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200 1'he Interpretation of the Historical Processbut which only too rarely manifests itse1f in full intensity. Direction, fixing,ordering, defining, by cause and effect, are things that one can do if onelikes. These things are work, but the other is creation. Form and law,port rayal and comprehension, symbol and formula, have different organs,and their opposition is that in which life stands to death, production todestruction. Reason, system and comprehension kill as they "cognize." Thatwhich is cognized becomes a rigid object, capable of measurement andsubdivision. Intuitive vision, on the other hand, vivifies and incorporates thedetails in a living inwardly-felt unity. Poetry and historical study are kino

TOYNBEE (1889-,)

ARNOLDJOSEPHTOYNBEEwas born in 18~9. Educated at Bal1iol CoIlege,Oxford, he was a FeIlow and Tutor of BaIliol from 1912 until1915. He wasa member of the Middle Eastern section of the British delegation to thepeace conference in 1919; and from 1919 to 1924 Professor of Byzantine andModern Greek Language, Literature, and History at London Universi ty.From 1925 until his retirement thi rty years later he was Director of Studiesin the Royal Institute of International Affairs and Research Professor ofInternational History at London. The author of a number of books on inter-national politics and Greek history, his principaI work has been hisA Study of History (Vais. I-III in 1934, Vols. IV-VI in 1939, Vols. VII-Xin 1954).

A Study of History is the product of a learning and erudition whichmake previous attempts to present a systematic picture of human historylook rather thin and ketchy; it has been inspired by a vision of imaginat ivepower and range; and the author exhibits throughout a considerable capacityfor synthesizing historical materiai, for tracing unsuspected patterns, and forinventing fresh frameworks of classification and interpretation. Yet, in spiteof this, Toynbee's work has been the object of very severe criticism, par-ticularly concerning the method which he has employed.

Toynbee's method, initially at any rate, appeared to be an induct ive one.His basic unit is the "civi lizat ion" (compare Spengler's "cultures") and hedaims to have discovered twenty-one such civilizations which have existedat various times during the course of human history. A comparative examina-tion of these shows, he thinks, that they have passed through similar stagesof growth, breakdown, and eventual dissolut ion, the final phase of each onebeing marked by the formation of a "universal state." Thus, in the history

TOYNBEE 201ture of the Roman Empire; and paralIeis to such a development are, Toynbeeclaims, to be found in the other civilizations he mentions. These paralIeisare discussed and elaborated in great detail; certain historical "laws"- the"law," for example, of "challenge-and-response"-are formulated to accountfor the emergence of crucial phases in a civilization's career ; and Toynbeedraws conclusions concerning the future open to contemporary "Western"civilization, which has not yet, he seems to think, passed irrevocably intothe period of decline and dissolution.The criticisms brought against Toynbee's procedure from a methodolo-gical standpoint have been of various kinds; two may briefiy be ment ionedhere. First, it has been argued that Toynbee's method of identifying thecivilizations which form the subject matter of his inquiry is not independentof the paralleis he subsequently finds between their subsequent careers.Thus, some of the divisions he makes between temporarily adjoining civi li-zat ions seem to be determined by considerations of what course a civiliza-tion must pursue if it is properly to be called a "civilization." And, insofaras he does this, the conclusions at which he arrives concerning the similarpaths followed by different societies do not represent important factualfindings based upon empirical observations at all; they merely refiect themethod of cIassi ficat ion initially employed. Secondly, it has been pointedout that, in his later volumes at least, Toynbee seems at times to imply thatsocieties are the agents or instruments of purposes lying outside them:Toynbee asks, for example, whether "universal states" are "ends in them-selves or means towards something beyond them." But the raising of ques-tions like this one implies a radical shif t of ground; they cannot be answeredsolely by an appeal to the evidence supplied by historical research andinvestigation, and yet it was upon such an appeal that Toynbee initiallyseemed to be relying in his work.The foIlowing extracts are illustrative of some of the dominating featuresof Toynbee's thought about history: in particular , his employment of unify-ing concepts and generalizations, and his concern with the fate of Westerncivilization.

