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Toynbee was not committed to any one religion. He involved himself deeply in both Christianity and Buddhism but called himself an agnostic. God, he said, was a feeling that "wells up from a deeper level of the psyche." As for man's relationship to that sacred force, Toynbee once used a metaphor from his own dreams. In this dream, he said, he had seen himself holding onto the foot of the crucifix high above the altar of the Benedictine Abbey of Ampleforth in Yorkshire. Then he heard a voice call out in flawless Latin: "Amplexus expecta "—Cling and wait.
Toynbee's work attracted relatively little attention and less praise when it first appeared. Reviewing the first three volumes in 1935, the Journal of Modern History sniffed: "A Gargantuan feast, shall we say? Or is it hash and not chopped up fine enough at that?" In 1947. however, in the postwar search for international understanding, Toynbee suddenly experienced the truth of the Victor Hugo remark about an idea whose time has come. A one-volume abridgment of the first six books of the study sold a phenomenal quarter of a million copies. (An abridgment of Vols. VII to X appeared in 1957.)
International Sage. Even then Toynbee had his critics, who accused him of romanticism, vagueness and even factual error. But he had become an international sage, like Einstein, Schweitzer or Bertrand Russell, who was asked for his opinion on all manner of subjects. A mild and white-haired figure, married to his longtime research assistant, Veronica Boulter (his 33-year first marriage ended in divorce in 1946), Toynbee frequently visited U.S. universities and once commented that the things he liked best about the U.S. were Bing Crosby and peanut butter. Not all his views were so benign. When he was 80, he declared in the autobiographical Experiences that the U.S. (in Viet Nam) and Israel (in Palestine) were partners in colonialism. As recently as last year, he wrote in the Observer that fuel shortages might well lead to authoritarian governments in the West, but he added hopefully that "a society that is declining materially may be ascending spiritually." Indeed, his view of the future became almost mystical: "In the 21st century, human life is going to be a unity again in all its aspects..."
Last week, when Toynbee died at 86 in a York nursing home of the aftereffects of a stroke, the British obituaries were somewhat restrained. The Guardian observed that "his scheme of universal history was too absolute, and even his immense erudition too vulnerable...for his most ambitious work to prevail among contemporary generations." But some of those contemporaries were more generous. Harvard's Samuel Eliot Morison said that "he was one of the few people who dared to write on the broad sweep of history." Daniel Boorstin, recently confirmed as the new Librarian of Congress, commented that "few historians have spent themselves so unstintingly or so effectively in the effort to transcend the provincialism of their time and place." Toynbee felt that there was a kind of intellectual provincialism, too, in what he called "the dogma that 'life is just one damned thing after another,' " for he himself had "a lifetime conviction that human affairs do not become intelligible until they are seen as a whole."