History vs.
The
City of God
Richard V. Chase
l
IKE previous centuries, ours has invented an abstract "man"
who is supposed to embody the fundarn!,ental qualities of human
nature. The twentieth-century "man" is irrational and religious.
Pareto, and the other "Machiavellians," have endowed
this
"man"
with what Pareto called a "sociology"; the psychoanalysts have sup–
plied him with an unconscious full of overwhelming primordial images
and tyrannical instincts; Bergson has given
him
a "life forc;e" and a ,/
primitive religion. It has remained for
A.
J.
Toynbee* to provide
him with a world history.
Perhaps most of the irrationalists of our time have had their
roots deep in the Christian religion. Their sense of the evil and
treachery in human nature is often close to the sense of Original Sin.
Their mysticism, especially in the case of Bergson, merges with "'
Christian mysticism. With the exception of the neo-Thomists, how–
ever, Toynbee is the most overtly Christi.an of all; and we must go
back to St. Augustine to understand Toynbee's idea of history.
When Gibbon wrote at the end of his
History
that he had "des–
cribed the triumph of barbaricsm and religion," he grievously damaged
the prestige of Christian historiography. But time heals wounds, and
the tradition that ran from St. Augustine's
City of God
and Orosius'
History against the Pagans
in the fifth century to Bossuet's
Universal
History
in the seventeeth has come down to Toynbee's
Study of His–
tory
in the twentieth. For although the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries rejected the Augustinian historical theory, Toynbee has em-
*
Arnold Joseph Toynbee was born in 1889; educated at Winchester and
Balliol; Political Intelligence, 1918; delegate to the Paris Peace Conference;
Professor of History at U . of London, etc. Three volumes of the
History
appeared
in 1934 and three more in 1939. At least three more are yet to come.
45
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