Word: romane
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...process of the revelation of always deeper religious insight . . . civilizations will have fulfilled their function when once they have brought a mature higher religion to birth; and, on this showing, our own Western post-Christian secular civilization might at best be a superfluous repetition of the pre-Christian Graeco-Roman one, and at worst a pernicious backsliding from the path of spiritual progress. In our Western world of today, the worship of Leviathan-the self-worship of the tribe -is a religion to which all of us pay some measure of allegiance; and this tribal religion is, of course, sheer...
Historian Gibbon, says Toynbee, was not the only eminent scholar to view Christianity as a menace to civilization. Anthropologist Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough) regretted that the "unselfish ideal" of Greek and Roman society, which subordinated the individual to the welfare of the state, was superseded by the "selfish and immoral doctrine" of "Oriental religions which inculcated the communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only objects worth living for. . . ." The result, said Frazer, was "a general disintegration of the body politic...
...Frazer and Gibbon, Historian Toynbee replies: the Graeco-Roman civilization was not destroyed by Christianity but "decayed from inherent defects of its own." He also rejects the idea that religions act as bridges between civilizations. He sees it as just the reverse...
...first appearance Christianity was provided by the Graeco-Roman civilization with a universal state, in the shape of the Roman Empire with its policed roads and shipping routes, as an aid to the spread of Christianity round the shores of the Mediterranean. Our modern . . . civilization in its turn may serve its historical purpose by providing Christianity with a completely worldwide repetition of the Roman Empire to spread over...
...following in the steps of Louis Budenz, who had quit as managing editor of New York's Daily Worker (TIME, Oct. 22, 1945) to rejoin the Roman Catholic Church, Convert Hyde took along his two children. His wife, a Communist for ten years, also quit the party. Said Hyde: "It became obvious to me that the movement for which I had fought and worked so long was destroying those very freedoms and decencies for which it claimed to be fighting. . . . Communism was incapable of providing a cure for an extremely sick world. My growing disillusionment led me to seek...