The tales of the troubadors inspired, among others, the young Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) with dreams of knightly service. He was to translate these dreams after the year 1205 into a new kind of religious order - a mendicant order sworn to the service not of Queen Guinevere, or Queen Eleanor, but of Lady Poverty.

Christopher Dawson, in Medieval Essays, writes of St Francis: 'The ideals of his fraternity were founded on those of romantic chivalry rather than those of Benedictine monasticism. It was to be an order of spiritual knighthood, dedicated to the service of the Cross and the love of Lady Poverty. The Friars were his 'Brethren of the Round Table', 'jongleurs of God', and they were to set forth like Knight Adventurers on the path of God, performing deeds of spiritual prowess, shrinking from no hardship or danger and finding their reward in the service of love. Thus the courtly ideals of courtesy, joy, generosity and romantic love found a new religious application of which the life of St Francis himself was the perfect manifestation...' .

An interesting case could be made for tracing the Renaissance and the civilization that followed it to the inspiration provided by St Francis of Assisi.  Dante, Leonardo and Columbus were all Franciscans. This remarkable saint was a living paradox, as Chesterton brings out in his little biography. Francis was an ascetic who loved the world of nature, and by his asceticism - his life of voluntary penance - he somehow managed to purge the ancient paganism and made possible a new and innocent interest in the order of creation, which was subsequently reflected by his followers both in art and in science. But there is also a much more conscious spirtuality of human and divine suffering. After St Francis (the first known stigmatic in Christian history), the Crucifix in Western art begins to bleed. First Giotto (another Franciscan), and then the other great painters of Italy, begin to emphasize not the iconic tableau but the human drama of Christ and the saints, and to celebrate these are frescoes and altarpieces.

The trouble with the new 'Franciscan' attentiveness to nature is that innocence is not transmissible. Each person has to achieve purity for himself: it is not an achievement that can be passed on from one to another. Those who followed Francis, who walked the path he had cleared for them, were not all saints. The 'worst' is ever the corruption of the 'best', and the gifts of grace are a sword that impales those who prove unworthy. As St Paul taught, it was the gift of the Law that had created sin. In this way, the possibilities opened up by Franciscanism led both to great nobility of soul and to the extremes of decadence. Both tendencies are clearly visible in the Italian Renaissance. From Donatello to Michaelangelo you see a rediscovery of pagan classicism, but also a conscious attempt to transcend the classical, both in technical expertise and in naturalism. There is something splendid, but at the same time unwholesome, about the new obsession with anatomical detail (which shades into eroticism), and also with the artists' self- confidence in their own genius (which shades into megalomania). The same story is repeated in architecture and in music. In the sciences, too, the ancients were soon to be transcended in a deliberate attempt to wrest the secrets of nature from her, with the help of the same mathematical techniques then being used to plan buildings and the perspective drawings. In fact, it is not hard to see the same mentality present in science as in the visual arts, as the emphasis shifted from the spiritual principles revealed in matter to its outward appearance and mechanical operation - from final causes to efficient causes.

It was in Oxford, with Franciscans such as Robert Grosseteste, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, and the 'spiritual Franciscans' such as Roger Bacon, that the mentality emerged that was truly to define the modern world. This came about in the period of intellectual turbulence following the rediscovery of Aristotle and his Arabic commentators (such as Averroes) via the new school of translators in Toledo. Working mainly in the University of Paris, and following the lead of his teacher Albertus Magnus, St Thomas Aquinas had succeeded, in a masterly way, in integrating the legacy of Plato with the new material from Aristotle - for example, defending free will against the unbalanced Averroism of such men as Siger of Brabant. Unfortunately, the Archbishop of Paris felt it necessary to wade into the argument with a stronger and much cruder condemnation of the new Aristotelian influences. This cast a temporary shadow even over Aquinas's solution. In the brief period between the Condemnations of 1277 and the canonization of Aquinas in 1323 the damage had been done. Franciscan scholars who had already begun to oppose the new Greek and Arabic influence (in the name of the Platonic tradition that had come partly through Augustine) were strengthened in their resolve. Whereas Aquinas had given primacy to the pure intellect over the will and heart, the Franciscans reversed this priority, and some of them developed an exaggerated anti- intellectualism that led them to deny the universal principles on which both the Aristotelian and the Platonic conception of philosophy had depended. For these 'modern' thinkers - the Nominalists - nothing could be real except individual things, to each of which we attach a conventional label or nomen such as 'man' or 'dog', 'wise' or 'faithful'.

The development of science during the Renaissance period was, therefore, made possible in Europe partly by the new climate of thought created by Franciscanism, first in its attention to nature, and then in its sense of the world's radical dependence on God. But another ingredient was necessary, and that was the application of mathematics to the investigation of nature. Modern science owes as much to the sorcerers and alchemists of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries as it does to the theologians and philosophers, for it was they who had kept alive the mathematical speculation of the Pythagorean tradition, which became an indispensable tool in the hands of the new empiricists, during the coming centuries. The Renaissance Platonist, Pico della Mirandola, spoke for many when he expressed his view that, 'By numbers a way is had to the searching out and understanding of everything able to be known.' By applying mathematics to the design and analysis of his experiments, a scientist could probe beneath the surface of reality, and unlock the secrets of nature's power. This was what the magicians had always craved, and now at last science began to deliver the goods. As soon as it did, it became the dominant intellectual and cultural force on the planet. The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said that when science becomes far enough advanced it is always indistinguishable from magic. And the more power it gives, the more convincing it appears: the ultimate proof of a scientific theory is that it works.

Roger Bacon (1214-94)

'This Oxford Franciscan attacked both the superstitions of the masses and the hostiity towards science of the Paris schoolmen. He called for the empirical investigation of nature and urged men to experiment, although he himself was unable to achieve very much in this field.... Bacon had his own vision of the technical world of the future: ships without oarsmen, submarines, "automobiles", aeroplanes, small magical gadgets for releasing oneself from prison, magical fetters (for use on other people), and devices for walking on water.'

Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World

If taken too far, the idea of the world's dependence on God's will, deprived of the intelligibility that comes from universal ideas, might have led to the idea of an arbitrary and irrational cosmos. Far from being conducive to the development of science, this would have nipped it in the bud. (It certainly introduced into European tradition a persistent worry about how cause could be related to effect.) But the dangers of irrationalism were counterbalanced by the belief that God has ordered things mathematically. With the application of mathematics, 'universals' had in fact returned through the back door - now they were safely separated from theology. (It has been suggested that the mathematicization of nature appealed not only to the magicians but to the rising merchant classes, for whom counting and measuring was in any case a way of life.) There is, however, yet a third condition for the birth of modern science, and once again we can link it to the nature of Christianity. Without the drive to understand, to 'wrest' nature's secrets from her, there would have been no great intellectual impetus towards the new discoveries of Galileo, Kepler and Newton. The motivation came from the same source as the drive to recapture the Holy Land and convert the Muslims: it was the 'holy impatience' (or perhaps unholy impatience) of Christendom. Christianity had introduced the idea that God had entered the world and given history a purpose and a direction: and not only a direction, but an imminent end. The drive to understand the world came from the drive to convert the world, in readiness for the Second Coming of Christ. Bacon, says Heer 'considered it better to confound unbelievers by wisdom and true learning than to conquer them in wars conducted by pugnacious illiterates whose successes could only be ephemeral. Military Crusades had failed and must be replaced by crusades of learning, to win over minds and souls.' The same energy, when deprived of a religious object by secularization, was turned to the physical conquest and mastery of the planet in the age of the great colonial powers.