As the Orient Express sped westward from Istanbul one September day in 1921, a tall, slender young classicist gazed thoughtfully out the window. "I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the Bela Palanka Gorge in the light of the full moon, as our train bore down upon Nish," wrote Arnold Toynbee, who had been covering the Greco-Turkish war for the Manchester Guardian. Before he went to sleep that night, he took out a fountain pen and jotted down "a list of topics" on half a sheet of paper.
For almost 40 years, Toynbee developed those same jotted notes into A Study of History, his 3 million-word, twelve-volume masterwork on the rise and fall of civilizations. And when he was done with his originally planned ten volumes, the historian noted the end as precisely as he had noted the beginning: "Finis. London, 1951, June 15,6:25 p.m., after looking once more this afternoon at Fra Angelico's picture of the beatific vision."
Teaching Thucydides. The son of a social worker (his mother was one of the first women in England to earn a university degree), Toynbee studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford, and he was teaching Thucydides there when the first World War broke out. Unfit for the military because of a bout of dysentery, Toynbee spent the war working in the Foreign Office, then roamed the Middle East, and eventually taught at the University of London. He thought he would write his study of history in one long summer vacation. He published the first three volumes in 1934, reached Vol. X in 1954, and finally completed Vol. XII, Reconsiderations, in 1961.
It was Toynbee's destiny to arrive on the historical scene when it was still dominated by the same kind of nationalism that had led to the World War. Toynbee insisted that Britain could only be understood as a small part of Western Christian civilization, and that Western Christianity was only one of five contemporary civilizations. The others: Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and the Far East. Toynbee's taxonomy was somewhat arbitrary; he enraged many Jewish scholars by dismissing Judaism as one of several dead cultures that he rated as "fossils"; Africa was ignored almost entirely.
At any rate, Toynbee declared that the 21 civilizations he identified in recorded history had all followed certain patterns of growth and decay. According to what he called the law of "challenge and response," a specific challenge like the shortage of food in preclassical Greece might lead to varying responses (Spartan militarism or Athens' overseas empire), and after a "time of troubles" there would emerge a larger entity that would attempt to serve as a universal state (nurturing a universal church)—until it collapsed.
Oswald Spengler had been developing somewhat similar theories as early as the first volume of Decline of the West in 1918. But while Spengler argued that the decay of civilizations was inexorable and essentially purposeless, Toynbee insisted that man retains his freedom of choice: "I do not believe that civilizations have to die...Civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills." Moreover, it has a purpose, a dimly perceived but divinely ordained purpose. "History," he wrote, "[is] a vision of God's creation on the move."