2020 Summer Reading Recommendations:
Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts

In his investigation into what he labels the “parts of prudence,” St. Thomas distinguishes between two kinds of judgment: synesis and gnome (ST II.II, q. 51, aa. 3–4). Synesis uses conventional rules to judge what one should do or avoid. When conventional rules do not apply, gnome judges what to do according to higher principles. For instance, suppose you borrowed a friend’s car to take a trip. Conventional rules would have you return the car and keys to your friend promptly upon returning. Your judgment here is synesis. But if while returning the car and keys you find your friend inebriated and bent on driving somewhere, this conventional rule won’t do. There is a higher principle at work that concerns your friend’s well-being. Instead, you judge you should withhold his keys until the morning. That kind of judgment is gnome.

In his 2018 biography, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts presents, on the one hand, the life of Winston Churchill. It is the Churchill we all know: the one who first called out Nazi Germany for the thuggish, bellicose power it was; the one who urged Britain to rearm and condemned the appeasement of Hitler’s Germany; the one who, when these warnings failed, stirred the British people to stand fast against the Nazi threat after Germany had dispatched their French allies. It is the Churchill who offered the British people nothing but “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

On the other hand, Roberts furnishes a sober, historical defense of Churchill’s judgment against his detractors. Citing a host of mistakes Churchill made in his sixty-year political career, such as his role in the Dardanelles disaster in World War I and Britain’s return to the gold standard, many of Churchill’s contemporaries and present-day commentators have claimed that he lacked sound judgment. Roberts doesn’t let Churchill off the hook for these mistakes but, as he recounts near the end of his book,

Churchill’s supposed lack of judgment was hung around his neck throughout his career, sometimes, as we have seen, for good reason. Yet when it came to all three of the mortal threats posed to Western civilization, by the Prussian militarists in 1914, to the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s and Soviet Communism after the Second World War, Churchill’s judgment stood far above that of the people who sneered at his. 

Roberts’s account makes it clear, I would suggest, that Churchill developed a kind of gnome throughout his life that made him indispensable for the survival of Western civilization in the early twentieth century. In other words, through the vast experiences of his eventful life—including his mistakes—coupled with his capacity to learn from those experiences and deepened by his reading of history, Churchill saw the larger historical arcs of his day and came to sound judgments when conventional thinking floundered. This 1,000-page biography narrates the life that made these judgments possible. It recounts the sensitive and emotional child of neglectful, egotistic aristocrats who nevertheless wished to restore the name to his father that his father had lost. It chronicles the soldier and war journalist who fought in several theaters of the British Empire, exposing him, among other things, to Islamic fundamentalism in the Sudan. He would later identify the same fanaticism in the Nazis. It tells of the brave escape from a South African prison that won Churchill a seat in Parliament. It details the politician who, after a strategic disaster in the Gallipoli campaign, served on the front lines of World War I, where he made several night forays into no-man’s land producing so much noise that he sounded like a “baby elephant.” It spells out how all this came to bear on Churchill’s leadership during the ordeal against Nazism so that he could make sound, critical judgments and with his oratorical genius convince the world to do likewise.

Churchill prepared for that ordeal all his life by developing his sense of judgment and rhetorical genius such that he would later write, “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” That preparation saved Western civilization in a moment of need, and Roberts’s account is a gripping one for anyone interested in this larger-than-life hero of the Second World War. 

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 Photo of Churchill at Coventry Cathedral by Captain Horton.