St. Francis Of Assisi

by G.K. Chesterton

There is something of a harmony between the hearth and the firelight and my own first pleasure in his words about the brother fire;

grotesque but haloed with the love of God.

To those tormented by a mere intellectual curiosity about who is kissing or killing whom, it is unsatisfactory.

Men for whom reason begins with the Reformation, can never give a complete account of anything, for they have to start with institutions whose origin they can never explain, or generally even imagine.

To understand the Spanish Inquisition it would be necessary to discover two things that we have never dreamed of bothering about; what Spain was and what an Inquisition was.

It may well be suggested later indeed that St. Francis is unintelligible, just as St. Dominic is unintelligible, unless we do understand something of what the thirteenth century meant by heresy and a crusade.

Until we understand, not necessarily in detail, but in their big bulk and proportion that pagan progress and that Christian reaction,

Their studies of unsavoury subjects never take note of the testimony they bear to the truths of traditional morality. But if we had the taste for such things, we could cite thousands of such things as part of the case for Christian morals. And an instance of this is found in the fact that nobody has written, in this sense, a real moral history of the Greeks.

glad good news brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin.

it was good enough to realise that its paganism was becoming wicked,

Thousands of them had philosophy and family virtues and military honour to hold them up; but by this time the purely popular thing called religion was certainly dragging them down.

In another and more literal sense its name was Pan.

let anyone who knows a little Latin poetry recall suddenly what would have once stood in place of the sun-dial or the fountain, obscene and monstrous in the sun; and of what sort was the god of their gardens.

"This sort goeth not out but by prayer and fasting."

men had only been freed from slavery by the fear of hell,

It seemed to the heretic a sane simplification of religion; while it seems to a Catholic an insane simplification of religion, because it simplifies all to a single idea and so loses the breadth and balance of Catholicism.

Duke Godfrey

Bernadone may have employed people but he was not an employer; that is; he did not belong to an employing class as distinct from an employed class.

but he evidently expected his own family to work in a way almost as plain as a peasant's.

such persons to pester the wealthy without any great danger.

That the grace of God is in Courtesy."

is a curiosity of language that courage actually means running;

If we mean by what is practical what is most immediately practicable, we merely mean what is easiest.

There are often any number of them; but they are too often used so as to be a sort of sentimental sediment of the medieval world, instead of being, as the saint emphatically is, a challenge to the modern world. We

And if we infer from our own experience that war paralyzed civilization, we must at least admit that these warring towns turned out a number of paralytics who go by the names of Dante and Michael Angelo, Ariosto and Titian, Leonardo and Columbus, not to mention Catherine of Siena and the subject of this story.

it must be remembered that when the interests of an age are mainly religious they must be universal.

In truth orthodoxy was not dead but it may have been dull; it is certain that some people began to think it dull.

He was not without some vision of that wreath of laurel which Ceasar has left for all the Latins.

who are ordinary and selfish men whom God has not broken to make anew.

The bishop addressed some remarks to him, full of that excellent common sense which the Catholic Church keeps permanently as the background for all the fiery attitudes of her saints.

He told Francis that he must unquestionably restore the money to his father; that no blessing could follow a work done by unjust methods; and in short (to put it crudely) if the young fanatic would give back his money to the old fool, the incident would then terminate.

it is enough to indicate here that the whole philosophy of St. Francis revolved around the idea of a new supernatural light on natural things, which meant the ultimate recovery not the ultimate refusal of natural things.