Reflections on ‘Saint Francis of Assisi’ by G. K. Chesterton
… it is utterly useless to study a great thing like the Franciscan movement while remaining in the modern mood that murmurs against gloomy asceticism. The whole point about St. Francis of Assisi is that he certainly was ascetical and he certainly was not gloomy. Chesterton’s book Saint Francis of Assisi was published in 1923, about two decades after the publication of Heretics (1905) and a decade before the publication of Saint Thomas Aquinas: The…