TOYNBEE AND SUPER-HISTORY
539
timate feelings into words, they found expression in Greek or Latin
verse, and not in the English vernacular that happened to be his
mother tongue" (IX, 411). Indeed, volumes I and VII begin with two
long poems written, respectively, in Greek and Latin; but "intimate feel–
ings" are also expressed frequently in the vernacular of the text in which
the author feels less at home. But is it poetry when the author informs
us, after giving a reference in a footnote: "My aunt Gertrude's copy,
with my name written in it in her handwriting, dated 'September 1906',
is here on my desk in May 1951"? Or doesn't it seem to come straight
out of a movie? And there are a great many similar passages.
Surely, people begin to think of Toynbee as a poet only where he
has raised other expectations and then failed to fulfill them. At the
end of Part XI, for example, after well over 200 pages on "Law and
Freedom in History," one expects some resolution of the conflict be–
tween those who affirm and those who deny the presence of laws in
history. But Toynbee concludes: "Since the God who is Love is also
Omnipotence, a soul that loves is liberated by the maker and master of
all laws from a bondage to laws of the Subconscious Psyche which
Babylonian souls used to project on to inexorable stars in their courses
and which Hellenic souls used to personify as malignant
keres
and
daimones; and a liberating truth which had once proved potent to set
free (John VIII.32) fast-fettered Hellenes and Babylonians might once
again be taken to heart by the children of a post-Christian World which
had been vainly seeking to ban those dread psychic principalities and
powers (Rom. VIII.38; Eph. 111.10 and VI.12Y in the name of a
Science that was as impotent to exorcize them as any pre-Christian
magic." I have moved the footnotes into parentheses and might add
that probably more than half of Toynbee's footnotes are of this nature.
But is this poetry or merely murky?
It might he suggested that Toynbee is really a theologian. In this
capacity, however, I should rank him with the friends of Job. To vindi–
cate the justice of
God,
he regularly infers, as they did, that misfortune
is a proof of a prior moral transgression. From the destruction, appar–
ently by external force, of the Central American Indian civilizations,
Toynbee infers that they deserved their fate. Evidence to the contrary
does not deter Toynbee. Thus he speaks, for example, of churches which
"committed spiritual suicide by going into politics" and forfeited the
chance of "playing a church's authentic role"; and he continues: "Cases
in point were the syncretistic Egyptiac Church . . . Zoroastrianism, J u–
daism, Nestorianism, and Monophysitism, whicn had allowed themselves
to
be used by a submerged Syriac Civilization as weapons in its warfare
