end of the one-volume edition): "This chapter itself was written on the eve of the outbreak of the General War of 1939-45 for readers who had already lived through the General War of 1914-18, and it was recast for republication on the morrow of the ending of the second of these two world wars within one lifetime by the invention and employment of a bomb in which a newly contrived release of atomic energy has been directed by man to the destruction of human life and works on an unprecedented scale.

"This swift succession of catastrophic events on a steeply mounting gradient inevitably inspires a dark doubt about our future, and this doubt threatens to undermine our faith and hope at a critical eleventh hour which calls for the utmost exertion of these saving spiritual faculties. Here is a challenge which we cannot evade, and our destiny depends on our response."

/- Oxford University Press; $40.50. Next week Oxford will publish a one-volume abridgment edited by D. C. Somervell and revised by Professor Toynbee. In its 589 pages, readers will find Toynbee's argument stripped to its essentials.

* In 1913, Toynbee allied himself with another British scholarly dynasty by marrying the daughter of Professor Gilbert Murray, famous classical scholar and the Swinburnian translator of Euripides and other Greek dramatists. They had three sons, of whom the best known is Philip Toynbee, novelist (School in Private, The Barricades) and reviewer for British magazines like Horizon, Contact and others. Shortly after World War II, Toynbee and Rosalind Murray were divorced. Toynbee then married Veronica Boulter, for many years his secretary and researcher.

* He served in a similar capacity at the recent Foreign Ministers conference in Paris.

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