Arnold Toynbee's spiritual experiences
The direction of the 20th century historian's life and scholarship were profoundly affected by three transcendent moments during troubled times
I am very interested in the intersection between scholarship and spiritual experience. I have myself been blessed with spiritual experiences in several key moments of self-doubt that left me comforted in the moment and also permanently changed in some way. This is quite common, though the tendency in academic discourse is to turn a blind eye to this reality. My heroes, including my intellectual heroes, are imperfect individuals who followed Truth where it would lead, and in one way or another find that it leads to a loving God.
Arnold Toynbee is one such. His epic Study of History was written in 12 volumes between 1934 and 1961. The reader can’t help noticing as the man who professed atheism at Oxford progressively turns toward the divine as the volumes go by. In the end his most dramatic conclusions are about humanity’s growth along the spiritual dimension even as one civilization replaces another. God works through history to elevate mankind. Toynbee’s earlier volumes were very well received and gave him a good deal of fame, but by the end his peers didn’t know how to deal with all the religious themes and spiritual content, and could no longer take Toynbee seriously. At one time in the 1950s Toynbee was considered the greatest living historian; now he is thought of by historians as an odd duck if he is thought of at all. Mostly his work is ignored.
What I didn’t know until this weekend as I was reading Toynbee’s biography, Arnold J Toynbee: A Life, by William McNeill, is that, like me (and so many others), Toynbee reported two or three very personal divine manifestations at pivotal moments that brought him peace in challenging times but also altered the course of his life and his work. I will relate these three events here, from McNeill.
1. Resolve when depressed, 1919
Toynbee was working for the British Foreign Office during World War I, wearing himself out putting in long hours to gather intelligence and make recommendations for the coming peace treaty, regarding how the shattered Eastern European and central Asian nations should be reorganized. In the end, he was demoralized as his fervent recommendations were ignore. He was also facing challenges with a mostly neglected family and with financial uncertainty. He felt his ambition of writing a great work of history slipping away. With all of this at the same time he fell into deep physical depression and psychological hopelessness. In Toynbee’s words written later about himself:
“In London, in the southern section of the Buckingham Palace Road, walking southward along the pavement skirting the west wall of Victoria Station, the writer, once, one afternoon not long after the end of the First world War he had failed to record the exact date had found himself in communion, not just with this or that episode in History, but with all that had been, and was, and was to come. In that instant he was directly aware of the passage of History gently flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow of this vast tide. . . . An instant later, the communion had ceased, and the dreamer was back again in the every-day cockney world.”
McNeil concludes that this experience “presumably confirmed Toynbee in his resolve to write a great work of history, somehow, by hook or by crook, in spite of all the practical obstacles and distressing distractions,” and he was soon recovered from his funk. This experience may have contained less specifically theological content than his later experiences, but would certainly be at home in William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience.
2. Strength at a time of moral weakness, 1929
Though not religious or believing at this time of his life, Toynbee was brought up with protestant moral principles. Therefore he felt a great deal of inner turmoil when he, as a married man, felt a strong attraction to another woman on a business trip. (Fortunately she told him to go away when he professed his love in a fit of folly.) Somehow during this time of turmoil he had another spiritual experience that helped him overcome his weakness in the moment and also changed his life trajectory. Toynbee the Classics nerd coded this experience into a poem written in Greek with allusions to both Greek mythology and the New Testament. I won’t copy that here. McNeill’s biography doesn’t give an account of the experience itself, but dwells on the effects of it. I will quote a large section from page 144 of McNeil, which includes a first-person quote from Toynbee.
Thereafter he could no longer believe that "religion itself was an unimportant illusion," which was the view he had carried away from his classical education, Instead, he became convinced that a supernatural reality had communicated with him in some quasi-personal way. Such an entity was far closer to the Christian God of his childhood than to any of the pagan gods of Greece. His use of the phrase "the unknown God" for that which intervened when "weak hereditary gods" had fled shows that he realized this, for it artfully echoed words St. Paul used when preaching to the Athenians.
Yet Toynbee did not in the end return to the religion of his childhood. He found too much of Christian doctrine incredible for that to be possible. Instead he began a long spiritual travail, seeking to define a faith of his own in the light of this and a second similar encounter with a spiritual reality that communicated its presence to him in a way he could not understand intellectually, - yet could no longer doubt or deny. The effort to come to terms with these mystical experiences bulked large in his subsequent thought and writing, and it is clear that his mature views did not achieve definition in 1930, or for years thereafter. Still, it is worth quoting the words he used, some thirty-six years afterward, to describe his encounter with an unknown God in 1930.
“How are we to picture to ourselves a god who is spiritually higher than the highest human spiritual flights, yet is at the same time, in one of his aspects, a person like enough to a human person for communication, person to person, to be possible between God and a human being? I find this incomprehensible intellectually. The nearest I have come to understanding the mystery has been in two experiences that were not acts of thought but that felt as if they were flashes of insight or revelation. Each experience came to me at a moment of very great spiritual stress. The earlier one came when I was in a moral conflict between the better and the worse side of myself, and this at a moment when the better side was fighting with its back to the wall. The second experience came at the moment of death- -a tragic death of a fellow human being with whose life mine was intimately bound up. [This refers to the suicide of his son Tony in 1939.] On the first occasion it felt as if a transcendant spiritual presence, standing for righteousness beyond my reach, had come down to my rescue and had given to my inadequate human righteousness the aid without which it could not have won its desperate battle.”
This testimony is all we have to go on in trying to figure out what happened. Whatever the character or psychological springs of the experience, it carried with it an emotional force that changed Toynbee's outlook on the world permanently and profoundly. It, with the subsequent similar experience in 1939, made him over from a satisfied more or less Stoical neo-pagan into a seeker after fuller and less ambiguous revelation of the transcendental spiritual reality whose existence he could now neither understand nor doubt.
3. Comfort and forgiveness after a son’s suicide, 1939
The third event (also alluded to in the description above) came after Arnold Toynbee’s son Tony shot himself but lived several days with the wound before finally succumbing to complete the suicide. Tony had been at odds with his parents over important issues, and shot himself after an unlucky romance. The Toynbees were there at their son’s side during those few days. This would be a harrowing experience for any father, and workaholic Toynbee felt significant guilt for his deficiencies in the home and in his son’s life. Here is how Toynbee himself later described the spiritual experience that he had at this time:
It felt as if the same transcendent spiritual presence, standing for love beyond my, or my dying fellow human being's, capacity had pulled aside, at that awful moment, the veil that ordinarily makes us unaware of God's perpetual closeness to us. God had revealed himself for an instant to give an unmistakable assurance of his mercy and forgiveness.
I can only imagine the sort of gut-punch Arnold Toynbee must have felt in that situation, the regret and the anguish, but I have experienced the transcendent power of God’s forgiveness that Toynbee describes. Reading Toynbee’s account brings tears to my eyes. God loves his children - even wayward scholars, it would seem.
I’m still working through the biography, but this background gives a much better understanding of Toynbee’s work and helps explain the stunning turn toward the divine in his Study. I am impressed with Toynbee letting his scholarship follow truth wherever it would lead him, regardless of what the heckling world would think, even if it led him to God.