The Chariot to Heaven

When civilizations are flourishing, historians have noted, religion is generally at a low ebb; when civilizations disintegrate, religion thrives. Does this mean that religion is a fatal parasite on civilization? Yes, suggested 18th Century Historian Edward Gibbon.* No, says Historian Arnold J. Toynbee: on the contrary, civilizations are merely steppingstones in the progress of religion.

Toynbee's arresting thesis, first stated in a lecture delivered at Oxford in 1940, has now been distributed in pamphlet form/- by the Religious Book Club.

Historian Gibbon, says Toynbee, was not the only eminent scholar to view Christianity as a menace to civilization. Anthropologist Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough) regretted that the "unselfish ideal" of Greek and Roman society, which subordinated the individual to the welfare of the state, was superseded by the "selfish and immoral doctrine" of "Oriental religions which inculcated the communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only objects worth living for. . . ." The result, said Frazer, was "a general disintegration of the body politic."

To Frazer and Gibbon, Historian Toynbee replies: the Graeco-Roman civilization was not destroyed by Christianity but "decayed from inherent defects of its own." He also rejects the idea that religions act as bridges between civilizations. He sees it as just the reverse:

The Steppingstones. "If religion is a chariot, it looks as if the wheels on which it mounts towards Heaven may be the periodic downfalls of civilization on Earth. It looks as if the movement of civilization may be cyclic and recurrent, while the movement of religion may be on a single continuous upward line. The continuous upward movement of religion may be served and prompted by the cyclic movement of civilizations round the cycle of birth--death--birth. . . .

"If ... it is the historical function of civilizations to serve, by their downfalls, as steppingstones to a progressive process of the revelation of always deeper religious insight . . . civilizations will have fulfilled their function when once they have brought a mature higher religion to birth; and, on this showing, our own Western post-Christian secular civilization might at best be a superfluous repetition of the pre-Christian Graeco-Roman one, and at worst a pernicious backsliding from the path of spiritual progress. In our Western world of today, the worship of Leviathan--the self-worship of the tribe --is a religion to which all of us pay some measure of allegiance; and this tribal religion is, of course, sheer idolatry.

"Communism, which is another of our latter-day religions, is, I think, a leaf taken from the book of Christianity--a leaf torn out and misread. Democracy is another leaf from the book of Christianity, which has also, I fear, been torn out and, while perhaps not misread, has certainly been half emptied of meaning by being divorced from its Christian context and secularized; and we have obviously ... been living on spiritual capital, I mean clinging to Christian practice without possessing the Christian belief. . . ."

The Spiritual Heir. "If this self-criticism is just, then we must revise the whole of our present conception of modern history.. . . Our present view of modern history focuses attention on the rise of our modern Western secular civilization as the latest great new event in the world. ... If we can bring ourselves to think of it, instead, as one of the vain repetitions of the Gentiles--an almost meaningless repetition of something that the Greeks and Romans did before us and did supremely well--then the greatest new event in the history of mankind will be seen to be a very different one. The greatest new event will then not be the monotonous rise of yet another secular civilization out of the bosom of the Christian church . . . it will still be the Crucifixion and its spiritual consequences. . . .

"At its first appearance Christianity was provided by the Graeco-Roman civilization with a universal state, in the shape of the Roman Empire with its policed roads and shipping routes, as an aid to the spread of Christianity round the shores of the Mediterranean. Our modern . . . civilization in its turn may serve its historical purpose by providing Christianity with a completely worldwide repetition of the Roman Empire to spread over. . . .

"It is even possible that as, under the Roman Empire, Christianity drew out of and inherited from the other Oriental religions the heart of what was best in them, so the present religions of India and the form of Buddhism that is practiced today in the Far East may contribute new elements to be grafted on to Christianity in days to come. And then one may look forward to what may happen when Caesar's Empire decays--for Caesar's Empire always does decay after a run of a few hundred years. What may happen is that Christianity may be left as the spiritual heir of all the other higher religions . . . while the Christian church as an institution may be left as the social heir of all the other churches and all the civilizations."

* In his classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon referred to Rome's downfall as "the triumph of barbarism and religion" [Christianity].

/- "Christianity and Civilization"; published by the Quaker center, Pendle Hill (25-c-).

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