PARTISAN REVIEW
all the historical evidence is blandly ignored which shows that in those
communities, like thirteenth-century Christendom, where men have come
closest to universal citizenship in the City of God, they suffered more
torture, exploitation, terror, and wars of extermination than in most other
communities before or since.
The great merit of Mr. Toynbee's new book is that it makes his
theological assumptions so explicit that they cannot be dismissed by
reader or critic as a quaint anachronism. His honest self-portraiture
shows how focal they are to his reading of history and at the same time
how cruelly deceived he is in his notions that they are supported by an
empirical analysis of the facts of the past, or that they support in any
way the concrete proposals he makes to his fellow-men in the present.
The following are among the more modest of Mr. Toynbee's theo–
logical beliefs. Civilization has a goal. The goal is "the communion of
saints on earth." "No known civilization has ever reached the goal of
civilization yet." Only a truly Christian civilization based not merely
on the brotherhood of man but on "the Christian doctrine of the Trinity"
can realize the goal of history. The community of saints on earth is not
the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. For the tincture of original sin will
always cling to imperfect creatures; that is why the church, even when
it triumphs over all secular institutions, will have to stand forth "armed
with the spear of the Mass, the shield of the Hierarchy, and the helmet
of the Papacy." "On this showing, the victorious Church Militant on
Earth will be a province of the Kingdom of God. . .. " Even before
that blessed victory, "the state of eternal felicity in the other world"
can
be
won by Christian souls in this one. Indeed, "the Christian soul
can attain, while still on earth, a greater measure of man's greatest good
than can
be
attained by any pagan soul in this earthly stage of its
existence."
One could have foretold on the strength of these beliefs why Mr.
Toynbee would find psychologically plausible, in advance of
his
study
of history, two further propositions which have a familiar ring. First,
that Western civilization took the path of disintegration, not only spiritual
but social and economic, when it surrendered its Christian faith for
secularism, humanism, and naturalism. And second, that social welfare
and progress can be most effectively achieved only through the "replace–
ment of the mundane civilizations by the world-wide and enduring reign
of the Church Militant on Earth."
It does not seem to have suggested itself to Mr. Toynbee that
insofar as he is interested in the brotherhood of man, democracy, peace,
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