TOYNBEE AND CRITICS
Smith, Huston
Toynbee and Critics The Professor and the Fossil, by Maurice Samuel. Knopf. 268 pp. $4. An Historian's Approach to Religion, by Arnold Toynbee. Oxford. 318 pp. $5. Reviewed by Huston...
...poetry and religion with pro-founder truth as intuited by the subconscious...
...This phenomenon has opened the way for the re-erection of three earlier religious idols: the local state, the world-wide community, and the self-sufficient individual, the latter represented in the modern world by the technician instead of the philosopher...
...Part One of his latest book, titled "The Dawn of the Higher Religions," traces the shifting foci of man's ultimate concern from nature through the local community, the world-wide empire, and the self-sufficient individual, to the God of the higher religions—Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam...
...The rumblings of the critics had been rising for some time, but recently they touched exasperation...
...After 31 critics had worked him over as an historian and one had hit pay dirt on his treatment of the Jews, this autumn was hardly the most propitious moment for Toynbee to deliver his Olympian view of the way religion looks to an historian...
...It follows that the best way for a Western mind to get at life's most important truth is to strip the Christian gospel of its incongruous and outworn Greek scientific dress...
...Samuel's book is impassioned to the point of not being altogether fair to Toynbee even as Toynbee was not fair to the Jews...
...But the greatest critic will be he who comes forth with an alternative approach to religion that does more justice to the total range of man's historical knowledge...
...The Professor and the Fossil is Maurice Samuel's biting attack on Toynbee's treatment of the Jews, whose post-Christian history Toynbee has characterized as "a fossil relic of a dead civilization...
...Beginning with the displacement of Christianity by science and reason in modern Western civilization, Toynbee traces the worldwide spread of the secularized Western outlook...
...Samuel has little trouble showing that this fossil has been strangely alive...
...Science and philosophy deal with truth as known by the conscious mind...
...Toynbee believes with passion that "arch-sin is committed by the followers of a higher religion when they idolize their own religious institutions" by claiming for them unequivocal uniqueness, superiority, or finality...
...that time and again the work is at variance with the historical facts themselves, and that Toynbee deliberately ignores material that does not fit his thesis...
...Specifically he charges that quite apart from the accuracy of their facts or hypotheses, large portions of A Study of History are logically unintelligible...
...If so, as the higher religions become less isolated geographically and individuals adopt their faiths more by choice than by historical accident, "the appearance of the religious map may be expected to change from the pattern of a patchwork quilt to the texture of a piece of shot silk...
...If this is so, we are not justified in dismissing it because parts need correction...
...Toynbee sees man's spirit as consisting of conscious and subconscious domains...
...One—Toynbee and History: Critical Essays and Reviews, edited by Ashley Montagu (Sargent...
...resist the temptation to put it into an alternative scientific dress of a Western cut which will also be incongruous and ephemeral...
...It is possible that each of the surviving faiths may show an affinity with a major personality type...
...Reviewed by Huston Smith ARNOLD TOYNBEE, the histor-ian who for 35 years (with time out for the War) has been reviewing the rise and fall of civilizations, appears at last to have come upon his own "time of troubles...
...5)— gathered the judgment of 31 critics on A Study of History...
...The outlook for the future is that the ambiguous benefits of technology will cause the pendulum of man's foremost concern to return from science to religion with, however, more freedom and tolerance in this realm than the West has thus far known...
...It presented a single author closing in on Toynbee's treatment of a single topic...
...The most recurrent criticism was that he forced the evidence to fit his scheme...
...Two books focused the discontent...
...We will be justified in dismissing it when someone else does the same job better than he...
...385 pp...
...Because they call man from self-centeredness in both its individual and collective form, "it is evident already that the epiphany of these religions has been a decisive and significant new departure in History...
...Part Two considers "Religion in a Westernizing World...
...Most of the contributors felt "the dean of living historians" needed to be cut down to size...
...They found him not only out of his depth in the various areas of their own specialization, but guilty of vague definitions, dubious analogies, and slippery transitions from fact to hypothesis to myth to wishful thinking...
...But he does not stop there...
...The insights from these religions should avoid permanent entanglement with the philosophy or science of any age, for the latter become dated in a way prophecy does not...
...The second book was different in every respect save its critical tone...
...His close reading of Toynbee's treatment of the Jews leads him to question Toynbee's competence as an historian in general...
...Toynbee needed to be called on "the fossil," and he has been called with a thoroughness and force...
...The most adequate formulations of the latter are those of the higher religions, of which Toynbee finds Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism supreme because of their clearer insight into the value of love even when it leads through self-sacrifice into suffering...
...Many more books like Samuel's are needed to correct aspects of this view...
...and take the truth that it expresses in its non-scientific poetical sense...
...And yet it deserves a wide audience, for on the whole Samuel is right...
...Yet the kind of thing Toynbee has been trying to do—see the entirety of human history in perspective— very much needs doing...
...No appreciable amalgamation or displacement among the higher religions is within sight...
Vol. 20 • December 1956 • No. 12
