Vision of God's Creation

As the Orient Express sped westward from Istanbul one September day in 1921, a tall, slender young classicist gazed thoughtfully out the window. "I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the Bela Palanka Gorge in the light of the full moon, as our train bore down upon Nish," wrote Arnold Toynbee, who had been covering the Greco-Turkish war for the Manchester Guardian. Before he went to sleep that night, he took out a fountain pen and jotted down "a list of topics" on half a sheet of paper.

For almost 40 years, Toynbee developed those same jotted notes into A Study of History, his 3 million-word, twelve-volume masterwork on the rise and fall of civilizations. And when he was done with his originally planned ten volumes, the historian noted the end as precisely as he had noted the beginning: "Finis. London, 1951, June 15,6:25 p.m., after looking once more this afternoon at Fra Angelico's picture of the beatific vision."

Teaching Thucydides. The son of a social worker (his mother was one of the first women in England to earn a university degree), Toynbee studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford, and he was teaching Thucydides there when the first World War broke out. Unfit for the military because of a bout of dysentery, Toynbee spent the war working in the Foreign Office, then roamed the Middle East, and eventually taught at the University of London. He thought he would write his study of history in one long summer vacation. He published the first three volumes in 1934, reached Vol. X in 1954, and finally completed Vol. XII, Reconsiderations, in 1961.

It was Toynbee's destiny to arrive on the historical scene when it was still dominated by the same kind of nationalism that had led to the World War. Toynbee insisted that Britain could only be understood as a small part of Western Christian civilization, and that Western Christianity was only one of five contemporary civilizations. The others: Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and the Far East. Toynbee's taxonomy was somewhat arbitrary; he enraged many Jewish scholars by dismissing Judaism as one of several dead cultures that he rated as "fossils"; Africa was ignored almost entirely.

At any rate, Toynbee declared that the 21 civilizations he identified in recorded history had all followed certain patterns of growth and decay. According to what he called the law of "challenge and response," a specific challenge like the shortage of food in preclassical Greece might lead to varying responses (Spartan militarism or Athens' overseas empire), and after a "time of troubles" there would emerge a larger entity that would attempt to serve as a universal state (nurturing a universal church)--until it collapsed.

Oswald Spengler had been developing somewhat similar theories as early as the first volume of Decline of the West in 1918. But while Spengler argued that the decay of civilizations was inexorable and essentially purposeless, Toynbee insisted that man retains his freedom of choice: "I do not believe that civilizations have to die...Civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills." Moreover, it has a purpose, a dimly perceived but divinely ordained purpose. "History," he wrote, "[is] a vision of God's creation on the move."

Toynbee was not committed to any one religion. He involved himself deeply in both Christianity and Buddhism but called himself an agnostic. God, he said, was a feeling that "wells up from a deeper level of the psyche." As for man's relationship to that sacred force, Toynbee once used a metaphor from his own dreams. In this dream, he said, he had seen himself holding onto the foot of the crucifix high above the altar of the Benedictine Abbey of Ampleforth in Yorkshire. Then he heard a voice call out in flawless Latin: "Amplexus expecta "--Cling and wait.

Toynbee's work attracted relatively little attention and less praise when it first appeared. Reviewing the first three volumes in 1935, the Journal of Modern History sniffed: "A Gargantuan feast, shall we say? Or is it hash and not chopped up fine enough at that?" In 1947. however, in the postwar search for international understanding, Toynbee suddenly experienced the truth of the Victor Hugo remark about an idea whose time has come. A one-volume abridgment of the first six books of the study sold a phenomenal quarter of a million copies. (An abridgment of Vols. VII to X appeared in 1957.)

International Sage. Even then Toynbee had his critics, who accused him of romanticism, vagueness and even factual error. But he had become an international sage, like Einstein, Schweitzer or Bertrand Russell, who was asked for his opinion on all manner of subjects. A mild and white-haired figure, married to his longtime research assistant, Veronica Boulter (his 33-year first marriage ended in divorce in 1946), Toynbee frequently visited U.S. universities and once commented that the things he liked best about the U.S. were Bing Crosby and peanut butter. Not all his views were so benign. When he was 80, he declared in the autobiographical Experiences that the U.S. (in Viet Nam) and Israel (in Palestine) were partners in colonialism. As recently as last year, he wrote in the Observer that fuel shortages might well lead to authoritarian governments in the West, but he added hopefully that "a society that is declining materially may be ascending spiritually." Indeed, his view of the future became almost mystical: "In the 21st century, human life is going to be a unity again in all its aspects..."

Last week, when Toynbee died at 86 in a York nursing home of the aftereffects of a stroke, the British obituaries were somewhat restrained. The Guardian observed that "his scheme of universal history was too absolute, and even his immense erudition too vulnerable...for his most ambitious work to prevail among contemporary generations." But some of those contemporaries were more generous. Harvard's Samuel Eliot Morison said that "he was one of the few people who dared to write on the broad sweep of history." Daniel Boorstin, recently confirmed as the new Librarian of Congress, commented that "few historians have spent themselves so unstintingly or so effectively in the effort to transcend the provincialism of their time and place." Toynbee felt that there was a kind of intellectual provincialism, too, in what he called "the dogma that 'life is just one damned thing after another,' " for he himself had "a lifetime conviction that human affairs do not become intelligible until they are seen as a whole."

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