1. The Disintegration of Civilizations*In the last chapter we sought, and found, a parallel -which involved alsoan inevitable contrast-between the ro1es of creative personalities in growing

and in dis integrating societies. We are now to pursue a similar line of inves-"This selectionis fromChapterXXI ofD. C. Somervell'sabridgementof Vols.I-VI ofA Study of History,copyrightby Oxford UniversityPress, with whosepermissionit is

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202 The Interpretation of the Historical Processtigation in a different part of our subject and to look for a parallel-whichwill presumably again involve a contrast-between what may be called therhythm of growth an~ the rpythm of disintegration. The underlying formulain each case is one with which we are already very familiar, since it hasaccompanied us all through this Study; it is the formula of challenge-and-response. In a growing civilization a challenge meets with a successfulresponse which proceeds to generate another and a different challengewhich meets with another successful response. There is no term to thisprocess of growth unless and until a challenge arises which the civil izationin question fails to meet-a tragic event which means a cessation of growthand what we have called a breakdown. Here the correlative rhythm begins.The challenge has not been met, but it none the less continues to presentitself. A second convulsive effort is made to meet it, and, it this succeeds,growth will of course be resumed. But we will assume that, after apartiaiand temporary success, this response likewise fails. There will then be afurther relapse, and perhaps, after an interval, a further attempt at aresponse which will in time achieve a temporary and partiai success inmeeting what is still the same inexorable challenge. This again will befollowed by a further failure, which may or may not prove nnal and involvethe dissolution of the society. In military language the rhythm may beexpressed as rout-rally-rout-rally-rout. . .,.If we revert to the technical terms which we devised early in this Studyand have so constantly used, it is at once apparent that the time of troublesfollowing a breakdown is a rout; the establishment of the universal state,a rally; and the interregnum which follows the break-up of the universalstate, the nnal rout. But we have already noticed in the history of oneuniversal state, the Hellenic, a relapse into anarchy fol1owing the death ofMarcus Aurelius in A.D. 180 and a recovery under Diocletian. There mightprove to be more than one relapse and recovery in the history of anyparticular universal state. Indeed the number of such relapses and recoveriesmight be found to depend on the power of the lens that we applied to theobject under examination. There was, for instance, a brief, but startling,relapse in A.D. 69, the "year of four emperors," but we are concerned herewith salient features only. There might also be a period of partiai recoveryin the middle of the time of troubles. If we al10w for one signai recoveryduring the time of troubles and one signai relapse during the lifetime ofthe universal state, that will give us the fonnula: rout-rally-rout-ral1y-rout-ral1y-rout, which we may describe as three-and-a-half "beats" of ourrout-rally rhythm. There is, of course, no special virtue in the number three-and-a-half. A particular instance of disintegration might show two-and-a-half,or four-and-a-half, or nve-and-a-half without failing to conform in essentialsto the general rhythm of the disintegration process. Actual1y, however, three-and-a-half beats seems to be the pattern which nts the histories of a numberof disintegrating societies, and we will pass a few of them in rapid reviewby way of ilJustration.

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TOYNBEE / The Disintegration of Civilizat;ons 203the "Orthodox Christian," the "Hindu," are considered in turn. Hethen goes on: ]We might subject the disintegrat ion of our other civilizat ions to a similaranalysis in all cases where we possess sufficient evidence to make suchexaminat ion remunerative. In some cases we should find that the ful l quotaof "beats" is lacking simply because the civilization in question was swal-lowed alive by one of its neighbors before it had worked its passage to thehaven of natural death. We have, however, already adduced enough evi-dence of the rhythm of disintegration to apply this rhythm-pattern to thehistory of our own Western Civilization in order to see if it throws anylight upon a question which we have several times asked and never yetprofessed to answer: the question whether our own civilization has suffereda breakdown, and, i t so, what stage it has now reached in its disintegration.One fact is plain: we have not yet experienced the establishment of auniversal state, in spite of two desperate efforts by the Germans to imposeone upon us in the first half of the present century and an equally desperate

