St Thomas Aquinas - Chesterton, G. K.

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Résumé :
The scion of a noble Italian family, Tommaso of Aquino turned his back on privilege and - to the consternation of his family - took the strict vows of a Dominican friar. G. K. Chesterton's biography views the life of this saint through the glass of the historical and revolutionary changes he brought about as one of the most influential thinkers of his day. Chesterton explores the nature of the Gothic revolution and Aquinas' place in it, contrasting him with St Francis of Assisi - a near contemporary - and finding their differences 'complementary'. St. Dominic, Albertus Magnus and St. Bonaventure all figure in the tale, with Chesterton's famed wordplay and sense of fun giving a light touch to a work that has been described by Aquinas scholar Etienne Gilson as "...

Biographie:
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, (29 May 1874 - 14 June 1936), was an English writer, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, orator, lay theologian, biographer, and literary and art critic. Chesterton is often referred to as the prince of paradox.Time magazine has observed of his writing style: Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories-first carefully turning them inside out.
Chesterton is well known for his fictional priest-detective Father Brown,[5] and for his reasoned apologetics. Even some of those who disagree with him have recognised the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man.[4][6] Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an orthodox Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. George Bernard Shaw, his friendly enemy, said of him, He was a man of colossal genius.[4] Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin.
Chesterton was born in Campden Hill in Kensington, London, the son of Marie Louise, n?e Grosjean, and Edward Chesterton.[8][9] He was baptised at the age of one month into the Church of England,[10] though his family themselves were irregularly practising Unitarians.[11]According to his autobiography, as a young man Chesterton became fascinated with the occultand, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards.
Chesterton was educated at St Paul's School, then attended the Slade School of Art to become an illustrator. The Slade is a department of University College London, where Chesterton also took classes in literature, but did not complete a degree in either subject.
In September 1895 Chesterton began working for the London publisher Redway, where he remained for just over a year.[14] In October 1896 he moved to the publishing house T. Fisher Unwin,[14] where he remained until 1902. During this period he also undertook his first journalistic work, as a freelance art and literary critic. In 1902 the Daily News gave him a weekly opinion column, followed in 1905 by a weekly column in The Illustrated London News, for which he continued to write for the next thirty years.
Early on Chesterton showed a great interest in and talent for art. He had planned to become an artist, and his writing shows a vision that clothed abstract ideas in concrete and memorable images. Even his fiction contained carefully concealed parables. Father Brown is perpetually correcting the incorrect vision of the bewildered folks at the scene of the crime and wandering off at the end with the criminal to exercise his priestly role of recognition and repentance. For example, in the story The Flying Stars, Father Brown entreats the character Flambeau to give up his life of crime: There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don't fancy they will last in that trade. Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it. Many a man I've known started like you to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime.

Sommaire:
without comparison the best book ever written on St Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement."...