Toynbee on Hellenism
AYRES, C. E.
Toynbee on Hellenism Hellenism: The History of a Civilization. By Arnold J. Toynbee. Oxford. 253 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by C. E. Ayres Professor of Economics, University of Texas ARNOLD TOYNBEE is...
...What, then, does it mean to say that humanism is man-worship...
...Here again it would seem to be the absence of sectarian fanaticism that wins Toynbee's praise...
...Reviewed by C. E. Ayres Professor of Economics, University of Texas ARNOLD TOYNBEE is immensely learned, a superb story-teller and a man with a mission...
...It is present in the closing sentences of the present book: "In the field of politics, a revival of the Hellenic worship of idolized local states is, today, the dominant religion of the West and of a rapidly Westernizing world...
...But this is not the book Gilbert Murray commissioned...
...This is Toynbee's original field...
...The Modern World must exorcise this demon resolutely if it is to save itself from meeting with its Hellenic predecessor's fate...
...and especially Christianity...
...Islam and other higher religions...
...But as the word "humanism" is commonly used, it refers to a world-view in which the element of worship is minimized, if not eliminated altogether...
...Thus, in the opening chapter of his new book, Toynbee identifies "man-worship" with "humanism," as he has done elsewhere...
...For that matter, what is idolization...
...And in that case why was the Augustan age the least inhumane, and why were the city-states so noble an experiment before they underwent "idolization...
...But in spite of the apparent, and perhaps misleading, lucidity of his exposition, I have never been able to sink my teeth in it before...
...But is it, indeed, our tragedy that they are only a thin, disguising veneer...
...It is the "worship" theme that seems to me obscure...
...and the present book, short as it is compared to his major works, gives full scope to all three of these endowments...
...Somewhere along the line Toynbee has become convinced that the trouble with Western civilization is that it has lost true religion and has succumbed to the fatal fascination of "man-worship...
...and I find it just as elusive as ever in the present volume...
...Isn't it precisely the superhumanization of human institutions, and in that case isn't its fatal flaw not its humanism but its supernaturalism...
...The tragedy of the Greek city-states is comprehensible enough, and so is the analogy of present-day nationalism...
...This enigma is further clouded by Toyn-bee's concept of idolization...
...But on this showing it is superstition—the deification of prevailing institutions—that spelled nemesis, not humanism as such...
...As a plea for world order, this is plain enough...
...This, on his showing, is what the Greeks did—it was their undoing, as it may be ours...
...It was so, seemingly, because Hellenism thereby injected into Judaism the concept of the incarnation, derived from the pagan creeds of the Near East and utterly repugnant to Judaism proper...
...As a narrative of the rise, the brilliant noon and the eventual setting of what we commonly call Greek civilization, it is a fascinating story...
...It seems that even after Hellenic civilization had begun to wither on the vine, in the fifth century B.C...
...But how...
...But as demonology it is decidedly opaque...
...This stormy meeting and eventual mating of Hellenism with Judaism gave birth to Christianity and Islam, and these two Judaic-Hellenic religions are professed by half the human race today...
...As he says in his preface, the present book was commissioned in 1914 by Gilbert Murray, and even before that he had plodded afoot over much of the homeland of the Hellenes...
...Leaving aside the much-criticized anthropomorphism of the Toynbee theory of "challenge and response," I can see a point to saying that the city-states, admirable as they were in their heyday, later stood in the way of an effective response to the challenge of world civilization, just as one might well say the same of modern nationalism...
...Seemingly, the early history of the Greek city-states was the golden age of Hellenic culture...
...Later, a process of idolization set in, and it was this that stood in the way of the univer-salization of Mediterranean civilization...
...Properly speaking, it is not a story at all...
...it enjoyed an Indian summer during the Augustan age, precisely because of the tolerant secularism of the Romans...
...For many years it has been one of the principal themes of his grand panorama of rising and falling civilizations...
...in consequence of which "this was the least inhumane age of Hellenic history...
...Granted all the balefulness of the modern cult of nationalism, is nationalism a menace because nations are human institutions, or because, as history so abundantly shows, all human institutions tend to become superhuman-ized...
...This opacity is thickened by Toynbee's treatment of the "higher religions...
...It is a sort of morality play: the drama of the inspiring rise and the heartbreaking fall of a great civilization...
...Just what Toynbee means by "man-worship" I have never been able to make out...
...It is only thinly disguised by a veneer of Christianity...
...Indeed, it is a true morality play in the sense that the real moral is for us...
...on this showing, are we to understand his pronouncement that "Hellenism's encounter with Judaism . . . was the most portentous event in Hellenic history...
...The tragic history of the Hellenic world shows that this Hellenic form of idolatry is a ghost of Hellenism that we harbor at our peril...
...The same confusion seems to cloud Toynbee's outlook on the contemporary scene...
...Thus, in returning to his first love, after surveying virtually all the civilizations of the world in A Study of History, he writes of the people, places and events of Hellenic history with all the intimacy of life-long acquaintance...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 32
