"Those who really desire to attain an independence, have only set their minds upon it, and adopt the proper means, as they do in regard to any other object which they wish to accomplish, and the thing is easily done."
"Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant."
"Every crowd has a silver lining."
"More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing than by believing in too much."
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Thoughts on Revenge
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Fredrich Nietzsche
Since the evolution of the Greek polis in the fourth century B.C., man has attempted to live in a civilized society. Society was developed due to the common needs of commerce, and safety of the people in a relatively small geographic area. To create order out of a ancient, chaotic, tribal system, the constraints of laws were needed, and a government to enforce them. Common virtues, ethics, and morals emerged with the establishment of the Greek city-state. This made communication between the people easier and devised a valuation of what was "right" and "wrong." These valuations endured for centuries with little question, until the late nineteenth century. Fredrich Nietzsche challenged all ideas that had not only come before him, but also those which proliferated during his own period. He "deconstructed" society and its "noble lies" in an attempt to show us that man "is something to be overcome." He attempted to debase all of society by proving values, ethics, and the like are errors of humanity. If you destroy the order of society by destroying everything it values, can any society still exist, or better yet, could the destroyer still exist within society? Would Nietzsche be comfortable in any society? To what extent can we use the hammer and still remain a part of society? These are my "question marks." In order to answer these questions, first it is necessary to determine what Nietzsche found so base in herd morality. Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science, morality ranks "human drives and actions, [and] always express(es) the needs of a community and herd: whatever profits it." Instead of man creating his own valuations of "good" and "evil," the "herd" gives them to him, denying man of his individuality. Therefore, man becomes a "function of the herd." The word "individual" becomes a profanity, and individualism is punished with exile; "freedom of thought counted as discontentment itself." When individualism became discontentment, guilt and conscience were created. Anytime an action damaged the "herd," it "created pangs of conscience for the individual." This overabundance of guilt destroyed man's pride and condemned him to become a "camel." The camel bears the load of his master throughout his existence, and stores his own guilt in his humps. He takes away his master's load, and anytime he drops a portion of that load, his hump stores more guilt. Herd morality does this to the individual. It forces the individual to take the burden of existence from the creators of the morality and feel guilt when they do not maintain the burden. "The spirit of revenge: my friends, that up to now, has been mankind's chief concern, and where there was suffering there was always supposed to be punishment." Nietzsche uses Socrates as primary proof of revenge, resentment, and resentiment in morality. The poor, ordinary, construction worker received word from the Delphic oracle that "none is smarter than Socrates." Using dialectic as his method, he proceeded to question the men of Athens; "the dialectitian lays on his opponent the burden of proving that he is not an idiot. He infuriates and at the same time paralyzes" according to Nietzsche. Socrates used dialectic to enact his revenge on the nobility of declining Athens, and prove himself worthy of nobility. The same nobles he resented, he desired to become. He took his resentment inward and expressed it as revenge-resentiment-and subsequently applied this universally as a virtue. Thousands of years later people are still using his methods. Why should one person's idiosyncratic virtue be applied to everyone? Zarathustra also speaks of the revenge in morality. In the first discourse of Zarathustra, he tells the town of the Motley Cow, "fire of love and fire of anger glow in the name of all virtues." This is not love of man, or even humanity, that Nietzsche is speaking of. Rather, it is obedience and rule that are the "fire of love." The "fire of anger" is the resentment of the "good" against what has been done to them in the past. They have suffered therefore, everyone must, since "they knew no other way of loving their God than by nailing men to the cross." This suffering, due to resentment, is passed down the generations as tradition. All herd morality is based in tradition. The "strength of our knowledge" doesn't lie in truth, but tradition and old moldy volumes. Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (one of my favorite lines) "even mold enobles." The older a morality, virtue, or value is, the more revered it becomes. People accept postulates without proof. Why? Because it is tradition, "We have done this for generations. Therefore, it is the Truth. How can so many generations be wrong?" This attitude, based out of laziness, causes sleep. People want the easiest road in life. So, rather than question preconceived beliefs, they simply beleive for the sake of beleiving-they SLEEP!! Zarathustra speaks of the herd, "they are modest even in virtue-for they want ease." Either they go through motions and, rather than believe strongly in anything, beleive "modest(ly)," or they are the martyrs, who take the burdens from everyone, "[and] go along, heavy and creaking, like carts carrying stones downhill." Herd morality's most common basis is religion. Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "God is a supposition: but I want your supposing to be grounded by conceivability." He goes on to say, "alas, how weary I am of all the unattainable that is supposed to be reality." When belief in an "unattainable supposition" is the basis of a morality, isn't the morality also then unattainable, and based in supposition? And if this is true, then there is no "true" morality, and the Truth itself is then concealed from the masses. The concealment of truth is the worst enemy of man. All of morality is based on lies. Nietzsche writes in the autobiographical Ecce Homo, "the lie of the ideal has been the curse of reality, by means of it, man's most basic instincts have become mendacious and false." Values that are "antagonistic" to the nature of man, the Dionysian nature, have been denied and labeled "evil." This "evil" of man is the "Truth." Nietzsche writes, "men have given themselves all their good and evil. Truly, they did not take it, they did not find it, it did not descend to them as a voice from heaven." "Evil" is not evil, rather a variation of good, there is no such thing as evil, it is a category created by man to provide a purpose to his existence-to be "good." Zarathustra states, "man first implanted values into things to maintain himself-he created a meaning of things, a human meaning." We created the values of the world, and in so doing gave it our own interpretation. We created the world in our own image. These lies have been fabricated to seal the truth of existence; existence is chaos. Nietzsche saw that the noble lies of herd morality were set in stone, along with the error they were based upon. The error of these lies resulted in the destruction of individualism and freedom of man. This in turn, indicated the need for destruction of the stone tablets of herd morality. When men destroy these base values, transvaluation can follow. As Nietzsche says through Zarathustra, "he who has to be creator, always has to destroy." For the transvaluation to take place, Nietzsche needed to define how we should destroy and create and what type of values should be created. To understand how the destruction should take place, Nietzsche speaks of his "hammer [which] rages fiercely against its prison." The "lion" destroys herd morality with his "hammer." The "hammer" is pure Dionysian-pure nihilism. However, an overflow of Dionysian intoxication will annihilate everything; a balance is required. Nietzsche adds the reason and wisdom of Apollo to create this balance. This reason and wisdom allows man to destroy the right moral enemies and create the right values. In this way, reason and will