St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi

These most excellent works of G. K. Chesterton were enhanced by introductions by Ralph McInerny and Joseph Pearce. It was especially nice to have his essays on both saints in one book.

Gilson said that Chesterton's book on Aquinas was the best book on Aquinas and I can see why he says this. Chesterton captures the spirit of the Great Philosopher of common sense (following Aristotle) and perhaps Chesterton can do that because he himself was the apostle of common sense! But not only does he capture the spirit of Aquinas but he managed to move me deeply over the great saint whose work is a hymn in praise of creation. I was particularly taken by the description of Aquinas' death. But the relevance today of Aquinas and Aristotle who stands behind him is the issue of whether we can trust our reason - Aristotle and Aquinas both shout out: "Yes, we can" but much of modernity philosophy is agnostic - simply refusing to see what is before us. Further, Aquinas is key to the dialogue which must always take place between faith and reason. We simply cannot have a faith which is contrary to reason - this precisely is the great message of Aquinas, which Chesteron wonderfully explains. More than that, reason can lead us to God in whom we live and move and have our being. And going further, the senses can lead us to God because unlike the Platonists Aquinas teaches that "Everything that is in the intellect has been in the senses". Everything about which we think including our thoughts about God and the after life is saturated with the pictorial and non-pictorial life of the senses . But what does it mean to die and to be separated from our body until the end of time -what manner of sense less life can this be: Ah, that is a great mystery! I will give some examples from the text to explain why Chesterton is so good: "But I am not ashamed to say that I find my reason fed by my senses; that I owe a great deal of what I think to what I see and smell and taste and handle; and that so far as my reason is concerned, I feel obliged to treat all this reality as real". "It was the very life of Thomist teaching that Reason can be trusted; it was the very life of the Lutheran teaching that Reason is utterly untrustworthy". " a man is not a man without his body, just as he is not a man without his soul. A corpse is not a man; but also a ghost is not a man" "St Thomas was making Christendom more Christian in making it more Aristotelian" (i.e. moving it away from the platonic tendencies established since Augustine and moving back towards rejoicing in the glory of creation) "It is the fact that falsehood is never so false as when it is very nearly true". "St Thomas was willing to allow the one truth to be approached by two paths, precisely because he was sure that there was only one truth. Because the faith was the one truth, nothing discovered in nature could ultimately contradict the Faith. Because the Faith was one truth, nothing really deduced from thre Faith could ultimately contradict the facts". This is a key passage and we see that theme reflected in the writings of Benedict XVI in his latest encyclical, "Caritas i

Legendary Christian philosopher GK Chesterton wrote concise semi-biographies of St. Francis and St. Thomas Aquinas in 1923 and 1936 (the year of his death), respectively. Those years saw him convert to Catholicism, crystallizing a journey taking him from early appreciation of St. Francis in poetry and essays, to the depths of Oscar Wilde's nihilism to the freedom of orthodoxy expressed in that book and in his classic "Everlasting Man." For their contrasting both saints' lives, drawn differently as silhouettes of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote (to name one of Chesterton's first, richest allegories in the Aquinas book), both books could with editing meld into the single volume Ignatius Press published. Both used Chesterton's mix of allegory, paradox and common sense eloquence making each of his books a re-discovery. Best of all, in Chesterton's words, both saints "reaffirmed the incarnation, by bringing God back to earth." Chesterton writes each saint's biography inside out, seeing the major events of both lives through the prisms of their times. He shows both refuting their near-assigned destinies: born "on the hem of the imperial purple," Aquinas asks to be a begging friar and winds up arrested, imprisoned, and even tempted by his family. Born a successful merchant's son, young Francis Bernadone renounces his possessions (including his father Peter), takes poverty and dependence as a lover and walks into the woods in a hair-shirt, taking every existing thing as his family, every day as one without history, and finally writing his life philosophy in "Canticle of the Sun." Loving the poor, having and wanting nothing, both depended on and thanked God for everything. Francis begged for the worst crumbs and traded down with beggars, using the remainder rebuild churches and lives. Aquinas appreciated his gift senses as windows into God's beauty and reality, refusing to separate earthly process from heaven's factual logic. His "Ens" philosophy, stemming from his need to draw Aristotle's influence back to Christ, filled volumes and stood as the easiest theory to understand and accept of how the world works. (Chesterton's image of the child at the window watching grass makes it simpler still.) The same can be said of Chesterton's humorous to miraculous anecdotes attributed to St. Francis. These range from Francis' attempts to convert the Sultan of Damietta by throwing himself into fire, creating a snow angel substitute family to refute temptation, to receiving Stigmata (which Chesterton defends with stiletto-sharp apologia). Chesterton also shares part of Francis' relationship with St. Clare, from which formed one of three religious orders he'd inspire. After Francis' death, without his guidance, these would splinter into heresy before the Papacy wisely reigned its passions against what Chesterton referred to as "the staleness" of a new religion. Benito Mussolini, who hijacked his country's proud religious and secular history to gain power, once sa

St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis make for quite a contrast--St. Thomas was one of the greatest brains of the Catholic Church, and St. Francis had one of the greatest hearts. Chesterton has a knack for putting ideas and people into the largest possible context with the least amount of details. These biographies, though short on specifics, put across the essence of each man's character and his impact on the world. Chesterton's writing style in both is more poetic than his essays and even some of his fiction. "And for him [St. Thomas] the point is always that Man is not a balloon going up into the sky, nor a mole burrowing merely in the earth; but rather a thing like a tree, whose roots are fed from the earth, while its highest branches seem to rise almost to the stars." "He [St. Francis] devoured fasting as a man devours food. He plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for gold. And it is precisely the positive and passionate quality of this part of his personality that is a challenge to the modern mind in the whole problem of the pursuit of pleasure." Chesterton piles on insights like these on page after page. Chesterton paints a very personal picture--after reading these biographies, I felt as if I really knew who these men were, how they spoke, how they thought, how they might have talked to me. One caution--these works may not be the best place to start. In my case, I didn't know much about St. Francis to begin with. Since Chesterton doesn't provide many historical details, some of his references (e.g., to his miracles and famous sayings), were hard to follow.

I found this book by accident and haven't even finished it yet, but what a pleasure to read! Chesterton's logic and humor are delightful and the way he is always looking at the "big picture" of Christianity is wonderful. It's a good thing it has footnotes to explain some of the references to British politics. He writes as though to non-Catholics (which I am) who know very little about St. Francis (other than he preached to the animals) and next to nothing about St. Thomas Aquinas. If you like Chesterton and are remotly interested in these two saints who were in many ways opposites of each other, buy and read this book.