122 - Mankind and Mother Earth

Mankind and Mother Earth
By Arnold J. Toynbee
New York and London, Oxford University Press, 1976. 596 pp. $19.50.

One of the valid claims for synoptic history is that it serves our urgent need for historical perspective. The human past illuminated may become a resource for contemporary wisdom. But this always poses at least two questions: one, just how much of the human past can be brought into clear and critical focus by any given historian at any given moment; and two, just how much authority do a historian's moralizings gain from his eminence as historian? There would seem to be a rough analogue to "the Peter Principle" among historians: viz, their pontifications often overreach their expertise. Thus, even genius-class historians may end up with conclusions no more profound than the editorials of our run-of-the-mill pundits.

This would seem to be the case with Mankind and Mother Earth, a posthumous volume in which an undoubted genius has attempted nothing less than total perspective of the entire human past-in the light of a specific diagnosis of the current human crisis and a specific prescription for human survival. The gist of Toynbee's diagnosis is that humanity has finally come by enough "demonic" power so as to be able to destroy the only "biosphere" (that we know of) in the universe. This

124 - Mankind and Mother Earth

diagnosis is realistic enough; the prescription, however, is utopian: "instead of wrecking the biosphere, Man may use his power over it to replace the state of nature by a state of grace in which love will prevail" (pp. 20-22). The bulk of the book is a barebones synopsis of "progress" from our earliest origins through all our salient vicissitudes down to our present crisis-all with a view to explaining "the dark riddle" of the repeated frustrations of our ideal aspirations.

Mankind and Mother Earth is a book that prompts long thoughts and opens up broad vistas. It must be read and re-read carefully, else the "story-line" gets blurred. But the labor is rewarding-even when one cannot check the primary sources or when one finds himself doubting or disagreeing with one or another glittering generality. Toynbee shuttles tirelessly from one historical epoch to another, from one "civilization" to another, from one seminal figure (or idea) to another, with very large generalizations as warp for his enormous tapestry. He sees Asia as the continent, with "European, African, Arabian and Indian peninsulas" (p. 469) and with the Americas as "its largest offshore islands" (p. 32)! He traces the mutations of "the Old Oikurmene" ("Asian") and the emergence of "the New Oikumene" (global). His heroes are readily identified: two scarce pages devoted to Akhenaton (pp. 98-99), three to Ashoka (pp. 225-27), four to Muhammad (pp. 365-69), seven admiring references to St. Francis. Stalin, Hitler, and Mao are not even mentioned, and recent world history is curiously truncated. Even so, as one soars over so immense an historical inscape, there is this mind-stretching sense of the sheer happenstance of historical experience and yet also its perennial continuities.

By the same token, however, Mankind and Mother Earth offers an exposed flank to nit-pickers-and to specialists who will find that many of Toynbee's generalizations in their respective fields range from dubious to outrageous. My own list runs past sixty-in a book where the sources that I could check for myself cover far less than half of it. For example, it is boldly said that "it is certain that Jesus and Muhammad were consciously following the Syrian prophetic tradition … [and were] two mighty epigoni of Zarathustra and 'Deutero-Isaiah' " (p. 178; italics added). It is equally clear to Toynbee that Mary was an avatar of "Isis, the tender Mother, . . . a goddess incarnate who had assumed (Isis's] character, image and attributes . . . " (pp. 295-96). Again, he suggests that Rome's persecution of Christianity amounted to a competition between two Syrian "weather gods: Yahweh and Jupiter Dolichenus" (p. 297) and that "Dolichenus was no match for Yahweh" (p. 298). Or, it is confidently concluded "that this British theologian's [i.e. Pelagius] Iranian-like insistence on man's moral responsibility is salutary at all times and places" (p. 335). Etc. Then, there are some actual misstatements: for example, that "Pulcheria was the power behind the throne of Theodosius [II]" (p. 327); that the iconodulist victory at Nicea II was only "momentary" (p. 397); that the Anabaptists were a single "sect" (p. 503); that the date for the destruction of Teotihuacan was ca. 600 (pp. 361, 422, 517). Etc. Fi-

126 - Mankind and Mother Earth

nally, there are at least four strange misspellings: pp. 48, 155 ("Golden Camel"-for "old"), 73 (Imhopte), 294 ("reality ander pow"), and 355 ("Pure Hand Buddhism"; cf. 466).

Anyway you take it, then, this is an exercise in historiographical hubris. And yet by sinning thus bravely, Toynbee stretches our horizons and enlarges our sense of the human heritage and community as few other synoptists have done. This is the main justification for the effort required to wade through all these packed pages, to sift all these bold conjectures. But finally to be done with Mankind and Mother Earth is to ponder Toynbee's "sermon" (for odd though it may seem, that is what this book amounts to). "Will mankind murder Mother Earth or will he redeem her . . . ? This is the enigmatic question which now confronts us" (p. 596). Fair enough-and familiar enough. But what is Toynbee's "gospel" in response to this enigma? It turns out, unsurprisingly, as yet another version of human self-salvation: "human love extended to include all components of the biosphere, inanimate as well as animate" (p. 594). This, in turn, makes "some form of global government" necessary for human survival. But where is the evidence for any realistic expectation of any such utopian conversion of mankind-more especially in light of this rehearsal of man's inveterate inhumanity to man and his age-old bent to disunity? What else is this particular call for a universal "change of heart" but a visionary hope already falsified by any realistic remembrance of our human past as such? How then are we to avoid the conclusion that Toynbee's diagnosis is more credible than his prescription, and, therefore, that a very different sort of wisdom is needed-from history rather differently conceived-if we are to face our admittedly "enigmatic" future with anything like confidence and hope?

Albert C. Outler
Perkins School of Theology
Southern Methodist University Dallas, Texas