destroy together. Once we destroy all of man's enemies, there is one more thing to be destroyed. Zarathustra tells his disciples, "you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame." We must sacrifice ourselves because we are only prophets of the "child," or "Ubermensch," and are still in some ways decadents ourselves. In Zarathustra's third discourse, Nietzsche gives man guidelines for the type of new values he should create. Zarathustra tells his followers, " 'This is now my way: where is yours?' Thus I answered those who asked me 'the way.' For the way-does not exist!" Nietzsche wants no "parasites" or "disciples." These take the new table of values and make them universal, everyone is able to understand them and they become popular. Nietzsche wants man to create and "place above" himself his own values. In this way the values stay individual, but Nietzsche does provide, what appears to be, a general outline of the type of values we should create. "Do not spare your neighbor! Man is something that must be overcome!" Nietzsche is attacking the common Christian virtue: "love thy neighbor as thyself." This virtue is a show of the weak "will to power." He wants us to overcome this stale virtue and "destroy" even our neighbor. This is not to be taken literaly as a killing, or mauling of our neighbor. Rather, he wants us to destroy our neighbor's values and in this sense we destroy him, showing him that man is something to be overcome. Nietzsche wants us to always "consider what [we] can give in return." We cannot desire anything for free, therefore we must fight and work for our morality. When people work hard for anything, they usually keep it close to them, and thus value it more than anything else. He expects us to do the opposite, "everything is in flux . . . [do not] firmly fix" your values and tables. We are still overcoming, and life itself is constantly overcoming, do not write your values in stone. "I will not deceive even myself," this affirmation of the will to truth is at the heart of Nietzsche's new morality. If we deceive ourselves, it is easy to fall back into the role of the "camel" and its herd morality. If we do not deceive ourselves, we shatter the "good" and the "just." They need our belief to survive, without our belief, they can't justify their existence. This is why "they hate the creator most," he destroys all that is "holy" to them. We need to realize we will never become the"Ubermensch." We can only be prophets of his coming. As with all prophets, we must die to make way for the savior, or as Nietzsche puts it , the "child." Unlike the "old-idol priests," who preserve their existence, Nietzsche wants us to die at the right time to prepare for the coming of the "child." The prophet can't enter the promised land, he must "go under," that is six feet under, to prepare for the coming of the "Ubermensch." In order to create new values, the past has to be redeemed. To redeem it, a transformation of every "'It was,' until the will says: 'But I willed it thus! So shall I will it.'" is necessary. We have to "make ammends to [our] children for being the children of [our] fathers;" and become yea-sayers, saying yes to all that has happened and will happen. This is Nietzsche's way of redeeming man of his facticity. If we can't redeem our facticity, everything we create becomes tainted by it, and reeks of the herd. The transformation releives the guilt of what has passed and transforms it into an act of the will; causing man to love life as it is, was, and will be-amor fati. Nietzsche's doctrines of eternal return and amor fati combine to redeem man's past and future, but are also the most apparently contradictory doctrines of his philosophy. Nietzsche writes in Zarathustra, "all things recur eternally and we ourselves with them, and that we have existed an infinite number of times before and all things with us." It is necessary to keep in mind that this is not reincarnation; "I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life in the greatest things and the smallest." The "Ubermensch" becomes an impossibility-Nietzsche's own noble lie- due to his doctrine of eternal return. If we return eternally, our lives are already created and there is no transvaluation. How can we create new values when our lives have already been mapped out? There is no original thought just like there is no original text. As Stanley Rosen says, we are who we are "under the illusion that we have been transformed into something 'beautiful and new.'" We cannot avoid our fate, nor change it, the decision we make at every step has already been made countless times. These doctrines devaluate the entire world, and all Being within it. Nothing is greater than another because the fate of Being is already decided. Therefore, if Nietzsche wants man to create, man has to assign his own value to the world. Man is free to create out of the chaos. The valuation becomes our own perspective, but at the same time we also create a new noble lie because the world is, in itself, worthless. Therefore, if man creates his own value in the world, why does Nietzsche assign guidelines for the creation of these values? Assigning guidelines only creates a new herd morality. Denying man of his freedom and individuality, the same things Nietzsche fought against (or so it seems) he creates. Nietzsche is attempting to relay two separate messages in one philosophy. This explains the apparent contradiction. He is trying to relay a message to the new noblemen, the strong willed, to create their own system of values, including a new noble lie. At the same time, he is attempting to speed up the decadence of the Enlightenment by preaching deconstruction. Rosen calls these different teachings Nietzsche's esoteric, or higher, and exoteric, or lower public, teachings. The exoteric truth, the speeding up of decadence, is a "return to the cruel creativity of the Renaissance city-state or to the polis of Homeric Greece." This exoteric truth is a type of horizontal herdism, in other words, not transcendental experience, but experience for the masses. This speeds up the deconstruction of decadence, in turn making the new nobility's mission much easier. The esoteric, or higher teaching of Nietzsche is "nature is. . . chaos, there is no eternal impediment. . . to the will to power." The will to power is defined in nature as a "natural order of rank." This rank is the expression of power as chaos, which we misperceive in order to make life "livable"- our noble lies. Yes, rank, Nietzsche created a ranking of values to replace the old ranking of the herd. Nietzsche even admits: My philosophy aims at an ordering of rank: not an individualistic morality. The ideas of the herd should rule in the herd-but not reach out beyond it: the leaders of the herd require a fundamentally different valuation for their own actions. It is only the new nobility who can "triumph over the truth precisely because [they] know that Being is chaos." As we can now see, Nietzsche did not want the populous to transvaluate values, he wanted them to accelerate the degeneration of society. He desired a new nobility of "gods, but no God" to perform the transvaluation. These two requirements help to explain the superficial contradictions in Nietzsche's philosophy. An evaluation of Nietzsche's own life will show how he applied these philosophical differences to himself. The first thing we need to remember is, Nietzsche is a Zarathustra, not the Ubermensch, the Ubermensch was his noble lie. In his autobiographical work, Ecce Homo, he writes, "Zarathustra himself as a type, came to me-perhaps I should rather say-invaded me." As I have explained before, the Ubermensch is a becoming, but Zarathustra does not become the Ubermensch, he is the prophet, destroyer, and must die before the coming of the "child." Nietzsche writes, "social intercourse is no small trial to my patience." He needed and enjoyed his solitude, just as Zarathustra. He had an "incontestable lack of sufficient companionship," and his "loathing of mankind. . .was always [his] greatest danger," but he needed this companionship. He wrote in 1882, following a loss of his relationships with his mother, sister, sometime girlfriend Lou Salome, and friend Paul Roe: attempts "to return 'to people' was resulting in my losing the few I still, in any sense, possesed." In his later years, Nietzsche was the ultimate "loner." He had little contact with anyone, and when he finally went mad in 1888, he was committed to a