Cultural View of History

In Europe before World War I, trust in the progress and development of history was basically unshakable. People believed that history was developing, centering on Europe. It was Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) who questioned this linear, Eurocentric image of history.

Spengler advocated a cultural view of history, asserting that the foundation of history is culture. He regarded a culture to be an organism, and thus considered, a culture is born, grows, and dies, and therefore its death is inevitable. In Western civilization, he found symptoms of this impending decline, which corresponded to the decline of Greece and Rome, and predicted the decline of the West. He advocated that, knowing in advance of this decline of the West, one should live in acceptance of this inevitable destiny, without falling into pessimism. There was a strong tie with Nietzsche on this point. Spengler’s view of history was deterministic.

Under the strong influence of Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975) propounded his unique cultural view of history. According to Toynbee, the essential entity that constitutes world history is not a region, an ethnic people, or a nation, but a civilization. He considered that each civilization passes through the stages of genesis, growth, breakdown, disintegration, and dissolution.

The cause of the genesis of a civilization can be found in the human response to the challenges from the natural or social environment. Creative minorities foster a new civilization while guiding the masses of people, but when the creative minorities themselves eventually lose creativity, the civilization breaks down. Then, the creative minorities turn into the ruling minorities, and the “internal proletariat” within the civilization and the “external proletariat” surrounding it are born and separate themselves from the ruling minorities. As a result, society falls into confusion. After a while, however, the strongest among the ruling minorities establishes a “universal state,” bringing an end to the period of turmoil. Under the oppressive rule by the universal state, the internal proletariat nurtures a “higher religion” and the external proletariat (savages surrounding it) forms the “barbarian war-bands” (aggressive forces). Thus, the universal state, the higher religion, and the war-bands constitute three factions. Eventually the higher religion becomes a “universal church” by converting the ruling classes, but the universal state soon collapses, and together with it, the civilization meets its death.

After the first civilization has disappeared, the external proletariat invades and becomes converted to the higher religion, giving birth to a civilization of the new generation. The relationship of such old and new civilizations is called “appreciation and affiliation.” There were twenty-one fully grown civilizations in world history. All the present civilizations are in their third generation, and are separated into the four lineages of Christian (the West, Greek orthodoxy), Islamic, Hindu, and Far East civilizations. It can be said that the succession of civilizations through three generations, as advocated by Toynbee, correspond to the providential synchronism in three generations in the Unification view of history (the Age of the Providence to Lay the Foundation for Restoration, the Age of the Providence of Restoration, and the Age of the Prolongation of the Providence of Restoration).

It is characteristic of Toynbee’s view of history that it excludes determinism and asserts non-determinism and the theory of free will: how human beings respond to challenges depends on their free will. Therefore, the way in which history proceeds is never predetermined, but human beings can choose their future.

Toynbee clearly envisioned the City of God (Civitas Dei) as a future image of human history. Yet, based on his non-deterministic position, he considered that the choice of the “Kingdom of God” or the “kingdom of night” would depend on human free will. He wrote as follows:

Under a law of love which is the law of God’s own Being, God’s self-sacrifice challenges Man by setting before him an ideal of spiritual perfection; and Man has perfect freedom to accept or reject this. The law of love leaves Man as free to be a sinner as to be a saint; it leaves him free to choose whether his personal and his social life shall be a progress towards the Kingdom of God or the kingdom of night. ¹⁵

Another characteristic of Toynbee’s view of history is the introduction of God into his view of history which, he says, modern society seems to have forgotten.

What do we mean by History? And the writer … would reply that he meant by History a vision―dim and partial, yet (he believed) true to reality as far as it went―of God revealing Himself in action to souls that were sincerely seeking Him. ¹⁶