Arnold Joseph Toynbee comprehension of history. Arnold Toynbee - comprehension of history. Civilizations exist as integral in sociocultural terms and limited in space and time by humans. society. They are in quite complex relationships with each other.

Toynbee A.J.

COMPREHENSION OF HISTORY (Collection)

Per. from English/Comp. Ogurtsov A.P.; Entry Art. Ukolova V.I.;

Closing Art. Rashkovsky E.B.

Pages 320 and 321 are missing!

Arnold Toynbee and the comprehension of history. . . . . . . . . . . 5

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

The relativity of historical thinking. . . . . . . . 14

Field of historical research. . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Comparative study of civilizations. . . . . . . 42

Part one. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

The problem of the genesis of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

The nature of the genesis of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . 93

The reason for the genesis of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Call-and-Response. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

Six outposts in history Western Europe. . . . . . 142

Part two. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

The growth of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

The process of growth of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214

Growth analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250

Care-and-Return. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

Fractures of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

Part three. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

Collapses of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

Movement of Schism-and-Palingenesis. . . . . . . . . . 338

A split in the social system. . . . . . . . . . . . . 343

A split in the soul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358

Archaism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415

Futurism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427

Detachment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 438

Transfiguration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443

Decay analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449

Rhythms of decay. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473

Part four. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 484

Universal states. . . . . . . . . . . . . 484

Universal states as goals. . . . . . . . . 486

Universal states as means. . . . . . . 499

Provinces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505

Capitals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509

Part five. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515

Universal churches. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515

Civilization as regression. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529

Part six. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541

Heroic Ages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541

Contacts between civilizations in space. . . . . 555

Social consequences of contacts between modern 577

each other's civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Psychological consequences of contacts between 587

civilizations contemporary to each other. . . . . . . . . .

Contacts of civilizations in time. . . . . . . . . . . 599

Part seven. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 617

Inspiration from historians. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 617

Reading Toynbee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 643

Scientific commentary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 655

The end of a century, and even more so the end of a millennium, invites reflection on the meaning of history. Humanity looks into the past to find signs of the future. There are quite loud voices predicting the end of history, be it about the fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecies or about its achievement of a certain stable state generated by the successes of Western liberalism and democracy and capable of substantivizing the present, discarding the eternal flow of history from the past into the future (let us at least remember the sensational concept American scientist Francis Fukuyama, behind which the shadow of the great Hegel appears). However, in the end, a close, one might say convulsive, look into the past - necessary element the self-affirmation of humanity in its newfound hope, almost lost in the twentieth century, which brought unprecedented revolutionary upheavals and bloody wars, genocide and environmental crisis, which put peoples and every person on the brink of survival, but at its end still extracted the warmth of humanism from the flames of destruction, the light of insight, foreknowledge of the possibility of the continuation of life and the movement of history, but no longer as the chariot of Vishnu, mercilessly destroying everything in its path, but as a field for the realization of the phenomenon of man in a spiritually and socially converging world, becoming a factor in truly cosmic evolution.

What place in this peering into history can be occupied by the reflections of the English thinker Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), who has long been recognized as one of the “pillars” of the philosophy of history, exalted and ridiculed, and today seeming almost old-fashioned in his academic respectability? Unfortunately, the Russian translation of Toynbee’s main work “A Study of History” (more precisely, extracts from it) comes out very late, although the name of the English thinker has occupied a strong place for many decades in courses on the history of philosophy taught in our universities, where it was considered good in a tone of scolding him as (a representative of bourgeois history and sociology), following Spengler, striving to “rethink the entire socio-historical development of mankind in the spirit of the theory of the circulation of local civilizations,” while emphasizing that

5 he "sought to provide an idealistic answer to positivist evolutionism" and also had a great influence on the philosophical and historical thought of the West. In a word, we treated Toynbee almost well, given the context of the ever-increasing and intensified criticism of “bourgeois consciousness” and “bourgeois science.”

By the way, Toynbee’s concept, which was striking in its grandeur of concept and inconsistency in execution, was by no means perceived ambiguously in the West. For example, the largest French historian Lucien Febvre, one of the founders of the most influential school of historical scholarship, sometimes called the “Annals school,” wrote, not without mockery, of “the seductive historian-essayist,” whose work generates “the feeling of sensation evoked in the gullible reader by the impressive overview of all these carefully numbered civilizations, which, like scenes of melodrama, replace one another before his admiring gaze; the genuine delight inspired by this magician, who with such dexterity juggles peoples, societies and civilizations of the past and present, shuffling and shuffling Europe and Africa, Asia and America. But if you do not succumb to tempting spells, if you reject the sentimental position of the believer present at the service, if you look impartially at Toynbee’s ideas and the conclusions from them, what new will we, historians, see in all this? .. Toynbee simply adds the voice of England to the French voices. And we have the right to judge to what extent this voice stands out in the British world against the background of other voices. In our world, its owner can expect only a place among the choristers." This statement serves as another evidence of how biased outstanding scientists can be in assessing each other and their national historical schools. However, if some saw in Arnold Toynbee only an ordinary interpreter of well-known truths, then others proclaimed him the prophet of a new vision of history, but in essence, in both cases the main thing eluded - the real understanding of history in the interpretation of the English historian. However, in fairness it should be noted that Toynbee did not try to cast his understanding into it. a chased form. It rather shines through the interweaving of concepts and approaches, running into each other and “darkening” the foundation of the channel along which the scientist’s thought rushes.

INSPIRATION OF HISTORIANS

A HISTORIAN'S VIEW

Why do people study history? For what purpose, if the question is addressed to a specific person, did the author of this book write it for thirty years? Are people born historians or made into them? Everyone will give their own answer to this question, because everyone relies on their own personal experience. The author of this work, for example, came to the conclusion that the historian, like everyone who is lucky enough to find a goal in life, goes to this goal, trusting the call of the Lord to feel and find after Him (Acts 7:27).

If this answer satisfies the discerning reader, perhaps it will somewhat clarify the following of the questions we have posed. Asking ourselves why we study History, let us first try to define: what is meant by History? Still relying only on personal experience, the author will try to present his own view on the subject. Perhaps his view of History will seem inaccurate or even incorrect to someone, but the author dares to assure the reader that through comprehension of reality he is trying to comprehend God, who reveals Himself through the movements of souls who sincerely seek Him. Since “no man has ever seen God” (John 1:18), and our clearest views are but His “refracted rays,” the historian’s view is nothing more than one of the many multitudes of existing opinions possessed by different souls with different gifts and different levels of comprehension of His “lofty works”. In addition to historians, there are astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, poets, mystics, prophets, administrators, judges, sailors, fishermen, hunters, shepherds, farmers, artisans, engineers, doctors on Earth... The list is, in fact, endless, for human callings are numerous and diverse. The presence of the Lord in each of them is implicit and incomplete. And among all these countless human destinies and views, the historian’s point of view is one of the possible experiences, but, like others, it complements the understanding of what God creates for man. History allows us to see the divine creative force in movement, and our human experience captures this movement in six dimensions. The historical view of the world reveals to us the physical cosmos, moving in a circle in four-dimensional Space-Time, and Life on our planet, evolving in the five-dimensional frame of Space-Time-Life. And the human soul, rising to the sixth dimension through the gift of the Spirit, rushes through the fatal acquisition of spiritual freedom in the direction of the Creator or from Him.

THE ATTRACTIVENESS OF FACTS OF HISTORY

Susceptibility. If we are not mistaken in considering History as a view of the divine creation in motion from a divine source to a divine goal, we should not be surprised that in the minds of conscious beings History awakens as the simple evidence that they are alive. But since Time is an ever-seething stream, sometimes accelerating and sometimes slowing down, we will not be at all surprised to find that a person’s internal receptivity to the impressions of History always remains at approximately the same level. Fluctuations in this susceptibility depend, as a rule, only on specific historical circumstances.

For example, we have been convinced more than once that the vividness of historical impressions is proportional to their strength and painfulness. Let's take a generation whose childhood coincided with the transition of the new Western society to the modern one, that is, at the end of the 19th century. A man who lived through the Civil War as a child in the southern states of America undoubtedly had a deeper historical consciousness than his contemporary who spent his childhood in the North. For the same reason, a Frenchman who grew up during the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, who lived through all the ups and downs of 1870-1871, turned out to be endowed with a much sharper historical consciousness than any of his contemporaries in Switzerland, Belgium or England.

However, history is capable of influencing the human imagination through the centuries, evoking the memory of a bygone past. History influences receptive souls with its monuments and memorials, names of streets and squares, architecture, changes in fashion, political events, traditional holidays, ceremonies and parades, and liturgies.

The conservatism of church institutions, designed to clothe the highest religions in harmonious forms, undoubtedly made them the most powerful emitters of impressions, repositories of the spirit of historical events and historical characters. The main problem that all soteriological religions have faced is the problem of educating the masses. And this problem was successfully solved through teaching history and conveying the moral law in a visual form. Even in the mosque, where the use of fine arts for educational purposes was limited by the Prophet Muhammad's fidelity to the second commandment of Moses, architectural lines skillfully influenced the religious feeling of the believers. In the Christian church - until it turned into a chapel of one of the Western Christian sects, where the second commandment is observed with Muslim strictness - prophets, apostles and martyrs were placed around the image of the Lord, fully armed with their traditional attributes: with a cross, a sword, a wheel or a book and a pen in hand.

It is easy to see that in those days when living civilizations were preserved under the auspices of a living higher religion in its traditional form, visiting a church (mosque, synagogue, Hindu or Buddhist temple) automatically introduced the believer to history. Education was as effective as it was informal, reaching the widest sections of the population who did not have the opportunity to attend school. Christ and his apostles, saints and martyrs, patriarchs and prophets, the biblical perspective of history from creation through the Fall and redemption to the Last Judgment - all this was perceived as a true reality, more important for Christian souls than local secular history courses.

Referring candidly to my personal experience, I confess that the longer I live, the more deeply I feel how lucky I am to have been born at that time of Western civilization, when it was the norm to take children to church every Sunday, to have received a classical education by studying Latin and Greek at school and university. In the days of my childhood, Latin and Greek had not yet been displaced from the educational system by Western vernacular languages ​​and literatures, medieval and modern Western history and natural science.

The automatic stimulus of the social environment in which a person is born and grows is the earliest and most powerful source of inspiration for potential historians. However, this is not enough for two reasons.

First, even in third-generation civilizations that grew out of doll-churches, informal teaching of history through the church institution never penetrated the society to its depths, since the vast majority of the population of any society are peasants. Thus, by 1952, the peasantry made up three quarters of all living humanity. And to the peasantry, as you know, history always seems like a meaningless fairy tale, despite all its instructiveness and thoroughness. The peasantry, caught in the whirlwind of history, drawn into civilization in order to provide materially for a privileged minority, remains to this day the most unfortunate brother of those primitive societies that civilizations simply have not yet had time to absorb. In the peasant consciousness, the government has always been the same inevitable and ruthless scourge as, for example, war, plague or famine.

The only fragment of History in which the peasantry could feel any interest is the prehistoric era, when pre-man became man - a phenomenon in its historical significance more outstanding than the emergence of civilizations. However, this historical event, brought to the light of God by Western archaeologists, anthropologists and psychologists not so long ago, faded from the people’s memory many centuries ago, and the practically primitive subsoil of living civilizations still remains absolutely devoid of any historical consciousness. In fact, for three quarters of the population of our planet even now, that is, in 1952, history does not exist. And this happened not because the majority demonstrates less sensitivity to enlightenment, but because the majority still lives not according to the laws of History, but in the rhythms of Nature.

However, even for the minority whose social environment is aimed at the study of History, this predisposition to the radiation of the historical social environment is not in itself sufficient to induce a child to become a historian. Passive receptivity, without which he would never have taken the true path, is also not sufficient to reach the intended harbor - for this, inspiration and the desire to set his own sails are necessary.

Curiosity. The mind of a would-be historian is like an airplane with a jet engine. After receiving the first impulse to study History, when it becomes aware of its existence through the influence of a historically oriented social environment, the mind generates its own next impulse, transforming receptivity into curiosity. This transition from the passive to the active phase forces the student of History to take the initiative into his own hands and further follow at his own risk and fear, charting a course into the unknown celestial spheres.

Without creative awakening and curiosity, even the most famous, impressive and majestic monuments of History will not produce the desired impact on the imagination, for the eyes turned to them will be blind (Isaiah 42, 20; Jer. 5, 21; Ezek. 12, 12; Matt. 13, 14: Mark 4, 12; John 12, 40; Rom. This truth was confirmed by the Western philosopher-traveler Volney, who visited the Islamic world in 1783-1785. And in 1798, a whole group of scientists took advantage of Napoleon's invitation to accompany the expeditionary forces in Africa. Unlike these fearless men of science, neither Napoleon himself nor his army were drawn to Egypt by the call of History. The driving forces of the invaders were barbaric restlessness and ambition. However, Napoleon was aware that he had touched a string, the sound of which could touch even the ignorant heart of the rudest soldier. Therefore, before the decisive battle, he considered it necessary to address the army with the following words: “Soldiers, forty centuries are looking at you,” referring to the pyramids that opened their eyes during their march to Cairo. One can be sure that Murat Bey, the commander of the Mamluk armed forces, did not even think of encouraging his incurious comrades with a similar reminder.

French scientists who visited Egypt with Napoleon's troops discovered a new dimension of History that was to satisfy Western curiosity. The scientific interest of that era focused primarily on the classical languages ​​and literature of the Hellenic civilization. 1798 brought an unexpected victory. The origins of their own cultural heritage were discovered. After re-mastering the Latin and Greek classics from a new angle, Western scholars began to master the Arabic and Persian classics of Islamic society, the Chinese classics of the Far Eastern society, the Sanskrit classics of Hindu society, and, not content with studying the Hebrew originals of the Bible, which the Christian church shared with the Jewish diaspora, Western scholars By that time, scientists had also mastered the ancient Iranian language of the scriptures of Parsi Zoroastrianism. Thus, being the owners of all the riches of the past, which were preserved in the cultural heritage of living civilizations, Western scientists began to unearth hidden riches that had been underground for thousands of years, consigned to complete oblivion.