sanitarium. Before the madness finally took total control of him, he destroyed the last few relationships he had. His delusions of grandeur had become intense. On a visit to Turin in 1888, he wrote "here in Turin I exercise a perfect fascination." Hayman writes in his biography of Nietzsche: "he thought people were reacting to him preferentially and lovingly." These delusions of grandeur caused Nietzsche to be "premptory with friends and aquaintances." He identified himself as "the foremost mind of the period." When a fellow scholar wrote a concrete arguement against his position in The Problem of Wagner, he replied, "On questions of decadence, I am the highest court of appeal there is on earth." Finally, in a letter to his sister Elizabeth, he signed himself, "your brother, now quite a great person." These delusions of grandeur not only destroyed any relationships he may have had, but destroyed any possibility of life within society. Nietzsche believed himself the only person of the new nobility in the age of decadence. This caused his madness. To answer the questions I have raised regarding Nietzsche's existence in society, I have to first define society. A society is a group of people organized for some common purpose. Wherever people gather for a common purpose, they form a society. This society purports common values and judgements which are not necessarily the judgements of any other society. Society only exists as the herd, therefore there is no individual morality, but only herd morality. Even if new values are created, the powerful, or strong will to power, only create a new herd morality with new noble lies. Nietzsche destroyed the common values of the society he lived in during the late nineteenth century, but this does not necessarily mean he can't exist in a society. He was unable to live in the society of decadence, but surely Nietzsche could live in a society based upon his noble lie, the Ubermensch. A noble lie bounded by conceivability, and ruled by "gods," his new nobility. Since he could not create his noble lie and new nobility in a period of decadence, he sacrificed himself for the coming of his children, the Ubermenschen. Since Nietzsche conceived a new society, he is not a pure nihilist, nor is he a sociopath, he is only sociopathic to what he considers a decadent society, not one he would create. There is no creating out of the self, since the world itself has no inherent value, only inherent activity. All values based on our creation of value are illusions-our own noble lies. These are only our perception and interpretation of reality, certainly not reality, because reality is composed of infinite interpretations. We have only one. We create out of chaotic activity within the world and within ourselves. This is the only form of creation and therefore, assignment of value available to man. Therefore, each man has a different ranking of value, and society in the common sense of the word, can't exist. Due to the infinite interpretations of value. The only common thread available is man's freedom to create. We are still a part of the Enlightenment that Nietzsche was attacking over a hundred years ago. The difference today is we know more, and are more willing to purport it, because of philosophers like Nietzsche. We scream what only others whisper. God is dead, but we have created new gods for ourselves, and these are not ourselves as Nietzsche would have wanted it. Our new gods are consumerism, money, power-all new forms of horizontal herdism. We buy clothes off a rack to look "cool;" the more money you make the better person you are; and everyone wants to control someone else, whether it is at work or in a relationship: "the omnipresence of power." Today's society does however realize the problems Nietzsche was speaking of regarding society and its herd morality. White and Hellerich, two postmodern philosophers, write in their essay "Nietzsche at the Altar: Situating the Devotee:" "This is to be a history of immanent activity not transcendent verities. . .the self-writing of a new generation of Ubermenschen and Ubermadchen." We know that actions are inherent in our being; far more valuable than espousing higher truths, "transcendent verities." Which can not even be truths because there is no universal truth because of the infinite interpretations of Truth. We become our own gods by creating our own truths. We realize the "hammer" must still be used. Deconstruction is still a common philosophy. Generation X (though I hate to use this label) has deconstructed the old herd morality to some extent, though not necessarily in the fashion which Nietzsche would have desired. Portrayed in everything from art and music to the Internet. As we close in on the twenty-first century, we are still in an age of decadence. Nietzsche's Ubermensch was and still is an unattainable possibility for society. We are still decadent.
STUDY OF HISTORY — Arnold J. Toynbee.
Above the high altar of the Benedictine Abbey of Ampleforth, in Yorkshire, hung a man. He was holding on precariously to the foot of the crucifix, while a voice said: "Amplexus expecta [Cling and wait] !"
Thus Professor Arnold Toynbee once saw himself in a dream. The eminent British historian (who dreams as fluently in Latin as he writes in Greek) tells this nighttime vision in the concluding volumes of his monumental Study of History. While to 20th century psychoanalysts the dream may be a commonplace of troubled souls, it nevertheless sums up Historian Toynbee's ultimate message to Western civilization. The mesage is: hang on, wait and pray.
Coming at the end of a lifetime's work that ranges over all recorded history in dazzling detail, and pronounced at a time of unprecedented crisis, these words may sound like a thundering anticlimax. Yet the mind that formed them, the context in which they are set down and the view of man that lies behind them, all compel utmost attention from Americans, who themselves are now haunted by the feeling that they are precariously hanging on above a menacing chasm of history.
Toynbee to Date. On the morning after the start of World War II, the first six volumes of Toynbee's Study were gathering dust in libraries, their author un known outside a tiny circle. But by 1947 an abridgment had become a bestseller, and today Toynbee is a household word in all the better-informed households. His fame rests on two major achievements:
¶ In an age of historians who consider God irrelevant, Toynbee put God back into history. The end of history, he asserted, is the Kingdom of God, and history is "God revealing Himself."
¶ In an age of "antinomian" historians (who are devoted "to the dogma that 'life is just one damned thing after another' "), Toynbee organized history in a pattern. He treated not of nations or races or even "forces," but of civilizations which he saw living and dying in regular cycles. This concept was popularized by Germany's brilliant Historian Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), but where Spengler saw the rise and fall of civilizations inexorably fated, Toynbee believed them subject to man's free will and God's grace
In Toynbee's image, Western civilization was a climber high up on a rocky cliff. All other civilizations had fallen to their deaths or were lying stagnant on lower ledges. Only the West was still free to continue the climb. According to Toynbee, Western civilization was born out of the dying Roman Empire and the church, had its period of growth in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and probably suffered its fatal breakdown (defined by Toynbee as a failure of self-determination followed by submission to "false idols," such as nationalism) in the period of the 16th and 17th century religious wars. Since then, the West has been in its "time of troubles," marked by recent wars. Invariably, in all past civilizations examined by Toynbee, the next stage had been the forcible establishment of a "universal state," in which the strongest of the warring rivals knocked out all others and for a time enforced peace. Invariably, these universal states rotted away inside their imposing armor. Grown morally feeble, the leaders ("creative minority") no longer responded to the challenges that faced them, the masses ("internal proletariat") lost faith in the leaders, and barbarians waiting outside the walls ("external proletariat") finally conquered the dying civilization. (Today's barbarians, for the most part, are not outside civilization's walls but inside.)
