Toynbee's Metaphysics
FITCH, ROBERT E.
WRITERS and WRITING Toynbee's Metaphysics An Historian's Approach to Religion. By Arnold Toynbee. Oxford. 317 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch Dean, Pacific School of Religion Early in...
...It is also expressed in the doctrine of the Christ as God's voluntary acceptance of human suffering in order to redeem man...
...There are radical differences between the Buddhaic conception of the self and the Hebrew-Christian regard for the person, between the intermediate pessimism of Christianity and the ultimate pessimism of Buddhism, between the socially defeatist pity and compassion of Buddhism and the creative, active and redemptive love of Christianity...
...In this conclusion, some readers will feel that Toynbee has turned too neat a trick...
...All that Toynbee cares for is the essence of religion or its soul...
...The essential sin is self-centeredness...
...Whether this diminishes or augments the Original Sin of the historian is an interesting question...
...It may be scandalous to Greek and to Hindu thought that there can be anything final and unique in history...
...Schopenhauer understood this very well if Toynbee does not...
...If it does, then the historian's business is not to obliterate the fact in favor of his metaphysical prejudice...
...Among these philosophers, it is already a commonplace that the powerful and challenging religions of the modern world have been cults of the secular...
...nor does it occur to him to inquire into the interesting circumstance that Judaism, alone of all the great living religions, has managed its survival and enhanced its vitality without ever possessing a preponderance of political, military and economic power...
...Liberalism, Christianity, Islam, and their parent Judaism itself . . . and the Buddhaic group of philosophies and religions?post-Buddhaic Hinduism, the Maha-yana, and the Hinayana...
...Also there is a very real sense in which the Jews were a religiously "chosen people," just as the Greeks were "chosen" to give us philosophy and Britain was "chosen" to give us political democracy...
...a form of Man-worship that has been found to be bad religion by the general experience of Mankind...
...In any case, the business of the historian is not to deny these unique and final qualities, but to define precisely the point at which they exist and the way in which they occur...
...but to reconstruct his metaphysics so as to account for the fact...
...This book, however, must be put down as a disappointing and often a dull performance...
...Apparently the historian has a technique for partially transcending Sin through his ability to get out of himself and his own culture as he surveys other civilizations...
...He sees Judaism barely maintaining itself by the meticulous observance of an "archaic ritual law" with an attention to formalities that is "spiritually sterilizing...
...This is notable in his treatment of Judaism, the current vigor of which seems to have missed him entirely...
...For this reason Toynbee speaks of the present as though it were already past and refers to the year 1956 as though it belonged to a distant epoch...
...Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch Dean, Pacific School of Religion Early in this book, Toynbee makes one of those assertions with which he likes to jolt our conventional judgments...
...Nor is there any more presumption in acknowledging the one election in history rather than the other...
...The self-centeredness which is the heart of Original Sin accounts for the fact of man's suffering, Toynbee says...
...The important question is whether, in point of fact, history does or does not exhibit the unique and the final...
...And, in spite of its title, it will strike many persons as being not so much the record of an historian's approach to religion as the elucidation of a metaphysician's approach both to religion and to history...
...This is expressed in the Mahayana ideal of the bodhisatlva, who puts off the time of his own salvation in order to help others...
...Again, it is Toynbee's passion for the universal that makes him impatient of the "accretions" that develop with the manifestations of Absolute Reality in space and time...
...Man suffers because he seeks to be the center of his universe, but cannot be so...
...Surely the professional historian, of all people, is the one whose regard for fact should be stronger than his allegiance to metaphysical assumptions...
...Among these "anachronistic or exotic nonessentials" to a greater or lesser degree are religious institutions, rituals, taboos, myths, theologies and social conventions...
...Meanwhile, in the main body of the book, he performs as an historian a service that will be appreciated by many philosophers of religion...
...It is Toyn-bee's intention to tell us how to go about closing this chasm...
...But the Greek and the Hindu could never envisage history as am -thing more than an inherently meaningless pattern of eternal recurrence...
...Arnold Toynbee already has a well-established reputation as one of the most weird, wonderful, comprehensive, fertile and provocative minds in our generation...
...He treats of the idolization of the parochial community, the ecumenical community, the nation-state, the ecumenical state, the self-sufficient philosopher, technology...
...What is most peculiar about Toyn-bee's perspective, bowever, is his distaste for the unique and the final...
...The greatest of them teach the voluntary acceptance of suffering as an opportunity for active service to men...
...So the Judaic (in its Christian form) and the Buddhaic come together, and we have closed the chasm...
...Because of his contempt for the unique, he does not ask in what sense Judaism is the parent—as he himself declares—of other faiths...
...Moreover, the resurgent vitality of Buddhism today lies with the Hinayana not the Mahayana branch...
...He tells us that the greatest cultural gulf in our time is not between Liberalism and Communism, but "the chasm between the whole Judaic group of ideologies and religions ?Communism...
...Toynbee presents these cults at length as various phases of man-worship...
...There is a very real sense in which Shakespeare has uniqueness and finality in poetry and in the drama...
...It is an expression of "collective self-worship...
...It is true that the unique and the final do not belong to science, but it does not follow that they cannot be found in religion, literature and the arts...
...However, the secular cults accentuate rather than curtail the strong and formidable Original Sin which Toynbee believes to be endemic in human nature...
...All the great religions acknowledge this situation...
...Nor is he haunted by any Hebrew-Christian prejudice that the soul should be accompanied by a body, and that body and soul are united in a common being...
Vol. 39 • October 1956 • No. 44
