"The Vision of a Natural World Made New"

it is not true to represent St. Francis as a mere
romantic forerunner of the Renaissance and a revival of natural
pleasures for their own sake. The whole point of him was that the secret
of recovering the natural pleasures lay in regarding them in the light
of a supernatural pleasure. In other words, he repeated in his own
person that historic process noted in the introductory chapter; the
vigil of asceticism which ends in the vision of a natural world made
new. 

G K Chesterton, from St. Francis of Assisi