Somewhere late in its time of troubles, but short of the fatal establishment of a universal state, is the point where Toynbee tentatively left the West at the end of Volume VI. And that is the point where he now takes up the story again.
New Vision of History. The concluding volumes of the Study are dominated by a striking assertion: religion is not merely a guide or inspiration to civilization but its very reason for being.
Toynbee rejects the view that religions are "cancers" of civilization (e.g., Gibbon held that rising Christianity sapped the strength of the Roman Empire). He also discards the view, to which he inclined earlier, of religion as mainly a chrysalis for civilization (e.g., the church preserved "a precious germ of life" of the dead Roman civilization). Toynbee now believes that the higher religions do not exist to give birth to civilizations, but that civilizations exist in order to give birth to higher religions. "The birth of a civilization is a catastrophe if it is a regression from a previously established church, while the breakdown of a civilization is not a catastrophe if it is the overture to a church's birth."
Does this mean that the West is doomed, able only to take cold comfort from the hope that out of its grave new religious life will sprout? Not necessarily, says Toynbee: "I do not believe that civilizations have to die . . . Civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills."
Toynbee ridicules the smugness of the 18th and 19th centuries in terms of a Max Beerbohm cartoon (see cut). The Enlightened Dandy is so taken with his perfection that he can conceive of the future only as a gawkier version of himself; the Victorian Bourgeois is so optimistic that he sees the future as a figure fairly bursting with progress. But Toynbee believes that the 20th century's thin, frightened young man who sees only a question mark in the future ("Is he perhaps wondering whether he can even look forward to having any successor of any kind?") may be equally wrong. Doom is no more automatic than progress.
Herodians, Zealots & a Nymph. Toynbee is sure that a universal state—a single, worldwide government run either by Washington or Moscow—has been rendered inevitable ("sooner rather than later") by modern technology. The atom bomb clinched it. The only question is: Will the world state come about by war or peacefully? Toynbee has no illusions that it can be brought about by the U.N., or by any "talismanic blueprint of a federal constitution." His own answer is conditioned by a fascinating historical analysis of how nations try to meet the penetration of foreign civilizations. There are, he says, two constantly recurring patterns of response by "the party at bay against an inhuman enemy within its battered gates." These two responses he calls Zealotism and Herodianism, after the two Jewish parties at the time of Christ, who tried to cope with the inroads of Hellenic civilization.
The Zealots fought the Hellenic aggression by trying to keep out all Hellenic ideas and insisting on old ways and values to the last. The Herodians were as firmly convinced that the only way to stave off the enemy was to borrow enough Hellenism to give the Jews a chance to hold their own. In the end, both methods proved equally futile. Why?
Suppose, says Toynbee, a pixie Lady of the Lake sees her inviolate body of water sullied by "an audacious backwoodsman's canoe." Acting as a Zealot, she will use her supernatural power to freeze the water solid. As a Herodian, she will eventually drain her lake bed dry. But in either case, says Toynbee, she will only transform her lake into a road and let in the "landlubber dry-shod." Roughly translated into the different, present-day situation (in which the West is very far from being "at bay"), the Zealots might advocate stringent repression of all hostile ideas, as well as dropping a few atomic bombs on Russia; the Herodians would favor gradual appeasement. Toynbee would consider both parties an "unmerciful pair of pedants." Both courses would in the end aid the Communists: appeasement obviously by strengthening them, internal repression and atomic war with all its terrors by making democratic life impossible for a long time, regardless of who wins. A smart nymph, according to Toynbee, would work for peaceful coexistence.
The Case for a Détente. This is one interpretation of Amplexus expecta: the West must hang on, using self-restraint, patience, fortitude, tolerance. The U.S. is, in effect, ruler of half the world; Russia, ruler of the other half. Let it stay that way, says Toynbee, in a "pacific partition of the Oikumené (habitable world)." Look for a détente and play for time. (As a precedent, Toynbee cites 600 relatively peaceful years between Rome and Parthia, beginning about 20 B.C.)
Toynbee shares the widespread and dangerously simple view that Soviet Russia is a continuation of old-style imperialism on the world scene, only "cloaked" by Communism. One cause of friction between Russia and the West, says Toynbee, is that they have not "had time to become spiritually intimate" with each other. "What, on both sides, was now needed above all was time to allow a Subconscious Psyche, whose pace was the tortoise's gait, to adjust itself to . . . the technological conjuring tricks of a practical intellect that had been racing ahead of its subconscious yokefellow at the pace of a march hare . . . The two monsters [Russia and the U.S.] might settle down side by side to live and let live . . . gradually become less unlike one another."
In such passages of fantastically wishful thinking, it looks as if Toynbee, an eminent historian when dealing with the distant past, becomes just another minor pundit when dealing with the present. The Herod-Zealot comparison may well be a brilliant flash of historic insight. What Toynbee seemingly fails to realize is that in the present situation, "coexistence" is bound to lead to Herodianism.
If this were Toynbee's whole view of Russia and the West, Americans might well dismiss the learned professor as just another crypto-Herod and tell him to go paddle his "audacious canoe." But there is far more to Toynbee than that. Toynbee never seems to regard coexistence as anything but a temporary expedient to gain time for the pursuit of a long-range solution. In Toynbee's view, the long-range solution to the problem of Communism—as to all other major problems in the world today—is a matter of religion. In general, this view is hardly news in 1954; Toynbee's specific application is.
Communism: Christian Heresy. Toynbee places the present time in the Christian Era, but refers to modern Western civilization as "post-Christian" or "ex-Christian." He uses these phrases to express his belief that the West began to divorce itself from Christianity in the 17th century. He thinks that it is a failure of Christianity that gave Communism its chance.
