TOYNBEE AND SUPER-HISTORY
541
Sermon on the Mount: "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy
closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is
in secret. ... But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen
do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking."
Toynbee's religiousness, like the rest of his work, has something
of Hollywood in it: it is spectacular, has a huge cast, and is, for all its
ostentatious humility, charged with self-importance. And his conceit
is essentially different
from
the self-stylization of Socrates in his Apology
or of Nietzsche or Shaw. It is more like that of a movie star: there is
neither sarcasm in it nor any discrimination between what is representa–
tive and what is trivial. In the first two indices, little space was given
to the author, and hardly more to God. In the new index both have
attained to two whole columns, and many references to "Toynbee,
Arnold Joseph" are on the level of "walking, liking for."
There are of course many good things in these volumes, including
not only some of the contributions of Toynbee's critics, which he had
the good grace to print, but also occasional thought-provoking judg–
ments, many fascinating quotations and observations, and several good
anecdotes. More's the pity that it all does not add up to a great work.
Far from being more scientific than Spengler, whom he calls a "pon–
tifical-minded man of genius," Toynbee is more pontifical, less original,
and endowed with an essentially eclectic and digressive mind. What
suggests the possibility of greatness in Toynbee's case is mainly the lavish
expenditure and sheer size of his undertaking. Beyond that, the fashion–
able taste for a mixture of almost any kind of religion with erudition
has helped to make Toynbee one of the idols of our new illiteracy.
This illiteracy does not know the distinction between erudition and
scholarship, between irresponsibility and poetry, between assurance and
evidence. One reads Toynbee's indictments and is impressed by the
wealth of footnotes" and one does not notice that they sometimes refer
to nothing but other passages in which the same unfounded claim is
made, supported by similar cross-references--or that a spectacular figure
is cut down to less than half its size in a note; or that a splashy fifty–
page claim is unostentatiously dropped in a few sentences, much later.
In an age in which similar techniques beset us so sorely, the scholar
bears a greater responsibility than ever. I have no quarrel with the
virtues Toynbee advocates. "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the
hands are the hands of Esau."