attempt by Napoleonic France a hundred years earlier. Another fact isequally plain: there is among us a profound and heartfelt aspiration for theestablishment, not of a universal state, but of some form of world order,akin perhaps to the Homonoia or Concord preached in vain by certainHellenic statesmen and philosophers during the Hellenic time of troubles,which will secure the blessings of a universal state without its deadly curse.The curse of a universal state is that it is the result of a successful knock-outblow delivered by one sole surviving member of a group of contendingmilitary Powers. It is a product of that "salvation by the sword" which wehave seen to be no salvation at all. What we are looking for is a free consentof free peoples to dwell together in unity, and to make, uncoerced, thefar-reaching adjustments and concessions without which this ideal cannotbe realized in practice. There is no need to enlarge upon this theme, whichis the commonplace of thousands of contemporary disquisitions. Theastonishing prestige enjoyed by the American President Wilson in Europe-though not in his own country-during the few short months preceding andfollowing the armistice of November 1918 was a measure of the aspirationsof our world. President Wilson was addressed for the most part in prose;the best-known surviving testimonials to Augustus are in the verses of Virgiland Horace. But, prose or verse, the spirit animating these two outpouringsof faith, hope and thanksgiving was manifestly the same. The outcome,however, was different. Augustus succeeded in providing his world with auniversal state; Wilson failed to provide his with something better.

That law man goes on adding one to one;Ris hundred's soon hit.This high man, aiming at a mill ion,Misses a unit.lThese considerations and comparisons suggest that we are already faradvanced in our time of troubles; and, if we ask what has been our most

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204 The Interpretation of the Historical Processconspicuous and specific trouble in the recent past, the answer clearly is:nationalist ic internecine warfare, re inforced, as has been pointed aut in anearlier part of this Study, by the combined "drive" of energies generatedby the recently released forces of Democracy and Industrialism. We maydate the incidence of this scourge from the outbreak of the French Revolu-tionary wars at the end of the eighteenth century. But, when we examinedthis subject before, we were confronted by the fact that, in the modernchapter of our Western history, this bout of violent warfare was nat thefirst but the second of its kind. The earlier bout is represented by theso-called Wars of Religion which devastated Western Christendom from themiddle of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century, and wefound that between these two bouts of violent warfare there intervenes acentury in which warfare was a comparatively mild disease, a "sp ort ofkings," not exacerbated by fanatic ism in either the rel igious sectar ian or thedemocratic national vein. Thus, in our own history tao, we find what wehave came to recognize as the typical pattern of a time of troubles: a break-down, a rally and a second relapse.We can discern why the eighteenth-century rally in the course of ourtime of troubles was abortive and ephemeral ; i t was because the tolerat ionachieved by "the Enlightenment" was a toleration based nat on the Christianvirtues of faith, hope and charity but on the Mephistophelian maladies ofdisillusionment, apprehension and cynicism. It was nat an arduous achieve-ment of religious fervor but a facile by-product of i ts abatement .Can we at all foresee the outcame of the second and stm more violentbout of warfare into which our Western World has fallen in consequenceof the spiri tual inadequacy of i ts eighteenth-century Enl ightenment? If weare to try to look into our future, we may begin by reminding ourselvesthat, though all the other civilizations whose history is known to us maybe either dead or dying, a civilization is nat like an animal organism, con-demned by an inexorable destiny to die after traversing a predeterminedlife-course. Even if all other civilizations that have came into existence sofar were to prove in fact to have followed this path, there is no known lawof historical determinism that compels us to leap aut of the intolerablefrying-pan of our time of troubles into the slow and steady fire of a universalstate where we shall in due course be reduced to dust and ashes. At thesame time, such precedents from the histories of other civilizations andfrom the li fe-course of nature are bound to appear formidable in the sinisterlight of our present situation. This chapter itself was written on the eveof the outbreak of the General War of 1939-45 for readers who had alreadylived through the General War of 1914-18, and it was recast for re-publication on the morroW of the ending of the second of these two worldwars within one lifetime by the invention and employment of a bomb inwhich a newly contrived release of atomic energy has been directed by manto the dest ruction of human life and works on an unprecedented scale. Thisswift succession of catastrophic events on a steeply mounting gradient

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TOYNBEE The Disintegration 01Civilizations 205the utmost exertion of these saving spiritual faculties. Here is a challengewhich we cannat evade, and our destiny depends on our response.I dreamed, and behold I saw a man cloathed with mgs, standing in a certa inplace, wi th his face from his own house, a book in his hand and a great burdenupon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book and read therein; and as heread he wept and trembled; and, not being able longer to contain, he broke out

with a lamentable cry saying "What shaH I do?"It was not without cause that Bunyan's "Christian" was so greatlydistressed.I am for certain informed (said he) that this our city will be burned with

fire from Heaven-in which fearful overthrow both myself with thee my wife andyou my sweet babes shaH miserably come to ruine, except (the which yet I seenot) some way of escape can be found, whereby we may be delivered.What response to this challenge is Christian going to make? Is he goingto look this way and that as if he would run, yet stand stm because he cannat