This was a powerful intellectual breakthrough, for long ago the unbroken chain of tradition had been broken, and there was no one who could initiate the convert into its secrets. Without outside help, scientists had to decipher forgotten scripts and discover the structure, vocabulary and meaning of dead languages, dead in the truest sense of the word, unlike Latin and Sanskrit, which are called dead because they fell out of verbal use, but nevertheless continue to be used in the liturgy and classical literature. The understanding of ancient Egyptian civilization by Western scholars, which began in 1798, was thus a much more significant achievement in the development of modern Western historical interest than the Italian Renaissance of Latin and Greek literature of the 14th and 15th centuries. Today, at least eleven dead civilizations are known - ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Sumerian, Minoan, Hittite, and Indus and Shang cultures in the Old World, and Mayan, Yucatan, Mexican and Andean civilizations in the New World. During the lifetime of my generation, four remarkable discoveries were made: the Indus culture, the Shang culture, the Hittite and Minoan civilizations. And it must be admitted that this has significantly advanced our knowledge and understanding of history.

Of course, this is not the pinnacle or limit of the achievements of Western intellectual pioneers. Their success could not help but infect with curiosity those non-Western peoples who, just a century and a half ago, in the days of Volney and Napoleon, lived and worked under the shadow of the monuments of the Past, not paying any attention to them. In 1952, Japanese, Chinese, Egyptian and Turkish philologists, historians and archaeologists worked hand in hand with Western enthusiasts in the fields already “ready for the harvest” (John 4, 35: Matt. 9, 37-38; Luke 10, 2 ). The amazing successes and achievements of scientists not only did not confine them to their environment, but also, by arousing interest in science, increasingly expanded the circle of non-professional amateurs.

The popularity of archeology these days has become so widespread that even newspapermen do not ignore its discoveries, giving readers detailed information from excavation sites. The discovery on November 4, 1922 of the tomb of Tutankhamun (1362-1352 BC) created in England almost the same sensation as the birth of a bear cub by a polar bear in a zoological garden in 1950. Nowadays, when Greek classes are relegated to the background by the official school , England remains the only country where there is an increase in the number of children wanting to study Greek and Latin, and general interest in classical history and literature is stimulated by an ever-increasing number of translations, the quality of which is also steadily increasing.

In the author's mind, the heroic example of the response of invincible curiosity to the challenge of tormenting circumstances has always been Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890). It began with that memorable day in Winchester, when the author, as a boy, listened to a lecture by his teacher M. J. Randall, who, while talking about the Iliad, also dwelt on the outstanding events of this romantic life. Having been born a year before Schliemann's death, the author of these lines could not therefore have been familiar with this hero of History, but he had the good fortune to personally know two of his younger contemporaries.

G. W. Bailey (b. 1899), world-famous philologist, professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge in 1952, spent his childhood on a farm in Western Australia. It is difficult to imagine a less suitable environment for a future scholar in the field of oriental languages. The harshness of the virgin, recently developed lands was not conducive to fairy tales and legends. And how the boy received the books as a heavenly gift. The West Australian farm produced a seven-volume encyclopedia and four textbooks in French, Latin, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish. Later, the boy became interested in Arabic and Persian, but Persian took over and then turned into an interest in Sanskrit.

This was the first spark that ignited Bailey's curiosity. In 1943, a modest scientist told me how his family looked at him good-naturedly and at the same time with some surprise when, at noon after field work, he crammed Oriental grammar in the hayloft. Having reached university age, the young scientist realized that he was at a certain limit and further studying oriental languages ​​on his own, relying only on books, was hardly possible. What was his next step? At that time, Oriental languages ​​were not taught at the University of Western Australia. All that remained was to go to Western Europe or North America. Bailey decided to improve his Latin and Greek, for which he entered a local university, where he received a scholarship, and soon the opportunity to go to Oxford for in-depth study of oriental languages.

However, even in Cambridge there was no department that could provide assistance in the study of the Khotanese language, a language related to Persian and Sanskrit. This language was discovered by Western scientists while Bailey was studying the Avesta in a hayloft in Western Australia. But it was this language that became the field of activity in which Bailey later demonstrated his brilliant abilities as a researcher and scientist.

Bailey's experience to some extent echoes the experience of another modern researcher, specialist in modern history of the Far East F. S. Jones. As a graduate student, Jones accidentally discovered in the university library a collection of books on the history of the Far East, once donated to the university by F. W. Dickens, an Englishman who served in 1866-1870. a military doctor in China and Japan, and later taught Japanese studies at the university. The dust that covered the books told the young scholar that he was the first to take an interest in them; and this pile of books, abandoned by everyone, had a decisive influence on the intellectual quest of the young man. Without giving up his full-time academic work, Jones has since been systematically engaged in the Far East. This became a subject of his personal interest. Using the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, he went to China and spent about two years there - from the fall of 1935 to the summer of 1937, studying Chinese at the College of Chinese Studies in Beijing and even traveling around the country, despite the fact that in China at that time there were great riots. At the end of 1937, he entered the Far Eastern department of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, from where he returned to his alma mater in Bristol. I worked with him for fourteen years and never once noticed that he lost interest in his favorite subject, even for a while.

I must say that my soul was once scorched by the same fire. I will never forget the memorable winter morning beginning of 1898, when four volumes in identical bindings appeared on a bookshelf in my parents’ London apartment. It was Fisher Unwin's History of Nations series. I had a completely favorable environment for my consciousness to awaken at the turn of nine or ten years and call me to become a historian. My mother was a historian. I well remember her writing True Tales from Scottish History in 1898, and I remember the delight that filled me when I picked up the book with its vivid pictures. My mother wrote this book to pay off a debt to the nanny who looked after me when I was four or five years old. And although I was sad to leave my nanny, I was rewarded by spending more time with my mother. Every night when my mother put me to bed, she would tell me the history of England before the Battle of Waterloo. I was very sensitive to my native history, but that memorable morning had a decisive impact on my further intellectual development. For the discovery of the radiance of the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian luminaries brought me out of the Yin state and brought me into the Yang dynamics, awakening an undying curiosity. And this has been going on for more than fifty-four years.

The schooner went out into the open ocean (as a child, I once ran away to the seashore, but the nanny caught up with me and returned home; now there was no nanny to return me from the intellectual journey I had undertaken into the Ocean of History). At school, my curiosity was fueled by the experience of Herodotus, who went to the Achaemenid Empire, and I began to study the varieties of Christianity in Georgia and Abyssinia. The university opened up to me a new world of the Far East and the Great Eurasian Steppe. When I passed my final exams, my curiosity led me into the theater of colorful Hellenic history - I became a member of the British School of Archaeology in Rome and Athens. There I made a discovery of the then still living Ottoman world. This gave me a place in the Turkish section of the foreign department of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Between the first and second world wars, my curiosity led me to study intensively international relations. It expanded my horizons. But to add another dimension to my intellectual universe, I, together with C. G. Jung, took a plunge into the abyss of the Subconscious. After the Second World War, the same insatiable curiosity drew me into the field of economics. I started researching production cycles, hoping that this will allow me to better understand the relationship between Law and Freedom in History. And on September 15, 1952, having passed the second half of the sixty-fourth year of my life, I felt how the approaching Time was pushing me even more persistently on the journey in search of new worlds.

At this age I was inspired by the example of the historian, banker and statesman Georg Groth (1794-1871), who, two years before completing the last concluding volume of his twelve-volume history of Greece, became interested in new work. As a result of this passion, three volumes on Plato appeared. Before the last of them had time to come out, the author began to write about Aristotle. However, he was unable to answer the challenge of Time with a new edition - Death stopped the race.

Devoted with all my heart to the example of George Groth, I tried to keep up with Lord Bryce (1838-1922), who, before finishing one book, was already planning the next. He accomplished his last feat - the study "Modern Democracies" - when he was already over eighty. He intended to write about Justinian I and his wife Theodora when death interrupted his plans.

Inspired by the examples of Bryce and Grote, having crossed the threshold of the twelfth part of my planned thirteen work in December 1950, I began to think about “The Religion of the Historian” and “The History of Hellenic Civilization”, which I began back in 1914, but stopped because of the first world war.

In 1952, my curiosity led me to switch from studying Arabic and Turkish to studying New Persian. I was quite able to combine the study of three languages ​​in 1924, when I had to participate in the publication of the Chronicle of International Relations. The first systematic notes for this Study, which I began to write regularly in 1930, date back to 1927. Five years spent at Winchester (1902-1907) gave me sufficient knowledge of Greek and Latin to be fluent in the ancient classics , however, the dream of being able to navigate the Islamic classics with such fluency never left me. I took my first steps towards this in 1915 at the London School of Oriental Research, but in 1924 I was forced to stop my studies in Turkish and Arabic. By 1952, the desire, which had been relegated to the background in 1924, had already grown into an urgent need. I literally burned with shame when I remembered that my favorite hero, Heinrich Schliemann, learned thirteen languages ​​on his own.

In 1952, I was also seized by a passionate desire to travel to the most remarkable historical places that I had never seen or which had once bewitched me.

Every time I think about my Herodotusian ambitions, I remember an anecdote told by Lord Bryce. Lord Bryce, an inveterate traveler who had already traveled half the world by that time, somehow felt slightly unwell. This made him think that further travel might be in doubt. Then he and Lady Brice decided to choose the most severe region for their next journey in order to test their physical condition. Their choice fell on Siberia. Having successfully overcome the Siberian expanses, they decided that they were quite capable of the rest of the world. The example of Lord Bryce inspired me the more, the closer I came to the end of the Comprehension of History. And now, in the middle of my sixty-fourth year of life, I thank God for the curiosity that He gave me fifty-four years ago and which has never left me since then.

Will-o'-the-wisp of omniscience. Without inspiration, which is spurred by curiosity, no one can become a historian, because without it it is impossible to break the state of Yin, the state of infantile receptivity, it is impossible to force your mind to rush around in search of a solution to the mystery of the Universe. It is impossible to become a historian without curiosity, just as it is impossible to remain one if you have lost this quality. However, curiosity is a necessary thing, but clearly not sufficient. And if curiosity is Pegasus, then, once having saddled him, the historian must constantly remember the reins and not allow his winged horse to gallop, as they say, wherever his eyes look.

A scientist who allows his curiosity to develop uncontrollably runs the risk of losing his creative potential. This is especially dangerous for a Western scientist, who, due to the tradition of education that has developed in the West, is often inclined to consider the goal of education not a conscious and full-blooded life, but an exam. The institution of examination, which has shaped learned minds during the last eight centuries of Western history, was introduced into Western universities by the fathers of the early Middle Ages. The educational system was formed on the basis of theology. And the myth of the Last Judgment was part of the heritage received by the Christian church from the cult of Osiris, as well as through Zoroastrianism. But if the Egyptian fathers of the cult of Osiris considered the Last Judgment as an ethical test, symbolically represented by the scales of Osiris, on the scales of which lay the good and bad deeds of the departed soul, the Christian Church, also imbued with Hellenistic philosophy, supplemented the question of Osiris “Bad or good?” Aristotelian intellectual problem: “True or false?”

As the abomination of intellectualism took hold of Western secular education as well as Western Christian theology, the fear of failing an examination was based not on the public discovery of something wrong in the student's worldly life, nor on the possibility of being deprived of a degree, which was within the jurisdiction of the university. , but on the fact that those who fail the exam will be doomed to eternal torment in hell, for the medieval, and even early modern Western, Christian faith provided for mandatory punishment for unorthodox views. As the flow of information available to the Western examiner for his ongoing intellectual warfare with the student increases exponentially, examinations in the West have become a nightmare that can be compared to the nightmare of medieval Inquisition interrogations. However, the worst exam that awaits us is the post-mortem exam; for even an excellent student, who has laudably passed all the tests that his alma mater has brought upon him, goes out into life not in order to apply his knowledge in practical matters, but in order to continue to accumulate it and ultimately take it to the grave.

The painful race for the will-o'-the-wisp of omniscience contains a double moral flaw.

Ignoring the truth that the only legitimate purpose of all knowledge is its practical use within the framework of the life allotted to a person, the sinner scientist partially renounces his sociality. Refusing to recognize the immutable law that the human soul cannot achieve perfection in this world, a person loses humility. Moreover, this sin is not only more serious, it is also more insidious, for here the intellectual hybrid of the scientist is hidden under the mask of false humility. The scientist is subconsciously cunning, claiming that he cannot publish, write, or say anything about what he is not completely convinced of until he knows everything thoroughly. This professional integrity is nothing more than a camouflage for the three deadly sins - satanic pride, irresponsibility and criminal laziness.

This humble person is in fact overcome by pride, since he strives for an obviously unattainable intellectual level. Omniscience is the destiny of Almighty God, and Man must be content with relative, partial knowledge.

The intellectual error present in the pursuit of omniscience resembles a moral error raised to a degree; and the beginning of the evils here is the wrongful identification of multiplicity with infinity. True, the human soul is characterized by the need to seek harmony between itself and Infinity. However, omniscience, as Faust discovered with his insightful mind, cannot be achieved through the consistent addition of knowledge to knowledge, art to art, science to science, forming a bad infinity.

Since the time of Dante, Western scientists have puzzled over an insoluble problem, applying to it the formula: “Know more and more about less and less”; but this path turned out to be more fruitless than even the method of Goethe’s Faust, not to mention the fact that the practical significance of scientific research was lost. As the scientist reduces the sector of his vision in the hope of getting to the bottom of the matter, science as a whole becomes divided into countless segments, each of which does not become less complex than the whole due to the procedure performed. But even if attempts to delve into these infinitesimal quantities were less chimerical than attempts to embrace and cognize the whole, the final goal of all these academic exercises would still remain unachieved: since, as we have already noted more than once in our study, the human mind is not capable of competing with the eternal divine understanding of the infinite.

From the point of view of a historian, the verdict on the idea of ​​encyclopedism was pronounced by History itself. This false ideal was the last intellectual error that the old civilization rejected, and the first one rejected by the new one, as soon as the time came to part with childish amusements (1 Cor. 13:11).

There was an episode in the life of the author of these lines that to some extent illustrates what was said above. In December 1906, when I was eighteen years old, I found myself in the company of two outstanding scientists. These were P. Toynbee, the author of A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Places in the Works of Dante, and E. Toynbee, publisher of the letters of Horace Walpole. In addition, they were my uncle and aunt. During their visit, which was extremely pleasant and interesting for me, I did not notice how I had revealed all my various historical interests, ranging from the Assyrians to the Fourth Crusade. However, I was somewhat disheartened by the parting advice that my uncle, out of the kindness of his heart, gave to his impressionable nephew before leaving. “Your Aunt Nellie and I,” said the Dante specialist, “have come to the conclusion that you are spreading yourself too thin. We would advise you to choose one thing and concentrate on that subject.” And now, in 1952, the author of these lines still retains in his soul the memory of how everything in him opposed this advice and he firmly decided not to follow it. It so happened that later, when the aunt died prematurely without finishing the publication of Walpole's letters, the uncle himself violated his intellectual principles, sacrificing them on the altar of love for his wife. After her death, he continued her work, and it must be said that his non-professional literary work did not go unnoticed. After the letters were published in The Times, they were widely quoted. Meanwhile, his nephew, despite his good decision not to follow the wrong advice, almost reached an intellectual impasse, from which the Dante specialist successfully emerged thanks to a tragic event in his own family.

