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PARTISAN REVIEW
braced it anew, with the emotions of one who has come home after
wandering frantically among the materialists. To Augustine, the sack
of Rome heralded the end of the sinful City of the Pagans; Toynbee
believes that we may have arrived at
~
similar crisis when western
man "made a holocaust of his own children in our great Western
Civil War of A.D. 1914-18." The age of reason and science which
flourished from the time of Gibbon to our time becomes, in the mind
of Toynbee, a new age of paganism. And as the Christian church in–
herited the Roman universal state, so, he hopes, a new church
will
inherit an Anglo-Saxon universal state. St. Augustine thought that
history was one long preparation for the coming of the savior; Toyn–
bee, who has heard of about 25 times as many civilizations. as Augus-
- tine, still thinks so. Whereas Gibbon thought that progress was man's
increasing ability to amend his own "crimes, follies and misfortunes,"
St. Augustine and Professor Toynbee think it is an ascension from the
earthly City of Destruction to the heavenly City of God.
Toynbee's
History
shows how thoroughly we are repeating the
religious experience of the late days of antiquity. The mysteries of
death and resurrection, which filled the ancient world with the coming
of the Oriental fertility cults, are the very fabric of
A Study of History.
That our own culture is deeply concerned with these matters is suf-
, ficiently proclaimed by works like
The Plumed Serpent, The Waste
Land
and
Finnegans Wake.
The intuitions of the conservative profes–
sor of history have become those of Lawrence, Eliot and Joyce, though
Toynbee would frown on these writers
if
he were acquainted with
their writing. The apocalyptic announcement about the
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
and the searching "in stony places" for the resurrected life in Eliot's
short poem are repeated with endless ramification in Toynbee's
several thousand pages of universal history.
That history should be universal is one of Toynbee's basic
dogmas;
A Study of History
tries to encompass all known civiliza–
tions. Toynbee is inspired by the wide visions of Ibn Khaldun, de
7
Gobineau, Turgot and Lord Acton. He believes, with Acton, that a
universal history does not have to be "a burden on the memory"
and that it can be "an illumination of the soul." He attributes Acton's
memorable failure ever to write his vast history of liberty to "the
