The following is from Chapter I of G. K. Chesterton's
St. Thomas Aquinas. Chesterton had first published in 1923 his biography of
St. Francis of Assisi and in this first chapter in the biography of Aquinas first published in 1933 compares the two famous friars.
I
ON TWO FRIARS
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.
I have said that these can only be portraits in outline.
But the concrete contrast is here so striking, that even if we
actually saw the two human figures in outline, coming over the hill
in their friar's gowns, we should find that contrast even comic.
It would be like seeing, even afar off, the silhouettes of Don Quixote
and Sancho Panza, or of Falstaff and Master Slender. St. Francis
was a lean and lively little man; thin as a thread and vibrant
as a bowstring; and in his motions like an arrow from the bow.
All his life was a series of plunges and scampers;
darting after the beggar, dashing naked into the woods,
tossing himself into the strange ship, hurling himself into
the Sultan tent and offering to hurl himself into the fire.
In appearance he must have been like a thin brown skeleton
autumn leaf dancing eternally before the wind; but in truth it
was he that was the wind.
St. Thomas was a huge heavy bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet;
very mild and magnanimous but not very sociable; shy, even apart
from the humility of holiness; and abstracted, even apart from his
occasional and carefully concealed experiences of trance or ecstasy.
St. Francis was so fiery and even fidgety that the ecclesiastics,
before whom he appeared quite suddenly, thought he was a madman.
St. Thomas was so stolid that the scholars, in the schools which
he attended regularly, thought he was a dunce. Indeed, he was the sort
of schoolboy, not unknown, who would much rather be thought a dunce
than have his own dreams invaded, by more active or animated dunces.
This external contrast extends to almost every point in the
two personalities. It was the paradox of St. Francis that while he was
passionately fond of poems, he was rather distrustful of books.
It was the outstanding fact about St. Thomas that he loved books
and lived on books; that he lived the very life of the clerk
or scholar in The Canterbury Tales, who would rather have a hundred
books of Aristotle and his philosophy than any wealth the world
could give him. When asked for what he thanked God most,
he answered simply, "I have understood every page I ever read."
St. Francis was very vivid in his poems and rather vague in his documents;
St. Thomas devoted his whole life to documenting whole systems
of Pagan and Christian literature; and occasionally wrote a hymn
like a man taking a holiday. They saw the same problem from
different angles, of simplicity and subtlety; St. Francis thought
it would be enough to pour out his heart to the Mohammedans,
to persuade them not to worship Mahound. St. Thomas bothered
his head with every hair-splitting distinction and deduction,
about the Absolute or the Accident, merely to prevent them from
misunderstanding Aristotle. St. Francis was the son of a shopkeeper,
or middle class trader; and while his whole life was a revolt
against the mercantile life of his father, he retained none the less,
something of the quickness and social adaptability which makes
the market hum like a hive. In the common phrase, fond as he was
of green fields, he did not let the grass grow under his feet.
He was what American millionaires and gangsters call a live wire.
It is typical of the mechanistic moderns that, even when they
try to imagine a live thing, they can only think of a mechanical
metaphor from a dead thing. There is such a thing as a live worm;
but there is no such thing as a live wire. St. Francis would have
heartily agreed that he was a worm; but he was a very live worm.
Greatest of all foes to the go-getting ideal, he had certainly
abandoned getting, but he was still going. St. Thomas, on the
other hand, came out of a world where he might have enjoyed leisure,
and he remained one of those men whose labour has something of
the placidity of leisure. He was a hard worker, but nobody could
possibly mistake him for a hustler. He had something indefinable
about him, which marks those who work when they need not work.
For he was by birth a gentleman of a great house, and such
repose can remain as a habit, when it is no longer a motive.
But in him it was expressed only in its most amiable elements;
for instance, there was possibly something of it in his effortless
courtesy and patience. Every saint is a man before he is a saint;
and a saint may be made of every sort or kind of man; and most of us will
choose between these different types according to our different tastes.
But I will confess that, while the romantic glory of St. Francis
has lost nothing of its glamour for me, I have in later years grown
to feel almost as much affection, or in some aspects even more,
for this man who unconsciously inhabited a large heart and a
large head, like one inheriting a large house, and exercised there
an equally generous if rather more absent-minded hospitality.
There are moments when St. Francis, the most unworldly man who ever
walked the world, is almost too efficient for me.