I spent eleven years of my youth, from the autumn of 1900 to the summer of 1911, in an incessant race, now preparing for exams, now passing them. The overall demoralizing effect of these efforts was that I slowly but surely forgot my original decision never to become a specialist. In 1911, as a graduate student in my final year of study, I was suddenly surprised to discover that the vice of narrow specialization that had struck me had also engulfed my older friend G. L. Cheeseman, who had once inspired me by his example and awakened my interest in the late Roman Empire.

With the memory of Cheeseman's past intellectual predilections in mind, I headed to New College, where he was working as a teaching assistant in Roman history. This trip was preceded by a meeting with Dr. Bussel, a very talented scholar, who had the idea of ​​stirring up a wave of interest in the history of Byzantium in Oxford. When we parted, we decided to expand the circle of supporters of this idea. I had no doubt that Dr. Bussell's proposal would find warm support at New College. To my surprise and disappointment, this idea aroused the sharpest protest, as if Mephistopheles had appeared to them in my person, tempting them to destroy the established monastic order. Assistant Cheeseman popularly explained to me that his duty was to master as thoroughly as possible the subject the college had entrusted him with teaching. Expanding the boundaries of scientific activity is completely beyond his power. In a word, Byzantium was absolutely not of interest to him.

In the summer of 1911 the author of these lines was appointed assistant in Greek and Roman history at Balliol. Having passed the last academic exam, he considered himself sufficiently enlightened to never take exams again. And he has strictly adhered to this rule ever since.

In the same year, 1911, I decided to use the rather long vacation due to me after passing the exams to study sources of Roman history. I interrupted my studies only for trips to Paris, Rome and Athens, and in 1912 I returned to Oxford as a member of the college council. Appreciating the beauty of distant travels, I began to devote a minimum of time to museums and libraries. A dormant passion for communication with nature awoke in me, which I tried to satisfy by traveling on foot whenever possible. Fortunately, I was smart enough to understand that the landscape of the Hellenic world is worth seeing with my own eyes, for it presents a picture that has no equal.

However, life invaded the academic world of the learned wanderer and presented him with tasks of a completely different kind. On the evening of November 8, 1911, returning to Rome from an expedition to the Etruscan burial grounds in Cerveteri and Corneto, the young discoverer of antiquities unexpectedly noticed that his neighbors in the carriage, the Neapolitans, were looking very unfriendly at the soldiers who had filled the carriage. This was a kind of echo of the hostilities that unfolded in Tripolitania. On November 18, 1911, I had to transfer from an Italian ship to a Greek one. I had to sail to Patras, and the Italian ship did not dare approach the hostile Turkish coast. Spending the next eight months in the Greek villages, I heard plenty of talk in local cafes about “the international policy of Sir Edward Grey.” The question of when the war would start - this spring or next? Shepherds and farmers, traders and artisans, it seemed, everyone, including small children, had their own view on this problem. And only the author of these lines reveled in the landscapes of continental Greece and Crete, where medieval French castles and later Venetian fortresses competed in mystery with Hellenic temples and Minoan palaces.

Twice during this reckless journey the Oxford lecturer was arrested as a Turkish spy. The first time, on the evening of November 16, 1911, he was detained by an Italian carabinieri, and the second time, on July 21, 1912, he was stopped by a Greek military patrol.

At the end of my trip, I ended up in the hospital with dysentery after drinking from a stream of seemingly crystal clear water. There I again turned to reading, which I had interrupted last fall. During my illness, I studied Strabo’s “Geography” and began Pausanias’s “Description of Hellas.” When, already in Oxford, I was tormenting Pausanias, I was suddenly overcome by an attack of aching melancholy from the realization of the exorbitant price that I inevitably have to pay for my desire to know the infinite.

The scientist who strives for intellectual omniscience awaits the same fate as the soul striving for spiritual perfection. Each new step into the unknown, instead of clarifying the path and bringing us closer to the goal, further clouds and removes the ideal. Just as someone who strives for holiness becomes more and more convinced of his own sinfulness as he gains spiritual insight, so someone who strives for omniscience sees his own ignorance more and more clearly as he accumulates knowledge. In both cases, the gap between the goal and those going towards it becomes wider. This pursuit is inevitably doomed to failure, because the finite human nature is lost before the incommensurable infinity of God, and in return there remains only moral regression - from fatigue through disappointment to cynicism.

Having experienced the torment of this hopeless race after a ghost, the author of these lines freed himself from the horror of an imaginary posthumous examiner with the help of one remarkable event in his life, an event that had nothing to do with wars or even rumors of wars (Matt. 24:6; Mark 13:7; Luke 21:9).

In the summer of 1911, during an intensive study of original sources on the history of the Hellenic world of the 4th century. BC The author has more than once resorted to the method of comparing the same facts given in different presentations. The information about the organization and size of the Lacedaemonian army, given by Xenophon, conflicted with what settled in the author’s head during his preparation for the exams, when he studied this period according to Thucydides. In addition, the dates given by Xenophon also differed from the testimony of Thucydides. In short, reading the sources gave rise to a number of questions that could only be resolved through careful empirical analysis.

Subsequently, when the author found himself in Greece a few months later, theoretical research, fertilized by the beauties of the landscapes of Lacedaemon, gave new insight into the city-states of the 4th century. BC and their possessions. Field and book work activated my mind to such an extent that in 1913 an urgent need arose to summarize the collected material. That same year I wrote up and published an article entitled "The Development of Sparta." I couldn't waste any more time reading aimlessly. First world war interrupted my studies on the history of the Hellenic world, and the onset of inflation required more and more funds to maintain the family budget. And I took up journalism.

In 1952, thirty-seven years after such a sharp turn in his intellectual activity, the author can state that the chosen path was not wrong. From then on, I taught myself to write rather than read, and it became a system. I still consider reading and travel to be necessary preparatory stages for creativity. However, over time, I learned to work in such a way that writing, traveling and reading became, as it were, independent processes from each other. In order to write, I no longer needed any special training.

Since 1916, I began to collect a bibliographic file of historical research, and I put the broadest meaning into the term “history”. However, I have always been careful to limit this sphere of intellectual activity to certain boundaries, trying to avoid the pretensions to completeness that are characteristic of many professionals, for the failures of potentially creative minds have taught me that too pedantic collection of cards, names, titles, and even books themselves, leads to sterilization. Thus, while trying not to lose curiosity, I at the same time kept it within certain limits. Curiosity is given to a person like a bowstring: a bow can shoot only when the string is taut. Likewise, curiosity keeps the human mind active. Because the price of creativity is constant tension.

The author made his intellectual turn while completing a course of classical Western education based on the examination system. A truth was revealed to him, which, perhaps mistaking it for a truism, had been overlooked by many outstanding thinkers. The truth, quite obvious and at the same time stubbornly neglected by scientists, is that Life is Action. Life, when it does not turn into action, is doomed to collapse. This is true both for the prophet, the poet, the scientist, and for the “mere mortal” in the common usage of this expression.

Why is the understanding of the depth of Action, its absolute necessity, less widespread among scientists than among “practical people”? Why is fear of action aa?a considered a distinctive professional characteristic of a scientist?

Plato considered the only possible path for a philosopher to be “intense intellectual communication.” And Elijah, having heard a quiet voice that reached him after lightning, an earthquake and a storm, was absolutely sure that this was the direct presence of spiritual force, which is the source of every action in the Universe (1 Kings 19, 11-13). The “great and mighty wind,” which “moved the mountains and broke the stones before the Lord,” came and went before his Maker and Creator to cause Elijah’s prophetic intuition to manifest itself. Elijah, who was waiting for the Lord, had to show that physical strength is only one of the manifestations of God, but not Almighty God Himself. Or I knew, as Laozi knew, that the silence of the Source of Life (wuwei) is, in essence, the fullness of activity, which seems like inaction only to the uninitiated.

Prophets, poets and scientists are chosen vessels called by the Creator to perform human action of an etherealized kind, which perhaps more resembles God's own action than any of the actions produced by Human Nature. In this, as in any other, form of meeting between the divine and the created, the test is the price of privilege; for the truth that Life is Action is as difficult for one to whom a higher spiritual calling has been revealed, as it is obvious for a man of action who is on a spiritually lower level. Elijah himself was called by the Word of the Lord so that the criminal act of inflicting death would not be carried out at the moment of despair, which comes when faith is lost (1 Kings 19, 1-18). But this sin, which is the bitter experience of poets, prophets and scientists, is not characteristic of businessmen or military men. An example of this is the duel between Hector and Ajax.

It is clear to Hector and Ajax without words that their lives completely depend on each other’s actions. In contrast, a prophet, poet or scientist resembles an archer sending an arrow at a target that is so far away that it is impossible to see it.

“Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again” (Eccl. II, 1). Hector or Ajax does not think about the goal, because it is nearby. However, the archer who does not see his goal, or the thinker who does not know the consequences of his abstract thoughts, is doomed to painful hesitation.

Thus, beyond the "practical" action within the framework of Space and Time there is a spiritual action that appears much more godlike in two aspects. Agamemnon, who lived a short and dull life, owes his literary immortality to a poet who died in complete obscurity. Homer's poems continue to touch the hearts of people and excite their imagination many centuries after the ephemeral Mycenaean Empire collapsed without having a tangible impact on all subsequent political life; and how many strong and courageous people who lived before Agamemnon turned out to be completely consigned to oblivion only because in their time a poet was not born who would immortalize them in his creations.

However, precisely because the spiritual activity of Human Nature has the divine power to produce action across thousands of miles and years, souls called by God to such spiritual action tend to hesitate and hesitate, wasting the time of life and not seeing the cardinal difference between action and inaction. . It is precisely because the archer's target is out of sight that the archer can put his bow aside without releasing an arrow, while a warrior cannot throw away his sword during a duel.

Man does not know Eternity - the Divine Eternal Now - in the final earthly life. Eternity is hardly accessible even to Collective Humanity, which persistently collects and accumulates from century to century the fruits of the labors and achievements of Science and Technology; for even this human coral reef would never have existed if each of the innumerable organisms composing it had not performed its separate individual action within its own short earthly path and narrow field of action. In this regard, the collective fruits of Science and Technology do not have any significant internal difference from the gifts of Poetry and Prophecy. Like the latter, they owe their existence to the individual creative acts of individual souls, illuminated by the meaning and grace that the Creator sent down to them.

A scientist, as well as a manual worker, is given only one life, and this life, for various reasons, can be very short. At any moment a person must be prepared for death, because no one knows whether it will come in a year, in a month, next week, or maybe even today. When making plans for the future, a person must constantly remember the transience of life. You cannot count on a miracle that will help you accomplish the impossible by expanding the boundaries of Life or Intelligence. It should always be remembered that one of the fundamental laws of Human Nature is the law according to which any undertaking that goes beyond the capabilities of a mortal turns out to be ephemeral. Indeed, the intellectual who can learn from his own experience will find that even the greatest work of art ever created by the human soul did not completely consume the creator's life.

The restrictions that changes in one’s destiny and the very shortness of life impose on a person’s creative capabilities are only external and negative in nature. The rhythm of the artist’s work correlates with his mental chronometer, the two hands of which are the Intellect and the Subconscious Spring of Spiritual Creativity. Listening to the rhythm of merciless Time, a man of action challenges Death itself.

IMPULSE TO RESEARCH THE RELATIONS BETWEEN FACTS

Critical reactions. While exploring the inspiration of historians, we discovered that those who are destined to become a historian move from a passive perception of the reality around them to an active desire to learn the facts of history. Moreover, we have discovered that it is impossible to become a historian, just as it is impossible to remain one, unless the mental mill is set in motion by a powerful current of curiosity. We also noticed that if the future historian does not restrain his insatiable curiosity, he sets off in pursuit of the will-o'-the-wisp of omniscience, and this is a false path that leads to nowhere.

What is the correct approach? A person destined to become a historian must learn to curb his curiosity. His interest in facts is manifested and satisfied not for the sake of this interest itself, but ultimately for the sake of creativity. The historian must be inspired by the desire not just to learn the facts, but to comprehend their meaning. The highest meaning of creative search is the search for God acting in history, and the first blind step on this pilgrimage path is the desire to understand how the facts of History are interconnected. The first mental movement of the historian examining the relations between facts is a critical response to apparent contradictions, and the second is a creative response to challenging phenomena.

In studying the awakening of the critical faculty in the mind of the historian, the author is forced to turn to his own experience, for he has no other first-hand evidence.

So, in March 1897, less than eight years old, while visiting, he loudly expressed his disbelief when he heard one of the adults extolling the delights of the transatlantic flight he had just completed. This statement clearly contradicted what the boy had heard from his great-uncle Harry, who was undoubtedly a more significant authority, considering that he was not just a passenger, but the captain of the ship. The child had heard plenty of the old man's stories about the moldy ship's biscuits, worn out by the weevil, about the open war with the ship's rats, and how corned beef steaks and pudding were good only for rat bait. Therefore, the story about very good food seemed to the boy to be a clear exaggeration on the part of the passenger. True, Captain Toynbee retired in 1866, and he sailed on ships of a completely different class. Therefore, after explanations given, not without humor, to a critical child, the mistrust that flared up in the child’s mind dissipated and for the first time the child felt that human relationships do not stand still and this movement can be so fast that dramatic changes can occur within one human life .

The next contradiction that arose in the author's childhood mind occurred when he was taking his first steps in understanding history. This happened at the end of the ninth year of his life. Having by that time read four volumes of “History of Nations” by Z. A. Ragozina, which described the history of how Iranian-speaking peoples came to the forefront of universal history in the period between the fall of the Assyrian Empire and the clash of the Achaemenid Empire with the Hellenes, he delved with interest into the previous and subsequent chapters of Iranian history. Aunt Elsie Marshall had just given her nephew a volume of Benjamin's "Persia" for his birthday. Eagerly reading this new book, he discovered that he was moving along completely unknown paths. Even now, fifty-three years later, the author of these lines clearly remembers how shocked he was that the facts of Iranian history as presented by Ragozina and Benjamin turned out to be completely incompatible. This first intellectual shock somewhat debunked in the eyes of the young historian the previously indisputable authorities who had so easily discredited themselves by contradicting each other. This sad discovery became for him a painful beginning of historical wisdom, for he realized that one should never blindly trust an “authority” as if he were an infallible oracle of gospel truth.

