Authors Who Inspired Authors

A Beginning List of Authors and Books 
     that Inspired Authors who Inspire Me

Read by Day, Merton, O'Connor, & Percy
(According to Paul Elie's book The Life You Save May Be Your Own)

• Augustine
• Balzac
• Blake
• Agathe Christie
• Joseph Conrad
• DeQuincey
• Dickens
• Dostoevsky
• Dumas
• T.S. Eliot
• Galsworthy
• Gorky
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Victor Hugo
• William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience
• James Joyce
• Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ
• Kierkegaard
• Peter Kropotkin
• Jack London
• De Maupassant
• Frank Norris
• O'Neill
• The Papal Encyclicals
• The Psalms
• Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
• Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
• St. Teresa of Avila
• St. Therese of Lisieux
• Tolstoy

Troubadours and Lovers

Chesterton characterized St. Francis in this way:

He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour.  He was a Lover.  He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation.

In describing "the problem of St. Francis" he gives the clue to resolving that problem: "the clue to the asceticism and all the rest can best be found in the stories of lovers..."  All of St. Francis' seeming contradictions are "resolved in the simplicity of any noble love; only this was so noble a love that nine men out of ten have hardly even heard of it."

As Chesterton explains the purpose of his book, he advises:
"The reader cannot even begin to see the sense of a story that may well seem to him a very wild one, until he understands that to this great mystic his religion was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love-affair."  He also reveals his personal motivation: "...my only claim even to attempt such a task is that I myself have for so long been in various stages of such a condition..."

God bless you Mr. Chesterton!

Chesterton's Francis

I'm reading G. K. Chesterton's Saint Francis of Assisi (with an introduction by Joseph Pearce).  Here's an excerpt from Pearce's introduction:

The admiration that Chesterton felt towards St. Francis was inextricably bound up with his belief in the superiority of childlike innocence over all forms of cynicism.  St. Francis and his followers were called the Jongleurs de Dieu because of the innocence of their jollity and the jollity of their innocence.  'The jongleur was properly a joculator or jester; sometimes he was what we should call a juggler.'  It was this mystical synthesis of laughter and humility, a belief that playing and praying go hand in hand, which was the secret of the saint's success.  Ultimately, however, the laughter and the humility were rooted in gratitude because, as Chesterton discerned with characteristic and Franciscan sagacity: 'There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.'

I too believe childlike innocence is far superior to cynicism, that playing and praying go hand in hand, and that we can be grateful for all things, especially as we know all things come through Our Father's loving hands.