Toynbee's argument: technology had created the means to abolish poverty. No longer was it morally right for "a small fraction of Mankind" alone to enjoy "the fruits of Civilization." But the West failed to pay "the huge interim payment on account of social justice" owing to the poor. It was in response to this failure that Marx, a Western man, produced Das Kapital, a "Christian heresy" designed to offset a Christian failure.
For the Russian Communists, says Toynbee, Marxism was made to order. On grounds of social justice, they were able to appeal to men of good will everywhere. "In thus denouncing the children of a Modern Western 'ascendancy' for their failure to pay a moral debt . . . Communism was proclaiming in a challengingly loud un-Christian voice a commandment of Christ's which, on the Christian Church's lips, had sunk to a discreetly inaudible whisper repeated by churchmen under their breath; and, if Marxism was nevertheless a heresy from a truly Christian point of view, this was because, like most other heresies in their day, it had taken up arms on behalf of one grievously neglected Christian truth to the still more grievous neglect of this one Christian truth's Christian setting."
It is important for the West to pay this "moral debt" by solving the economic problems of backward people, says Toynbee; however, it will not do any good unless it is done unselfishly, "through a spontaneous outburst of love."
Homunculus & Leviathan. In the long run, thinks Toynbee, Communism will prove inadequate as a substitute religion, because it offers "a stone for bread." But in the short run its appeal might be more effective than the West's, particularly among the "peasants" of Asia and Africa, whose voice may well decide the future. The West has erred because it has chosen to fight Communism chiefly with Communism's own materialist weapons. In fact, paradoxically, it is materialist Communism which now preaches its own gospel with a fervor recalling "Holy Russia," while the U.S. stresses material prosperity. Toynbee is sure that a "decisive majority of all living men and women" would in the end side with the U.S. Nevertheless: "'Holy Russia' [is] a more rousing war cry than 'Happy America.' "
Both Communism and Western liberalism, says Toynbee, worship not God but man. It is a contest "between two incompatible versions of the cult of a human idol." Liberalism worships the individual as symbolized by Homunculus, Communism worships "the collective human beast" as symbolized by Leviathan. As long as the battle is fought on these terms, the Communists will keep winning. Western democracy must base its appeal on more than freedom, more than prosperity, more than the right to vote and to strike; it must base its appeal on religion. Only thus can democracy "recondition" its paralyzed weapons and "turn the tables on [the] Communist assailants." Then "the idol Leviathan might still be triumphantly defied and defeated by souls contending for the liberty of Conscience and risking martyrdom for the glory of God . . . The grace of God [might] bring about this miracle in ex-Christian Western hearts genuinely smitten with contrition . . ."
But Which Religion? Americans, who have always believed in freedom under God, will not be surprised by Toynbee's insistence that, in order to win, the West must have religion on its banners and in its heart. The lengths to which Toynbee carries the matter will antagonize liberals who believe that freedom and human dignity are great goods (and mighty weapons) independent of religion. But the real question posed by Toynbee's plea for religion is: Which one?
Arnold Toynbee calls himself a Christian. His works are drenched with Christian symbolism, terminology and theology. He often seems to speak with deep Christian fervor. Yet his beliefs fit into no Christian orthodoxy. He is not a Christian in any strict sense of the word.
To Toynbee, all the "higher religions," i.e., Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, are simply separate ways to the City of God. Toynbee sees the prophets of other religions as precursors of Christ, and their sufferings "Stations of the Cross in anticipation of the Crucifixion." But he does not explicitly accept Christ's divinity. Toynbee also sees Christianity as the "climax of a continuous upward movement of spiritual progress" and thinks that "a 20th century historian might venture to predict that Christianity's transfiguring effect on the World up to date would be outshone by its continuing operation in the future." But he does not accept Christianity as the only true religion. To do so, he believes, is a "sin." If to be a Christian is to believe that Christianity "possesses a monopoly of the Divine Light . . . then I am not entitled to call myself a Christian." Since finishing the Study, Toynbee has expressed himself even more strongly. Said he: "If all the religions in the world were to disappear except Christianity and Buddhism, I would not be able to make a choice between them. In this part of the world, of course, it would be more convenient to keep Christianity, but convenience aside, there would be no choice between them for me."
Toynbee believes that even a "post-Christian" West may yet be saved by Christianity, but not as it is embodied in the existing churches. In fact, a return to orthodoxy would be merely a false and temporary refuge. Instead, Toynbee suggests a kind of spontaneous rally of faith, possibly even the emergence of a new spiritual species. In the distant future, he foresees a kind of blending of all the higher religions—"a terrestrial Communion of Saints who would be free from sin . . . because each soul . . . would be cooperating with God at the cost of sore spiritual travail."
If such a beatific vision seems too remote from history to some readers, Toynbee earnestly replies that "a goal can often best be reached by aiming at a more ambitious goal beyond it," and that "spiritual progress will incidentally bring mundane progress in its train."
The Technician. The ten-volume Study is a huge and complex structure. It is almost a kind of separate literary civilization, with a life of its own. Toynbee, now 65, started to write the concluding volumes in 1947, after a seven-year stint with the British Foreign Office, and with the help of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Working on the history half days (he is also director of studies at the Royal Institute of Foreign Affairs), Toynbee wrote in longhand with a fountain pen, following a penciled outline he had made in 1927. He also drew on 15 notebooks he had filled with thoughts and quotations over the years, but he kept more of his universe of facts filed in his head. The manuscript that he finally delivered to his publishers in five suitcases does not make easy reading, but reading it is a major intellectual adventure.
The baffling ease with which Toynbee glides over the millenniums, from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy to the U.S. Civil War to Carthage's "wooden curtain" of ships to Persian headgear to the Nestorian Uighur Turkish secretaries of the Mongols to the Tokugawa regime in Japan to the Argonauts to Kon-Tiki to the Prankish Lex Salica to U.S. television, gives the reader a heady sense of omniscience and omnipresence. Toynbee is at his most fascinating and most expert as a technician of civilization. When he ex plains a civilization's functioning, he evokes the kind of satisfaction that goes with learning the workings of a complex machine, except that Toynbee's big machines are powered by mankind and subject to the tragedies of blood, the triumphs, agonies and ironies of history. Toynbee's knowledge of the machinery is unmatched—the cities, armies, ruling classes, police forces, bureaucracies, churches, cliques. In his hands, civilizations become curiously human, not merely in the trite sense that they seem young or old, fresh or tired, but in that they seem to parallel human psychology; they try to evade death, fool themselves about their fate, are egocentric or lovelorn or fear-haunted or resigned.
