Blind Man’s Buff

Arnold Toynbee’s new book (An Historian’s Approach to Religion: Oxford University Press, $5.00) offers us 1) a history of man’s worship-pings, 2) an explanation of the great turning-points in that history, 3) an analysis of man’s present politico-religious predicament, 4) a prediction as to how man will extricate himself from that predicament, and 5) a long-run solution to man’s religious problem, one aspect of which is a religious “message” of sorts. It would, therefore, be a bargain even at twice its price; and Suburbia, which in books at least has a sharp eye for a bargain, will predictably buy and absorb it in vast quantities.

First, then, as to the history of man’s “worship-pings,” or, in Toynbee’s own phrase, man’s “religions”—this term he uses broadly enough to cover everything, e.g., Nationalism and Technology, to which, consciously or unconsciously and with or without religious experience, man has ever subordinated himself. (Where I distinguish between “worship-pings” and “religion,” Toynbee distinguishes between “religions” and “higher religions.”) Here, though specialists will pick quarrels with him on matters of detail (and will no doubt win most of the resulting arguments), Toynbee the professional historian is in his element. He has a carefully worked-out story to tell, and he brings to the telling of it the vast learning, the profound sense of drama, the sympathetic imaginativeness, and, above all, the rich gift of phrase that have marked all of his historical writings. Human societies and communities, he declares, have at different times and places worshipped one or another of “no more than three objects… namely, Nature, Man himself, and an Absolute Reality that is not either Nature or Man but is in them and at the same time beyond them.”

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Willmoore Kendall

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Arnold Toynbee’s new book (An Historian’s Approach to Religion: Oxford University Press, $5.00) offers us 1) a history of man’s worship-pings, 2) an explanation of the great turning-points in that history, 3) an analysis of man’s present politico-religious predicament, 4) a prediction as to how man will extricate himself from that predicament, and 5) a long-run solution to man’s religious problem, one aspect of which is a religious “message” of sorts. It would, therefore, be a bargain even at twice its price; and Suburbia, which in books at least has a sharp eye for a bargain, will predictably buy and absorb it in vast quantities.

First, then, as to the history of man’s “worship-pings,” or, in Toynbee’s own phrase, man’s “religions”—this term he uses broadly enough to cover everything, e.g., Nationalism and Technology, to which, consciously or unconsciously and with or without religious experience, man has ever subordinated himself. (Where I distinguish between “worship-pings” and “religion,” Toynbee distinguishes between “religions” and “higher religions.”) Here, though specialists will pick quarrels with him on matters of detail (and will no doubt win most of the resulting arguments), Toynbee the professional historian is in his element. He has a carefully worked-out story to tell, and he brings to the telling of it the vast learning, the profound sense of drama, the sympathetic imaginativeness, and, above all, the rich gift of phrase that have marked all of his historical writings. Human societies and communities, he declares, have at different times and places worshipped one or another of “no more than three objects… namely, Nature, Man himself, and an Absolute Reality that is not either Nature or Man but is in them and at the same time beyond them.”