A year or so later I had another shock when I came across a map that hung in the largest classroom at Waton Court Preparatory School, near Canterbury, where I was sent at the age of eleven. From the tenth chapter of the Book of Genesis, I had by that time clearly understood that humanity is a single family, and history is a single sequence of events. However, out of the blue, the map posted in the classroom presented me with a problem that I had not thought about before.

Looking at the map, I was first of all struck by the accuracy of the date: 4004 BC, which was listed as the year of Creation (this Creation date was, of course, the product of Archbishop Usher). Peering at this huge map, which ended at some event of the 19th century, I noted for myself, among the many different colors representing the histories of various peoples and states, one rather wide area called “China”. From whom did the Chinese descend - from Shem, Ham or Japhet? For some reason it never occurred to me to ask this question before. However, now that there was a map before my eyes, I suddenly wanted to trace how China is connected with the three sons of Noah, and try to connect the Chinese with Adam and Eve. This procedure seemed quite simple at first. However, the hairs on the young explorer's head stood on end when his gaze, which began its journey across the map from the three-thousand-year-old Chinese dragon, suddenly stopped, not revealing any connection with Japhet, Ham or Shem. It turned out that four hundred million Chinese were born spontaneously, literally out of nowhere.

And then it became clear to the young researcher that either the cartographers were criminally negligent, or the fact is that it is simply impossible to trace the result of the fertility of Noah and his sons (Gen. 9, 1 and 7) in all the diversity of humanity that populated the Earth. This astonishing discovery for the first time caused the future historian to doubt whether the family tree is a true diagram that accurately reflects the history of the progressive division of the human family.

As this doubt grew stronger, the author began to try alternative systems of classification that could embrace all the living and extinct branches of humanity and at the same time establish the degree of difference and points of contact between them. Did the key to this historical mystery lie in physical nature? Or should it be sought in language? Since the author of these lines was shocked by the absurdities of the school map, his mind has been tirelessly working on these questions, discarding one argument after another. And it must be said that it took ten or twelve years to come to the conclusion that the linguistic and racial approaches to the problem were as unsatisfactory as the genealogical approach that was rejected in his youth. Returning again and again to the problem that puzzled him in his youth, the author drew three times various schemes, trying to find the right path. The result of these works was the present study, in which the author, as it seems to him, comes to a positive solution to the issue. His final conclusion boils down to the fact that the most significant thing in human relationships is not Race or Language, but secular and religious Culture.

I remember another striking contradiction that struck my mind in my youth. This was during the First World War. One day I was wandering around the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. My gaze fell on the bust of a girl, made of majolica in a modern Western style. I was not surprised that the sculpture was from Italy, but it was a complete surprise that this work, so modern, turned out to be made in the 14th century. Before me was material evidence that Italy in the 14th century. in some ways has already reached the level of the modern era, while Western Christianity as a whole, with perhaps an exception. Flanders did not demonstrate similar successes until the end of the 15th century, and perhaps even until the beginning of the 16th century. Thus, Italy seemed to be ahead of the rest of Western Christianity by about two centuries. This example shows that within the same society there are quite possible different “sectors” that historically have different rates of development. Chronologically being contemporaries, people can actually belong to different cultural eras.

These thoughts, inspired by Italian sculpture of the 14th century, did not leave the author for a long time and visited him again, confirming their truth when thirty years later, at the end of the Second World War, he once again visited this museum to see the exhibition of works of art from the chapel of the English King Henry VII in Westminster Abbey. This time I was even more struck by the cultural gulf that separated medieval western England and the rebellious heirs of Hellas. This chain of observations, which confirmed the existence of a cultural discrepancy between Northern and Central Italy in the late Middle Ages, prompted the author to comprehend the special historical role of the creative minority.

Correct comprehension of History can also be facilitated by a critical look at contradictions that have not been proven, but are suspected. And now, in September 1952, the author of these lines has not forgotten that March day in 1899, when his mother read aloud to him book 3 by A. Ragozina “Chaldeans”. Assyriologists and Egyptologists of the last century were greatly impressed by the actual duration of human history compared to the relative brevity of the biblical chronological version, so the antiquity of the "Chaldean" (i.e. Sumerian) civilization was main theme Ragozin's work. The talented writer substantiated her thesis with two chronological statements that had been discovered by that time: the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (669-626 BC) and the Neo-Babylonian emperor Nabonidus (556-539 BC), without asking whether the advisers of these sovereigns had reliable information and whether their data can be relied upon. Ashurbanipal's document stated that the statue of the goddess Nana (i.e. Inanna - the original Sumerian name of the goddess, whose Akkadian name was Ishtar), which Ashurbanipal returned to Uruk (Erek) from Susa in 635 BC, remained for 1635 years in Elamite captivity. Ragozina comes to a simple conclusion: “If we add 645 to 1635, we get 2280 - an indisputable date”: and although she also insists on the date 3750 BC. as at the time of the prosperity of the king of Akkad Naramsin, confirming it with Nabonidus’s statement that Naramsin ruled 3200 years before him, she is insured here with the “possibility of an error by the engraver” who compiled the inscription, but does not take into account the possibility that the emperor-archaeologist himself could name this date at random .

Ragozina’s categorical statement that Nabonidus and Ashurbaipal knew what they were talking about, of course, could not be perceived critically by a diligently attentive child, but he was immediately interested in how these Assyrian and Babylonian “years” relate to the years by which we now measure our lives. Perhaps this question arose in his mind due to some echo of the fundamentalist debates that took place in Western Christianity in the 19th century. . In these disputes, an attempt was made to save biblical chronology by the assumption that the years of life, generously given in hundreds to the forefathers in the Bible, should be read not as “years”, but as “months”. Perhaps, if I had grown up in a village, the idea would never have occurred to me that a certain degree of arbitrariness in various options for counting the year is permissible, since for a farmer the length of the year is established not by human will, but by the seasonal cycle. However, the child grew up in the city and was deaf to the rhythms of Nature, dispassionately completing its cycle in the endless alternation of spring flowering and autumn withering. In his urbanized world, “years” were perceived simply as segments of Time, as artificially and arbitrarily allocated by people, like everything that people could invent, create or agree on, based on their will and at their own desire.

However, before I laughed at my childish ignorance, I discovered that the question was much smarter than it might have seemed. The calendar of Babylonian origin, accessible to the consciousness of an English boy at the beginning of the 20th century, was built on the solar cycle. Over the centuries, this calendar has been corrected several times to more accurately align it with the solar cycle. At the same time, the lunar cycle remained unchanged, only the length of the months was arbitrarily changed in order to fit the months within the framework of a single year. An English boy discovered that the method of calendar calculation used by Christians was not accepted throughout the world. Muslims, for example, used a calendar that was based not on the solar, but on the lunar cycle, so the nominal “year” of the lunar months, ignoring seasonal alternation and starting the Muslim era with the Hegira, allows itself to slide, as it were, along the dial of the Christian-Babylonian sundial.

However, until 1950, when the author of these lines began to take notes on chronology, he could not fully understand for himself the significance that the Islamic lunar calendar has for correctly resolving the question of the length of the Sumerian year, a question that first excited him more than fifty solar years. years ago. And then one day in the autumn of 1950 solar year I came across Pöbel’s articles about the recent finds of Assyrian royal lists in Khorsabad. I must say, I was amazed at the ingenuity of modern Assyrologists. Then I read the work of Sidney Smith, in which he criticized Poebel's reconstruction of Assyrian chronology, and was quite surprised to find that a famous modern archaeologist was, in fact, repeating the question with which a child once puzzled his mother: how can one be sure that " years,” with which Assyrian chronologists measured time, noting a series of events, were they really solar years, and not some other?

The highly hypothetical correspondence which Pöbel took for granted in his reconstruction of Assyrian chronology by studying the recently discovered king list in conjunction with other documents was convincingly challenged by a distinguished opponent. In Assyria, as Sidney Smith argues, the Babylonian solar calendar, which approximated the true solar year, was not adopted for official use until the reign of Tiglath-pileser I (1114-1076 BC). “For a long time,” writes Smith, “this calendar was considered equivalent to the Julian... But the Assyrian calendar originally used has significant deviations from the Babylonian, and an accurate translation of Assyrian years into Julian years is simply impossible.” Sidney Smith believes that the calendar, which was abolished in Assyria in 1114 BC. in favor of the Babylonian solar calendar of that time, was lunar, that is, had the same basis as the calendar which, 1736 years later, was still in use in a remote and backward Arabian oasis and which then, by chance, preserved in its desert citadel, became the official calendar a new universal church created by the prophet of Mecca.

Creative answers. If the observation or even the unconfirmed conjecture that historical facts contradict each other can inspire the human mind to intellectual effort in an attempt to resolve the question and establish the truth, then all the more can one expect that the mind, prompted to action by intuition that has grasped the connection between historical facts, will come to a certain positive decision.

A traditional historical mystery that can awaken the imagination and thought of a historian is the presence of identical cultural elements at widely separated points in Space and Time. It could be the same clothes, the same words, or even the same hairstyles. The similarity, often approaching identity, can hardly be a coincidence. Rather, it depends on an unbroken chain of historical tradition and geographical diffusion, which is entirely amenable to reconstruction and decipherment.

How, for example, did it happen that on a bronze medal made in 1439 by the Italian master Vittoro Pisano (Pisanello) for the Eastern Roman emperor John VII Palaiologos (1425-1448), and on a fresco painted on the western wall of the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo where -sometime between 1452 and 1466. Piero della Francesco, in which the same John VII is represented in the image of Constantine the Great, this last representative of the Byzantine imperial throne is depicted in a hairstyle that, like two peas in a pod, reproduces the double ancient Egyptian crown, which became one of the symbols power of the pharaoh after the unification in 3100 BC. Upper and Lower Egypt? How did this complex headdress, very strange for anyone who is not familiar with this episode of Egyptian history, appear four and a half millennia later, not on the banks of the Nile, where it was invented, but on the banks of the Bosphorus, and even a thousand years after that? How did the last vestiges of living Egyptian tradition disappear? The historian, in search of an answer to this question, will certainly remember that the pre-Christian Roman emperors claimed the right to be considered the legitimate successors of the Egyptian pharaohs. However, it would be too fanciful to assume that the Roman incarnations of the Egyptian pharaohs were actually decorated with ancient Egyptian paraphernalia, including the symbolic double crown, and that, despite the subsequent disappearance of Egyptian culture and the conquest of Egypt itself and the Roman Empire by Muslim hordes, these ancient Egyptian regalia were transferred from the Old Rome to the New, where they were preserved as signs of the Eastern Roman ghost until the arrival of the last of the Palaiologos, who revived them in hairstyles, perhaps without realizing either their origin or their meaning.

It is also interesting to see how the historical clothing of the Scythians and Dacians reappears in the mythical robes of the gnomes, heroes of Western folklore. The gnomes themselves, of course, appeared as a subconscious reaction of the psyche to the challenge of a new experience in extracting metal ores from the bowels of the Earth, an experience that required comprehension and internal acceptance, because this activity was not completely natural for humans. The costume in which human imagination dressed the gnomes, settling them in a magical land, certainly had to correspond to some real costume of the living people with whom the pioneers of medieval Western Christianity encountered in their advance to the east. If we speculate about the possible habitat of this forgotten tribe, whose clothes turned out to be immortalized in the outfits of immortal gnomes, the imagination pictures a horde of nomadic shepherds who, having violated the boundaries of their traditional pastures, entered the Dniester valley and the forests of Galicia. Further, it is easy to imagine how these pastoralists, finding themselves in an unusual physical environment, were forced to change both their lifestyle and occupation, turning to ore mining. The historical prototypes of the fictional dwarfs thus lived somewhere in the Carpathian region and represented a mining community, the nomadic origin of which was revealed by the traditional clothing of their distant ancestors. Aggressive Germanic tribes came here in search of minerals and it was in this form that they found the former nomads who became miners.

The desire to find the roots of connections between historical facts, of course, is also caused by facts of a different kind. In the area of ​​language, for example, the question arises as to why the vocabulary of the English middle class at the end of the 19th century. The name of the Sumerian goddess appears - Inanna. The story of the transfer of Inanna from the Sumerian pantheon to English usage is remarkable in that this name was preserved, despite the enormous Space and Time, although it lost the first sound. In Victorian everyday life, when a child’s nanny meant more than even his own mother, it was quite natural that the child would call the most powerful female figure in his miniature domestic world after the name of the unforgettable mother-goddess.

The motive that encourages us to connect widely separated but equivalent concepts or ideas with each other sometimes goes back not to the desire to restore a broken link in the chain, but to the desire to reach its origins. For example, who were the ancestors of the Etruscans? Who are the descendants of the lost ten tribes of Israel? There are almost no peoples who are not suspected by the Hellenic or modern Western seeker of antiquities of being the ancestors of the Etruscans; and even fewer peoples from the Islamic and Christian regions in which modern scientists would not look for family connection with the Lost Ten Tribes.

The fantastic nature of such statements should serve as a warning that potentially creative intellectual impulses can give rise to serious errors and misunderstandings; and the prudent mature historian, of course, values ​​his time and energy too much to deal with obviously insoluble problems, even if they once struck his imagination, perhaps even in childhood. However, there are at least two reasons that make it possible to see something more than an empty pastime in attempts to solve these eternal mysteries of History. First of all, they can shed light on general historical issues. Plutarch's questions regarding the history of clothing reveal the strikingly interesting truth that the conductivity of the social fabric of human life is exceptionally high in two social environments of a special kind: in the “universal state” and in the nomadic-pastoral society. Our reflections on certain words of the common English dictionary reveal the truth that the energy radiated by the elements of culture is exceptionally high if these elements are traced back to the names of deities. Such guiding lights on the landscape of world history justify the intellectual effort expended in exploring connections between facts that at first glance may seem trivial; but the main justification for this intellectual search, similar to childish fun, lies in itself, for the task set by Virgil to “know the causes of things” never leaves the heart of a true historian.

TOYNBEE Arnold Joseph(1889–1975) – British historian, cultural scientist, one of the most authoritative developers of the civilizational approach to understanding history.

