St. Francis of Assisi. G. K. Chesterton

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      Table of Contents

       St. Francis of Assisi

       Copyright Information

       Introduction

       Chapter I

       Chapter II

       Chapter III

       Chapter IV

       Chapter V

       Chapter VI

       Chapter VII

       Chapter VIII

       Chapter IX

       Chapter X

St. Francis of Assisi

      G. K. Chesterton

Copyright Information

      Copyright © 2020 by Wildside Press LLC.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC.

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Introduction

      Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 – 1936) was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic. He has been referred to as the “prince of paradox,” and Time magazine observed of his writing style: “Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out.”

      He was a large man in every way, standing 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighing around 286 pounds. His girth gave rise to an anecdote during the First World War, when a lady in London asked why he was not “out at the Front.” He replied, “If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.” On another occasion, he remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw, “To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England.” Shaw retorted, “To look at you, anyone would think you had caused it.” And P.G. Wodehouse once described a very loud crash as “a sound like G. K. Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin.”

      He affected an unusual style for the time, and could be found wearing a cape and a crumpled hat, with a swordstick in hand and a cigar hanging out of his mouth. He had a tendency to forget where he was supposed to be going and miss the train that was supposed to take him there. It is reported that on several occasions he sent telegrams to his wife from an incorrect location, writing such things as “Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?” to which she would reply, “Home.” Chesterton himself told this story—omitting, however, his wife’s alleged reply, in his autobiography.

      Much of his work is religious in nature. Even his most famous creation, the fictional priest-detective Father Brown, has a religious background. He was baptised at the age of one month into the Church of England, though his family themselves were irregularly practising Unitarians. He married Frances Blogg in 1901; the marriage lasted the rest of his life. Chesterton credited Frances with leading him back to Anglicanism, though he later decided Anglicanism was a “pale imitation” and entered full communion with the Catholic Church in 1922.

      Even some of those who disagree with his theological writings have recognized the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an “orthodox” Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin. On his contributions, T. S. Eliot wrote:

      He was importantly and consistently on the side of the angels. Behind the Johnsonian fancy-dress, so reassuring to the British public, he concealed the most serious and revolutionary designs—concealing them by exposure ... Chesterton’s social and economic ideas...were fundamentally Christian and Catholic. He did more, I think, than any man of his time—and was able to do more than anyone else, because of his particular background, development and abilities as a public performer—to maintain the existence of the important minority in the modern world. He leaves behind a permanent claim upon our loyalty, to see that the work that he did in his time is continued in ours.

      Chesterton died of congestive heart failure on the morning of 14 June 1936, at his home in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. The sermon at Chesterton’s Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral, London, was delivered by Ronald Knox. Knox said, “All of this generation has grown up under Chesterton’s influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton.” He is buried in Beaconsfield in the Catholic Cemetery.

      —Karl Wurf

      Rockville, Maryland

Chapter I

      The Problem of St. Francis

      A sketch of St. Francis of Assisi in modern English may be written in one of three ways. Between these the writer must make his selection; and the third way, which is adopted here, is in some respects the most difficult of all. At least, it would be the most difficult if the other two were not impossible.

      First, he may deal with this great and most amazing man as a figure in secular history and a model of social virtues. He may describe this divine demagogue as being, as he probably was, the world’s one quite sincere democrat. He may say (what means very little) that St. Francis was in advance of his age. He may say (what is quite true) that St. Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the modern mood; the love of nature; the love of animals; the sense of social compassion; the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity and even of property. All those things that nobody understood before Wordsworth were familiar to St. Francis. All those things that were first discovered by Tolstoy had been taken for granted by St. Francis. He could be presented, not only as a human but a humanitarian hero; indeed as the first hero of humanism. He has been described as a sort of morning star of the Renaissance. And in comparison with all these things, his ascetical theology can be ignored or dismissed as a contemporary accident, which was fortunately not a fatal accident. His religion can be regarded as a superstition, but an inevitable superstition, from which not even genius could wholly free itself; in the consideration of which it would be unjust to condemn St. Francis for his self-denial or unduly chide him for his chastity. It is quite true that even from so detached a standpoint his stature would still appear heroic. There would still be a great deal to be said about the man who tried to end the Crusades by talking to the Saracens or who interceded with the Emperor for the birds. The writer might describe in a purely historical spirit the whole of that great Franciscan inspiration that was felt in the painting of Giotto, in the poetry of Dante, in the miracle plays that made possible the modern drama, and in so many other things that are already appreciated by the modern culture. He may try to do it, as others have done, almost without raising any religious question at all. In short, he may try to tell the story of a saint without God; which is like being told to write the life of Nansen and forbidden to mention the North Pole.

      Second,