An Historian’s Approach to Religion by Arnold Toynbee (review)

BOOK REVIE1VS An Historian's Approach to Religion. By ARNOLD ToYNBEE. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. Pp. 327 with index. $5.00. :Mr. Arnold Toynbee has an astonishing amount of information about a great many things. How much knowledge he has about these same things is disputed among authorities. As for wisdom that is something else again. However, few critics would be disposed to question his methodology which conforms to the accepted norms of historical research though the conclusions he reaches are often startling. Somewhow he manages to use a scholar's tools, in an unscholarly fashion at least, in An Historian's Approach to Religion. The author has consulted a vast number of writers on subjects ranging from astrology to Zoroastrianism. He is familiar with the Old and New Testaments, with Buddhistic and Hindu texts, the Mahayanian bodhisattvas , the classical works (poetical and philosophical) of ancient Greece and Rome, the German, Italian and French philosophers of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and, of course, with contemporary theories on man and the universe. But with none of these is Mr. Toynbee completely satisfied. Nor has he given us his own convictions on these questions, perhaps because he has no convictions. It would be difficult to find a book that is so well written and so unsatisfactory. In the first chapter Mr. Toynbee asks the question: "What is the nature of the Universe? a question," he adds, "that all historians ought to be trying to answer." It is certainly not the function of the historian to discuss the nature of the universe. This is the philosopher's field. Mr. Toynbee says the historian's point of view is one of his more recent acquisitions in relation to the historic era. But because of his preoccupation with a time-space dimension in connection with the historian's viewpoint, the author gets himself involved in a discussion that confuses him and consequently his reader, and this in spite of the apparent lucidity of his statements . For example, he has his historian viewing the Universe, which includes the stellar cosmos, at one moment and the next moment the Universe is considered as the earthly habitation of man. According to Mr. Toynbee, "Man begins by worshipping Nature; when he ceases to worship Nature he is left with a spiritual vacuum which he is impelled to fill; and he is then confronted with the choice of substituting for the worship of Nature either a worship of himself or an approach to Absolute Reality through the worship of God or quest for Brahma or 207 208 BOOK REVIEWS Nirvana." This religious issue, he adds, was raised by the recent rise of the civilizations, and it has not yet been decided. " Man ... having reached a stage in his history at which he is no longer willing to worship Nature because he fancies that he has subjugated her-has been torn between Man hims~f and1 God as the object of his worship, or between humlih power or happiness and Brahma-Nirvana as his spiritual objective. (p. 21) Mr. Toynbee concludes that in spite of Man's victory over non-Human Nature, the worship of Nature is still embedded in the living higher religions . "Its presence is evident," he says, "in current Hinduism; it is also seen in th~ Mahayana and in Christianity, ·e. g., in the cult of the Mother of God and in the Sacrament of Bread and Wine." (The italics are the present writer's.) The worship of Nature is to be found even in Islam, "which is the most rational of all the living Judaic higher religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and Islam is a match for Judaism itself in the severity of its monotheism and in the clearness of its apprehension of the transcendent aspect of God." In reading this book two facts must be kept in mind, namely, Mr. Toynbee repudiates the Catholic doctrine of an infallible teaching authority in matters of faith and morals and denies that Christianity, as Catholics interpret it, is an exclusive deposi~ory of divine truth. His appreciation of Catholicism is conditioned by these facts. In the volume under review the author gives us a book...