He devoted his life to teaching and scientific activities. Worked at the University of London, London School of Economics, Royal Institute of International Affairs. Author of numerous works on historical, philosophical and political issues. The most fundamental work of A. Toynbee is the twelve-volume “Comprehension of History” (published in 1934–1961). In this work, using a wide range of factual material, the concept of history as a process of birth and death of relatively independent civilizations going through similar stages of development is developed. Main criterion identification of civilizations – religious. The mechanism of their dynamics is described by A. Toynbee in terms of “challenge-response”. The “challenge” sent to civilization by nature, climate, social contradictions, etc., is accepted by the “creative minority.” If it finds a worthy “answer,” its authority grows and civilization grows stronger and develops. As the creative minority loses the ability to find such “answers,” it turns into an “elite” that relies not so much on its authority as on force. This means that civilization has entered a stage of breakdown and decay. At the same time, breaking history into local episodes of the birth and death of civilizations, A. Toynbee still tries to preserve the idea of ​​​​its integrity - “a single tree of history.”

Main works in Russian: "Comprehension of history"; "Civilization before the court of history"; "The role of personality in history"; "Research into History".

The falsity of the concept of "unity of civilization"

Having answered the objection that civilizations are too heterogeneous for comparison, let us respond to the exact opposite, but also valid objection, that civilizations, being homogeneous, are essentially identical, and we are not actually dealing with twenty-one civilizations, but only with one single . This civilization is unique, and there is nothing to compare it with. This thesis about the "unity of civilization" is a false concept, very popular among modern Western historians, whose thinking is strongly influenced by the social environment.

One of the reasons that gave rise to this misconception is that modern Western civilization has spread its economic system throughout the world. Economic unification, which rests on a Western basis, was followed by political unification, which has the same basis and goes almost as far. Despite the fact that the political expansion of the Western world these days is not as obvious and offensive as economic expansion, nevertheless, about 60–70 states of the modern world, including also existing non-Western states, are currently members (in varying degrees of inclusion) a single world system of states with a single international law.

Western historians exaggerate the significance of these phenomena. Firstly, they believe that at present the unification of the world on the economic basis of the West is more or less completed, which means, as they believe, unification in other areas is also being completed. Secondly, they confuse unification with unity, thus exaggerating the role of a situation that historically developed quite recently and does not yet allow us to talk about the creation of a single Civilization, much less identify it with Western society.

Western society is nevertheless proclaimed to be a unique civilization, possessing unity and indivisibility, a civilization that, after a long period of struggle, has finally achieved the goal of world domination. And the fact that its economic system holds all of humanity in its networks is presented as “the heavenly freedom of the children of God.”

The thesis about the unification of the world on the basis of the Western economic system as a natural result of a single and continuous process of development of human history leads to gross distortions of facts and to a striking narrowing of historical horizons.

Firstly, such a view of the modern world should be limited only to the economic and political aspects of social life, but in no way extend it to culture, which is not only deeper than the first two layers, but also more fundamental. While the economic and political map of the world has indeed been almost completely “Westernized,” the cultural map remains to this day as it was before the onset of Western economic and political expansion. How did our historians manage to look and not see? We will understand how tight their blinders are by analyzing the English word "natives"(natives) and corresponding words in other European languages.

In Europeans' descriptions of the natives, local flavor and exoticism prevail. Westerners perceive natives as part of the local flora and fauna, and not as people like themselves, endowed with passions and having equal rights with them. They are even denied the right to sovereignty over the land they occupy,

Secondly, the dogma of the “unity of civilization” forces the historian to ignore the fact that the continuity of the history of two related civilizations differs from the continuity of two successive chapters of the history of one civilization. Ignoring this difference, historians begin to consider Hellenic history as one of the chapters in the history of Western civilization (which they have already unconditionally identified with Civilization). The history of Minoan society is also viewed from the same angle. Thus, three civilizations are united into one, and the history of a single Civilization is straightened into a line descending from the comprehensive modern Western civilization to the primitive society of the Neolithic, and from the Neolithic through the upper and lower layers of the material culture of the Paleolithic to the prehistoric ancestors of Man.

Thirdly, they simply ignore stages or chapters of the history of other civilizations if they do not fit into their general concept, dismissing them as “semi-barbarian” or “decayed” or relegating them to the East, which was effectively excluded from the history of civilization. Finally, they do not take into account the presence of other civilizations at all. Orthodox Christianity, for example, is either considered part of Western Christianity, as the name suggests, or is depicted as a temporary growth on the body of Western society. Orthodox Christianity, according to this version, when it arose, served as a stronghold of Western society in the fight against the East. Having exhausted its functions, this growth atrophied and disappeared, just as the gills and tail of a tadpole fall off at the stage of its transformation into a frog. As for the other three non-Western civilizations - Islamic, Hindu and Far Eastern - they are generally rejected as “native” in relation to the chariot of Western society.

With the help of such a Procrustean framework, the thesis of the “unity of civilization” is preserved to this day. Compared to the period of life of an individual, the period of life of a civilization is so enormous that one cannot even hope to measure its curve until one is at a sufficient distance. And this perspective can only be obtained by studying a dead society. The historian can never completely free himself from the society in which he himself lives. In other words, to take the liberty of asserting that the current society is the result of human history means insisting on the correctness of the conclusion, excluding the possibility of its verification. But since such egocentric illusions have always been characteristic of people, there is no point in looking for scientific evidence in them. [...]

The false concept of the “unity of history” based on Western society has another incorrect premise - the idea of ​​​​straightforward development.

This is nothing more than the simplest image of a magic beanstalk from a fairy tale, which pierced the ground and grows upward, without sprouting or breaking under the weight of its own weight, until it hits its head against the sky. At the beginning of our work an attempt was made to apply the concept of evolution to human history. It was shown how representatives of the same type of society, finding themselves in the same conditions, react completely differently to trials - the so-called challenge of history. Some die immediately; others survive, but at such a cost that after that they are no longer capable of anything; still others so successfully withstand the challenge that they emerge not only not weakened, but even having created more favorable conditions for overcoming future trials; there are those who follow the pioneers, like sheep follow their leader. This concept of development seems to us more acceptable than the old-fashioned image of a bean sprout, and in our study we will proceed from it.

The division of history into "ancient" and "modern" records the transition from Hellenic to Western history, while the division into "medieval" and "modern" refers to the transition from one chapter of Western history to another. Without pursuing distant goals, we note for now that the conventional formula “ancient + medieval + modern” history is not only inadequate, but also incorrect.

Call-and-response area. "Full Sails" or "Too Good Land"

Challenge encourages growth. By responding to a challenge, society solves the problem facing it, thereby transferring itself to a higher and more perfect state from the point of view of complication of the structure.

Lack of challenges means lack of incentives for growth and development. The traditional view that favorable climatic and geographical conditions undoubtedly contribute to social development turns out to be incorrect. On the contrary, historical examples show that conditions that are too good tend to encourage a return to nature, a cessation of all growth.

Egypt is traditionally viewed as a region with favorable natural and climatic conditions. However, it turns out that initially it was a difficult area for agriculture, which flourished thanks to a special irrigation system. In Central America, in Ceylon, in the north of the Arabian Desert, on Easter Island, in New England [...] and the Roman Campaign [...] one can see traces of life, once settled and civilized, and then extinct, abandoned, forgotten. This suggests that civilization exists thanks to the sowing efforts of man. It is enough to deprive a city of energy supply, and civilized life in it will immediately be called into question. It was enough for the Polynesian merchants to stop their dangerous voyages to Easter Island, and the great achievements of its ancient culture turned into a mystery within a few generations [...]. Italian Capua turned out to be “treacherous” because the soldiers, addicted to “earthly joys,” became completely demoralized and forgot about their military duty [...]. Moses led his fellow tribesmen out of Egypt, where they “sat by the meat pots” and “ate bread to their fill,” and it was no coincidence that they complained that they wanted to “starve” them (Ex. 16:3). Conversely, left to their own devices, the peoples living in the hot Central African jungles found themselves deprived of natural stimulus and remained frozen for thousands of years at a primitive level [...].

Growth incentives can be divided into two main types: incentives natural environment and stimuli from the human environment. Among the stimuli of the natural environment, one can distinguish the stimulus of the “barren land” and the stimulus of the “new land”.

There are many incentives for the “barren land” in history. Harsh natural conditions often serve as a powerful stimulus for the emergence and growth of civilization. For example, if we compare the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys, the former is much more suitable for cyclical seasonal farming than the latter. It would seem that the ancient Chinese civilization should have arisen precisely in the Yangtze Valley. But it originated in the Yellow River Valley. If we compare two areas in South America, we can find a similar situation. The Andean civilization arose not in Valparaiso, an area that, due to the abundance of rain, the Spanish conquistadors called an earthly paradise, but in the northern Peruvian region, where there was a constant shortage of water and agriculture was impossible without a complex irrigation system.

Growth analysis. The relationship between growing civilizations and individuals ((Toynbee A. Comprehension of history. P. 259–261.)

People united by a certain system of social relations are, as a rule, heirs of the same culture, and therefore it would be strange if similar responses did not follow to a common challenge. What is truly surprising in the real dynamics of social life is precisely that “the idea that is in the air” does not immediately capture the minds of all representatives of a given society. But this is nevertheless a fact. And if what is new is true creative idea or the project cannot conquer the entire society at the same time, then it is also true that they never appear beyond the boundaries of a social minority.

The importance of the creative minority in human history captured the imagination of H. G. Wells. “All my hopes for the future are connected with faith in that serious minority which is so fundamentally different from the indifferent and faceless mass of our society. I cannot understand the meaning of any great religion, I cannot explain the constructive course of history, until I turn to this thoughtful minority. They are the Salt of the Earth [...], these people are capable of devoting their lives to distant and majestic goals" [...].

The internal uniqueness and individuality of any creative act only slightly contradicts its tendency towards homogeneity, which is based on the fact that every member of society is a potential creator, and members of the same society live in the same social atmosphere. However, the creator, having declared himself, always finds himself thrown outside the inert, uncreative mass. Sometimes he has the fortunate opportunity to enjoy communication with a narrow circle of kindred spirits. Acts of social creativity are the prerogatives of either individual creators or a creative minority.

Western science and Western technology, which exist to transform knowledge into power and wealth, of which we have every reason to be proud, nevertheless have a dangerous esotericism. The great social forces of our time - Democracy and Industrialism - brought to life by Western civilization, arose from the depths of a creative minority, and this minority is now questioning whether it is capable of leading and controlling the gigantic energy of the released forces. The main reason why the Salt of the Earth cannot feel safe is that the majority, alas, are still “flat”.

At present, huge masses of people still remain at the intellectual and moral level at which they were one hundred and fifty years ago, when new gigantic social forces were just beginning to emerge. The extent of moral squalor and degradation of modern humanity is fully visible on the pages of the “yellow press”. In the perversity of the Western press, one can also feel the imperious force of modern Western industrialism and democracy, striving to keep the bulk of people, already culturally deficient, at the lowest possible level of spirituality. The same force breathed life into the evil institutions of War, Tribalism, Slavery and Property. The creative minority in the modern Western world faces the danger of regression, and the earth, transformed by the creative act, finds itself in the hands of new forces and a new apparatus of power. A crime is being committed, and it cannot be said that even greater misfortunes do not lie ahead. The use of the inventions of the minority would not lead to such catastrophic consequences if, at the time when the minority takes a giant moral and intellectual step forward, the majority did not remain stagnant. The stagnation of the masses is the fundamental cause of the crisis facing Western civilization today. This phenomenon is found in the life of all living civilizations and is a feature that characterizes the process of growth.

The very fact that the rise of civilizations is the work of creative individuals or creative minorities implies that the uncreative majority will be left behind until the pioneers bring up the rearguards to their own level. The last consideration requires clarification of the definition of civilization and primitive society. Earlier in this study we established that primitive societies are in a static state, while civilizations, or at least growing civilizations, are in a dynamic state. Let us now note that growing civilizations differ from primitive societies in their forward movement at the expense of a creative minority. It should be added that creative individuals, under any conditions, constitute a minority in society, but it is this minority that breathes new life into the social system. In every growing civilization, even during periods of its most vigorous growth, huge masses of people never emerge from a state of stagnation, like a primitive society in constant stagnation, since the overwhelming majority of representatives of any civilization are no different from the people of a primitive society.

The characteristic type of individual whose actions transform a primitive society into a civilization and cause the growth of a growing civilization is the "strong personality", the "medium", the "genius", the "superman": but in a growing society, at any given moment, representatives of this type are always in minority. They are just yeast in the common cauldron of humanity.

Thus, the spiritual demarcation between the Individual and the Crowd does not coincide with the line of demarcation that runs between civilizations and primitive societies. In the most developed and civilized societies, the overwhelming majority is an inert mass. [...]

Raising the uncreative majority of a growing society to the level of creative pioneers, without which forward movement is impossible, is in practice solved thanks to free mimesis - a sublime property of human nature, which is more likely the result of collective experience than inspiration.

To turn on the mechanism of mimesis, it is necessary to activate the internal potentials of a person, because mimesis is a trait inherent in man from time immemorial. “The initial lessons taught to Man by Nature boiled down to the acceptance of the customs of the group. Mimesis as imitation was developed quite naturally and freely, for Man became Man in the collective” [...].

Creative evolution thus uses a previously developed property to carry out new feature. The historical reorientation of the internally constant phenomenon of mimesis has already attracted our attention in the analysis of the specific differences between primitive society and civilization. We have noted that mimesis is a general feature of social life and that its effects can be observed in both types of societies. However, if in a primitive society mimesis is focused on the older generation of the living and on the images of ancestors who have passed on to another world, as the embodiment of the “crystal of custom”, then in growing societies the role model, the standard becomes a creative person, a leader who is paving a new path.

In order to induce the inert majority to follow the active minority, the mere fortitude of a creative personality is not enough. The mastery of high spiritual and moral values ​​presupposes the ability to perceive “cultural radiation”, free mimesis as imitation of the spiritual and moral impulse of the chosen bearers of the new.

• Toynbee A. Comprehension of history. M.: Iris-Press, 2002. pp. 86–88. URL: hrono.info/libris/lib_t/toinby_hyst004.html
• Toynbee A. Comprehension of history. pp. 126–127.

Educational institution

"Belarusian State University

computer science and radio electronics"

Department of Philosophy

Test No. 1

"PHILOSOPHY"

Option No. 106

Completed by: Kuprash Konstantin Sergeevich

Master's student at the Department of Ecology

group no.

Checked:

Comprehension of history is comprehension

humanity itself and in

yourself of the divine Law

and higher purpose.

