A Little Bit of Churchillania

In a different life, I probably would have been a military historian. As it is, my bedtime reading for nearly a decade now has basically run from 1853 to 1945, that is, from the start of the Crimean War to the end of World War II, with special attention on World War I. Each of those conflicts, of course, would have major implications for Eastern Christians in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere; but I don't read about these events for that so much as for their own sake--and also to understand what my maternal grandparents lived through in the Battle of Britain while working and living alongside the River Clyde in Scotland, then the scene of the largest ship-building works in the whole of the British Empire and therefore a target of frequent Luftwaffe bombing.

Like many Britons of her generation, my grandmother regaled me as a child with stories of several narrow escapes from bombing raids, and also the stirring oratory of Churchill on the wireless. As an adult, I decided that I needed to read more by and about Churchill to understand better who this man was who, my grandmother said, "united the whole country." I began of course by reading his six-volume The Second World War, which won him the Nobel Prize for literature. From there I backtracked to read his history of the First World War, The World Crisis, 1911-1918, a book about which one of his detractors rather archly said othat "Winston has written an enormous book about himself and called it The World Crisis." Arthur Balfour, prime minister of Britain from 1902 to 1905 and a sometime nemesis of Churchill, said that he was reading Churchill's "autobiography disguised as a history of the universe." Both histories are rather sui generis: part history, part autobiography, part memoir, part political tract written with present politics firmly in mind--a point made by David Reynolds' really splendid and enormously enjoyable In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War.

Reynolds' careful archival research has revealed in fascinating detail how Churchill worked as an author, and how he tendentiously put together especially the sixth volume with an eye to contemporary relations with Eisenhower, newly changed from supreme Allied commander to US president.

After reading Churchill himself, I began tackling Sir Martin Gilbert's biography of Churchill, starting with his helpful one-volume Churchill: A Life and then reading Gilbert's multi-volume authorized biography, which, with its official documents, runs to many thousands of pages in multiple volumes. Along the way, I enjoyed Gilbert's own self-reflective book--similar to Reynolds in some respects, though not so narrowly focused--In Search of Churchill: A Historian's Journey. Last Christmas, while driving across the country, I listened to the audio version of Gilbert's Churchill and America.

All this is just prelude to mention that I have just finished another very recent book about him that was immensely enjoyable: Barbara Leaming, Churchill Defiant: Fighting On: 1945-1955.

Haunted by the staggering electoral loss of July 1945, Churchill resisted, right up until the very last days, numerous and repeated efforts by everyone--friend, family, and foe--to get him to retire from 1945 onward. He felt he wanted to win an election on his own merits (he came to the premiership in 1940 when Neville Chamberlain resigned and advised King George VI to send for Churchill rather than Lord Halifax) and even more he felt that if he had power again he could mitigate the Cold War by arranging a three-power conference involving himself, Stalin, and Eisenhower, the latter of whom wanted nothing to do with such a tete-à-tete. Churchill, in his late seventies now, finally clawed his way back to government in the narrowly won 1951 election, and hung on until April 1955, surviving several strokes and continually going back on his word to his chosen successor, Anthony Eden, as to when he would retire.

Leaming's book is more blunt in some respects and does not shy away from some of the more ruthless aspects of Churchill's character. It is a helpful counterpoint to read alongside another book covering the same time-frame, a book that is written with a more moving and intimate portrait from Churchill's last private secretary and strong loyalist, Anthony Montague Brown: Long Sunset.

Montague is also interviewed by Churchill's grandaughter, Celia Sandys, in her Chasing Churchill: The Travels of Winston Churchill, a book that was later turned into an enormously enjoyable and deeply affecting documentary by PBS: Chasing Churchill.

Finally, I should mention that I'm looking forward to reading a new book Cita Stelzer has just published: Dinner with Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table. I heard the author interviewed a few weeks ago by Lynn Rossetto Kasper on her delightful radio program The Splendid Table.

Everlasting Memory!

On this Remembrance Day (as Her Britannic Majesty's Canadian Dominion calls it) or Veterans Day (as the American Republic styles it), our thoughts turn to those who have lost their lives in the many heinous conflicts of the last 100 years especially, beginning with World War I, on which myriad histories have been written, but some of the best that I have read include John Keegan, The First World War (Vintage, 2000); Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (1994); and, of course, Winston Churchill's six-volume history-cum-memoir, The World Crisis, 1911-1918, of which one of his detractors rather archly said that "Winston has written an enormous book about himself and called it The World Crisis." Arthur Balfour, sometime British prime minister and sometime nemesis of Churchill, said of The World Crisis that he was reading Churchill's "autobiography disguised as a history of the universe."

