St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi: With Introductions by Ralph McInerny and Joseph Pearce [Paperback]

G. K. Chesterton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2002

G.K. Chesterton with an introductions by Ralph McInerny and Joseph Pearce Here, together in a single volume, are the two biographies that many critics consider both Chesterton's best, and the best short portraits ever written of these two great saints. St. Francis of Assisi is a profoundly Catholic work, explaining and illuminating the life of St. Francis in a way no other biography has. The spiritual kinship the author felt with his subject enables the reader to delve into insights on the character of Francis that have eluded many. St. Thomas Aquinas is enriched by the author’s unique ability to see the world through the saint’s eyes, a fresh and animated view that shows us Aquinas as no other biography has. Acclaimed as the best book ever written on Aquinas by such outstanding Thomists as Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and Anton Pegis, this brilliant biography will completely capture the reader and leave him desirous of reading Aquinas’ own monumental work. “No two lives are more interesting or diverse than St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas. The St. Francis book is today especially significant because it addresses itself on how to reform a corrupt culture, while the St. Thomas book is important because it addresses the problem of disordered minds. Chesterton makes philosophy intelligible and poverty rich. No two books get at the heart of things better or in a more delightful manner.” —James V. Schall, S.J., Georgetown University

Product Details

• Paperback: 260 pages
• Publisher: Ignatius Press (October 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0898709458
• ISBN-13: 978-0898709452
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #76,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sketches of Two Seminal Saints in Classic Chesterton Style, July 1, 2007

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Anthony G Pizza "trivialtony" (FL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi: With Introductions by Ralph McInerny and Joseph Pearce (Paperback)

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 said, "The history of saints is mainly the history of insane people." Chesterton's sketches of Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi counter by saying both these sane, logical saints, mistaken by their times for poison, were medicine because they were antidotes. They stood and yet stand against changing 20th-21st century fashions and facelessness. Few Chesterton writings bring his enduring linguistic and logical gifts to such high yet focused purpose and proof. These books, economically and ideologically joined, make essential reading for followers of Chesterton, Catholic apologetics, and Christian history.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A high altitude view of two great Saints., May 11, 2007

By 

Brad Shorr "Brad Shorr" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi: With Introductions by Ralph McInerny and Joseph Pearce (Paperback)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Aquinas: heavenly, St Francis: excellent, January 11, 2010

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Aquinas "summa" (celestial heights, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi: With Introductions by Ralph McInerny and Joseph Pearce (Paperback)

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 in Veritate" when he says that faith should be purified by reason and reason should be purified by faith.

"Any extreme of Catholic asceticism is a wise, or unwise, precaution against the evil of the Fall; it is never a doubt about the good of Creation".

"If the morbid Renaissance intellectual is supposed to say: "To be or not to be - that is the question", then the massive medieval doctor does most certainly reply in a voice of thunder, "To be - that is the answer".

"The body was no longer what it was when Plato and Porphyry and the old mystics had left it for dead. It had hung unpon the gibbet. It had risen from a tomb. It was no longer possible for the soul to despise the senses, which had been the organs of something that was more than man. Plato might despise the flesh; but God had not despised it."

"After the Incarnation had become the idea that is central to our civilisation, it was inevitable that there should be a return to materialism, in the sense of the serious value of matter and the making of the body. When once Christ had risen, it was inevitable that Aristotle should rise again".

"St Thomas was not a person who wanted nothing and he was a person who was enormously interested in everything. As compared with many other saints, and many other philosophers, he was avid in his acceptance on Things; in his hunger and thirst for things".

Chesterton movingly describes the scene where the crucifix speaks to St Thomas and asks him what he asks of God:

"The stretched arms were truly spread out with a gesture of omnipotent generosity; the Creator himself offering Creation itself, with all its millionfold mystery of separate beings, and the triumphal chorus of the creatures. That is the blazing background of multitudinous Being, that gives the particular strength, and even a sort of surprise, to the answer of St Thomas, when he lifted at last his head and spoke with, and for, that almost blasphemous audacity, which is one with the humility of his religion: "I will have Thyself".

Chesterton beautifully recounts St Thomas end and the reading of the Songs of Solomon at his death bed and then:

"But there must have been a moment, when men knew that the thunderous mill of thought had stopped suddenly; and that after the shock of stillness that wheel would shake the world no more; that there was nothing now within that hollow house but a great hill of clay; and the confessor, who had been with him in the inner chamber, ran forth as if in fear , and whispered that his confession had been that of a child of five".

His legacy and thinking

"St Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs "

"Aquinas is almost always on the side of simplicity and supports the ordinary man's acceptance of ordinary truisms."

"The Thomist begins by being theoretical , but his theory turns our to be entirely practical."

Aquinas on St Francis of Assissi

Given that Chesteron's book on Aquinas is so wonderful, one is bound to feel a little deflated on reading his book on St Francis but to be deflated would be to do the book an injustice for it too is an excellent short book. So, I would recommend than rather than follow the order of this compendium, start with St Francis first and then end on the high note of Aquinas.

Let me just give a few quotes to show how Chesterton captures St Francis:

"Rossetti makes the remark somewhere, bitterly but with great truth, that the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank". "All goods look better when they look like gifts".

"A philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids. But as St Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ. Say, if you think so, that he was a lunatic loving an imaginary person: but an imaginary person, not an imaginary idea"

"The truth is that people who worship health cannot remain healthy".

"It may seem a paradox to say that a man may be transported with joy to discover that he is debt".

"It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be forever paying it. He will be always throwing things away in a bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks".

"Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church...it set the mood against the mind".

"St Francis was above all a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is thanksgiving. If another great man wrote a grammar of assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of acceptance, a grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss. He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing. He knew that we can best measure the towering miracle of the mere fact of existence if we realise that but for some strange mercy we should not even exist"