Arnold J. Toynbee

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975) is one of the greatest philosophers of the history of the 20th century. At the age of 33, Toynbee, who had received an excellent education and was at that time working as a promising official in the British Foreign Office, drew up a brief outline of his work, devoted to a philosophical consideration of the course of the historical process. It is as the author of “A Study of History,” a fundamental twelve-volume work devoted to the genesis, growth and collapse of cultures and civilizations, that Toynbee will remain in the history of humanities. Toynbee sets himself the task of comprehending the operating forces of world history - those forces that are capable of both giving birth to civilization and destroying it. And at the beginning of the 20th century there was no longer any doubt that civilizations were mortal. The First World War with its chemical weapons, submarine and air war, machine guns and tanks today - after Hiroshima and Auschwitz - seems to us something old-fashioned, and we forget that the number of victims of that war was in the millions, and that for contemporaries it had a truly apocalyptic scale. The question of the genesis, development and death of cultures acquired new relevance and special urgency. Toynbee begins his research with attempts to determine the intelligible (i.e., one that would be accessible to human understanding) subject field of historical research, and comes to the conclusion that in Nation states cannot be perceived as such. Considering the historical path of England, Toynbee notes that many events in the country's national history are incomprehensible in isolation from the history of the countries with which England was connected by a thousand sociocultural threads. And this means that the elementary unit of analysis for the historian must be an entity of a higher order of generality in which both England and the countries surrounding it could be included as structural units of the whole. Toynbee defines this essence as “civilization,” and specifically as “the civilization of the Christian West,” or simply “Western civilization.”

"Comprehension of History" Toynbee

However, it is obvious that Western civilization is neither the only one in world history, nor the first in the chain of its sisters. Examining the entire history of the world, Toynbee comes to the conclusion that the number of civilizations that existed throughout its entire length is not so large. He counts them, 21 in total (and including satellite civilizations and frozen civilizations - 37), and it is them that he considers as the main structural element of world history, the terminological and methodological basis for further reasoning. Civilizations exist as socioculturally integral human societies limited in space and time. They have a rather complicated relationship with each other. But what exactly creates Civilization? How and why does it occur? In order to understand Toynbee, it is important to remember that he is a religious thinker; for religious, Christian consciousness, the source of truth can be both Reason and Revelation, but the best is the combination of these two principles of Truth. That is why in Toynbee’s work the methods of strict scientific knowledge and elements of rationalistic intuitionism are intricately intertwined. History is the work of the Creator, carried out through the existence of man and humanity, and in this sense it is the crown of divine Revelation. The presence of Revelation in history inspires some optimism in the Christian thinker: history is not without meaning, and man must only comprehend it. Toynbee strives to Comprehension of History - all history as a whole, and only for this purpose makes an attempt to study its individual parts, like a doctor examining individual organs of a patient. The purpose of the study is to attempt to comprehend the mechanism of sociogenesis, a mechanism that would be highly universal for each and every individual civilization - and therefore for all of history as a whole. At the same time, Toynbee does not pretend that he will be able to identify the universal forces of sociogenesis. He just wants to comprehend the mechanism of social realization of these forces. His main work, “Comprehension of History,” was conceived as a social theory designed to clarify the driving forces of the mechanism of the historical process, in which man plays a leading role. In general, the concept of the historical process of the English professor is expressed in the following provisions: 1) every society can become a civilization; 2) civilizations “are ... societies with a wider extent, both in space and in time, than nation-states, city-states or any other political unions”; 3) in order to become a civilization, society, having received a “challenge” at the stage of its birth, which can be both external and internal, must give the correct “answer”; 4) each civilization in its development goes through four stages: birth, growth, breakdown and death, and the death of a civilization is not always the end of this process; 5) civilizations are comparable to each other; 6) no civilization covers all of humanity; 7) continuity in the development of civilizations is much less than continuity between the phases of development of one civilization. The author of “Comprehension of History” develops an open model of civilizational development, that is, he recognizes the dependence of its existence on internal and external conditions, among which external “challenges” are decisive for the emergence of civilizations. It is not favorable natural conditions, but the ability of society to overcome inertia, go beyond customs and traditions and give the correct “answer” to the emerging “challenge” - this is the decisive circumstance that, according to Toynbee, can lead to the genesis of civilization.

Most researchers of A. Toynbee's concept argue that he stands on the position of a cultural-civilizational paradigm. However, a deeper consideration of Toynbee’s reasoning inevitably leads to the conclusion that this is one of the first attempts at a unique synthesis of the linear and civilizational paradigms in his work.

1) All 37 civilizations discovered by the author of “Comprehension of History” can be considered simultaneous. Toynbee himself explains this metaphor by the fact that the six-thousand-year history of the existence of civilized societies is just a moment from the point of view of modern archaeology, geology and cosmogony. Human societies, which we designate as civilizations, are infinitesimal in relation to the age of the human race, our planet or the entire solar system. In this sense, the history of human societies is “a bundle of parallel, modern and relatively recent achievements.”

2) All local civilizations can be divided into three generations, between which there is a direct relationship. The first generation includes: Egyptian, Chinese, Indus, Andean, Sumerian-Akkadian and Aegean, which arose as a result of a natural “call”. Civilizations of the second generation - Syrian, Hellenic, Orthodox Christian and others - are adopted civilizations formed as a result of affiliation with the civilization of the first generation of primitive societies. The third generation includes modern civilizations - Western, Far Eastern, Indian, Islamic and Russian, formed on the basis of “universal churches” (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism).

3) Distinctive feature Toynbee's theory, which takes it beyond the cultural-civilizational paradigm, is the idea of ​​ecumenism. “The problems of survival and development of the human race, its historical destiny, which have become so pressing in the modern world, have led to the awakening of a sense of unity among all humanity.” From the position of Toynbean ecumenism, we can say that until the twentieth century, humanity did not have a common destiny. A feature of the social consciousness of past centuries was the claim to consider oneself and one’s society as a closed universe. In the modern world (thanks to global processes), there is a mixture of different nations, beliefs, ideas, ideologies and aspirations of people, which may mean the end of the era of multiple civilizations. Toynbee believes that humanity has no other choice but to create a single ecumenical civilization. If previously each society was looking for its own adequate “answer,” now, in the era of the emergence and aggravation of global problems, it is necessary to search for the correct “answer” at the global level, and this can be achieved through the recognition of not only one’s narrow local, but also universal human interests.

4) According to Toynbee, comprehension of the historical process will be more fruitful not by studying individual social communities, but on the basis of analyzing the algorithm of clashes of civilizations, which, in his opinion, will make it possible to understand the meaning of history and draw a picture of the human future.

Toynbee develops his own original view on the issue of the nature of social conflicts, which is determined by his original methodological guidelines.

According to the English professor, conflicts arise between any social entities, including civilizations, as a natural and objective result of any interaction. In the first volume of “Comprehension of History,” Toynbee identifies the following problem: are local civilizations an “intelligible field” of historical research and answers – yes. But in the course of his further research, he comes to the idea that it is possible to fully comprehend the essence and essence of what is happening inside civilization only in the context of its confrontation and interaction with near and distant neighbors, which, in turn, leads to conflict and the search for the right “answer.” ", due to which the development of civilizations occurs.

Toynbee Arnold Joseph

Comprehension of history (collection)

Toynbee A.J.

COMPREHENSION OF HISTORY (Collection)

Per. from English/Comp. Ogurtsov A.P.; Entry Art. Ukolova V.I.;

Closing Art. Rashkovsky E.B.

Pages 320 and 321 are missing!

Arnold Toynbee and the comprehension of history. . . . . . . . . . . 5

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

The relativity of historical thinking. . . . . . . . 14

Field of historical research. . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Comparative study of civilizations. . . . . . . 42

Part one. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

The problem of the genesis of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

The nature of the genesis of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . 93

The reason for the genesis of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Call-and-Response. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

Six outposts in the history of Western Europe. . . . . . 142

Part two. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

The growth of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

The process of growth of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214

Growth analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250

Care-and-Return. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

Fractures of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

Part three. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

Collapses of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

Movement of Schism-and-Palingenesis. . . . . . . . . . 338

A split in the social system. . . . . . . . . . . . . 343

A split in the soul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358

Archaism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415

Futurism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427

Detachment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 438

Transfiguration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443

Decay analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449

Rhythms of decay. . . .

Comprehension of history

Part four. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 484

Universal states. . . . . . . . . . . . . 484

Universal states as goals. . . . . . . . . 486

Universal states as means. . . . . . . 499

Provinces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505

Capitals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509

Part five. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515

Universal churches. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515

Civilization as regression. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529

Part six. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541

Heroic Ages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541

Contacts between civilizations in space. . . . . 555

Social consequences of contacts between modern 577

each other's civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Psychological consequences of contacts between 587

civilizations contemporary to each other. . . . . . . . . .

Contacts of civilizations in time. . . . . . . . . . . 599

Part seven. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 617

Inspiration from historians. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 617

Reading Toynbee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 643

Scientific commentary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 655

The end of a century, and even more so the end of a millennium, invites reflection on the meaning of history. Humanity looks into the past to find signs of the future. There are quite loud voices predicting the end of history, be it about the fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecies or about its achievement of a certain stable state generated by the successes of Western liberalism and democracy and capable of substantivizing the present, discarding the eternal flow of history from the past into the future (let us at least remember the sensational concept American scientist Francis Fukuyama, behind which the shadow of the great Hegel appears). However, in the end, a close, one might say convulsive, look into the past is a necessary element of self-affirmation of humanity in its rediscovery of hope, almost lost in the twentieth century, which brought unprecedented revolutionary upheavals and bloody wars, genocide and environmental crisis, which put peoples and every person on the brink of survival, but at its end still extracted from the flames of destruction the warmth of humanism, the light of insight, the foreknowledge of the possibility of the continuation of life and the movement of history, but no longer as the chariot of Vishnu, mercilessly destroying everything in its path, but as a field for the realization of the phenomenon of man in the spiritual and a socially converging world, becoming a factor in truly cosmic evolution.

What place in this peering into history can be occupied by the reflections of the English thinker Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), who has long been recognized as one of the “pillars” of the philosophy of history, exalted and ridiculed, and today seeming almost old-fashioned in his academic respectability? Unfortunately, the Russian translation of Toynbee’s main work “A Study of History” (more precisely, extracts from it) comes out very late, although the name of the English thinker has occupied a strong place for many decades in courses on the history of philosophy taught in our universities, where it was considered good in a tone of scolding him as (a representative of bourgeois history and sociology), following Spengler, striving to “rethink the entire socio-historical development of mankind in the spirit of the theory of the circulation of local civilizations,” while emphasizing that

5 he "sought to provide an idealistic answer to positivist evolutionism" and also had a great influence on the philosophical and historical thought of the West. In a word, we treated Toynbee almost well, given the context of the ever-increasing and intensified criticism of “bourgeois consciousness” and “bourgeois science.”

By the way, Toynbee’s concept, which was striking in its grandeur of concept and inconsistency in execution, was by no means perceived ambiguously in the West. For example, the prominent French historian Lucien Febvre, one of the founders of the most influential school of historical science, sometimes called the “Annals school,” wrote, not without mockery, about a “seductive historian-essayist,” whose work generates “a feeling of sensation evoked in the gullible reader by an impressive overview of all these carefully numbered civilizations, which, like scenes of melodrama, replace one another before his admiring gaze; the genuine delight inspired by this magician, who with such dexterity juggles peoples, societies and civilizations of the past and present, shuffling and shuffling Europe and Africa, Asia and America. But if we do not succumb to tempting spells, if we reject the sentimental position of the believer present at the service, if we impartially look at Toynbee’s ideas and the conclusions from them, what new will we, historians, see in all this?.. Toynbee simply adds the voice of England to the French voices. And we have the right to judge to what extent this voice stands out in the British world against the background of other voices. In our world, its owner can expect only a place among the choristers." This statement serves as another evidence of how biased outstanding scientists can be in assessing each other and their national historical schools. However, if some saw in Arnold Toynbee only an ordinary interpreter of well-known truths, then others proclaimed him the prophet of a new vision of history, but in essence, in both cases, the main thing eluded - the real understanding of history in the interpretation of the English historian. However, in fairness it should be noted that Toynbee did not try to cast his understanding into it. a chased form. It rather shines through the interweaving of concepts and approaches, running into each other and “darkening” the foundation of the channel along which the scientist’s thought rushes.

So, Toynbee called his main work “A Study of History.” The easiest way is to give it a school meaning and translate it as “The Study of History” or, slightly academicizing it, as “The Study of History.” But from the very first pages it becomes clear that any study based on detailed analysis, or research in the usual sense, can only be spoken of in very relative terms. Thoughts, concepts, definitions, facts, countries

6 and peoples, past and future merge into a complex pattern, more likely indicating the presence of mystery than giving clarity and consistency to the presentation of past events. Starting with 21 civilizations, Toynbee, by the end of his multi-volume work, loses 8 along the way, but, it seems, does not bother to notice the loss, carried away by the flow of understanding the movement or immobility of history. It is obvious that such work is almost impossible to call scientific research in the classical version. However, the more the reader delves into it, the stronger the feeling that in this case we are talking not so much about rational knowledge, but about comprehension, combining logical comprehension, intuition and even insight. Toynbee himself remarks, as if in passing: “Why should we believe that the scientific method, created for the analysis of inanimate nature, can be transferred to historical thinking, which involves considering people in the process of their activities? When a history professor calls his seminar a “laboratory”, does does he not thereby isolate himself from the natural environment? Both names are metaphors, but each of them is appropriate only in its own field. A historian’s seminar is a nursery in which the living learn to speak a living word about the living... We know it well enough, and we always remember it that way. the so-called “pathetic fallacy”, which spiritualizes and gives life to inanimate objects. However, now we are more likely to become victims of the opposite - the “apathetic fallacy”, according to which living beings are treated as if they were inanimate objects. So, is Toynbee a supporter of intuitionism? yes, then not in the sense that is familiar to us, but in the same sense in which he was Aurelius Augustine, the creator of the European, Christian philosophy of history, which was based on the original method of rationalistic intuitionism, which was then used by such great systematizing philosophers as Thomas Aquinas or Hegel, although they are more commonly counted among rationalists of a predominantly (if not exclusively) logical persuasion.

Next page

Identifying four stages of civilization development - genesis, growth, breakdown and death, which occur in the logic of the “challenge-and-response” concept, Toynbee believes that none of them can do without external social influence. The influence of external forces, that is, a different social environment, accompanies civilization throughout the entire period of its existence. The birth of civilization is the result of the interaction of two or more cultures. The growth stage is a constant search for adequate “answers” ​​not only to natural and climatic changes, but also to the “challenges” of neighboring societies. Breakdown is also provoked external influence. Toynbee boils down the essence of all the breakdowns to the loss of civilization’s ability to self-determination as a result of another “challenge”.

The inability to find the correct “answer” leads to an aggravation of both the internal conflict – between the “internal proletariat” and the “universal state”, and the external one – between the “universal state” and the “external proletariat”. This confrontation leads to the death of the “universal state” and the emergence of the “universal church”, which becomes the spiritual basis for the civilization of the next generation.

