Chesterton on St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi

St. Thomas and St. Francis | G.K. Chesterton | From St. Thomas Aquinas

Let me at once anticipate comment by answering to the name of that notorious character, who rushes in where even the Angels of the Angelic Doctor might fear to tread.

Some time ago I wrote a little book of this type and shape on St. Francis of Assisi; and some time after (I know not when or how, as the song says, and certainly not why) I promised to write a book of the same size, or the same smallness on St. Thomas Aquinas. The promise was Franciscan only in its rashness; and the parallel was very far from being Thomistic in its logic. You can make a sketch of St. Francis: you could only make a plan of St. Thomas, like the plan of a labyrinthine city. And yet in a sense he would fit into a much larger or a much smaller book. What we really know of his life might be pretty fairly dealt with in a few pages; for he did not, like St. Francis, disappear in a shower of personal anecdotes and popular legends. What we know, or could know, or may eventually have the luck to learn, of his work, will probably fill even more libraries in the future than it has filled in the past. It was allowable to sketch St. Francis in an outline; but with St. Thomas everything depends on the filling up of the outline. It was even medieval in a manner to illuminate a miniature of the Poverello, whose very title is a diminutive. But to make a digest, in the tabloid manner, of the Dumb Ox of Sicily passes all digestive experiments in the matter of an ox in a tea-cup. But we must hope it is possible to make an outline of biography, now that anybody seems capable of writing an outline of history or an outline of anything. Only in the present case the outline is rather an outsize. The gown that could contain the colossal friar is not kept in stock.

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Comments

[Thomas]

Great, great book(s). One thing that has always irritated me about it, however, is that the copyright dates are mixed up in the book.

I think I'm OCD.

[Dan]

I have not yet read Chesterton's book, which is very highly regarded by Aquinas scholars (I recall that Joseph Pieper gave it very high marks). But if anyone is looking for a nuts and bolts introduction to Aquinas and needs the requisite introduction to philosophy also, I highly recommend Ralph McInerney's "A First Glance at St. Thomas Aquinas." It is outstanding. It is not only a great introduction to St. Thomas, it also is an excellent introduction to philoposphy.