tell which way to go? Or will he begin to run-and run on crying "Life! Life!Eternal Life!"-with his eye set on a shining light and his feet bound for adistant wicket-gate? If the answer to this question depended on nobodybut Christian himse1f, our knowledge of the uniformity of human naturemight incline us to predict thatChristian's imminent destiny was Deathin his City of Destruction. But in the classic verson of the myth we aretold that the human protagonist was nat left entirely to his own resourcesin the decisive hour. According to John Bunyan, Christian was saved byhis encounter with Evangelist. And, inasmuch as it cannat be supposedthat God's nature is less constant than Man's, we may and must pray that areprieve which God has granted to our society once will nat be refused ifwe ask for it again in a humble spirit and with a contrite heart.

2. My View of History*

. . . The general war of 1914 overtook me expounding Thucydides toBaIliaI undergraduates reading for Literae Humaniores, and then suddenlymy understanding was i1luminated. The experience that we were having inour world now had been experienced by Thucydides in his world already."This extract istaken from Chapter I of Toynbee's Civilization on Trial, copyright byOxford University Press. It is here reprinted with the kind permission of the publishers.

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206 1'he Interpretation of the Historical ProcesSI was re-reading him now with a new perception-perceiving meanings inhis words, and feelings behind his phrases, to which I had been insensibleuntil I, in my tum, had run into that historical crisis that had inspired himto write bis work. Thucydides, it now appeared, had been over this groundbefore. He and his generation had been ahead of me and mine in the stageof historical experience that we had respectively reached; in faet, his presenthad been my future. But this made nonsense of the chronological notationwhich registered my world as 'modem' and Thucydides' world as 'ancient.'Whatever chronology might say, Thucydides' world and my world had nowproved to be philosophicalIy contemporary. And, if this were the truerelation between the Graeco-Roman and the Western civilizations, mightnot the relation between all the civilizations known to us turn out to bethe same?This vision-new to me-of the philosophical contemporaneity of allcivilizations was forti fied by being seen against a background provided bysome of the discoveries of our 'modern Western physical science. On thetime-scale now unfolded by geology and cosmogony, the five or six thousandyears that had elapsed since the first emergence of representatives of thespecies of human society that we label 'civilizations' were an infinitesimallybrief span of time compared to the age, up to date, of the human race, oflife on this planet , of the planet itself, of,our own solar system, of the galaxyin which it is one grain of dust, or of'the immensely vaster and older sumtotal of the stelIaI' cosmos. By comparison with these orders of temporaImagnitude, civilizations that had emerged in the second millennium B.C.(like the Graeco-Roman), in the fourth milIennium B.C. (like the AncientEgyptian), and in the first mil1ennium of the Christian era (like our own)were one another's contemporaries indeed.

Thus history, in the sense of the histories of the human societies calIedcivilizations, revealed itseIf as a sheaf of paralIel, contemporary, and recentessays in a new enterprise: a score of attempts, up to date, to transcend thelevel of primitive human life at which man, after having become himseIf,had apparently lain torpld for some hundreds of thousands of years-andwas stilI, in our day, so lying in out-of-the-way places like New Guinea,Tierra del Fuego and the north-eastern extremity of Siberia, where suchprimitive human communities had nat yet been pounced upon and eitherexterminated or assimilated by the aggressive pioneers of other humansocieties that, unlike these sluggards, had now, though this only recently,got on the move again. The amazing present difference in culturaI levelbetween various extant societies was brought to my attention by the worksof Professor Teggart of the University of California. This far-going differen-tiation had all happened within these brief last five or six thousand years.Here was a promising point to probe in investigating, sub specie temporis,the mystery of the universe.What was it that, after so long a pause, had so recently set in suchvigorous motion once again, towards some new and still unknown social