So, the logic of Toynbee’s concept leads us to the following conclusion: it is possible to comprehend the historical process only by studying the situation at the junction of local civilizations, that is, in the area of ​​intercivilizational conflicts.

In Toynbee’s logic, intercivilizational conflict should be understood not as clashes between ethnic groups, nations, states or military-political alliances, but as a large-scale “interaction-confrontation” along the civilizational fault line.

The author of “Comprehension of History” identifies the following causes of intercivilizational conflicts. The first is that any historically established community strives for expansion and fights to increase its territory.

The essence of the second is that civilizations at the moment of collision have different potential forces.

Arnold Toynbee "Comprehension of History"

By potential forces, Toynbee understands three mutually dependent factors. Characterizing the first of them, he notes that when civilizations enter a situation of conflict, the following circumstance is important: at what stage of civilizational development the warring parties are. A civilization is capable of its greatest activity at the stage of growth. The second factor refers to the demographic situation within the civilizations participating in the conflict. A civilization with a high population has more opportunities not only to resist its neighbors, but also to more successfully fight to increase its territories. The third factor influencing the potential of a civilization is the “impulse of life,” that is, the ability of a civilization to adequately respond to external “challenges” and develop appropriate “responses.”

The third reason is spiritual differences. They are most clearly visible in religious differences that have developed over centuries and will not disappear in the foreseeable future and which are more important than differences between states, nations or ethnic groups. A person can be half-Russian and half-Chinese, and even a citizen of both states, but he will not be able to be half-Christian or half-Buddhist. Human history has proven that religion is not a “little difference,” but perhaps the deepest difference that exists between people. The frequency, scale and severity of wars along fault lines are greatly increased by the belief in various gods. As civilization develops and its victories over nature and neighboring societies, the growth of civilizational self-awareness intensifies, which cultivates a hostile attitude towards representatives of other civilizations.

It is these reasons that initiate the conflict of civilizations, which develops in the logic of the “challenge-and-response” law. In this conflict, the civilization that is able to give a greater number of adequate “responses” to the “challenges” of its rival wins.

According to the English professor, the occurrence of conflicts between various social actors leads to large-scale socio-psychological consequences. Victory or defeat in a conflict does not have absolute historical significance; over time, it can turn into its opposite. The physical, political and economic suppression of one society by another is, according to Toynbee, only utilitarian in nature. His concept considers the dominant emotional-psychological and value-cultural changes within each civilization. The social significance of these changes lies in the fact that they influence the course and direction of the historical process as a whole.

Toynbee considers assimilation, racism, and the division of society into those who defend the traditions of their ancestors and those who advocate cultural change and the borrowing of any cultural objects from another civilizational field as the intracivilizational consequences of the conflict.

Assimilation as a social consequence of a civilizational conflict can be ambivalent. Either the conquered population will be subjected to this process, or the aggressor will become part of the captured society. An example in the first case is the Nubians who became part of the Egyptian civilization that captivated them, an example of the second situation is the barbarian hordes that invaded Europe and disappeared into Western civilization. The outcome of the conflict in this case depends on the phase of civilizational development of the participants in the confrontation, the demographic situation within societies and internal social tensions.

The English philosopher emphasizes that the most important social consequence of the clash of civilizations is not the physical victory of one of them, but the predominance of one or another spiritual culture. Successful aggression can lead to the penetration of exotic elements of the culture of its victim into the victorious civilization. As a result of the synthesis of different cultures, “universal churches” are born, that is, religions that express the interests of the “uncreative majority”, which are of a protest nature. This leads to a spiritual division within the victorious civilization into the “ruling minority” and the “proletariat”, which at the next “challenge” creates a situation where civilization is unable to develop the right solution and give the right “answer”, since social unity will be lost.

Another consequence of the conflict, no less significant for the fate of civilization, is a change in social psychology. The superiority of one civilization over another leads to its self-exaltation and humiliation of conquered peoples. It is on this basis, according to Toynbee, that racism develops. The terms “barbarian” and “native” arise when one civilization prevails over another due to its physical strength or technical and everyday equipment, but not due to the superiority of the spirit. These terms not only deny individuality, but also diminish the political, economic and cultural status of the conquered societies, resulting in the local population being perceived as part of the flora and fauna.

Analyzing the results of civilizational conflicts of the past, Toynbee comes to the conclusion that less developed societies, which are at the stage of growth, become “gravediggers” of stronger civilizations. This is explained by the fact that in growing civilizations a “creative minority” is in power and communication with the majority is carried out through mimesis, leading to spiritual unity. In mature civilizations, the “creative minority” was replaced by a “ruling minority,” whose forces are aimed at keeping the “internal proletariat” from social revolutions. Differences in the spiritual state of society lead to the fact that a civilization with significant economic power is forced to spend more resources on waging war and maintaining internal order. The modest demands of a society standing at a lower stage of development, but in a single spiritual impulse, allow it to quickly restore its undeveloped economy. As a result, the young society has great opportunities to continue the conflict.

A powerful economic system has worse recreational opportunities. Economic degradation has a stronger impact on developed societies, where the cost of conflict is higher, and therefore the demoralizing effect of defeat is more noticeable. Weakness in military operations, he progresses and learns faster, which gives impetus to development and is perceived as a heroic era, and this helps to raise the spirit even in conditions of defeat. The spirit of the people, as is known, is comparable to material strength. The outcome of military operations is often decided not only by the force of arms. A small army of Greeks led by Alexander the Great was able to conquer the vast Persian Empire.

Thus, the exhausting power of conflict has a more detrimental effect on an economically strong society that feels psychologically superior than on a society with low economic indicators.

The conflict of civilizations also leads to the division of a society that has undergone a civilizational attack into two opposing groups - “Zealots” and “Herodians”, who are trying to respond to the external social “challenge” in different ways. The emergence of these groups is a consequence of “cultural radiation.” “Zealots” represent that part of society that resolutely resists any outside influence and demonstrates loyalty to traditions in everything. “Herodians” are another group that recognizes the superiority of the enemy and calls for taking from him everything that may be useful in order to survive in this world.

ADD COMMENT[possible without registration]
Before publication, all comments are reviewed by the site moderator - spam will not be published

Current page: 1 (book has 31 pages in total)

Toynbee Arnold Joseph
Comprehension of history (collection)

Toynbee A.J.

COMPREHENSION OF HISTORY (Collection)

Per. from English/Comp. Ogurtsov A.P.; Entry Art. Ukolova V.I.;

Closing Art. Rashkovsky E.B.

Pages 320 and 321 are missing!

Arnold Toynbee and the comprehension of history. . . . . . . . . . . 5

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

The relativity of historical thinking. . . . . . . . 14

Field of historical research. . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Comparative study of civilizations. . . . . . . 42

Part one. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

The problem of the genesis of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

The nature of the genesis of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . 93

The reason for the genesis of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Call-and-Response. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

Six outposts in the history of Western Europe. . . . . . 142

Part two. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

The growth of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

The process of growth of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214

Growth analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250

Care-and-Return. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

Fractures of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

Part three. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

Collapses of civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

Movement of Schism-and-Palingenesis. . . . . . . . . . 338

A split in the social system. . . . . . . . . . . . . 343

A split in the soul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358

Archaism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415

Futurism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427

Detachment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 438

Transfiguration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443

Decay analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449

Rhythms of decay. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473

Part four. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 484

Universal states. . . . . . . . . . . . . 484

Universal states as goals. . . . . . . . . 486

Universal states as means. . . . . . . 499

Provinces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505

Capitals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509

Part five. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515

Universal churches. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515

Civilization as regression. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529

Part six. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541

Heroic Ages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541

Contacts between civilizations in space. . . . . 555

Social consequences of contacts between modern 577

each other's civilizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Psychological consequences of contacts between 587

civilizations contemporary to each other. . . . . . . . . .

Contacts of civilizations in time. . . . . . . . . . . 599

Part seven. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 617

Inspiration from historians. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 617

Reading Toynbee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 643

Scientific commentary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 655

The end of a century, and even more so the end of a millennium, invites reflection on the meaning of history. Humanity looks into the past to find signs of the future. There are quite loud voices predicting the end of history, be it about the fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecies or about its achievement of some stable state generated by the successes of Western liberalism and democracy and capable of substantivizing the present, discarding the eternal flow of history from the past into the future (let us at least remember the sensational concept American scientist Francis Fukuyama, behind which the shadow of the great Hegel appears). However, in the end, a close, one might say convulsive, look into the past is a necessary element of self-affirmation of humanity in its newfound hope, almost lost in the twentieth century, which brought unprecedented revolutionary upheavals and bloody wars, genocide and environmental crisis, which put peoples and every person on the brink of survival, but at its end still extracted from the flames of destruction the warmth of humanism, the light of insight, the foreknowledge of the possibility of the continuation of life and the movement of history, but no longer as the chariot of Vishnu, mercilessly destroying everything in its path, but as a field for the realization of the phenomenon of man in the spiritual and a socially converging world, becoming a factor in truly cosmic evolution.

What place in this look into history can be occupied by the reflections of the English thinker Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), long recognized as one of the “pillars” of the philosophy of history, exalted and ridiculed, and today seeming almost old-fashioned in his academic respectability? Unfortunately, the Russian translation of Toynbee’s main work “A Study of History” (more precisely, extracts from it) comes out very late, although the name of the English thinker has occupied a strong place for many decades in courses on the history of philosophy taught in our universities, where it was considered good in a tone of scolding him as (a representative of bourgeois history and sociology), following Spengler, striving to “rethink the entire socio-historical development of mankind in the spirit of the theory of the circulation of local civilizations,” while emphasizing that

5 he "sought to provide an idealistic answer to positivist evolutionism" and also had a great influence on the philosophical and historical thought of the West. In a word, we treated Toynbee almost well, given the context of the ever-increasing and intensified criticism of “bourgeois consciousness” and “bourgeois science.”

By the way, Toynbee’s concept, which was striking in its grandeur of concept and inconsistency in execution, was by no means perceived ambiguously in the West. For example, the prominent French historian Lucien Febvre, one of the founders of the most influential school of historical science, sometimes called the “Annals school,” wrote, not without mockery, about a “seductive historian-essayist,” whose work generates “a feeling of sensation evoked in the gullible reader by an impressive overview of all these carefully numbered civilizations, which, like scenes of melodrama, replace one another before his admiring gaze; the genuine delight inspired by this magician, who with such dexterity juggles peoples, societies and civilizations of the past and present, shuffling and shuffling Europe and Africa, Asia and America. But if we do not succumb to tempting spells, if we reject the sentimental position of the believer present at the service, if we impartially look at Toynbee’s ideas and the conclusions from them, what new will we, historians, see in all this?.. Toynbee simply adds the voice of England to the French voices. And we have the right to judge to what extent this voice stands out in the British world against the background of other voices. In our world, its owner can expect only a place among the choristers." This statement serves as another evidence of how biased outstanding scientists can be in assessing each other and their national historical schools. However, if some saw in Arnold Toynbee only an ordinary interpreter of well-known truths, then others proclaimed him the prophet of a new vision of history, but in essence, in both cases the main thing eluded - the real understanding of history in the interpretation of the English historian. However, in fairness it should be noted that Toynbee did not try to cast his understanding into it. a chased form. It rather shines through the interweaving of concepts and approaches, running into each other and “darkening” the foundation of the channel along which the scientist’s thought rushes.

So, Toynbee called his main work “A Study of History.” The easiest way is to give it a school meaning and translate it as “The Study of History” or, slightly academicizing it, as “The Study of History.” But from the very first pages it becomes clear that any study based on detailed analysis, or research in the usual sense, can only be spoken of in very relative terms. Thoughts, concepts, definitions, facts, countries

6 and peoples, past and future merge into a complex pattern, more likely indicating the presence of mystery than giving clarity and consistency to the presentation of past events. Starting with 21 civilizations, Toynbee, by the end of his multi-volume work, loses 8 along the way, but, it seems, does not bother to notice the loss, carried away by the flow of understanding the movement or immobility of history. It is obvious that such work is almost impossible to call scientific research in the classical version. However, the more the reader delves into it, the stronger the feeling that in this case we are talking not so much about rational knowledge, but about comprehension, combining logical comprehension, intuition and even insight. Toynbee himself remarks, as if in passing: “Why should we believe that the scientific method, created for the analysis of inanimate nature, can be transferred to historical thinking, which involves considering people in the process of their activities? When a history professor calls his seminar a “laboratory”, does does he not thereby isolate himself from the natural environment? Both names are metaphors, but each of them is appropriate only in its own field. A historian’s seminar is a nursery in which the living learn to speak a living word about the living... We know it quite well, and we always do. We remember the so-called “pathetic fallacy”, which spiritualizes and gives life to inanimate objects. However, now we are more likely to become victims of the opposite - the “apathetic fallacy”, according to which living beings are treated as if they were inanimate objects. So, Toynbee is a supporter of intuitionism. ? If so, then not in the sense that is familiar to us, but in the same sense in which it was Aurelius Augustine, the creator of the European, Christian philosophy of history, which was based on the original method of rationalistic intuitionism, later used by such great systematizing philosophers. , like Thomas Aquinas or Hegel, although they are more commonly counted among rationalists of a predominantly (if not exclusively) logical kind.

Today, many are looking for the truth of history; the best religious thinkers have strived to comprehend the truth, for which truth was only a guise. For secularized, and even more so for materialistic consciousness, the impossibility of achieving absolute truth was so obvious that sometimes the bearers of these forms of consciousness completely abandoned the search for truth, replacing it with mental stereotypes, as a result of which the “demythologized” history turned into an illustration of a dogmatized scheme. This does not mean that adequate knowledge of history is impossible along the lines of its materialistic understanding, but indicates that this understanding itself should not be linear and unambiguous, claiming exclusivity.

Toynbee is a religious thinker, or rather a Christian thinker. For religious consciousness, truth could be given in Revelation or comprehended by reason, but the best was a combination of these two possibilities. History is the work of the Creator, carried out through the existence of man and humanity, but by comprehending it, the historian also becomes involved in the process of creation. Just as divine providence (and even predestination) for a Christian does not exclude the freedom of human will, for Toynbee the recognition of the divine creation of history does not destroy the role of the historian as a co-creator of the past, for only in the process of co-creation can the moment of truth be revealed. Hence the predominance of synthesis over analysis, so indicative of Toynbee, hence his craving for universalism (although, paradoxically, he was more often reproached for fragmenting and localizing history). The latter, it seems to us, is due to the reluctance or inability to see the true dialectic in the combination of what seems incompatible, characteristic of Toynbee’s method. Indeed, he is an opponent of the interpretation of history as a process of movement in its classical version. It is no coincidence that he rejects the continuity of history, built by analogy with the ideas of classical physics. For him, another analogy, the continuity of history as the continuity of Life, is not so convincing, although it seems more organic to Toynbee.

