54
PARTISAN REVIEW
,>
But futurism points the way of salvation. In
his
failure to capture the
mundane future, the futurist glimpses the true path of Detachment
and Transfiguration. The ideal creative individual of a disintegrating
society is the dying savior-god-Christ and, in their several civiliza–
tions, Zagreu, Tammuz, Atts, Balder, Adonis and Osiris-whose res-
.>
urrection shows man the way out of the City of Destruction. Thus
the hope of a declining is still the hope of a growing civilization: the
mystic experience of detachment and rebirth. Sir James Frazer wrote
l,( the history of the dying gods without losing
his
faith in rational
thought. But to Toynbee, Frazer's long catalogue of the gods of death
and resurrection seems to say only that "one generation passeth away
and another generation cometh" and that "there is no new thing
)
under the Sun." Frazer, Toynbee would say, has committed the
(
Apathetic Fallacy by not understanding the mystic message of the
second birth which these fertility gods had to give. And so ToyEE-.ee,
the greatest of living historians, joins that earnest quest of our time
( after the elusive wraith of the crucial experience of the human being:
his birth.
4.
A Study of History
is a startling achievement of the historical
?'
imagination. It has an extraordinary wealth of sensitive erudition,
r which is occasionally marshalled into a beautiful synthesis of history
\and mythology. One hopes that because of Toynbee the instruments
of historical study will be made more sensitive, that historical analysis
will be made more flexible {ru;d that the imagination will learn to
~
encompass the rangeS of time and space more knowing! . But pre-
~ji_}t.
cisely because Toynbee himself loses his sensitivity when he passes
~
- from nature to myth, he is able to convince himself that the two are
-f~
really one.
As
Lionel Trill' g has said
(PARTISAN REVIEW,
May-June,
~
1942)
... if the historical sense is always with us, it must, for that reason, be refined
and made more exact. Above all, it must be kept complicated. History, like science
~
and art, implies abstraction. . .. But in making our abstraction, we ought to be
aware of what we are doing; we ought to remember that our abstraction is not
equivalent to the infinite complication of events from which we have abstracted.
The'historian . ..
~hould
always be humbly aware of' the limits of his abstraction
and be willing to complicate it.
Toynbee often alleges that the philosophical conclusions of the En-