TOYNBEE/My View of History 207the great majority of human societies had never shaken off? This questionwas simmering in my mind when, in the summer of 1920, Professor Namier-who had already put Eastern Europe on my map for me-placed in myhands Oswald Spengler's Untel'gang des Abendlandes. As I read thosepages teeming with firefly flashes of historical insight, I wondered at firstwhether my whole inquiry had been disposed of by Spengler before eventhe questions, not to speak of the answers, had fully taken shape in myown mind. One of my own cardinal points was that the smal1est intell igiblefields of historical study were whole societies and nat arbitrarily insulatedfragments of them like the nation-states of the modem West or the city-states of the Graeco-Roman world. Another of my points was that thehistories of all societ ies of the species called civilizations were in some senseparallel and contemporary; and both these points were also cardinal inSpengler's system. But when I looked in Spengler's book for an answer tomy question about the geneses of civilizations, I saw that there was stilIwork for me to do, for on this point Spengler was, it seemed to me, mostunilluminatingly dogmatic and deterministic. According to him, civilizationsarose, developed, declined, and foundered in unvarying conformity with afixed time-table, and no explanation was offered for any of this. It was justa law of nature which Spengler had detected, and you must take it on trustfrom the master: ipse dixit. This arbitrary fiat seemed disappointinglyunworthy of Spengler's brilliant genius; and here I became aware of adifference in national tradi tions. Where the German a priori method drewblank, let us see what could be done by English empiricism. Let us testaltemative possible explanations in the light of the facts and see how theystood the ordeal.

Race and environment were the two main rival keys that were offeredby would-be scient ific nineteenth-century Western historians for solvingthe problem of the cultural inequality of various extant human societies,and neither key proved, on trial, to unlock the fast-c1osed door. To takethe race theory first, what evidence was there that the differences in physicalrace between different members of the genus homo were correlated withdifferences on the spiritual plane which was the field of history? And, ifthe existence of this correlation were to be assumed for the sake of argument,how was it that members of almost all the races were to be found amongthe fathers of one or more of the civilizations? The black race alone hadmade no appreciable contribution up to date; but, considering the shortnessof the time during which the experiment of civilization had been on footso far, this was no cogent evidence of incapacity; it might merely be theconsequence of a lack of opportunity or a lack of stimulus. As for environ-ment, there was, of course, a manifest similarity between the physicalconditions in the lower Nile val ley and in the lower Tigris-Euphrates val ley,which had been the respective cradles of the Egyptian and Sumeriancivilizations; but, if these physical condit ions were really the cause of theiremergence, why had no parallel civilizations emerged in the physically

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208 The Interpretation of the Historical Processin the highlands of Kenya? The breakdown of these would-be scientifieimpersonal explanations drove me to turn to mythology. I took this turningrather self-eonsciously and shamefaeedly, as though it were a provoeativelyretrograde step. I might have been less diffident if I had not been ignorant,as I was at that date, of the new ground broken by psychology during thewar of 1914-18. If I had been aequainted at the time with the works ofC. G. Jung, they would have given me the eIue. I aetual1y found it inGoethe's Faust, in whieh I had fortunately been grounded at sehool asthoroughly as in Aeschylus' Agamemnon.Goethe's 'Prologue in Heaven' opens with the archangels hymning theperfection of God's creation. But, just because His works are perfect, theCreator has left Himself no scope for any further exercise of His creativepowers, and there might have been no way out of this impasse if Mephi-stopheles-created for this very purpose-had not presented himself beforethe throne and chal1enged God tgive him a free hand to spoil, if he can,one of the Creator's choicest works. God accepts the challenge and therebywins an opportunity to carry His work of creation forward. An encounterbetween two personalities in the form of challenge and response: have wenot here the flint and steel by whose mutual impact the creative sparkis kindled?In Goethe's exposition of the plot of the Divina Commedia, Mephi-stopheles is created to be diddled-as the fiend, to his disgust, discoverstoe late. Yet if, in response to the Devil's challenge, God genuinely puts Hiscreated works in jeopardy, as we must assume that He does, in order to winan opportunity of creating something new, we are also bound to assumethat the Devil does not always lose. And thus, if the working of chal1enge-and-response explains the otherwise inexplicable and unpredictable genesesand growths of civilizations, it also explains their breakdowns and dis-integrations. A majority of the score of civilizations known to us appearto have broken down already, and a majority of this majority have troddento the end the downward path that terminates in dissolution.

Our post mortem examination of dead civilizations does not enable usto cast the horoscope of ow own civilization or of any other that is still alive.Pace Spengler, there seems to be no reason why a succession of st imulatingchal1enges should not be met by a succession of victorious responses adinfinitum. On the other hand, when we make an empirical comparativestudy of the paths which the dead civil izations have respectively travel1edfrom breakdown to dis solution, we do here seem to find a certain measureof Spenglerian uniformity, and this, after all, is not surprising. Since break-down means loss of control, this in turn means the lapse of freedom intoautomatism, and, whereas free acts are infinitely variable and utterly unpre-dictable, automatic processes are apt to be uniform and regular.