In essence, the existence of society for Toynbee is a manifestation of Life as an element of the existence of the universe. He, however, does not stoop to a banal reference in this regard to the complexity of social life. His thought makes a movement, on the one hand, returning us to the classical philosophy of antiquity, and on the other, rushing towards modern relativistic theory. The continuity of history, like the continuity of space-time, is for Toynbee a “flowing over” of the discreteness of human existence. Each moment of movement represents the generative beginning of the next and at the same time a certain self-determining, internally completed integrity. Toynbee reflects: “We are unlikely to understand the nature of Life if we do not learn to identify the boundaries of the relative discreteness of the ever-running stream - the bends of its living streams, rapids and quiet pools, rearing crests of waves and the peaceful surface of the ebb, sparkling crystal hummocks and bizarre flows of ice, when in myriads forms, water freezes in the crevices of glaciers. In other words, the concept of continuity has meaning only as a symbolic mental image on which we draw the perception of continuity in all real diversity and complexity. Let us try to apply this general observation to the comprehension of history. Does the term “continuity of history” imply? generally accepted sense that the mass, momentum, volume, speed and direction of the flow of human life are constant or, if not literally constant, then vary within such narrow limits that the correction can be neglected. If this term implies an implica?

8 tions of this kind, then, no matter how attractive it may be, we will end up making serious mistakes."

From this kind of methodological reasoning, Toynbee assumes that the categories of space-time are of decisive importance for the historical study. However, having flashed a brilliant guess, it suddenly disintegrates into a confusion of rather banal concepts. Having imagined time as a space of historical life, Toynbee seems to feel timid before this thought. He splits history-path, history-life, and, consequently, the truth of history into local (in the most immediate meaning of this term) civilizations and societies, thereby falling into disunity with the object of knowledge, making impossible what he himself proclaimed in as the main goal - to comprehend the secrets of world history, becoming a prisoner of the rationalistic abstraction he condemns and ontologizing his own epistemological models.

History exists there, and only where there is time. Let us remember, for example, that, according to Christian ideas, human history itself did not begin from the moment of the creation of man, for his heavenly existence took place without essential changes, i.e. outside of history, but from the moment of the Fall, disobedience to the divine will, after which a person is cast into the stream of time and becomes mortal. It is no coincidence that the church fathers identified the measure of time “seculum” (century) with the concept of the world, worldly existence. Time is the field in which and thanks to which changes in the states of human society occur, and it is through it that the content of history is manifested. For the historian, these different states are not only connected, but also combined; the past and the present turn out to actually coexist. Remaining motionless in space, it accumulates historical time, accommodating moments, centuries, millennia in its temporal reality. It is no coincidence that the ancients called the historian a “transmitter of time” (translator temporis), for he was not only a keeper, but also an organizer of time as a conditional historical space. In this process of “transferring” time, Toynbee assigns exceptional importance to memory, thereby pointing to the deepest naturalness of the connection between history as the sphere of accumulation and development of human experience and memory as a means of ordering time. In this, the English thinker acts as a successor to a very ancient European intellectual tradition; let us remember that the functions of the goddess of memory Mnemosyne included time management. At the same time, Toynbee supported the idea, so characteristic of the thinking of the twentieth century, reflecting an awareness of the relationship of time to biological and then social evolution, an idea, one of the modifications of which is the 9th hypothesis about the replacement of the biosphere by the noosphere, presented by Vernadsky, Le Roy and Teilhard de Chardin.

Local civilizations are milestones of time, and not islands of history closed in on itself. Opened History is an analogue of an open Universe. It is open to ever-expanding and deepening comprehension. In this regard, Toynbee develops the concept of an “intelligible field” of historical knowledge. He carries out the conjugation of the ontological and epistemological, asserting the knowability of the essential aspects of history through their manifestation in the existence of various societies, “the boundaries of which were approximately established taking into account the historical context of a given country, and now represent societies with a wider extent both in space and in time than nation-states, city-states or any other political unions... In the light of these conclusions, a number of other conclusions can be drawn, approaching history as a study of human relations. Its true subject is the life of society, taken both internally and internally. in its external aspects. Inner side- is an expression of the life of any given society in the sequence of chapters of its history, in the totality of all its constituent communities. The external aspect is the relationship between individual societies, unfolding in time and space."

By delving into the concrete, the essential in history is cognized, which is based on the universal mind, the divine law - the Logos. The truth is revealed in the dialogue of humanity with it, or more precisely, in the Answer to its Challenge. This point of Toynbee's concept has sometimes been subjected to ironic criticism, especially in terms of the specific historical "garments" of the Challenge. For example, the famous Soviet historian L.N. Gumilyov wrote in his monograph “Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of the Earth”: “...according to A. Toynbee, Austria surpassed Bavaria and Badei in development because it was attacked by the Turks. However, the Turks first attacked Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary, and they responded to the challenge of capitulation, and Austria was defended by the hussars of Jan Sobieski. The example speaks not in favor of the concept, but against it.” We agree that the carelessness with which Toynbee illustrates Challenges and Answers on specific historical grounds can give rise to irony. However, to understand the concept of the English philosopher, it is very important to try to understand what is hidden behind each specific manifestation of the Challenge. To do this, we will again have to return to the starting points of the Christian philosophy of history.

Before the Fall, that is. Before the first act of free choice by man, the world was ahistorical. Man was not separated from God, and therefore he did not need either the manifestation or awareness of his own essence. From the moment of his free choice, he loses his natural unity with God, and separation arises between God and man. God abides

10 in the unchanging sphere of eternity, man is thrown into a constantly changing world where time rules. Thus, the first act of a person’s free choice opens the path of history and puts him in a situation of dialogue with God. This dialogue was originally captured in the Old Testament, which also contains prophecies regarding the future. The incarnation of the divine Logos in the person of Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the early promise. From this moment on, history unfolds as a process of salvation of humanity, which is at the same time an ever more complete revelation of human essence. Thus, according to Toynbee, the basis of history is the interaction of the world law - the divine Logos and humanity, which each time gives an Answer to the divine Question, expressed in the form of a natural or some other Challenge. Comprehension of history is humanity’s comprehension of itself and within itself the divine Law and the highest destiny. Can humanity give one single Answer to the divine Question, or does it continually give different Answers? Thus, using specific terminology, Toynbee raises the question of the alternative nature of historical development.

The author of “Comprehension of History” believed that the Challenge and the Answer can be manifested in various forms, but all the Answers, in essence, merge into one: “Trusting the call of the Lord, “feel and find after him” (Acts VP, 27).. “Perhaps the author’s view of history may seem inaccurate or even incorrect to some, but he dares to assure the reader that through comprehension of reality he tried to comprehend God, who reveals Himself through the movement of souls who sincerely believe in Him.” History, which on the surface of phenomena promises a variety of options, at the level of its true content turns out to be unidirectional, focused on comprehending God through human self-disclosure. Thus, the Toyibian concept of history acquires a moral interpretation. And if Reason compensated for man’s dependence on nature, then the moral law gave hope for harmonizing the interaction of history and personality. The establishment and dissemination of morality is possible through tradition and through mimesis (imitation).

The movement of history is determined by the completeness and intensity of the Response to the Challenge, the power of the Impulse directed towards the divine Call. A leap forward can be made by a creative minority, carrying along an inert mass, capable of transferring “the divine law from one soul to another.” However, Toynbee warns that the responsibility for the breakdown of civilizations lies with the conscience of their leaders: “Creative individuals at the forefront of civilization, influencing the uncreative majority through the mechanism of mimesis, can fail for two reasons. One of them can be called negative, and the other positive.

A possible “negative” failure is that leaders unexpectedly fall under the hypnosis they used to influence their followers. This led to a catastrophic loss of initiative “If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit” (Matt. XV, 14).

Power is strength, and strength is difficult to keep within certain limits. And when these frameworks collapse, management ceases to be an art. Stopping the column halfway is fraught with relapses of disobedience on the part of the simple majority and fear of the commanders. And fear pushes commanders to use brute force to maintain their own authority, since they are already deprived of trust. The result is absolute hell. The once clear formation falls into anarchy. This is an example of "positive" failure resulting from the abandonment of mimesis." Many historical dramas and tragedies of the twentieth century provide evidence of Toynbee's observation.

A call that remains unanswered is repeated again and again. The inability of a particular society, due to the loss of creative forces and energy, to respond to the Challenge deprives it of its viability and ultimately predetermines its disappearance from the historical arena. The collapse of society is accompanied by a growing sense of uncontrollability of the flow of life, the movement of history. At such moments, the action of historical determinism appears with sobering clarity, and Nemesis administers its historical judgment. The tragedy of collapse can lead to a social revolution, which, “not achieving its goal, then turns into reaction.” However, Toynbee believed that there are ways out of the dead ends of history: “... in our century, the main thing in the consciousness of societies is to understand themselves as part of a wider universe, while a feature of the social consciousness of the last century was the claim to consider oneself, one’s society, as a closed universe.” The search for a way out requires coordinated decisions based on a consistent moral position of all humanity, or at least a large part of it. This idea remains relevant on the eve of the third millennium.

The historical identity of Responses to Challenges is most fully revealed in the phenomenon of civilizations - closed societies, characterized by a set of defining features that allow them to be classified. Toynbee's scale of criteria is very flexible, although two of them remain stable - religion and the forms of its organization, as well as “the degree of distance from the place where a given society originally arose.” An attempt to classify according to the criterion of religion built the following series: “firstly, societies that are in no way connected with either subsequent or previous societies; secondly, societies that are in no way connected with previous ones, but connected with subsequent societies; thirdly , societies connected with previous ones, but less direct, less intimate connection than filial kinship, through the universal

Every society goes through stages of genesis, growth, breakdown and decay; the rise and fall of universal states, universal churches, heroic eras; contacts between civilizations in time and space. The viability of civilization is determined by the possibility of consistent development of the living environment and the development of the spiritual principle in all types of human activity, the transfer of Challenges and Answers from the external environment into society. And since the Challenges and Answers to them are of a different nature, civilizations turn out to be different from one another, but the main Answer to the Challenge of the Logos determines the essence of a single human civilization.

The significance of Toynbee’s conceptual constructions, which are very consonant with the thoughts of Spengler or Sorokin, of course, does not lie in their specific historical content, which turns out to be very conditional and schematized. A comparative method in which Sparta is compared with Germany in the 30s. twentieth century, and Ashurbanipal with Saint Louis, may cause quite reasonable objections from a professional historian. But no one before Toynbee, perhaps, attached such importance to the category “civilization,” a category that in recent years has been acquiring increasing epistemological significance and is confidently included not only in the research tools of philosophers, sociologists and historians, but also in the spiritual arsenal of humanity.

Today it has become quite obvious that Toynbee's philosophy is neither prophetic nor flawless, but without it it is impossible to imagine the mentality of the twentieth century. Toynbee's contemporary, the German philosopher Jaspers, argued: “History has a deep meaning, but it is inaccessible to human knowledge.” Toynbee tried to show by the means available to him that history is open to comprehension and that humanity is capable of giving a worthy Answer to the universal Challenge.

V.I. Ukolova

INTRODUCTION

RELATIVITY OF HISTORICAL THINKING

In every era and in every society, the study and knowledge of history, like any other social activity, is subject to the prevailing trends of a given time and place. At the moment, the life of the Western world is determined by two institutions: the industrial economic system and the equally complex and intricate political system that we call “democracy”, meaning responsible parliamentary representative government of a sovereign nation-state. These two institutions - economic and political - became dominant in the Western world at the end of the last century and provided, albeit temporary, but still a solution to the main problems of that period. The last century sought and found salvation, bequeathing its findings to us. And the fact that the institutions developed in the last century are preserved to this day speaks primarily of the creative power of our predecessors. We live and reproduce our existence in an industrial system and a parliamentary nation-state, and it is quite natural that these two institutions have significant power over our imagination and the real fruits of it.

The humanitarian aspect of the industrial system is directly related to man and the division of labor; its other aspect is addressed to the physical environment of man. The task of the industrial system is to maximize its productive capacity by man-made processing of raw materials into specific products and involving large numbers of people in this mechanically organized labor. This feature of the industrial system was recognized by Western thought back in the first half of the last century. Since the development of the industrial system is based on the successes of the physical sciences, it is quite natural to assume that there was some kind of “pre-established harmony” between industry and science (1). If this is so, then we should not be surprised that scientific thinking began to be organized in an industrial manner. In any case, this is quite legitimate for science at its early stages - and modern science is very young even in comparison with Western society - since for discursive thinking it is necessary first to accumulate enough empirical data.

14 data. However, the same method has recently found distribution in many areas of knowledge and outside a purely scientific environment - in thinking that is turned to Life, and not to inanimate nature, and, moreover, even in thinking that studies various shapes human activity. Historical thinking has also been captured by an alien industrial system, and it is in this area where relationships between people are explored that the modern Western industrial system demonstrates that it is hardly a regime in which one would like to live and work.

The example of the life and work of Theodor Mommsen is indicative here. Young Mommsen created a voluminous work, which, of course, will forever remain a masterpiece of Western historical literature. His History of the Roman Republic was published in 1854-1856. But as soon as the book saw the light, the author began to feel ashamed of his work and tried to direct his energy in a completely different direction. Mommsen spent the rest of his life compiling a complete collection of Latin inscriptions and publishing an encyclopedic collection of Roman constitutional law. In this, Mommsen showed himself to be a typical Western historian of his generation, a generation that, for the sake of the prestige of the industrial system, was ready to turn itself into “intellectual workers.” Since the times of Mommsen and Ranke, historians began to spend most of their efforts collecting raw material - inscriptions, documents, etc. – and publishing them in the form of anthologies or private notes for periodicals. When processing collected materials, scientists often resorted to division of labor. As a result, extensive research appeared, which was published in a series of volumes, which is still practiced by the University of Cambridge. Such series are monuments to human hard work, “factuality” and the organizational power of our society. They will take their place along with amazing tunnels, bridges and dams, liners, cruisers and skyscrapers, and their creators will be remembered among the famous engineers of the West. Conquering the realm of historical thought, the industrial system gave birth to outstanding strategists and, having won, obtained considerable trophies. However, a thoughtful observer has the right to doubt the scale of what has been achieved, and the victory itself may seem like a delusion born of a false analogy.