Gandhi, Hitler & Churchill in Limbo: A Trialogue
COVENANT & CIVILIZATION
January 30 is a strange combination of historical anniversaries. It is the anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi’s assassination, when the Indian proponent of nonviolence fell to a bullet fired at point-blank range. It is the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s inauguration into power, when German political office became a kind of altar, and a nation offered up its religious conscience for the promise of national-socialist rebirth. It is also the anniversary of Winston Churchill’s funeral, when Great Britain buried a man whose words had stiffened a civilization’s spine in its darkest hour. These events sit together on the calendar as warnings on top of warnings, and history waits to see whether men will learn.
The following trialogue between the three men takes place in a fictional locale that resembles the shadowy threshold C.S. Lewis describes at the beginning of The Great Divorce, a realm between death and the particular judgment before the throne of Christ, a fictional limbo of sorts.
Gandhi, Hitler, and Churchill find themselves in a shadowy, lifeless place — no sun, no stars, no comforting scenery. There is only a dark, neutral expanse, as if the world had been drained of ornament so that nothing remained except what each man had become. They stand three paces apart, and they all know the same thing without saying it: Death had ended the era of their speeches and begun their time of reckoning.
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