Briefly stated, the regular pattern of social disintegration is a schism

TOYNBEE I My View of History 209arresting the society's lethal self-laceration by imposing on it the peace ofa universal state. Within the framework of the dominant minority's universalstate the proletariat creates a universal church, and after the next rout,in which the disintegrating civilization finally dissolves, the universal churchmay live on to become the chrysalis from which a new eivilization eventuallyemerges. To modern Western students of history, these phenomena are mostfamiliar in the Graeco-Roman examples of the Pax Romana and the ChristianChurch. The establishment of the Pax Romana by Augustus seemed, at thetime, to have put the Graeco-Roman world back upon firm foundations afterit had been battered for several centuries by perpetual war, mis-government,and revolution. But the Augustan rally proved, after all, to be no more thana respite. After two hundred and fifty years of comparative tranquillity, theEmpire suffered in the third century of the Christian era a collapse fromwhich it never fully recovered, and at the next crisis, in the fifth and sixthcenturies, it went to pieces irretrievably. The true beneficiary of the tempo-rary Roman Peace was the Christian Church. The Church seized this oppor-tunity to strike root and spread; it was stimulated by persecution until theEmpire, having failed to crush it, decided, instead, to take it into partnership.And, when even this reinforcement failed to save the Empire from destruction,the Church took over the Empire's heritage. The same relation between adeclining civilization and a rising religion can be observed in a dozen othercases. In the Far East, for instance, the Ts'in and Han Empire plays theRoman Empire's part, while the role of the Christian Church is assumed bythe Mahayana school of Buddhism.If the death of one civilization thus brings on the birth of another, doesnot the at first sight hopeful and exciting quest for the goal of humanendeavours resolve itself, after all, into a dreary round of vain repetitionsof the Gentiles? This cyclic view of the process of history was taken soentirely for granted by even the greatest Greek and Indian souls andintellects-by Aristotle, for instance, and by the Buddha-that they simplyassumed that it was true without thinking it necessary to prove it. On theother hand, Captain Marryat, in ascribing the same view to the ship'scarpenter of BMS Rattlesnake, assumes with equal assurance that this cyclictheory is an extravaganza, and he makes the amiable exponent of it a !igureof fun. To our Western minds the cyclic view of history, if taken seriously,would reduce history to a tale told by an idot, signifying nothing. But mererepugnance does nat in itself account for effortless unbelief . The traditionalChristian beliefs in hell !ire and in the last trump were also repugnant, yetthey continued to be believed for generations. For our fortunate Westernimperviousness to the Greek and Indian belief in cycles we are indebted tothe Jewish and Zoroastrian contributions to our Weltanschauung.

In the vision seen by the Prophets of Israel, Judah, and Iran, history isnot a cyclic and not a mechanical process. It is the masterful and progressiveexecution, on the narrow stage of this world, of a divine plan which is

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210 The Interpretation of the Historical Proces!that learning comes through suffering-a discovery which we, in our timeand circumstances, have been making too.

Shall we opt, then, for the Jewish-Zoroastrian view of history as againstthe Graeco-Indian? So drastic a choice may not, after all, be forced uponus, for it may be that the two views are not fundamentally irreconcilable.After all, if a vehicle is to move forward on a course which its driver has set,it must be borne along on wheels that turn monotonously round and round.While civilizations riseand fall and, in falling, give rise to others, somepurposeful enterprise, higher than theirs, may all the time be making head-way, and, in a divine plan, the learning that comes through the sufferingcaused by the failures of civilizations may be the sovereign means of prog-ress. Abraham was an emigre from a civilization in extremis; the Prophetswere children of another civilization in disintegration; Christianity was bornof the sufferings of a disintegrating Graeco-Roman world. Will some com-parable spiritual enlightenment 'be kindled in the 'displaced persons' whoare the counterparts, in our world, of those Jewish exiles to whom so muchwas revealed in their painful exile by the waters of Babylon? The answerto this question, whatever the answer may be, is of greater moment than thestil1 inscrutable destiny of our world-encompassing Western civilization.