The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (302 page)

After reading Plato and Aristotle as a young man, Churchill declared for agnosticism. Although he embraced the Greek philosophical antecedents of Christianity, he found no intellectual reward in theological exercises. He subscribed to the Christian values of mercy and forgiveness, but his beliefs were not dictated by doctrine, and certainly not by clerics. He had been informed by his experiences as a soldier and journalist, and he rejected the carrot and stick of heaven and hell. The idea of an afterlife was not much more than an afterthought for Churchill, and one he considered equivalent to a belief in ghosts and goblins. He claimed he “did not much believe in personal survival after death, at least not of the memory.” The thought of oblivion did not vex him. Where others found only terror in the prospect of the negation of self, Churchill found sanguineness, and fodder for irreverent asides. He did not believe in another world after death, he told his doctor, but “only in ‘black velvet’—eternal sleep,” which did not stop him from playing whimsically with other possibilities in painterly terms: “When I get to Heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my five million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject. But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here. There will be a whole range of wonderful new colours which will delight the celestial eye.” Churchill’s fanciful heaven was also a distinctly pluralistic place where the full spectrum of humanity would mingle forever (although the membership list would never do for Churchill’s earthly private dining society, the
Other Club): “Indians and Chinese and people like that. Everyone will have equal rights in Heaven… that will be the real welfare state…. Of course, I admit I may be wrong. It is conceivable that I might well be reborn as a Chinese coolie. In such case I should lodge a protest.” In a similar impish vein, he once proclaimed a proof for God’s existence “is the existence of Lenin and Trotsky, for whom a hell is needed.”
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As for the act of dying, the transition from consciousness to nothingness or to some manner of
somethingness,
Churchill would have agreed with Dr. Johnson, who said dying “lasts so short a time,” and it does a man “no good to whine…. It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.”
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Such were Churchill’s sentiments exactly. In 1915, before departing on a planned journey to Turkey (he never made the trip), he entrusted his lawyer with a letter he wrote to Clementine, to be delivered in the event of his death: “Death is only an incident, & not the most important that happens to us…. If there is anywhere else, I shall be on the lookout for you.” He believed that were his final moment on earth to arrive via a German bomb, it would be due to chance. To Jock Colville, he quoted the French mathematician Henri Poincaré: “I take refuge beneath the impenetrable arch of probability.” Fate, not the Lord, would call Churchill home, although he once told Colville whimsically that were heaven ordered on the model of a constitutional monarchy, “there was always a possibility that the Almighty might have occasion to ‘send for him.’ ”
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He detested superstition. A court case being prosecuted by His Majesty’s Government caught his attention. He demanded of the home secretary “why the Witchcraft Act, 1735, was used in a modern court of justice?” It was all “obsolete tomfoolery” that inhibited the court’s ability to function. He thought much the same of churchgoing. He was at best an infrequent visitor to God’s house. His private secretary Anthony Montague Browne recalled that Churchill claimed he “rarely went to church. When approached about this, he [Churchill] said he was not a pillar of the church but a buttress—he supported it from the outside.” If he had to sit through a sermon on national days of prayer or state occasions, Jock Colville later wrote, he preferred that the pastor speak to politics or war, “but no Christianity.” His visits to church were so rare that Colville was shocked one Sunday late in the war when Churchill attended a service. It was the first time in almost four years that Colville had seen him do so. Only toward the end of the service did Colville grasp Churchill’s real motive for attending. After the minister delivered his sermon, the Old Man walked up to the pulpit and delivered one himself. He loved the glory and pageantry of christenings, funerals, and coronations performed within the mossy precincts of Britain’s ancient village churches or within the silent grandeur of
its great cathedrals, not for any proximity to the divine but because such rituals offered proximity to England’s storied past. Churchill was deeply moved by the melodic grace of hymns, by the power of voices uplifted in song. He loved the rolling peal of village church bells calling the faithful to worship, but, writes the British historian Roy Jenkins, there is no record of Churchill ever having left Chartwell in response to the summons. A Bible rests to this day on his bedside table at Chartwell, a sight that moves many visitors to conclude he sought guidance in Scripture. He did not. When Lord Moran, spying the Bible, asked Churchill if he read it, he replied, “Yes, I read it; but only out of curiosity.”
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Jock Colville thought it the “supreme blasphemy” when, over lunch one day, Churchill said, “Every nation creates god in its own image.” Yet history lent credence to that judgment; even Hitler claimed that god was on his side.
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He disliked holy men in general: “the old humbug Gandhi,” Greek Archbishop Damaskinos (“a pernicious priest”). Church of England prelates did not adorn Churchill’s dinner table. He considered the Anglican clergy to be a priggish and hypocritical lot. Why dine with those who would take moral umbrage to his ending an evening singing lustily and dancing about to Viennese waltzes while attired in an outrageous red dressing gown, a warmed snifter of brandy in one hand, and a cigar (or rifle) in the other? The death later in the war of William Temple, the archbishop of Canterbury, “caused the P.M. no sorrow,” Colville wrote. “In fact he was quite ribald about it.” Temple was a scholar and philosopher, but Churchill “who as far as the English clergy was concerned had a touch of King Henry II about him, disliked Temple’s left-wing tendencies and his outspoken political comments.” Churchill was a Cavalier, the clergy were Puritans—worse, Puritans with a leftward list. This, for Churchill, made them and their brand of Christianity suspect.

