A Saintly Job (But Someone’s Got to do it…)

How the monasteries took on the lucrative job of tempering God’s wrath – paid to pray for all, from peasants and paupers to the lords in the castle – which gave them the wealth to plant grape vines and create the most beatific of all drinks. Bart Van Loo charts the church’s commanding influence in shaping the burgundies we know today.

‘A White Cloak of Churches’

Not far from virgin forests, where rabbits, martens, wild boars, lynxes and bears roamed free (if they hadn’t already been slaughtered during the tedious hunting parties organized by local potentates), lay the idyllic village of Cluny, which, aside from its hunting lodge, wooden chapel and a few shabby vineyards, had nothing to recommend it. This Burgundian hamlet, with its paradisiacal sweetness, was the ideal place to accommodate a new monastery. The hunters would have to satisfy their cravings elsewhere. The yelping of the hounds was replaced by the praying of monks. The new Benedictine abbey was consecrated on 11th September 910 as an independent institution. By the middle of the 11th century, it had grown into the centre of a religious network that numbered 1,500 monasteries, one of first multinationals in history.

Ora et labora. Pray and work. Cluny bent the age-old Rule of Saint Benedict to its purposes. The accent shifted to the first aspect of the Rule, and not slightly but overwhelmingly. The monks may have had a symbolic encounter with a rake or a shovel, but it was serfs and tenant farmers who did most of the work. When it came to prayer and singing, however, they performed with gusto. As the Burgundian monk and chronicler Raoul Glaber wrote: ‘I myself am witness that in this monastery it is a custom... that Masses be celebrated constantly from the earliest hour of the day until the hour assigned for rest.’ At the height of their spiritual productivity, the brothers (who, thank God, could relieve each other owing to their sheer numbers) sang their way through 138 psalms in a single day, while Saint Benedict was quite happy if the monks could get through 150 a week. ‘…and they go about it with so much dignity and piety and veneration’, Glaber continued, ‘that one would think they were angels rather than men.’

The monks of Cluny made it a point of honour to attend to the spiritual welfare of the dead. The order laid the basis for the celebration of All Souls’ Day on November 2nd. An ever-expanding cemetery grew up around the monastery, an undertaking as lucrative as it was pious. To pray for the salvation of all mortals, living and dead, the monastic community, with hundreds of daughter houses throughout Europe, released a boundless stream of prayers to the Heavenly Father. Otherwise, an impressive silence reigned in the monastery, and monks were forced to communicate in sometimes unfathomable sign language. The sign for a woman was the same as that for a trout: an almost sensual stroking of the forehead with the index finger from one eyebrow to the other.

The liturgical aesthetic was echoed in the increasingly beautiful design of Cluny’s own abbey church. Three buildings followed each other in rapid succession, and the third remained the largest church in Europe until the construction of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Artistic creativity and monastic religious expression went hand in hand, and thanks to the international network of daughter houses and pilgrim churches in 11th-century Burgundy, these cultural forms spread across the continent. Europe embraced Romanesque architecture with enthusiasm. Older church buildings, the ceilings and roofs of which were usually made of wood and easily caught fire, made way for larger places of worship erected with massive stone walls and fitted with small windows. The pillars were connected by means of stone arches and ribbed vaults, thus allowing for larger interior spaces in which separate chapels could also be built – the success of the monastic life required more and more altars. For the first time, the exteriors of the churches were also ornamented, giving the facade in particular a most imposing vitality. As Glaber wrote: ‘It looked as though the very world was shaking itself to take off its old age and to reclothe itself in all areas in a white cloak of churches.’

The power of Hugo

It was mainly under the guidance of Abbot Hugo, who was elected in 1049 and led the order for 60 years, that Cluny made a name for itself and became known even in the far reaches of Portugal, Scotland and Italy. Hugo’s intelligence and authority reflected on the entire monastic community. After King Philip

I of France was excommunicated for adultery in the autumn of his years, he began to worry about his spiritual welfare and requested permission to enter the monastery. His only condition was that he be allowed to keep his crown. But Hugo was adamant: without distancing himself from worldly glory there would be no room for his royal cousin at Cluny. When William the Conqueror asked him for monks to staff his English monasteries, the abbot refused despite the handsome remuneration, and he did so because he feared his brothers would not be able to regulate their way of life in the same spirit of independence. It would easily take as long to pray a couple of rosaries as it would to list all of Hugo’s international achievements. The illustrious abbot wore out several popes in his long career, and he always maintained a direct line with Rome. He accompanied Bruno Egisheim, who had spent a night at Cluny as a pilgrim on his journey to the Vatican, and was present when Bruno donned the tiara for the first time as Leo IX. Pope Urban II was also steeped in the spirit of Cluny, and when he called for the First Crusade on November 18th 1095 during the Council of Clermont with the words ‘Deo to volt!’ (God wills it), Hugo of Cluny stood approvingly at his side. Finally, Pope Paschal II a former brother of the mother house, also aligned his policy with the great abbot’s favourite themes. Hugo’s network supplied much-needed support for a thorough reformation of the church. More than ever, celibacy for clerics a Christian marriage for the laity became two fundamental precepts. He also banned the sale of ecclesiastical offices, and lay-people were not allowed to interfere in religious affairs. The Peace of God movement, which first emerged in southern countries, only reached full bloom when Cluny agreed to support it. Soon, lords of the castle and knights from the northern Rhône valley, Burgundy the Franche-Comté and even from the regions north of Paris where the bloody tradition of the faihitha had never gone out of fashion – agreed to comply with the imposed rules for peace. The Holy See was firmly grounded in the Ecclesia Cluniacensis. In fact, over the course of the 11th century the Catholic Church was being governed from Burgundy as much as it was from Rome. But that didn’t stop the great Hugo from searching for his bed of straw every night to humbly sleep among his monks.

