Literary Giants Literary Catholics by Joseph Pearce Page A

man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk and not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be answered fully here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to have been asked; we have a suspicion that if they were answered we should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also.
    These words, which could have served as the introduction to Chesterton’s biography of Saint Francis published twenty-three years later, indicated that the saint had served as an antidote to the poison of the previous decade.
    In 1902, in Twelve Types , Chesterton again lauded Saint Francis with the lucidity and faith that had been almost wholly absent in the questioning ambivalence of his poem of ten years earlier.
    In July 1922 Chesterton was finally received into the Catholic Church. Eight weeks later he received the sacrament of confirmation, choosing Francis as his confirmation name. It would, perhaps, be easy to suggest that the obvious motive for the choice was a desire to show love and respect for Frances, his wife. It was, however, hardly surprising that he should have chosen the saint who had been the friend of his childhood, the ally in his confused adolescence and the companion in his approach to the Faith. In any case, the two motives are not mutually exclusive. In pleasing his wife, he was also pleasing himself.
    At the time of his reception into the Church, Chesterton was already planning a full-length biography of Saint Francis that would be published in the following year. Confirming the saint’s importance, he wrote that the figure of Saint Francis “stands on a sort of bridge connecting my boyhood with my conversion to many other things”. With these words in mind, it is not difficult to imagine that Chesterton took on the writing of Saint Francis of Assisi so soon after his conversion as an act of thanksgiving to the saint who, above all others, had accompanied him on his journey to the Faith.
    The admiration that Chesterton felt toward Saint Francis was inextricably bound up with his belief in the superiority of childlike innocence over all forms of cynicism. Saint Francis and his followers were called the Jongleurs de Dieu because of the innocence of their jollity and the jollity of their innocence. “The jongleur was properly a joculator or jester; sometimes he was what we should call a juggler.” It was this mystical synthesis of laughter and humility, a belief that playing and praying go hand in hand, which was the secret of the saint’s success. Ultimately, however, the laughter and the humility were rooted in gratitude because, as Chesterton discerned with characteristic and Franciscan sagacity, “there is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset”.
    Chesterton’s life of Saint Francis was destined to be one of the most commercially and critically successful of all his books. Typical of the enthusiastic response of the critics was that of Patrick Braybrooke, who described the book as “astoundingly brilliant”: “The Catholic Church has found in Mr. Chesterton the greatest interpreter of her greatest saint.” Ultimately, however, the book’s brilliance shone from the blurring of the distinction between the Chestertonian and the Franciscan. It is, at times, difficult to distinguish between Chesterton’s exposition of the Franciscan spirit and his elucidation of Chestertonian philosophy. Throughout the pages of the book, Chesterton chases the saint, complaining that all explanations of the saint’s enigmatic