Cluny vs Citeaux: Two Medieval Reforms
Medieval monasticism renewed itself in waves, and no two waves are more instructive to compare than the reforms that issued from two Burgundian valleys barely a hundred miles apart. Cluny, founded in 909 or 910, gathered the scattered energies of Benedictine life into a single disciplined body and made the worship of God the most magnificent activity in Europe. Cîteaux, founded in 1098, was in large part a reaction against what Cluny had become — a return to austerity, silence, and manual work in protest at the splendour of the older reform. To set the two side by side is to watch a single argument about what a monk's life is for play out across two centuries: in liturgy, in architecture, and in the pointed prose of the age's most famous churchman.
Cluny and the Freedom of the Cloister
The abbey of Cluny was founded by William I, Duke of Aquitaine, known as William the Pious. Its founding charter did something unusual and decisive: it gave the new monastery not to a local lord or bishop but to the apostles Peter and Paul — that is, directly to the papacy — and explicitly forbade any secular or episcopal power from interfering in its affairs. This exemption placed Cluny under the distant, and therefore largely nominal, authority of the Pope, and freed it from the lay proprietorship that had corrupted so many earlier monasteries, where founders and their heirs treated abbeys as private property to be plundered or handed to unqualified relatives. Protected in this way, and blessed with an extraordinary succession of long-lived and capable abbots — Odo, Majolus, Odilo, and Hugh the Great among them — Cluny became the engine of a reform that spread across France and far beyond it.
An Empire of Prayer and Its Great Church
What distinguished the Cluniac reform structurally was its centralisation. Older Benedictine houses were autonomous, each abbey a self-governing world under its own abbot. Cluny instead built a network. Monasteries that adopted its observance, or that it founded outright, became dependent priories subject to the abbot of Cluny himself; their priors were his deputies, and their monks in a real sense his monks. At its height in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries this ecclesia cluniacensis embraced hundreds of houses across Europe, an empire of prayer governed from a single Burgundian centre — arguably the first true religious order in the Western sense.
The visible summit of that empire was the abbey church. The third church built on the site, known to historians as Cluny III, was begun under Abbot Hugh around 1088. When complete it stretched roughly 180 metres and was, for some four centuries, the largest church in all of Christendom, surpassed only when the new St Peter's rose in Rome in the sixteenth century. Its high barrel-vaulted nave, its double aisles, its forest of Romanesque capitals carved with the tones of plainchant and the labours of the seasons, proclaimed in stone the conviction at the heart of the Cluniac programme: that nothing was too costly or too beautiful to be offered to God.
The Opus Dei as the Monk's Highest Work
That conviction found its fullest expression not in architecture but in worship. The Rule of St Benedict calls the Divine Office the opus Dei, the Work of God, and insists that nothing be preferred to it. Cluny took this at its word and expanded the liturgy to an extraordinary degree, layering additional psalms, processions, and commemorations onto the monastic day until the monks were in choir for the greater part of their waking hours. Manual labour, which Benedict had prescribed, quietly receded; the Cluniac monk's true work was liturgical, and the abbey's estates were worked by dependent peasants and servants so that the choir need never fall silent. Cluny became especially associated with prayer for the dead. It was Abbot Odilo who, around the year 998, established the annual commemoration of All Souls on 2 November, spreading through the Cluniac network a cult of intercession for the departed that became one of the order's defining services to medieval society.
Cîteaux and the Hunger for the Literal Rule
By the end of the eleventh century, to a certain kind of ardent monk, all of this looked less like fidelity to St Benedict than like a comfortable betrayal of him. In 1098 Robert of Molesme led a group of monks out of his own abbey and into a marshy clearing south of Dijon called Cîteaux, to found what they simply called the New Monastery. Their aim was a literal return to the Rule — the Rule as written, not as swollen by three centuries of accumulated custom. Where Cluny had multiplied the liturgy, they pared it back to what Benedict actually prescribed. Where Cluny had let manual labour lapse, they took up the hoe and the scythe themselves, and to make a life of both prayer and work sustainable they developed the institution of the lay brother, the conversus — a religious who took vows and did much of the heavy field and workshop labour, freeing the choir monks without importing the feudal dependence the reform was trying to escape. They wore undyed wool instead of dyed black, earning the name white monks, and they sited their abbeys deliberately in wildernesses far from towns. The experiment nearly failed for want of recruits, until in 1112 a young Burgundian nobleman named Bernard arrived at the gate with some thirty companions. Sent out in 1115 to found the abbey of Clairvaux, Bernard became the towering religious figure of the twelfth century, and under his influence the once-struggling reform exploded across the continent.
