Nunraw Life = Cistercian Vocation
Wednesday, 26 August 2015
Wednesday Chapter Talk by Br. Barry
Chapter Talk
Wednesday Chapter talk attached.
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| The Abbey of Cluny (South Burgundy), Citeaux near Dijon |
INTRODUCTION
CLUNY.
The Cistercians came into the world fighting. Their fierce
criticism of the monks of Cluny and the Cluniac Order was such that they were
accused of slander.
The arguments had all the heat of a ‘local derby’ as Citeaux is
only fifty miles from Cluny.
Who were these horrible Cluniacs who so provoked the ire of St.
Bernard and co.?
ORIGINS.
The monastery of Cluny was founded in the year 909 at the time
of the break up of the great Carolingian Empire. Its founder was Duke William
of Aquitaine. He gave his favourite hunting lodge to the monk Berno for the
purpose. Berno was from a wealthy family of Burgundy who had originally built
his own monastery and had lived an exemplary life there.
It has been said that the early history of Cluny is the history
of its abbots. Incredibly, there were only three abbots over a one hundred and
fifty year period, from the mid tenth century to the beginning of the twelfth.
How’s that for stability!
It is known that large numbers of feudal lords ended their days
as monks of Cluny so that one historian writes ‘Cluny’s history is that of a
remarkable alliance with the nobility.’
HORARIUM.
The horarium of Cluniac monasteries was dominated by the
liturgy. From the time of Abbot Ado, the second abbot of Cluny, in the first
half of the tenth century, the observance entailed the daily recitation of 138
out of the 150 psalms.
This makes some of the criticism of their monastic life hard to
understand when we consider that St. Benedict describes as ‘lukewarm’ those
monks who took a whole week to cover the psalter.
The poor Cluniacs, damned if they do and damned if they don’t:
attacked for not keeping to the Rule in such matters as food and clothing; and
attacked again for not being guilty of lukewarmness in reciting the psalm!
St. Odo gave his reasons for this emphasis on the liturgy. He
applied the words of the pagan Latin poet Virgil to the recitation of the
psalms, ‘uttering no human sounds’. The psalms are composed by the Spirit of
God.
Of the five ‘Holy Abbots of Cluny’ whose memorial we keep on the
11th May, St. Odo is in many ways the most attractive. His writings
anticipate many of the themes which St. Bernard was to become associated with:
devotion to the humanity of Christ, veneration of Mary, the mystical marriage
of the soul to God, the importance of interior prayer.
He has also been described as a ‘precursor of St. Francis of
Assisi: ‘he set before his monks the example of spiritual joy’; in the stories
associated with him, there is even a tame wolf to match St. Francis’ Wolf of
Gubbio’.
The Cluniac liturgy was not of course solely a matter of
chanting the psalms. It had a reputation for ever-lengthening nocturnal lessons
to be read at Vigils. Observance of Saint’s days and anniversaries multiplied.
An increasingly large community meant more and more time in processions, the
giving of the sign of peace and the distribution of communion.
In the year 998, Abbot Odilo instituted the solemn commemoration
of the dead of the Order which was the origin of All Souls Day. Prayer for the
dead was a characteristic of the Cluniac observance. St. Anselm, thinking about
entering the Cluny decided against it because he feared that he would have
little or no time for study.
ABBEY CHURCH.
In keeping with this focus on the liturgy, Abbot Hugh the Great
planned the building of a massive church. Work began in 1088 and was funded by
the royalty of several countries. It was to be the biggest church in
Christendom and remained so until St. Peter’s in Rome was rebuilt in the 16th
century. No wonder Cluny has been called ‘the second centre of Christendom’.
ECONOMY.
The economy of Cluny was an integral part of the feudal system
of the time. However, the Cluniacs did not participate in the clearing of
forests and draining of marshlands which were increasing in the 11th
century. These activities gathered pace in 12th century Europe under
the influence of the Cistercians. That fact is an interesting illustration of
the contrasting spirits of the two Orders: the one, established, conservative,
steady; the other, innovative, pioneering, radical.
LITERATURE.
One area in which the Cistercians definitely got one up on the
Cluniacs was the body of sermons and writings which the Cistercian Fathers
bequeathed to the Church. Cluny produced nothing comparable. However, there is
a piece of literature from Cluny which we are all familiar with.
‘Jerusalem the golden with milk and honey blest,
Beneath thy contemplation sink heart and soul oppressed’.
This hymn is a translation of a few verses of Bernard of Cluny’s
work entitled ‘On Contempt of the World’ composed around 1140. A poem, 3000
verses long, it is a satire or lament on the ills of church and society of his
day.
It has been described as ‘a great cry of pain wrung from a
deeply religious soul’ and that ‘Bernard cannot find word strong enough to
convey his prophetic rage at the moral apostasy of his generation’. But the
underlying theme is the traditional monastic one of the transitory nature of
material pleasures and the permanency of spiritual joys.
CONCLUSION.
The Cluniacs kept calm in the face of Cistercian criticism,
responding reasonably and with dignity. The monastic historian Jean Leclerq
says of Peter the Venerable, the last great Abbot of Cluny, he maintained a
tone of absolute serenity’. The Cluniacs were confident of the worth of their
observance.
In 1144 there were 460 monks at Cluny. The Abbey and the Order
continued in existence until the French Revolution.
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| The Abbey of Cluny (South Burgundy) |
CLUNAICS AND CISTERCIANS
It was in Burgundy (Burgogne), which in pre-nation state Europe was
outside the effective jurisdiction of the then King of France (who initially
only held sway over the small area of the Île de France around Paris), the
Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, that the heavyweight monastic reform
movements emerged. The first was the Abbey of Cluny which over
the first two hundred years of its life from 910 built up a network of around
1,000 Clunaic Priories across Europe and wielded enormous temporal and
spiritual power. The Abbey of Bec in Normandy became a leading European
centre of learning from the mid 1000s, but did not build an empire of
daughter establishments like Cluny.
The second major reform movement was the Cistercian Order (the
"White Monks" from their habits of coarse bleached wool,
contrasting with Benedictine black), which was established at Citeaux in
Burgundy (Latin Cistercium) in 1098 by Benedictines who had had enough of the
wealth and corruption that had overtaken the Benedictines and by then had
also spread to the supposedly reformed Cluny. The Cistercians
were the first order to be founded with a constitution ("The Charter of
Love" drawn up by English Saxon nobleman, monk, third Abbot of Citeaux
and Saint, Stephen (Fr: Etienne) Harding (c1060 - 1133)), which inter alia
laid down that their abbeys were to be sited in isolation - away from towns
and villages and "far from the concourse of men" - and also set out
the first international governance mechanisms known to any western
organization - who had what power and how were they appointed, how were
standards set and maintained, etc.
However, it was the energy, inspiration and writings of St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153)
which propelled the Cistercians from being a promising idea into a major
Pan-European Abbey Movement, during an extraordinary period of expansion
which resulted in the existence of 530 Cistercian abbeys by the end of the
eleven hundreds, just one hundred years after the order's foundation.
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MONKS AND MERMAIDS (A Benedictine
Blog)
http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/the-spiritual-path-of-st-seraphim-what.html This blog
is written by a monk and is about monasteries and the spiritual life, both
Catholic and Orthodox.
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| Citeaux trio founders |
