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Western Civilization. If the topmost climber from the pit of the past could take time from his desperate effort to save himself by climbing higher, he would see below a paralyzing panorama of desolation. Must he join it too? How much longer can he keep going? What is the state of Western civilization? How firm is its grip upon the rocks which can kill more easily than they can help his ascent?
Our civilization, says Toynbee, is in its time of troubles (he dates them from the wars of the Reformation), perhaps toward the end of them. He finds bleak comfort in the thought that as yet no universal state has been imposed despite Napoleon's attempt, and two attempts by the Germans. But from the vast design and complex achievement of A Study of History one hopeful meaning stands out: not materialist but psychic factors are the decisive forces of history. The action takes place within the amphitheater of the world and the flux of time; the real drama unfolds within the mind of man. It is determined by his responses to the challenges of life; and since his capacity for response is infinitely varied, no civilization, including our own, is inexorably doomed. Under God, man, being the equal of his fate, is the measure of his own aspiration.
Says Toynbee (near the end of the one-volume edition): "This chapter itself was written on the eve of the outbreak of the General War of 1939-45 for readers who had already lived through the General War of 1914-18, and it was recast for republication on the morrow of the ending of the second of these two world wars within one lifetime by the invention and employment of a bomb in which a newly contrived release of atomic energy has been directed by man to the destruction of human life and works on an unprecedented scale.
"This swift succession of catastrophic events on a steeply mounting gradient inevitably inspires a dark doubt about our future, and this doubt threatens to undermine our faith and hope at a critical eleventh hour which calls for the utmost exertion of these saving spiritual faculties. Here is a challenge which we cannot evade, and our destiny depends on our response."
† Oxford University Press; $40.50. Next week Oxford will publish a one-volume abridgment edited by D. C. Somervell and revised by Professor Toynbee. In its 589 pages, readers will find Toynbee's argument stripped to its essentials.
* In 1913, Toynbee allied himself with another British scholarly dynasty by marrying the daughter of Professor Gilbert Murray, famous classical scholar and the Swinburnian translator of Euripides and other Greek dramatists. They had three sons, of whom the best known is Philip Toynbee, novelist (School in Private, The Barricades) and reviewer for British magazines like Horizon, Contact and others. Shortly after World War II, Toynbee and Rosalind Murray were divorced. Toynbee then married Veronica Boulter, for many years his secretary and researcher.
* He served in a similar capacity at the recent Foreign Ministers conference in Paris.