Bernard's Apologia and the Quarrel Over Beauty
The clearest statement of what divided the two reforms was written by Bernard himself. Around 1125, at the invitation of his friend William of St-Thierry, a Benedictine abbot sympathetic to reform, Bernard composed the Apologia — a letter that is at once a defence of the Cistercians against the charge of arrogance and a devastating critique of Cluniac excess. He mocks the length and richness of the meals, the softness of the clothing, the cavalcades of horses with which great abbots travelled. But the passage that has echoed longest is his attack on the art of the cloister. Why, he demands, in the very place where monks sit and read, should there be that "deformed beauty and beautiful deformity" — the fighting knights, the hunters, the monstrous centaurs and half-men, the many bodies under one head and many heads on one body that crowd the carved capitals? So striking is this marble menagerie, he complains, that a monk is tempted to spend the whole day marvelling at the carvings rather than meditating on the law of God. And beneath the aesthetic objection lies a moral one: the church, he charges, is resplendent in its walls and wanting in its poor; it clothes its stones in gold and leaves its children naked.
Here the two visions stand fully opposed. For Cluny, material splendour was the natural language of praise, lifting the earthbound mind toward the heavenly Jerusalem; the beauty of the sanctuary honoured the God to whom it was offered. For Bernard, such splendour was a distraction from prayer, a scandal in the face of the poor, and a temptation especially dangerous to monks, who had renounced the world precisely to be free of it. Tellingly, Bernard conceded that rich churches might be defensible for ordinary lay worshippers, whose weaker devotion needed such aids; what he could not forgive was the intrusion of that spectacle into the monastic cloister, where it had no business being.
Empire Against Federation
The contrast extended to how each reform governed itself. Cluny was an empire, held together by the personal authority of one abbot over a web of subordinate priories — a structure that gave it unity and force but made it dangerously dependent on the quality of the man at its head. Cîteaux chose the opposite path. Its constitution, the Carta Caritatis or Charter of Charity, largely the work of the Englishman Stephen Harding and confirmed by the papacy in 1119, bound the abbeys together without subordinating them. Each Cistercian house was an autonomous abbey under its own abbot, yet each was linked to the others through filiation — the enduring bond between a mother house and the daughters it founded — and through two disciplinary instruments: the annual General Chapter at Cîteaux, where all the abbots met to legislate for the whole order, and mutual visitation, by which a mother abbey inspected its daughters. It was a federation rather than a monarchy, and it proved remarkably durable, spreading from the four elder daughters of Cîteaux — La Ferté, Pontigny, Clairvaux, and Morimond — to hundreds of abbeys within a single century.
What the Visitor Finds Today
The later fortunes of the two reforms could hardly be more different, and the difference is written on the landscape. Cluny grew immensely rich, and wealth in time dulled the very fervour that had made it. It slid into a long decline, and the French Revolution finished it: the abbey was suppressed, sold, and quarried for building stone in the years around 1800, so that the greatest church of the medieval West was almost entirely demolished. The visitor to Cluny today finds a handsome Burgundian town, an excellent museum, and — of that colossal church — little more than one surviving arm of the great transept, rising abruptly and alone, a fragment from which the imagination must labour to reconstruct the whole.
The Cistercians fared better, in part because they had less to lose to greed and more that was worth keeping for its very restraint. At Fontenay in Burgundy, founded by Bernard in 1118 and among the oldest Cistercian abbeys to survive largely intact, the visitor walks through exactly the architecture the Apologia demanded: an unornamented church of pure proportion, a bare cloister, a monks' dormitory and forge, all built to let silence and light do the work that carving and gold did at Cluny. In Provence, the living abbey of Sénanque, founded in 1148 and set among the lavender fields that fill its photographs, still shelters a small community and still shows the same lucid plainness. Standing in either place, one grasps the quarrel between Cluny and Cîteaux better than any text can convey it: two ways of loving God, one through magnificence and one through emptiness, each convinced it had found the truer road. To see how far each reform reached and to trace the abbeys of both from Burgundy across Europe, explore them on the interactive map.