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"In the language of mythology, when one of God's creatures is tempted by the Devil, God Himself is thereby given the opportunity to recreate the World. By the stroke of the Adversary's trident, all the fountains of the great deep are broken up. The Devil's intervention has accomplished that transition from Yin [passivity] to Yang [creativity] . . . for which God has been yearning ever since His Yin-state became complete, but which it was impossible for God to accomplish by Himself, out of His own perfection. And the Devil has done more for God than this; for, when once Yin has passed over into Yang, not the Devil himself can prevent God from completing His fresh act of creation by passing over again from Yang to Yin on a higher level. . . . Thus the Devil is bound to lose the wager, not because he has been cheated by God, but because he has overreached himself."
In this sense, the answer to the problem of history is the answer to the problem of evil. This is the philosophic crux of that act of creation which in the birth of civilizations Toynbee calls Challenge and Response.
The Theory. Toynbee's theory of history is a dialectic. That is, it reports the challenge of something (in this case, communities of men) by an exterior force. If the response to the initial challenge is successful, the success involves new challenges, new responses. If the new responses are not successful, the community breaks down, thereby liberating new creative forces—but on a higher plane, which has been reached by the society during the long developmental ordeal of responding to its challenges.
No attempt to simplify Toynbee's theory can communicate the scope of his historic purpose, the flexibility (amounting to wariness) of his cautious, scholarly mind, the grasp of his erudition, the profusion of historical comparison, contrast, allusion and quiet humor with which he weaves and vivifies his argument. Nevertheless, even grossly simplified, his main design, as on the reverse of a great tapestry, comes through.
Toynbee begins his investigation far down in the pit of history, when the Ice Age ground Europe beneath a creeping glacier. The plains of North Africa and the Middle East (now deserts) were then fertile, supporting a thick population of hunters and their prey—aurochs, oryx, etc. Among these hunters lived the progenitors of one of those broken bodies on the rock ledges of time—the Egyptiac civilization. Later, the ice retreated. The plains turned into deserts. The game fled. The hunters, too, had to retreat.
Some of them, says Toynbee, migrated to the moist Sudan, where their descendants probably survive as the primitive tribes of Shilluk and Dinka. But others, responding to the challenge of desiccation, resolved to change their lives completely. The valley of the Nile was then an all but inaccessible jungle of rank reeds, the lair of hippopotamuses and crocodiles. To live at all under such conditions required an effort beyond any that such men had ever made. Through the centuries, they drained the swamps, felled the reeds, diked the Nile, laid out fields. This response, Toynbee believes, was the genesis of Egyptian civilization—a response so powerful that its career, some 4,000 years, outlasted that of any civilization known to man.