CITY OF GOD
55
lightenment were not humble enough- indeed, he offers public
expiations for the excessive pride of rationalism. But he has far less
of humbleness, in Trilling':; sense, than the thinkers of the Enlighten–
ment, though, like other religious men, he goes about the grandiose
business of the spirit as if he were performing an act of abject self–
discipline. He constantly makes the unwarranted abstractions of which
Trilling speaks: he abstracts a mythical elite from the masses he
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abstracts the mind and its processes from their genetic situations, and
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in
doing so, he
all
but separates history from man
Pdf/,_
I think we must require of the historian that he never forget the
rt:
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social realities of the present. Toynbee's English predecessors, like
Gibbon, Macaulay and Lecky, wrote history with the practical intent
of illnminating the obscure areas of present social thinking. Toynbee
v
does not illuminate the present: he dissolves
it
in his immense sweep
of past and future. He has, nevertheless, an implicit message for us
about the present.
If
we become a complete; Toynbeean, we shall
believe that enlightened social action is degrading or, at best, fruitless.
We shall believe that the wreckage of our time is an inevitable way–
station in a pre-determined cycle of history, and that even if we had
seriously tried, we could have done nothing to alter the course of the
cycle. We shall believe, furthermore, that though some elites are
"bad" and oppressive, others are "good" and humane. But
if
the
Enlightenment taught us one simple lesson by its estimate of the Chris–
tian elite, it was that this is not so. The principles and policies of Toyn–
bee's saintly elite (like those of
all
elites)' not having been derived
from the study of nature and man, can be imposed on them only by
the violence of a form that does not fit its substance.
One finishes Toynbee's
History
with the sense of having had a
great and worthwhile experience. But the historian, one feels, should
not ask us to exchange the possibilities and probabilities of the real
V
world for the irrelevant mysteries of a celestial tragedy. I missed in
Toynbee the clear-headed empiricism and the natural sarcasm of his
English predecessors. I misse the sense, in short, of what men have •
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done, what men are doing and what men ought to do.
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