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.