Having enjoyed Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man and
Saint Thomas Aquinas, I opened this autobiography of St.
Francis eagerly. And I enjoyed it, and I learned quite a bit about St.
Francis, but it definitely left me wanting more.

Compared to Thomas, of course, Francis is a saint of a different
color. Apparently there’s not all that much biographical information
available about St. Thomas; not surprisingly, as he spent most of his
time thinking and writing. The difficulty in writing about St. Thomas
is that to explain why he was and is important you need to get into
serious matters of philosophy and theology–and to do that in a book
intended for a popular audience without losing them is no mean feat.

The problem of writing about St. Francis is far different. Here there is
a vast wealth of material, a plethora, possibly even a superfluity of
story and legend from which to draw. At the same time, Francis is a far
more popular saint than Thomas; everyone has at least the notion that
Francis got on well with birds and suchlike creatures, even if they know
nothing else about him. With Thomas, Chesterton didn’t need to worry
much about people’s preconceptions; here he does.

Consequently, Chesterton’s avowed intent in this book is to illuminate
the saint’s character. He tells us, in dribs and drabs, the bare
biographical details; he shares with us a handful of anecdotes which
illustrate his points. And he spends quite a lot of time telling us,
somewhat abstractly, what St. Francis was like, and perhaps more time
telling us what he wasn’t like. But he doesn’t tell us many stories
about things Francis actually did, because he’s more concerned that we
have the proper grounding to appreciate such stories and not
misunderstand them.

Unfortunately, this approach means that the narrative is somewhat
detached. For example, the early
biographies of Francis tell of a number of miracles God worked through
him during his life. In the chapter where Chesterton addresses this, he
spends most of his time talking about how strange it is that your average
historian will read such a biography, discount the miraculous on the
ground that it’s nonsense and that the author must be lying, credulous,
or a simpleton, and yet presume the remainder of the work to contain
worthwhile historical detail. Surely, says Chesterton, if the author is
unreliable, he’s unreliable?

Well, and so, but I’d have liked to hear more about Francis’ miracles.

I gather from some comments that Chesterton lets drop that he wrote this
book during a period when Saint Francis was quite a popular figure in
England, and books containing the kinds of stories Chesterton mostly
left out were perhaps all too easy to come by. Chesterton clearly
assumed that his audience had already read such books, or that having
finished his they might go on to do so, and therefore it was more
important to provide something they did not than to simply duplicate them.

I can’t argue with that; but it does mean that the book, though valuable,
didn’t satisfy me, and that I’m probably going to have to find something
else to read about St. Francis.

Chesterton, darn him, would undoubtedly be pleased.