No summary can suggest Toynbee's range. But his study of renaissances, those recurring attempts of civilizations to recapture their lost youth, is a good example. Charlemagne tried to snatch back features of Hellenism, and Timur Lenk tried to raise the ghost of the Cairene 'Abbasid Caliphate, neither with success. In literature, 15th century Humanism tried to revive the writing of Latin verse only to see the "vulgar" and more virile Western literature sweep Europe. Toynbee includes the Crusades among the "renaissances" that failed, a deplorable attempt to reach "religious goals by military short cuts." In effect, Toynbee is saying that to stay healthy, a civilization must plot its own course, quotes with approval the ghost of Achilles from the Odyssey: "I would rather be a wretched peasant on the land, abouring as a serf with a poor, portionless man for my master, than be sovereign ord of all the legions of the shades of the dead and departed."
The Law of God. For all of Toynbee's faults—his frequent vagueness, his overlong view that sometimes makes him shortsighted on contemporary problems—the Study remains by far the most audacious and imaginative view of man's time on earth yet undertaken by any historian.
Few readers will accept—or read—all of Toynbee; many will reject a great deal. But if the West, clinging to its steep cliff, wants a heartening message, one can be found in this "post-Christian" English historian. It is in the other, larger meaning of Amplexus expecta—that the West must cling to God, to a life that is always dangerous, and to man's constant, painful duty to choose between good and evil.
An example must be sought in Christ, says Toynbee, "not of shrinking from the suffering inherent in Human Nature, but of accepting it for the sake of saving human beings"; and in the bodhisattva (a future Buddha) whose characteristic virtue was "his fortitude in withstanding a perpetual temptation to desert his self-assigned post in a world of painful action in order to take the short cut to oblivion that lay perpetually open to him . . . Western Man's task [is] to school himself to 'living dangerously.' "
Beyond the "law of nature" of the scientists, the "laws of history" of the Marxists and Spenglerians, the "economic" and man-made laws worshiped by most modern historians, Western Man must submit once more to the Law of God. "In appealing to the Law of God, a human soul has to abandon certainty in order to embrace Hope and Fear . . . A human soul is apt to find in this what it brings to it . . . The Law of God is freedom itself, under a more illuminating name."
Thus Professor Arnold Toynbee once saw himself in a dream. The eminent British historian (who dreams as fluently in Latin as he writes in Greek) tells this nighttime vision in the concluding volumes of his monumental Study of History. While to 20th century psychoanalysts the dream may be a commonplace of troubled souls, it nevertheless sums up Historian Toynbee's ultimate message to Western civilization. The mesage is: hang on, wait and pray.
Coming at the end of a lifetime's work that ranges over all recorded history in dazzling detail, and pronounced at a time of unprecedented crisis, these words may sound like a thundering anticlimax. Yet the mind that formed them, the context in which they are set down and the view of man that lies behind them, all compel utmost attention from Americans, who themselves are now haunted by the feeling that they are precariously hanging on above a menacing chasm of history.
Toynbee to Date. On the morning after the start of World War II, the first six volumes of Toynbee's Study were gathering dust in libraries, their author un known outside a tiny circle. But by 1947 an abridgment had become a bestseller, and today Toynbee is a household word in all the better-informed households. His fame rests on two major achievements:
¶ In an age of historians who consider God irrelevant, Toynbee put God back into history. The end of history, he asserted, is the Kingdom of God, and history is "God revealing Himself."
¶ In an age of "antinomian" historians (who are devoted "to the dogma that 'life is just one damned thing after another' "), Toynbee organized history in a pattern. He treated not of nations or races or even "forces," but of civilizations which he saw living and dying in regular cycles. This concept was popularized by Germany's brilliant Historian Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), but where Spengler saw the rise and fall of civilizations inexorably fated, Toynbee believed them subject to man's free will and God's grace
In Toynbee's image, Western civilization was a climber high up on a rocky cliff. All other civilizations had fallen to their deaths or were lying stagnant on lower ledges. Only the West was still free to continue the climb. According to Toynbee, Western civilization was born out of the dying Roman Empire and the church, had its period of growth in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and probably suffered its fatal breakdown (defined by Toynbee as a failure of self-determination followed by submission to "false idols," such as nationalism) in the period of the 16th and 17th century religious wars. Since then, the West has been in its "time of troubles," marked by recent wars. Invariably, in all past civilizations examined by Toynbee, the next stage had been the forcible establishment of a "universal state," in which the strongest of the warring rivals knocked out all others and for a time enforced peace. Invariably, these universal states rotted away inside their imposing armor. Grown morally feeble, the leaders ("creative minority") no longer responded to the challenges that faced them, the masses ("internal proletariat") lost faith in the leaders, and barbarians waiting outside the walls ("external proletariat") finally conquered the dying civilization. (Today's barbarians, for the most part, are not outside civilization's walls but inside.)
Somewhere late in its time of troubles, but short of the fatal establishment of a universal state, is the point where Toynbee tentatively left the West at the end of Volume VI. And that is the point where he now takes up the story again.
New Vision of History. The concluding volumes of the Study are dominated by a striking assertion: religion is not merely a guide or inspiration to civilization but its very reason for being.
Toynbee rejects the view that religions are "cancers" of civilization (e.g., Gibbon held that rising Christianity sapped the strength of the Roman Empire). He also discards the view, to which he inclined earlier, of religion as mainly a chrysalis for civilization (e.g., the church preserved "a precious germ of life" of the dead Roman civilization). Toynbee now believes that the higher religions do not exist to give birth to civilizations, but that civilizations exist in order to give birth to higher religions. "The birth of a civilization is a catastrophe if it is a regression from a previously established church, while the breakdown of a civilization is not a catastrophe if it is the overture to a church's birth."
Does this mean that the West is doomed, able only to take cold comfort from the hope that out of its grave new religious life will sprout? Not necessarily, says Toynbee: "I do not believe that civilizations have to die . . . Civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills."
Toynbee ridicules the smugness of the 18th and 19th centuries in terms of a Max Beerbohm cartoon (see cut). The Enlightened Dandy is so taken with his perfection that he can conceive of the future only as a gawkier version of himself; the Victorian Bourgeois is so optimistic that he sees the future as a figure fairly bursting with progress. But Toynbee believes that the 20th century's thin, frightened young man who sees only a question mark in the future ("Is he perhaps wondering whether he can even look forward to having any successor of any kind?") may be equally wrong. Doom is no more automatic than progress.