Another fascinating study, about one of the bloodiest and most baffling of battles, is that of Christopher Duffy, Through German Eyes: The British & The Somme 1916 (Phoenix Press, 2007).

Duffy unearthed from Bavarian military archives German views of the British, whom many Germans held in condescending contempt as the "poor little men of a diseased civilization." Time and again, in the amusing records Duffy found, the German interrogators, confronted with British prisoners of war, could not believe that the former might lose the war to the latter's army of men of "crooked legs, rickety, alcoholic, degnerate, ill-bred, and poor to the last degree."

Centuries before the chimes of Big Ben in August 1914 signaled the commencement of hostilities between Britain and Germany, and so unleashed the one event that arguably more than any other shaped the rest of the century, many Christians had set themselves to asking if and when, and under which circumstances, lethal force might be used, or at least tolerated, by Christians. That gave rise to what came, in the West, to be known as the Just War tradition, of which today James Turner Johnson is perhaps the leading scholar in several books, including Ethics and the Use of Force (Justice, International Law and Global Security, Ashgate, 2011); Morality and Contemporary Warfare (Yale, 2001); Can Modern War be Just? (Yale, 1986); and Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry (Princeton, 1984). Others who have thought deeply about these issues, and helped Christians to do so today, include Michael Walzer, Just And Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations (Basic, 2006); and Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Theory (Readings in Social and Political Theory) (NYU, 1991).

Much of the Just War tradition is traced back, of course, to Augustine of Hippo (on whom the study by John Mark Mattox, St. Augustine and the Theory of Just War [Continuum, 2009] is the most recent). Many Eastern Christians have felt uneasy about Augustine for many reasons, some serious and some not--as I noted before. But whatever you think of him and his influence, it cannot be denied that Augustine gave rise to a very long, serious trajectory of intellectual work thinking through the hard problems of war and peace. Not as much work has been done in an Eastern Christian context, though Alexander Webster's two books, The Pacifist Option: The Moral Argument Against War in Eastern Orthodox Theology (ISP, 1999); and Virtue Of War: Reclaiming the Classic Christian Traditions East and West (2007) are notable exceptions.

Now, however, we have a very welcome new contribution to the discussion, published in September of this year: Hildo Bos and Jim Forest, For the Peace from Above: An Orthodox Resource Book on War, Peace and Nationalism (ORI, 2011).

About this book, the publisher tells us:

Since the early days of the Church, Christians have struggled to come to terms with Christ's words of peace and His example of peace. In Christ's life, as recorded in the New Testament, it is striking that He neither killed anyone nor summoned any of His disciples to kill. Indeed, the final miracle Christ performed before His execution was to heal an enemy's wound, an injury caused by the Apostle Peter in an attempt to defend his master. Yet, in the course of more than twenty centuries of Christian history, we see Christians often involved in war and, in surveying the calendar of saints, find not only those who refused to take part in war but also those who served in the military, though no one has been canonized due to his skill as a soldier. Besides the millions of Christians who have fought in armies, often against fellow Christians, we also find many priests, bishops and theologians who have advocated war and blessed its weapons. Our subject is an urgent one. Many people today live either near conflict areas or are directly touched by war or in areas where terrorist actions may suddenly occur. Everyone on the planet is in some way affected by wars in progress or wars in the making as well as the consequences of wars in the past. Every day thousands of Christians struggle in thought and prayer with some of the most difficult of questions: May I fight injustice by violent methods? Am I allowed to kill in combat? Are there limits on what I can do in the defense of my country? Am I as a Christian allowed to disobey demands that I believe are unjust or violate the Gospel? When the demands of my country seem at odds with the demands of the Kingdom of God, how do I respond to this conflict? Rarely do we find easy answers to these and similar questions.

Those of us in the Orthodox Christian tradition search for help in Holy Scripture, the canons provided to us by ecumenical councils, the witness of the saints, the writing of the Fathers of the Church as well as theologians of recent times. Imitation of saintly forebears alone, however, will not solve our problems. Different eras have adopted different attitudes. Also many of today's problems never existed before, not least the changed character of war in an era of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and mass propaganda. Yet knowledge of the thought and action undertaken by the Orthodox Churches on the issues of war and peace in recent decades surely can help us find ways out of the dead ends that many communities are experiencing today. This is the aim of this book.