When civilizations are flourishing, historians have noted, religion is generally at a low ebb; when civilizations disintegrate, religion thrives. Does this mean that religion is a fatal parasite on civilization? Yes, suggested 18th Century Historian Edward Gibbon.* No, says Historian Arnold J. Toynbee: on the contrary, civilizations are merely steppingstones in the progress of religion.
Toynbee's arresting thesis, first stated in a lecture delivered at Oxford in 1940, has now been distributed in pamphlet form† by the Religious Book Club.
Historian Gibbon, says Toynbee, was not the only eminent scholar to view Christianity as a menace to civilization. Anthropologist Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough) regretted that the "unselfish ideal" of Greek and Roman society, which subordinated the individual to the welfare of the state, was superseded by the "selfish and immoral doctrine" of "Oriental religions which inculcated the communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only objects worth living for. . . ." The result, said Frazer, was "a general disintegration of the body politic."
To Frazer and Gibbon, Historian Toynbee replies: the Graeco-Roman civilization was not destroyed by Christianity but "decayed from inherent defects of its own." He also rejects the idea that religions act as bridges between civilizations. He sees it as just the reverse:
The Steppingstones. "If religion is a chariot, it looks as if the wheels on which it mounts towards Heaven may be the periodic downfalls of civilization on Earth. It looks as if the movement of civilization may be cyclic and recurrent, while the movement of religion may be on a single continuous upward line. The continuous upward movement of religion may be served and prompted by the cyclic movement of civilizations round the cycle of birth—death—birth. . . .
"If ... it is the historical function of civilizations to serve, by their downfalls, as steppingstones to a progressive process of the revelation of always deeper religious insight . . . civilizations will have fulfilled their function when once they have brought a mature higher religion to birth; and, on this showing, our own Western post-Christian secular civilization might at best be a superfluous repetition of the pre-Christian Graeco-Roman one, and at worst a pernicious backsliding from the path of spiritual progress. In our Western world of today, the worship of Leviathan—the self-worship of the tribe —is a religion to which all of us pay some measure of allegiance; and this tribal religion is, of course, sheer idolatry.
"Communism, which is another of our latter-day religions, is, I think, a leaf taken from the book of Christianity—a leaf torn out and misread. Democracy is another leaf from the book of Christianity, which has also, I fear, been torn out and, while perhaps not misread, has certainly been half emptied of meaning by being divorced from its Christian context and secularized; and we have obviously ... been living on spiritual capital, I mean clinging to Christian practice without possessing the Christian belief. . . ."