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If Toynbee's repudiation of the nation as history's central fact was Copernican, it also had an Einsteinian effect. For the relations of civilizations could not be investigated without introducing a new space-time factor into the study of history. Where, before, there had been nations, dramatizing their buzzing brevity upon the linear scale of history, there were, from Toynbee's vantage point, vertical progressions of human effort. Where there had been a plane, there was now chasmic depth, the all but unimaginable tract of time.
Toynbee had introduced into the theory of history two other ideas of far-reaching consequence:
1) To the theory of Spengler (whom Toynbee, nevertheless, calls "a man of genius") that civilizations are tragic organisms, growing inexorably toward predetermined dooms, Toynbee advanced a dryly lucid counter-proposition: civilizations are not things-in-themselves, but simply the relations that exist between men living in a given society at a given moment of history.
2) He shattered the frozen patterns of historical determinism and materialism by again asserting God as an active force in history. His assertion, implicit throughout the 3,488 pages of A Study of History, implied another: the goal of history, however dimly sensed in human terms, is the Kingdom of God. That aspiration redeems history from being a futile tragedy of blood.
Hence the saying of Toynbee admirers that the writing of history must be dated B.T. and A.T.—Before Toynbee and After Toynbee.
The Man. Arnold Toynbee was born (1889) in London toward the end of one of the world's rare Golden Ages (the Victorian).
His family tree was an exfoliation of the eager 19th Century British mind. His uncle, Arnold Toynbee, economist, author of The Industrial Revolution, and possessor of a restless social conscience, died when he was only 31. But he so impressed his contemporaries that they named Toynbee Hall, first of London's East End social settlements, in his honor. Toynbee's father was a social worker. Toynbee's mother was one of the first British women to receive a college degree.* The Golden Age shed its westering light over young Toynbee in the guise of a thorough classical training at Balliol, the most intellectual of Oxford's colleges.
But all men, including the historian, are a part of history. Europe's Iron Age, closing over Toynbee while he was studying at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, taught him that history is also the present. It was the eve of the Balkan wars. In dingy Greek cafes, Toynbee heard something he had never heard at Balliol—discussion of the foreign policy of Sir Edward Grey.