A Grammar of Gratitude: Chesterton’s St. Francis of Assisi at 100

As much as we owe modern Christmas traditions to German and English traditions, there is one to whom we owe special thanks. While the modern tradition of a Christmas crèche with figurines seems to have dated to a few hundred years later, its origins were much more lively.

It was 800 years ago this year that St. Francis of Assisi, beset by various troubles with his brand-new order and also his own health, ordered one of his brothers to help organize the first live Nativity scene. In a cave in Greccio, a manger filled with hay was placed between an ox and an ass. In his Life of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Bonaventure recounts the scene:

The Brethren were called together, the folk assembled, the wood echoed with their voices, and that august night was made radiant and solemn with many bright lights, and with tuneful and sonorous praises. The man of God, filled with tender love, stood before the manger, bathed m tears, and overflowing with joy. Solemn Masses were celebrated over the manger, Francis, the Levite of Christ, chanting the Holy Gospel. Then he preached unto the folk standing round of the Birth of the King in poverty, calling Him, when he wished to name Him, the Child of Bethlehem, by reason of his tender love for Him.

Bonaventure adds that “Messer John,” the soldier-turned-friar-minor who actually organized this scene, “declared that he beheld a little Child right fair to see sleeping in that manger. Who seemed to be awakened from sleep when the blessed Father Francis embraced Him in both arms.” Bonaventure says that such a vision is worthy of belief in part because meditating on St. Francis’s example “must needs stir up sluggish hearts unto the faith of Christ” but also because the hay in the manger “proved a marvellous remedy for sick beasts, and a prophylactic against divers other plagues.”

The skeptical reader will find this account of visions and healings quaint and unbelievable. But one of the virtues of G. K. Chesterton’s St. Francis of Assisi, which celebrates its one-hundredth anniversary in 2023, is that while he does not commit himself to every miracle story recounted, he refuses to take the skeptical approach that denies miracles happened because “miracles do not happen.” For Chesterton, Francis is “a very real historical being” for whom “superhuman powers…were certainly a part of that history and humanity.” But we would be mistaken if we thought that the miracles themselves, even the stigmata, were the most significant superhuman thing. The most supernatural aspect of Francis’s career was that “great fixed idea” he held: “of praise and thanks springing to their most towering height out of nakedness and nothing.”

Chesterton’s own career was one of promoting the idea of thankfulness. In his 1908 classic Orthodoxy, he had written that “the test of all happiness is gratitude.” In Francis of Assisi he found one in whom a kind of supreme happiness had been achieved. “If another great man wrote a grammar of assent,” Chesterton writes at the end of St. Francis, referring to Newman, Francis “may well be said to have written a grammar of acceptance; a grammar of gratitude. He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing.”

Yet though Chesterton had been fascinated by Francis since his teen years, his earliest interpretation of him was not quite so precise a portrait of a man of pure gratitude and full faith. His 1892 poem “St. Francis of Assisi,” written when Chesterton was 18-years-old, cast the Poor Man of Assisi as “a monk that loved the sea-birds as they wheeled about his chapel” but who also “Did not claim a ruthless knowledge of the bounds of grace eternal,/Did not say ‘Thus far, not further, God has set the hopes of life.’” In other words, Francis was a contrast not just to the bad and inauthentic practices of Catholic faith in his age, but to the faith itself:

Dark the age and stern the dogma, yet the kind hearts are not cruel,
Still the true souls rise resistless to a larger world of love.

By 1900, however, we are getting close to the mature Chestertonian view of this figure. A review of a biography of Francis in The Speaker that year (later republished in a slightly different form in Twelve Types) includes Chesterton’s observation of the “fascinating inconsistency in the position of St. Francis,” that though “He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears,” nevertheless “this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we think the most imperious necessities.” No more did he see the dark age and stern dogma contrasting with the larger love. Now Chesterton sees the “three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience” that denied the natural goods of “property, love, and liberty” as at the heart of all true happiness: “It may be that under their sombre gowns, it was the monks that were the spendthrifts of happiness and we who are its misers.”

This is the mood and the argument of the 1923 volume, though it grounds more firmly that ascetical impulse in the dogmatic truths and the specificity of Catholic faith. Though not as great a work as his biography of St. Thomas or his monumental The Everlasting Man, this book, the first volume published after his 1922 reception into the Catholic Church, has had its fans. Six years after its publication, Chesterton had a private audience with Pope Pius XI, who opened the conversation, Chesterton tells us in The Resurrection of Rome, by saying “some very generous things about a sketch I wrote of St. Francis of Assisi.” And it is certainly a work of love. After all, Chesterton had taken “Francis” as his own confirmation name upon reception. Francis is the model for him, because Francis, he says in this later work on the saint, is a man who is in love not with a “religion” that is merely a “philosophy.” Instead, “as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.”