Churchill squeezed the present for all it was worth. He believed meaning is found only in the present, for the past is gone and the future looms indeterminate if it arrives at all. Churchill was an old trooper who, whether at his easel, speaking in the Commons, or dining with his cronies, manifested the soldier’s creed: savor the moment, for it may be the last. Yet for Churchill, if there were to be tomorrows, they would arrive on
his
terms. He was an optimist, not a determinist; the world was indeed often cruel, but it need not remain so. He subscribed to a variation of the Nietzschean, monumental view of history that he had arrived at from his youthful reading of Gibbon (
all
of Gibbon) and Winwood Reade’s
The Martyrdom of Man,
a must-read for young thinkers in the late nineteenth century. In his book Reade attributed to history a Darwinian, a survival of
the fittest, continuum. Churchill, paraphrasing Reade in a letter to his mother, wrote, “If the human race ever reaches a stage of development—when religion will cease to assist and comfort mankind—Christianity will be put aside as a crutch which is no longer needed, and man will stand erect on the firm legs of reason.”
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He synthesized his Gibbon and Reade and concluded that the greatness and goodness of the past could be recaptured through the exercise of will. God would play no part in the saga, because God, if indeed there was a God, was unwilling or unable to intervene. Yet that paradigm left open the possibility that a force of evil—such as Hitler—might well impose his will on the future. Churchill employed his present moments to plan his—and the world’s—better tomorrows through the exercise of
his
will. By doing so he intended to deny Hitler his supposed destiny. Churchill, not God, would safeguard the future of Europe and the British Empire, and he would do so by the vigorous exercise of his imagination and the imposition of his will by the only means he knew—action, action this day, action every day.

He saw communism not as the atheistic negation of Christian ideals (as did Franklin Roosevelt) but as the twisted fulfillment of those ideals. At dinner one evening later in the war he recited to his guests a Soviet creed:

“Communism,” Churchill declared when he finished, was “Christianity with a tomahawk.”
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Traditional religions at least held out the hope of mercy, love, and a forgiving deity. Not so the “non-God” religions that had overtaken Germany and Russia (although Churchill muted his criticism of Bolshevism after his alliance with Stalin). Three years before war came, during the early months of the Spanish Civil War, Churchill warned Britons of the “war between the Nazis and the Communists: the war of the non-God religions, waged with the weapons of the twentieth century. The most striking fact about the new religions is their similarity. They substitute the devil for God and hatred for love. They are at each other’s throats wherever they exist all over the world….” Britons, he warned, “must not blind their eyes to the power which these new religions exercise in the modern world. They are equipped with powerful agencies of destruction, and they do not lack their champions, their devotees, and even their martyrs.”
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Chamberlain—and France—had blinded his eyes to the threat, with the result that Hitler and his apostles brought their gospel first to Poland,
and now to Holland, Belgium, and France. Churchill intended that it not be brought to England.

H
e believed in Virtue and Right, not as matters of dogma, but as objective realities. Virtue was manifested in action. It took the form of the Aristotelian mean. Courage, the supreme virtue, could be found somewhere between cowardice and foolhardiness. Paraphrasing Samuel Johnson, Churchill wrote in
Great Contemporaries:
“Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because… it is the quality which guarantees all others.” Among the others was magnanimity.
In Victory: Magnanimity,
Churchill chimed, never revenge fueled by hatred. This was a virtue first expressed by Aristotle and most recently ignored by Hitler in Poland and, a generation earlier, by the good Christians who drafted the Carthaginian terms (Churchill believed) of surrender imposed upon Germany and Austria after the Great War. The argument put forth then that Germany had behaved like a mad dog since the Franco-Prussian War and deserved to wear the shortest possible leash was, for Churchill, flawed. It violated another of his maxims,
In Peace: Goodwill.
He believed that an economically healthy Germany was necessary for European stability.

Yet here now came the Hun again, waging a war that might soon result in the extermination of England. In fighting his battle to preserve liberty in England and restore it in Europe, there could be no middle path, no mean, and Churchill acknowledged none. Weapons and strategies that showed promise—special operations, assassination, sabotage, bacterial “spore” bombs, atomic fission bombs, aerial obliteration of German cities—were justified by the ends. Any weapon, especially one deployed often, accurately, and ruthlessly, was a fine weapon. His was a distinctly Old Testament approach to rendering justice. As much as he admired the merciful and demanded that generosity follow victory,
In War, Fury
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formed his philosophy of battle.
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In his youthful readings of Aristotle and Plato he discovered the pre-Christian philosophical antecedents that the Catholic Church later appropriated
and folded into its doctrine. He taught himself well and created a code he could live by. He was seduced by the powerful simplicity of Aristotle’s mean and Plato’s analogy of the charioteer, who in order to successfully navigate his way must keep a tight rein on his brace of winged horses.

Churchill had as much difficulty riding smoothly in double harness as he did in keeping his car on the road, but in the end, he achieved his mean. It was a moral journey of many twists and turns, of chutes and ladders. Images of him in his dressing gown, rifle at his shoulder, marching about late of an evening hardly conjure an image of the Aristotelian mean. He possessed, John Martin recalled, a “zigzag streak of lightning on the brain.” The Old Man zigged and zagged in many of his strategic decisions as war leader when, literally and metaphorically, he was all over the map. For every diarist who notes his exuberance, fairness, geniality, or generosity, there is to be found another who alludes to his roughness, his sarcasm, his low moods, and his bellicosity—sometimes the same observer on the same day. Yet Churchill’s journey toward the mean could unfold in no other way. “If he hadn’t been this sort of bundle of energy that he was,” recalled Martin, “he would never have carried the whole machine, civil and military, right through to the end of the war.”
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