Arnold Toynbee - Christianity and Civilization. Arnold Toynbee. Christianity and Civilization. From Civilization on Trial, Oxford University Press, 1. Published by permission. AS I WAS RE- READING my notes for this essay during the last few days, there floated into my mind the picture of a scene which was transacted in the capital of a great empire about fourteen hundred years ago, when that capital was full of war- not a war on a front but a war in the rear, a war of turmoil and street fighting.
The emperor of that empire was holding council to decide whether he should carry on the struggle or whether he should take ship and sail away to safety. At the crown council his wife, the empress, was present and spoke, and she said: 'You, Justinian, can sail away if you like; the ship is at the quay and the sea is still open but I am going to stay and see it out, because . Now that paraphrase of a famous phrase of Greek comes, I venture to think, rather near to the three Latin words which are the motto of the University of Oxford; and, if we believe in these three words Dominus Illuminatio Mea and can live up to them, we can look forward without dismay to any future that may be coming to us. The material future is very little in our power. Storms might come which might lay low that noble and beloved building and leave not one stone upon another.
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But, if the truth about this university and about ourselves is told in those three Latin words, then we know for certain that, though the stones may fall, the light by which we live will not go out. Now let me come by a very easy transition to what is my subject in this essay - -the relation between Christianity and civilization. This is a question which has always been at issue since the foundation of the Christian Church, and of course there have been a number of alternative views on it. One of the oldest and most persistent views is that Christianity was the destroyer of the civilization within whose framework it grew up. That was, I suppose, the view of the Emperor Marcus, as far as he was aware of the presence of Christianity in his world. It was most emphatically and violently the view of his successor the Emperor Julian, and it was also the view of the English historian Gibbon, who recorded the decline and fall of the Roman Empire long after the event.
In the last chapter of Gibbon's history there is one sentence in which he sums up the theme of the whole work. Looking back, he says: . He starts you there, and at the end of the long story he says . Gibbon assumes that the Graeco- Roman civilization stood at its height in the age of the Antonines and that in tracing its decline from that moment he is tracing that decline from the beginning. Evidently, if you take that view, Christianity rises as the empire sinks, and the rise of Christianity is the fall of civilization. I think Gibbon's initial error lies in supposing that the ancient civilization of the Graeco- Roman world began to decline in the second century after Christ and that the age of the Antonines was that civilization's highest point. I think it really began to decline in the fifth century before Christ.
It died not by murder, but by suicide; and that act of suicide was committed before the fifth century B. C. It was not even the philosophies which preceded Christianity that were responsible for the death of the ancient Graeco- Roman civilization. The philosophies arose because the civic life of that civilization had already destroyed itself by turning itself into an idol to which men paid an exorbitant worship.
And the rise of the philosophies, and the subsequent rise of the religions out of which Christianity emerged as the final successor of them all, was something that happened after the Graeco- Roman civilization had already put itself to death. The rise of the philosophies, and a fortiori that of the religions, was not a cause; it was a consequence. When Gibbon in that opening passage of his work looks as the Roman Empire in that age of the Antonines, he does not say explicitly - -but I am sure this was in his mind- - that he is also thinking of himself as standing on another peak of civilization and looking back towards that distant peak in the past across a broad trough of barbarism in between. Gibbon thought to himself: . All the values that I, Gibbon, and my kind care for began to be degraded. Religion and barbarism began to triumph. This lamentable state of affairs continued to prevail for hundreds and hundreds of years; and then, a few generations before my time, no longer ago than the close of the seventeenth century, a rational civilization began to emerge again.
Trained from infancy in this unselfish ideal, the citizens devoted their lives to the public service and were ready to lay them down for the common good; or, if they shrank from the supreme sacrifice, it never occured to them that they acted otherwise than basely in preferring their personal existence to the interests of their country. All this was changed by the spread of Oriental religions which inculcated the communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only objects worth living for, objects in comparison with which the prosperity and even the existence of the state sank into insignificance. The inevitable result of this selfish and immoral doctrine was to withdraw the devotee more and more. The saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and rapt in ecstatic contemplation of heaven, became in popular opinion the highest ideal of humanity, displacing the old ideal of the patriot and hero who, forgetful of self, lives and is ready to die for the good of his country.
Arnold Toynbee Christianity and Civilization From Civilization on Trial, Oxford University Press, 1948. Published by permission AS I WAS RE-READING my notes for this.
The earthly city seemed poor and contemptible to men whose eyes beheld the City of God coming in the clouds of heaven. Thus the centre of gravity, so to say, was shifted from the present to a future life, and, however much the other world may have gained, there can be little doubt that this one lost heavily by the change. A general disintegration of the body politic set in. The ties of the state and the family were loosened: the structure of society tended to resolve itself into its individual elements and thereby to relapse into barbarism; for civilization is only possible through the active co- operation of the citizens and their willingness to subordinate their private interests to the common good. Men refused to defend their country and even to continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for a thousand years.
The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle Ages, marked the return of Europe to native ideals of life and condusct, to saner, manlier views of the world, The long halt in the march of civilization was over. The tide of Oriental invasion had turned at last. And one might speculate about what the author of this passage, which was first published in 1.
Many reading this article are, of course, familiar with the passage. I have not yet mentioned the author's name; but, for those who do not know it already, I would say that it is not Alfred Rosenberg; it is Sir James Frazer.(1) I wonder what that gentle scholar thinks of the latest form in which Europe's return 'to native ideals of life and conduct' is manifesting itself. Now you will have seen that the most interesting thesis in that passage of Frazer's in the contention that trying to save one's soul is something contrary to, and incompatible with, trying to do one's duty to one's neighbour. I am going, in the course of this essay, to challenge that thesis; at the moment I merely want to point out that Frazer is at the same time putting Gibbon's thesis and stating it in explicit terms; and on this point I would give Frazer the answer that I have already ventured to give to Gibbon: that Christianity was not the destroyer of the ancient Greek civilization, because that civilization had decayed from inherent defects of its own before Christianity arose.
But I would agree with Frazer, and would ask you to agree with me, that the tide of Christianity has been ebbing and that our post- Christian Western secular civilization that has emerged is a civilization of the same order as the pre- Christian Graeco- Roman civilization. This observation opens up a second possible view of the relation between Christianity and civilization - -not the same view in which Christianity appears in the role of civilization's humble servant. According to this second possible view, Christianity is, as it were, the egg, grub and chrysalis between butterfly and butterfly. Christianity is a transitional thing which bridges the gap between one civilization and another, and I confess that I myself held this rather patronizing view for many years. On this view you look at the historical function of the Christian Church in terms of the process of the reproduction of civilizations.
Civilization is a species of being which seeks to reproduce itself, and Christianity has had a useful but a subordinate role in bringing two new secular civilizations to birth after the death of their predecessor. You find the ancient Graeco- Roman civilization in decline from the close of the second century after Christ onwards. And then after an interval you find - -perhaps as early as the ninth century in Byzantium, and as early as the thirteenth century in the West in the person of the Stupor Mundi Frederick II- - a new secular civilization arising out of the ruins of its Graeco- Roman predecessor. And you look at the role of Christianity in the interval and conclude that Christianity is a kind of chrysalis which has held and preserved the hidden germs of life until these have been able to break out again into a new growth of secular civilization.