Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

and then brought water, and washed and dried his feet. Only incidentally, however, was this done as a personal service to a filth-encrusted lunatic: for the truest benefit was to the souls of the humbled monks themselves.

Yet even that was not the highest purpose of the ritual. Back in the early years of the abbey’s existence, St Odo had laid down a potent marker of all his hopes for the infant monastery, by insisting that visitors’ shoes as well as their feet should be washed. Excessive? There were some monks at the time who had grumbled that it was. And yet how muddied by a lack of ambition, to say nothing of worldly pride, all such moaning had been—for Cluny, as Odo had trusted, was fated to be no ordinary monastery. Unprotected by the swords and spears of mortal warriors it may have been – and yet impressions of the abbey as a mighty citadel, girt around by fearsome ramparts, were not so wide of the mark.

Of the delicate and aristocratic Odilo it was said that he had the look, not of a duke, but of a prince of the archangels – which was to cast the monastery he headed as a radiant bridgehead of heaven. No wonder, then, that demons were widely believed to lie encamped all around its outer walls, placing it under a perpetual siege, driven by ‘the malice that the Devil has always harboured against Cluny’; but fated, so long as the abbey’s sanctity held firm, never to make a breach. No wonder either that the brethren who served as its gatekeepers should have required all who entered it to be cleansed – yes, and to have their shoes washed too. Filth was precisely what enabled demons to flourish. At Fleury, for instance, in a typically fiendish display of cunning, devils had made an attempt to steal through the sewers that led up to the brothers’ lavatories; and only the monastery’s patron saint, standing invisible guard over the urinals, had served to foil their plot. At Cluny likewise, the watch kept by the monks had to be tireless and unblinking. No hint of pollution could be permitted to infect the sacred space. The infernal and the earthly: both had to be kept at bay. To pass into Cluny was indeed to pass into a realm of angels.

But what was the abbey’s secret, what the source of its fearsome sanctity? Even a visitor as lunatic as the wild man of Nantua, taking his first tremulous steps inside the monastery, would surely have found himself conscious within seconds of something strange. To any refugee from chaos, Cluny could offer that rarest and most precious of all balms: order. It was to be found in the regular spacing of rich tapestries along the walls and of sumptuous carpets along the floors, as dazzling as they were beautiful, serving to soften every footfall, and to proclaim the praises of God. Even to a visiting dignitary, fittings such as these would have appeared rare luxuries – but to a beggarman such as the deserter from Nantua they would have appeared a glimpse of paradise. Which, in a sense, they were: for the monks of Cluny, in their own estimation at any rate, were the nearest to heaven of mortals anywhere. To the great bishops of the kingdom, long accustomed to look down upon abbots such as Odilo, this was a display of arrogance that verged almost on the blasphemous; but Odilo himself and the brethren he commanded were unperturbed. They knew that the end days were drawing near. At such a moment of excruciating peril, with the future of all humanity hanging in the balance, what else should they be doing but securing on earth an impregnable outpost of the City of God?

Earlier generations of monks, following the prescriptions of their rule, had devoted themselves to manual labour, so as to display humility, and to scholarship, so as to train their souls; but the monks of Cluny had little time for either activity. Instead, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, they sang the praises of the Lord: for this, in heaven, was what the choirs of angels did. Indeed, on one occasion, it was claimed, a monk had ended up so lost in his devotions that he had actually begun to levitate. Prayers and hymns, anthems and responses: the chanting never stopped. Odo had required his brethren to recite one hundred and thirty-eight psalms a day: more than three times what had traditionally been expected of a monk. Barely a minute of a Cluniac’s life went by, in short, but it was governed by ritual, as unwearying as it was implacable. Hence, for its admirers, the monastery’s unprecedented nimbus of holiness: ‘for so reverently are the masses performed there,’ as Rudolf Glaber put it, ‘so piously and worthily, that you would think them the work, not of men, but of angels indeed’.’

Here, then, was the well-spring of Cluny’s power: mysterious, tutelary, literally supernatural. Among those who reverenced it, of course, were the monks of Nantua, who had dutifully sent the deserter found wandering in the woods to be healed at the more celebrated monastery; nor was their faith betrayed. Brought before Odilo, the wild man was first permitted to listen to the brethren of the abbey as they chanted their psalms, and then sprinkled with holy water. His sanity was restored. Wonders such as this were widely reported – and the cause of much admiration. Even a living saint such as Romuald – no slouch himself when it came to performing miracles – was impressed by Cluny’s reputation. It was, the hermit pronounced, the ‘flower’ of monasteries: a pattern for all the world. If such was the view from as far afield as Italy, then the perspective of those who lived directly in Cluny’s shadow was, unsurprisingly, touched even more directly by awe.

Which was just as well – for the legions of Satan were not the only adversaries