CITY OF GOD
49
upset the static equilibrium, since God in His Perfection is incapable
of doing so alone. By trying to destroy man, the environment has
done the work of God. The challenge itself may take a physical or a
human form. Deserts, mountain ranges, jungles, oceans, droughts,
overpopulation, invru;ions, slavery, migrations,
all
have presented
their challenge to man. There
is
a golden mean, however, in the
severity of the challenge, and history is full of failures, testimony that "
the Devil has had the best of it. The Polynesians, who achieved the
beginnings of a high civilization on Easter Island, were finally unable
to sustain the formidable challenge of the ocean and have ever since
responded only to the soft challenge of their islands. The Spartans
petrified into an "arrested civilization" through over-specialization in
response to an overly severe military challenge.
It will be observed that there is a large element of naturalism
in this Toynbeean struggle of Challenge-and-Response. His account,
for example, of how the Eskimos and the Nomads "reverted to animal–
ism" by merging themselves with the functionS of the animals
isv
solidly and finely drawn. And his account of environmental forces
generally shows a tenacious mind at work. At every important juncture
of the book, however, when we feel that the facts warrant a toughly
limited generalization, we are asked to follow Toynbee into the realms
of myth and religion. But it is Toynbee's sense of the natural dif-
v
ficulty of human life, and not
his
walking with God, that lends
dignity to his
History)·
and sometimes it lends dignity to
his
God.
Civilizations grow after birth in a rhythmic pattern of stasis and
movement by responding to a series of different challenges. The
elan
of Prometheus (the mythical type of the growth process) repeatedly
overturns the static Zeus.
As
each ordeal successfully sustained, the
civilization comes nearer and nearer to the City of God. The criterion
of growth is of course not an increasing command over the
environ- ~ ~
ment: it is the transfer of human energy and attention from the
~
world to the mi'iid, from the natural to the spiritual, from- science
~
to religion. The world seems ultimately contemptible to Toynbee,
and the intellectual disciplines which deal closely with man's inter–
actions with nature seem to be vulgar and even beastly techniques.
James Burnham sumrs up the historical theory of the "Machiavel–
lians" (Mosca, Michels, Pareto) thus: "Historical . . . science is
above all the study of the elite, its composition, its structure, and the
mode of its relation to the non-elite." Burnham will find in Toynbee
