The long shadow cast by Cluny

Book reconstructs the history of a great and ancient abbey

CLUNY: IN SEARCH OF GOD'S LOST EMPIRE By Edwin Mullins

BlueBridge, 245 pages, $24.95

Hardly anything survives now of the once mighty Benedictine abbey of Cluny, which stood in Burgundy, France, for nearly 900 years. The last incarnation of the abbey church, a massive Romanesque building known by modern historians as "Cluny HI," took more than 40 years to build, was dedicated in 1130 and was the largest Christian church in the world until St. Peter's Basilica was built in Rome in the 16th century. Pope Urban II (1042-99), once a monk there, wrote of Cluny that it "shines as another sun over the earth."

In Cluny's glory days, its capable abbots influenced popes and exercised diplomacy with kings from Spain to England. The abbey, at least in its beginnings, was also a driving force for monastic reform. But by 1795, the church was entirely abandoned. In the ensuing years the church and abbey buildings were sold off stone by stone until the government finally granted protected status to what was left in 1823.

Journalist and filmmaker Edwin Mullins opens his book with a chapter called "The Long Shadow of the Past," in which he walks visitors through the modern town and points out bits of the abbey that remain. Cluny's most famous ruin--it's the standard picture in most guidebooks featuring the ancient abbey --is a 150-foot octagonal tower, the southern arm of one of the two transepts of the 12th-century church. Outside of the church remains, writes Mr. Mullins, "most of the old abbey is either lost altogether or buried beneath the modern town, though here and there a pillar or a fragment of carving throws up a reminder of what used to be here."

Cluny began either in 909 or 910 when Duke William of Aquitaine gave his favorite hunting lodge and the surrounding land to his friend Berno, a monk of noble birth. Duke William carefully drew up a charter for the proposed monastery. The foundation charter, one of the "seminal documents in church history," stipulated that Cluny would not fall under the jurisdiction of any local ecclesiastical or secular authorities, but was to be accountable only to Rome.

This was vital to the monastery's freedom of governance. When St. Benedict wrote his rule for monks in the sixth century, he made it clear that monasteries should be self-sufficient, led by an abbot who was elected by his own community. By the early 10th century, though, monasteries were frequently subject to the control of local landowners who would appoint abbots over communities in their area. Cluny's charter allowed the monks to follow the Rule of Benedict without this sort of interference. By the early 11th century, the abbey was the hub of a huge Cluniac federation of monasteries that were all ultimately under the authority of the abbot of Cluny.

Abbots of Cluny were remarkable men. The fifth and sixth abbots spanned the entire 11th century: Odilo (994-1048), now a saint, and Hugh (1049-1109), who began the huge church of Cluny III and was godfather to German emperor Henry IV. By the end of Hugh's reign, the monastery had become fabulously wealthy.

However, by this time the monks at Cluny were spending so much time in an endless round of prayers and Masses far more than the eight-times-a-day prayers Benedict prescribes--that there was no time left to do manual labor, also specified by the Rule of Benedict. What once was a reform was now in need of reform. Mr. Mullins spends the later chapters focusing on the last great abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable (circa 1022-1156), a tolerant, peaceful man who, in a time of Crusade. preferred to try to reason with Muslims rather than fight them.

By the end of Peter's abbacy, Cluny had more than 450 monks, but over the following centuries the community continued to decline. The French king took over the monks' right to elect their abbot and rulers appointed abbots as they saw fit--often men who never took monastic vows and hardly visited Cluny at all.

In 1790, the French National Assembly ordered that all religious communities be suppressed. Of the 41 monks who were left at Cluny, writes Mr. Mullins, "six were guillotined, two continued a monastic life elsewhere, and the rest returned to a secular life." After local authorities permitted the building to be put up for sale, three wealthy speculators bought the lot and basically turned it into a stone quarry in spite of an outcry from locals and people as far away as Paris who wished to save the beautiful buildings.

Mr. Mullins, a former art correspondent for England's Sunday Telegraph and Daily Telegraph, seems to be most at home when discussing the monastery's aesthetic contributions. There are some lovely, lyrical passages in an early chapter called "A White Mantle of Churches, "in which he traces Cluny's architectural style in some surviving churches in the countryside of east central France.