Cluny: In Search of God’s Lost Empire is a harder call. It wasn’t wretched, and had plenty of good information, but its omissions and the author’s take on medieval religion make it worth a library checkout, but probably not much more.

Cluny is, of course, about the famed monastery of Cluny, established in the 10th century and essentially destroyed in the late 18th-early 19th century (after centuries of decline). It’s a fascinating tale – this establishment, enormous and influential, which became the center of an important reform of religious life and the core of a widespread network of religious houses, as well as a vital ally of the Papacy – exists no more, except in a few stone ruins in a valley in Central France.

This relatively short, popular history tells the political story of Cluny quite well, and that’s an important part of the story, isn’t it? We who imagine that religion is only authentic when it’s pure and independent of "external" influences are in for repeated rude awakenings, which brings us, once again, back to the importance of history. Christianity exists in the world – that whole incarnation business, you knwo – and as difficult as it is to tease out and understand, spiritual realities exist in the midst of culture, of politics, of social realities, and Cluny was no exception. Secular leaders used Cluny, Cluny used them, everyone tried to deflect the power of bishops by going straight to Rome, and the foundation grew – grew in leaps and bounds, bringing the Gospel, bringing beauty, order and education along with it.

However, the book suffers in a couple of omissions – first, a serious lack of illustrations. Secondly, while Mullins does well with the political world of Cluny and the artistic patrimony – he explains the Cluniac influence by finding traces of it through still-standing Cluniac churches, looking at sculptures, and especially at column capitals – the spiritual world of Cluny. Yes, when you cover the art and architecture, you’re touching on the spiritual, naturally, but there’s no serious attempt to bringing us into the spiritual world of the Cluny monks. I was particularly unenlightened by one particular passage near the beginning that presumes to set the stage for what follows – but then I took the book back to the library, so that was lost to posterity. Until I read Godsbody today and saw that he quoted the precise passage I was going to question, at length:

…It remains one of the overwhelming contradictions of the Middle Ages that an ethos which was so dogmatic and doom-laden, so misogynist, so puritanical and disapproving of all the sensuous pleasures of day-to-day life, should yet have succeeded in creating so much that is the very opposite of those attitudes. What Cluny bequeathed to us is far from being the product of a hair shirt culture – in a great many fields, it is a legacy of serene beauty and sophistication that we still admire a thousand years later…it is the art of men who have seen the light, and are glorying in it."

I thought…Middle Ages? Puritanical? Well, perhaps relative to us folks here in the 21st century, but I am really not confident of this fellow’s sense of the Lay of the Medieval Land if he thinks of the Middle Ages as "disapproving of all the sensuous pleasures of day-to-day life."

There’s a complex relationship there, to be sure, in medieval spiritual and worldy sensibilities.  But Mullins’ black-and-white vision doesn’t come close, and so ultimately renders his book of limited value.