THE LEGACY OF ARNOLD TOYNBEE:

...If our world does become increasingly more unified, Toynbee will be heralded for his advocacy of ecumenicalism...

...Only through spirituality and univer-salism can mankind preserve itself and the individual fulfill himself-this is the essence of Toynbee's thought...

...Toynbee found the origins of the West's spiritual crisis in the disintegration of medieval religious unity and the transformation of the West from a Christian into a post-Christian civilization...

...In an age that has seen reason and optimism soar and collapse Toynbee raised the essential questions...

...In a secular age he saw religion as the principal goal of life and the essential concern of the historian...

...a witness to the time of our life and its problems, and as such it will remain of enduring interest to all future historians...

...His vision of a union sacree -a brotherhood of man knit together by the fatherhood of God-contains no small amount of biblical utopianism...

...Toynbee wanted to rescue personality and feelings from reason, which, in its relentless drive to make everything intelligible, degenerates into soulless mechanism, materialism and technocracy...

...It is an axiom of Toynbee's thought that if man is deprived of higher religions that stress love and compassion, he will embrace lower religions that promote conflict and distort personality...

...Such an orientation had to arouse strong reactions...

...Like St...

...Some critics with unrestrained fury accused Toynbee of conceiving himself as a messiah and of writing not history but a bible or at least a modern-day version of the City of God, a twentieth-century warning to sinful secularists...

...For both Augustine and Toynbee humanist rationalism unto itself is insufficient...

...marvin perry teaches in the history department of Baruch College of the City University of New York...

...Perhaps the ultimate significance of Toynbee is that he forces us to confront the problem of reason...

...Shattered by the senseless slaughter of World War I, Toynbee became disillusioned with the forces of Western civilization hitherto considered progressive-liberalism, secularism, technology, and above all, nationalism...

...Western man's "abandonment of his allegiance to a saving higher religion in order to go a whoring after a mundane civilization," he concluded, "wore the aspect of a second Fall...

...In an era that strives for knowledge according to standards set by science, much of Toynbee's history was rooted in poetry and prophecy...

...But unlike Thomas, Toynbee was a pluralist who held that all the higher religions are partial relevations of God's truth...

...Even if one regards Toynbee's theodicy as an unsatisfactory approach to interpreting the past, indeed as a regression to myth, and rejects his call for a return to God as a futile way of coping with the maladies that have afflicted the West in the twentieth century, he still remains an historian of stature...

...Because liberalism had dispensed with Christian love and the Christian precept that man's liberty comes from God's grace, said Toynbee, it was too selfish and competitive to preserve the sacro-sanctity of human personality...

...For both Toynbee and the prophets history is filled with spiritual meaning: it is the arena in which man's will clashes with God's commands...

...Like Thomas Aquinas, Toynbee sought a creative synthesis between the achievements of Athens and Jerusalem...

...Mankind must become one family or destroy itself," he insisted...

...I think not...

...Devoid of its Christian soul, he said, the modern West was a revival of Hellenism, a secular civilization that broke down because it overvalued man's creations...

...Although he disclaimed the role of prophet, like the ancient Hebrew prophets, Toynbee, in a time of social distress and moral confusion, exhorted man to find certainty in God's truth...

...He feared that the West showed signs of being caught in the same rhythm of breakdown and disintegration that had ruined other civilizations...

...Because science can reduce man to a cipher in a mechanized universe, he asserted, it cannot satisfy man's elemental need to preserve and express his personality...

...Like them he warned that when man forgets God and worships idols he brings disaster upon himself and the social order...

...While scholars in the various disciplines have been carving out still narrower areas of specialization, Toynbee chose to write a universal history...

...Conceived at a time when Western civilization seemed near col-'apse, the Study is, as Hans Kohn observed, "a tract for our own age and its predicament...

...Critics ridiculed as metahistory Toynbee's religious world-view, attacked him for using myths and poetry as historical proofs, and denounced his central idea that the West suffered a moral failure when it abandoned its Christian heritage for secularism...

...Consequently Toynbee regarded the vocation of the historian as "ultimately a quest for the vision of God at work in history...

...For these reasons one historian concluded that A Study of History will "be only a curiosity in 20 or 30 years...

...like St...

...The deification of the parochial community at the expense of mankind, he wrote, is the "political counterpart of polytheistic idolatry-the monstrous 'association' of false gods with God...

...To be effective, he held, liberal humanism must draw inspiration from religious prophets who have taught the presence of God, the dignity of man, the unity of humanity and communion with Absolute Reality as the true purpose of life...

...The world wars and totalitarianism he regarded as the terrible fulfillment of this apostasy from Christianity...

...With the curiosity and cosmopolitanism of a Polybius he studied all the civilizations of the world living and dead, an investigation that led him to champion a world-state...

...No other historian in our century has thought so spaciously about the past, has transcended the analytical approach of the specialist to give such broad meaning to the human experience...

...Augustine who wrote in the twilight of Graeco-Roman rationalism, Toynbee, intensely aware of the fragility of his own civilization, insisted that reason without the guidance of spiritual values will fail man...

...For Toynbee the most pernicious form of idol worship engaged in by modern man has been nationalism, the glorification of the nation state...

...This is achieved through poetry, art, music, and above all, through religion...

...For this reason alone, even if we reject his conclusions, his work is worthy of study and respect.dy and respect...

...LEGACY OF ARNOLD TOYNBEE MARVIN PERRY In many ways the thought of Arnold Toynbee, who died on Oct...

...If we reject the prophetic ideals of higher religions, warned Toynbee, we shall continue to pursue false gods whose power to wreck civilization has been often demonstrated...

...In an age of intellectual fragmentation he suggested a comprehensive meaning behind the facts of history...

...Who could deny his insight that man's religious sentiments have not been eradicated but have been rerouted into the cult of the state, the cult of the race, the cult of the leader, the cult of the party, the cult of the machine...

...because the rationalism of the Enlightenment was spiritually empty, it could not contain the brutal and irrational side of human nature which manifests itself in wars between nations and struggles between classes...

...Paul, Toynbee held that the oneness of God necessitates the unity of mankind...