Herodians, Zealots & a Nymph. Toynbee is sure that a universal state—a single, worldwide government run either by Washington or Moscow—has been rendered inevitable ("sooner rather than later") by modern technology. The atom bomb clinched it. The only question is: Will the world state come about by war or peacefully? Toynbee has no illusions that it can be brought about by the U.N., or by any "talismanic blueprint of a federal constitution." His own answer is conditioned by a fascinating historical analysis of how nations try to meet the penetration of foreign civilizations. There are, he says, two constantly recurring patterns of response by "the party at bay against an inhuman enemy within its battered gates." These two responses he calls Zealotism and Herodianism, after the two Jewish parties at the time of Christ, who tried to cope with the inroads of Hellenic civilization.
The Zealots fought the Hellenic aggression by trying to keep out all Hellenic ideas and insisting on old ways and values to the last. The Herodians were as firmly convinced that the only way to stave off the enemy was to borrow enough Hellenism to give the Jews a chance to hold their own. In the end, both methods proved equally futile. Why?
Suppose, says Toynbee, a pixie Lady of the Lake sees her inviolate body of water sullied by "an audacious backwoodsman's canoe." Acting as a Zealot, she will use her supernatural power to freeze the water solid. As a Herodian, she will eventually drain her lake bed dry. But in either case, says Toynbee, she will only transform her lake into a road and let in the "landlubber dry-shod." Roughly translated into the different, present-day situation (in which the West is very far from being "at bay"), the Zealots might advocate stringent repression of all hostile ideas, as well as dropping a few atomic bombs on Russia; the Herodians would favor gradual appeasement. Toynbee would consider both parties an "unmerciful pair of pedants." Both courses would in the end aid the Communists: appeasement obviously by strengthening them, internal repression and atomic war with all its terrors by making democratic life impossible for a long time, regardless of who wins. A smart nymph, according to Toynbee, would work for peaceful coexistence.
The Case for a Détente. This is one interpretation of Amplexus expecta: the West must hang on, using self-restraint, patience, fortitude, tolerance. The U.S. is, in effect, ruler of half the world; Russia, ruler of the other half. Let it stay that way, says Toynbee, in a "pacific partition of the Oikumené (habitable world)." Look for a détente and play for time. (As a precedent, Toynbee cites 600 relatively peaceful years between Rome and Parthia, beginning about 20 B.C.)
Toynbee shares the widespread and dangerously simple view that Soviet Russia is a continuation of old-style imperialism on the world scene, only "cloaked" by Communism. One cause of friction between Russia and the West, says Toynbee, is that they have not "had time to become spiritually intimate" with each other. "What, on both sides, was now needed above all was time to allow a Subconscious Psyche, whose pace was the tortoise's gait, to adjust itself to . . . the technological conjuring tricks of a practical intellect that had been racing ahead of its subconscious yokefellow at the pace of a march hare . . . The two monsters [Russia and the U.S.] might settle down side by side to live and let live . . . gradually become less unlike one another."
In such passages of fantastically wishful thinking, it looks as if Toynbee, an eminent historian when dealing with the distant past, becomes just another minor pundit when dealing with the present. The Herod-Zealot comparison may well be a brilliant flash of historic insight. What Toynbee seemingly fails to realize is that in the present situation, "coexistence" is bound to lead to Herodianism.
If this were Toynbee's whole view of Russia and the West, Americans might well dismiss the learned professor as just another crypto-Herod and tell him to go paddle his "audacious canoe." But there is far more to Toynbee than that. Toynbee never seems to regard coexistence as anything but a temporary expedient to gain time for the pursuit of a long-range solution. In Toynbee's view, the long-range solution to the problem of Communism—as to all other major problems in the world today—is a matter of religion. In general, this view is hardly news in 1954; Toynbee's specific application is.
Communism: Christian Heresy. Toynbee places the present time in the Christian Era, but refers to modern Western civilization as "post-Christian" or "ex-Christian." He uses these phrases to express his belief that the West began to divorce itself from Christianity in the 17th century. He thinks that it is a failure of Christianity that gave Communism its chance.
Toynbee's argument: technology had created the means to abolish poverty. No longer was it morally right for "a small fraction of Mankind" alone to enjoy "the fruits of Civilization." But the West failed to pay "the huge interim payment on account of social justice" owing to the poor. It was in response to this failure that Marx, a Western man, produced Das Kapital, a "Christian heresy" designed to offset a Christian failure.
For the Russian Communists, says Toynbee, Marxism was made to order. On grounds of social justice, they were able to appeal to men of good will everywhere. "In thus denouncing the children of a Modern Western 'ascendancy' for their failure to pay a moral debt . . . Communism was proclaiming in a challengingly loud un-Christian voice a commandment of Christ's which, on the Christian Church's lips, had sunk to a discreetly inaudible whisper repeated by churchmen under their breath; and, if Marxism was nevertheless a heresy from a truly Christian point of view, this was because, like most other heresies in their day, it had taken up arms on behalf of one grievously neglected Christian truth to the still more grievous neglect of this one Christian truth's Christian setting."
It is important for the West to pay this "moral debt" by solving the economic problems of backward people, says Toynbee; however, it will not do any good unless it is done unselfishly, "through a spontaneous outburst of love."
Homunculus & Leviathan. In the long run, thinks Toynbee, Communism will prove inadequate as a substitute religion, because it offers "a stone for bread." But in the short run its appeal might be more effective than the West's, particularly among the "peasants" of Asia and Africa, whose voice may well decide the future. The West has erred because it has chosen to fight Communism chiefly with Communism's own materialist weapons. In fact, paradoxically, it is materialist Communism which now preaches its own gospel with a fervor recalling "Holy Russia," while the U.S. stresses material prosperity. Toynbee is sure that a "decisive majority of all living men and women" would in the end side with the U.S. Nevertheless: "'Holy Russia' [is] a more rousing war cry than 'Happy America.' "
Both Communism and Western liberalism, says Toynbee, worship not God but man. It is a contest "between two incompatible versions of the cult of a human idol." Liberalism worships the individual as symbolized by Homunculus, Communism worships "the collective human beast" as symbolized by Leviathan. As long as the battle is fought on these terms, the Communists will keep winning. Western democracy must base its appeal on more than freedom, more than prosperity, more than the right to vote and to strike; it must base its appeal on religion. Only thus can democracy "recondition" its paralyzed weapons and "turn the tables on [the] Communist assailants." Then "the idol Leviathan might still be triumphantly defied and defeated by souls contending for the liberty of Conscience and risking martyrdom for the glory of God . . . The grace of God [might] bring about this miracle in ex-Christian Western hearts genuinely smitten with contrition . . ."
