Darkness to Dawn: Cluny and the Rescue of Christendom

Part 3 in our exploration of the early medieval Catholic "renaissance"

A little green sprout in a hundred years of winter

The remains of the medieval abbey of Cluny today - only a tower and a fragment of the wall of a transept of the great church.

Last week, in part II of this series, “Otto the Great Turns the Tide,” we delved into the extraordinary reign of Otto the Great, the Frankish warlord whose prowess on the battlefield was matched by his administrative talents - a rare combination in any age. His sweeping imperial reforms - together with a firm hand on the period’s incredibly wayward papacy - were to lay the groundwork for the Church’s recovery from its most corrupt and chaotic era, the Saeculum Obscurum - that we explored here: “That other time the Church hit rock bottom: the ‘Saeculum Obscurum’”.

Otto’s vision for a unified Christian empire brought a measure of stability to a fragmented Europe. Yet, even as his political and ecclesiastical reforms took hold, the deeper spiritual renewal that the Church desperately needed was already being prepared.

In the forests and pasturelands of the Burgundian countryside, a small, isolated - and politically radical - experiment would grow into a revolutionary movement reshaping monasticism and the Church.

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In today’s post for paid subscribers - and warm greetings to the new subscribers who signed up over the Christmas holidays - we’re getting back to the story of how the Church and Christian western Europe was dragged away from the precipice of disaster in the 9th and 10th centuries, to blossom into the great civilisation of Western Christendom that we call the “Middle Ages”¹.

We find many parallels in that period with our own time of fear and chaos, both in the Church and the world, and I hope the story will both uplift minds and hearts, and maybe give some encouragement to the kind of people who are working to bring us out of our own dark age.

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At the Sacred Images Project we talk about Christian life, thought, history and culture through the lens of the first 1200 years of sacred art. The publication is supported by subscriptions, so apart from plugging my shop, there is no advertising or pop-ups. It’s my full time job, but it’s still not bringing a full time income, so I can’t yet provide all the things I want to and am planning for.

You can subscribe for free to get one and a half posts a week.

For $9/month you also get the second half of the third post, plus a weekly paywalled in-depth article on our great sacred patrimony. There are also occasional extras like downloadable exclusive high resolution printable images, ebooks, mini-courses, videos and eventually podcasts.

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At the Met, I found this gorgeous painting by Bartolo di Fredi, a successor (after the Black Death) to the great Sienese masters Duccio di Buoninsegna and Simone Martini, and have created a standing masonite panel print from it.

I think it would make an elegant addition to a prayer corner or mantel.

You can order one here:

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