It is Chesterton’s full acceptance of the Incarnation in all its paradoxical glory that makes his biography not merely an exploration of a “fascinating inconsistency” but of a shimmering consistency. While the tradition of Francis as “a second Christ, the creator of a new gospel” is absurd and even blasphemous, an example of the “extravagances [to] which later degenerate Franciscans, or rather Fraticelli” descended, the power behind Francis’s movement was no doubt due to Francis’s own single-minded pursuit of the full stature of Christ. As soon as the order is founded, Chesterton writes, “he does not compare himself with his followers, towards whom he might appear as a master; he compares himself more and more with his Master, towards whom he appears only as a servant.”

And while it is easy to focus on Francis’s own study and relentlessly literal and spiritual application of the Beatitudes, “it is evident that he made an even closer study of the silent sermon on that other mountain; the mountain that was called Golgotha.” Francis’s “refrain,” repeated “through all his plunging and restless days,” was: “I have not yet suffered enough; I have not sacrificed enough; I am not yet worthy even of the shadow of the crown of thorns. He wandered about the valleys of the world looking for the hill that has the outline of a skull.”

Though he does not frame it in exactly these terms, Chesterton’s depiction is a eucharistic one. Francis offered himself as a sacrifice to the uttermost end not merely out of some desire to satisfy divine justice but out of gratitude to the one who had already done so and out of desire to be made over into that one’s image in every respect.

Joseph Ratzinger once wrote that almost all Christian movements have begun, from the earliest monastic period until today, not with “people trying to start a new religious community,” but with people “trying to establish Christianity as a whole, the Church that is obedient to the Gospel and lives on that basis.” That is indeed the proper lens with which to see Francis, and Chesterton shares it. What is significant about Francis’s movement was that it was a new spin on the monastic impulse—a monasticism without monasteries or any of the “economic repose” that characterized those great institutions from which “had come the works for which the world will never be sufficiently grateful, the perseveration of the classics, the beginning of the Gothic, the schemes of science and philosophies, the illuminated manuscripts and the coloured glass.” It was this that made his movement so easy to join, so easy to multiply in rapid fashion.

But much as it contrasted with the monastic arrangements of the day, it was the fruit and the flower of all the earlier monastic movements that themselves began with the desire to live Christianity with, as Ratzinger has said, “a discipleship with no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts.’” No mere “nature worship” or even a social philosophy, Francis’s vision was that of a world captured by Christ, giving thanks for mere existence and also the opportunity to live as Christ, following the sermons of both of those mountains in Christ’s life. And the effects of that vision lived out by men and women in brown robes tied with ropes were remarkable. As Chesterton puts it, “In a better sense than the antithesis commonly conveys, it is true to say that what St. Benedict had stored St. Francis scattered; but in the world of spiritual things what had been stored into the barns like grain was scattered over the world as seed.”

Never content with one image when two will do, Chesterton also describes Francis’s work as “of the nature of an earthquake or a volcano, an explosion that drove outwards with dynamic energy the forces stored up by ten centuries in the monastic fortress or arsenal and scattered all its riches recklessly to the ends of the earth.”

Of course, whenever there is an explosion, there is the possibility of damage. Chesterton’s last chapter, on “The Testament of Francis,” fully admits that later Franciscans were tempted toward a narrowed and uncatholic version of what Francis had begun. That temptation to follow Francis’s example to the letter in the details of his own discipleship but miss the spirit of following what Christ is demanding that I do led to the heretical desire “to abolish not only private property but property.” For if Francis was opposed to having it, we all should be. So too a desire to forego book learning. If Francis, whom Chesterton calls “the first Italian poet,” seems ignorant of Virgil, “do we really desire that Dante should never have heard of Virgil?” So too celibate chastity. That some are called to it does not mean all are. Today, of course, it is too easy to find the Franciscans who have gone in the opposite direction, embracing nature without the supernatural vision only to end up in the promotion of the unnatural.

Francis, Chesterton believes, may well have been “the only Franciscan.” Certainly, we can say that “however wild and romantic his gyrations might appear to many,” he “hung on to reason by one invisible and indestructible hair.” He was “sane.” Healthy in mind and spirit, he denied himself and his followers what he knew was good so that he might never fail to give thanks for the very fact of himself, never confuse his love of the Giver and the gifts. And yet out of his asceticism “came a whole awakening of the world and a dawn in which all shapes and colours could be seen anew.”

And here we return to that first Nativity scene. Chesterton recounts the tale, saying that it included “kings and angels in the stiff and gay medieval garments and the golden wigs that stood for haloes.” The babe in the manger was “a wooden doll or bambino, and it was said that he embraced it and that the image came to life in his arms.” This tale is a kind of synechdoche of Francis’s effect on a whole medieval world. Francis was himself a kind of “embodied spirit,” a second Christ who did not compete with the first. Instead, he was the “wandering fire” who shed light on Christ’s presence among us and allowed others to light their own “torches and tapers” of faith.

It’s not just the Nativity scene for which we give thanks. Francis’s grammar of gratitude, which had become second nature to him through constant conversation with Jesus himself, is the kind of thing that allows the Word to become flesh again and again in the lives of believers at the altar, in Scripture, at the creche, and in the company of all God’s creatures—ox, ass, and most particularly those marked with his image.