But Which Religion? Americans, who have always believed in freedom under God, will not be surprised by Toynbee's insistence that, in order to win, the West must have religion on its banners and in its heart. The lengths to which Toynbee carries the matter will antagonize liberals who believe that freedom and human dignity are great goods (and mighty weapons) independent of religion. But the real question posed by Toynbee's plea for religion is: Which one?
Arnold Toynbee calls himself a Christian. His works are drenched with Christian symbolism, terminology and theology. He often seems to speak with deep Christian fervor. Yet his beliefs fit into no Christian orthodoxy. He is not a Christian in any strict sense of the word.
To Toynbee, all the "higher religions," i.e., Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, are simply separate ways to the City of God. Toynbee sees the prophets of other religions as precursors of Christ, and their sufferings "Stations of the Cross in anticipation of the Crucifixion." But he does not explicitly accept Christ's divinity. Toynbee also sees Christianity as the "climax of a continuous upward movement of spiritual progress" and thinks that "a 20th century historian might venture to predict that Christianity's transfiguring effect on the World up to date would be outshone by its continuing operation in the future." But he does not accept Christianity as the only true religion. To do so, he believes, is a "sin." If to be a Christian is to believe that Christianity "possesses a monopoly of the Divine Light . . . then I am not entitled to call myself a Christian." Since finishing the Study, Toynbee has expressed himself even more strongly. Said he: "If all the religions in the world were to disappear except Christianity and Buddhism, I would not be able to make a choice between them. In this part of the world, of course, it would be more convenient to keep Christianity, but convenience aside, there would be no choice between them for me."
Toynbee believes that even a "post-Christian" West may yet be saved by Christianity, but not as it is embodied in the existing churches. In fact, a return to orthodoxy would be merely a false and temporary refuge. Instead, Toynbee suggests a kind of spontaneous rally of faith, possibly even the emergence of a new spiritual species. In the distant future, he foresees a kind of blending of all the higher religions—"a terrestrial Communion of Saints who would be free from sin . . . because each soul . . . would be cooperating with God at the cost of sore spiritual travail."
If such a beatific vision seems too remote from history to some readers, Toynbee earnestly replies that "a goal can often best be reached by aiming at a more ambitious goal beyond it," and that "spiritual progress will incidentally bring mundane progress in its train."
The Technician. The ten-volume Study is a huge and complex structure. It is almost a kind of separate literary civilization, with a life of its own. Toynbee, now 65, started to write the concluding volumes in 1947, after a seven-year stint with the British Foreign Office, and with the help of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Working on the history half days (he is also director of studies at the Royal Institute of Foreign Affairs), Toynbee wrote in longhand with a fountain pen, following a penciled outline he had made in 1927. He also drew on 15 notebooks he had filled with thoughts and quotations over the years, but he kept more of his universe of facts filed in his head. The manuscript that he finally delivered to his publishers in five suitcases does not make easy reading, but reading it is a major intellectual adventure.
The baffling ease with which Toynbee glides over the millenniums, from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy to the U.S. Civil War to Carthage's "wooden curtain" of ships to Persian headgear to the Nestorian Uighur Turkish secretaries of the Mongols to the Tokugawa regime in Japan to the Argonauts to Kon-Tiki to the Prankish Lex Salica to U.S. television, gives the reader a heady sense of omniscience and omnipresence. Toynbee is at his most fascinating and most expert as a technician of civilization. When he ex plains a civilization's functioning, he evokes the kind of satisfaction that goes with learning the workings of a complex machine, except that Toynbee's big machines are powered by mankind and subject to the tragedies of blood, the triumphs, agonies and ironies of history. Toynbee's knowledge of the machinery is unmatched—the cities, armies, ruling classes, police forces, bureaucracies, churches, cliques. In his hands, civilizations become curiously human, not merely in the trite sense that they seem young or old, fresh or tired, but in that they seem to parallel human psychology; they try to evade death, fool themselves about their fate, are egocentric or lovelorn or fear-haunted or resigned.
No summary can suggest Toynbee's range. But his study of renaissances, those recurring attempts of civilizations to recapture their lost youth, is a good example. Charlemagne tried to snatch back features of Hellenism, and Timur Lenk tried to raise the ghost of the Cairene 'Abbasid Caliphate, neither with success. In literature, 15th century Humanism tried to revive the writing of Latin verse only to see the "vulgar" and more virile Western literature sweep Europe. Toynbee includes the Crusades among the "renaissances" that failed, a deplorable attempt to reach "religious goals by military short cuts." In effect, Toynbee is saying that to stay healthy, a civilization must plot its own course, quotes with approval the ghost of Achilles from the Odyssey: "I would rather be a wretched peasant on the land, abouring as a serf with a poor, portionless man for my master, than be sovereign ord of all the legions of the shades of the dead and departed."
The Law of God. For all of Toynbee's faults—his frequent vagueness, his overlong view that sometimes makes him shortsighted on contemporary problems—the Study remains by far the most audacious and imaginative view of man's time on earth yet undertaken by any historian.
Few readers will accept—or read—all of Toynbee; many will reject a great deal. But if the West, clinging to its steep cliff, wants a heartening message, one can be found in this "post-Christian" English historian. It is in the other, larger meaning of Amplexus expecta—that the West must cling to God, to a life that is always dangerous, and to man's constant, painful duty to choose between good and evil.
An example must be sought in Christ, says Toynbee, "not of shrinking from the suffering inherent in Human Nature, but of accepting it for the sake of saving human beings"; and in the bodhisattva (a future Buddha) whose characteristic virtue was "his fortitude in withstanding a perpetual temptation to desert his self-assigned post in a world of painful action in order to take the short cut to oblivion that lay perpetually open to him . . . Western Man's task [is] to school himself to 'living dangerously.' "
Beyond the "law of nature" of the scientists, the "laws of history" of the Marxists and Spenglerians, the "economic" and man-made laws worshiped by most modern historians, Western Man must submit once more to the Law of God. "In appealing to the Law of God, a human soul has to abandon certainty in order to embrace Hope and Fear . . . A human soul is apt to find in this what it brings to it . . . The Law of God is freedom itself, under a more illuminating name."
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