Bernard and the beatific harvest…

From 1100 on, the worldly success of the Benedictine order provoked growing criticism. Shouldn’t the monks stick to their own affairs within the walls of their monasteries and leave the world to its own devices? Wasn’t that how the Cluniac monks got started in the first place? Wasn’t it the king’s job to guarantee peace in his kingdom? Cluny’s affluence and splendour also came under fire. Shouldn’t modesty be a Catholic virtue? Could it be that the order had become far too rich?

The strongest opposition came from Burgundy itself. In Cîteaux, scarcely a hundred kilometres from Cluny, an abbey with even stricter observance was consecrated in 1098. Driven by Bernard of Clairvaux, a Burgundian born and bred, the Cistercian order would eventually unite more than 700 daughter houses within its fold. At a time when money and corruption were on the rise in church circles, the ascetic example of Cîteaux exerted ever greater fascination. Soon the Catholic world found that it could follow two opposing paths, two ways that led from and to Burgundy: a religiosity moved by beauty that was nourished, by liturgical ceremony and dazzling churches, and a mystical passion that relied on the joys of poverty and asceticism, Cluny as opposed to Cîteaux, Hugo versus Bernard. More than ever before, Burgundy of the 12th century had become the beating heart of the Respublica Christiana

Bernard, unlike the followers of the great Hugo, honoured not only the ora but also the labora of Benedict’s Rule. There were no serfs as there were in Cluny; the Cistercian brothers themselves put their hands to the plough. There was something particularly Burgundian about this physical doggedness, however. In 1110 the monks planted the first grape vines on the stony subsoil of a nearby slope, and they did their utmost to create as beatific a drink as possible. Was there a more perfect counterpart to spiritual labour than to harvest the blood of Christ by the sweat of one’s brow? The Cistercians continued to plant their vines until thousands of acres were put into service. Gradually they improved their production methods, which had made little progress since the arrival of the Romans. It was a labour-intensive enterprise, but wasn’t time something that the monks had in abundance?

They built a stone enclosure that served to defend their grape vines from the far too aggressive pigs, boars and deer. It also protected the early vines from the wind, and they thrived from the stored heat that the stones gave off at night. In 1212 this Clausum de Vougeot – the walled grove of Vougeot – was reported in a document, named after the adjoining village. And perhaps the abstinence-loving Saint Bernard once celebrated Mass with wine that would one day become the celebrated grand crus of Burgundy. ‘Take this, all of you, and drink from it: for this clos-de-vougeot is my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.’

The Meursault and Clos de Tart wines, renowned for both their name and their finish, also came to full maturity thanks to the daughter houses of Cîteaux. The temptations of alcohol gave rise to the requisite moral dilemmas, and one of the monks once asked Bernard how the Rule of Saint Benedict could be reconciled with the love for Bacchus. ‘By not drinking more than one hemina a day’ was the answer given by the spiritual leader. This ancient Roman measurement was the equivalent of 0.27 litres, one small carafe to get you through the day. In short, enough to modestly quench your thirst but not enough to cause you to nod off during the intoning of the psalms. And as an extra test of abstinence, the monks slept above the wine cellar at night. Despite the severity of Bernard, who refused the position of archbishop when it was offered him in order to stay on as abbot, the order of Cîteaux ended up following the same path as Cluny and became one of the wealthiest religious organizations in Europe. Their inspiring power shrank as their treasuries filled and their administrative ambitions grew. The affluent Cistercians were a contradiction in terms. Few of their abbots were inclined to reject the bishop’s mitre, and they built magnificent Gothic cathedrals that were a far cry from the sober, modest edifices their order had once so fervently promoted.

Extract from The Burgundians – A History of 1111 Years and One Day, Bart Van Loo; Head of Zeus (London) 2021. Reproduced with kind permission of the publishers.

A Saintly Job (But Someone’s Got to do it...)

Matt Kramer (1990)