The Cluny Journal — Born Today

For a limited time, you can subscribe to the newly launched Cluny Journal, which I have been working on since this summer, for free: clunyjournal.com

Get thoughtful reflections from the best writers of our age who approach important questions related to work, creative endeavors, life, and love with verve and wit, with existential seriousness, and a spirit of renewal. It's time to build. You will not find smart entrepreneurs and business leaders alongside literary and artistic luminaries with priests and rabbis anywhere else. I hope you consider subscribing, and pass this along. More on the backstory below.

I first heard about Cluny in 2013 while taking a history class in Rome. It captured my imagination as soon as I understood its full significance. In the early tenth century, at a time when political and social conditions were extremely unstable in Europe, and Western monasticism was in severe decline, the abbey of Cluny was founded at the site of the Duke of Aquitaine’s favorite hunting grounds.

Within two centuries, this institution—which acted like connective tissue between various spheres of society—rose to become the nexus of intellectual life, spiritual renewal, and innovation. The monks took in the sick, cared for the poor, and illuminated manuscripts in its renowned scriptorium that spread through the world. Trust in institutions at the time of Cluny’s founding could not have been lower—it would make today look like a fairy tale. The abbey was set up at the peak of the lay investiture controversy in which politics and church hierarchy had fused. Powerful feudal lords could appoint abbots and bishops.

But the Cluny abbot was established with a property grant and rights unlike any the world had ever seen at that time: the new monastery would be established as politically independent, and no local power players would be able to exert control over it. They threw down the gauntlet. They were not willing to compromise with the worldly. But rather than isolate the abbey, the bet paid off: over the following decades after its establishment in 910 A.D., Cluny built the largest church in all of Christendom and awed visitors with the beauty and reverence of its liturgy and the dedication of its monks. While other abbeys had become lax and lazy, Cluny maintained a higher standard undergirded by faith, hope, and love and a sense of mission that was articulated in centuries, not years. The Cluniac Reforms led to well over 1,000 sister abbeys and institutions spread throughout Europe united by a common bond of kinship.

Its independence allowed for it to develop real spiritual and moral authority as well as intellectual independence, and Cluny became a home for anyone who wanted to refresh their souls amidst the warring world outside—some so that they could produce art, others so that they could prepare for marriage, others because they were starving and needed to eat. The hospitality was unreasonable, but real hospitality should be.

When I returned from Rome in 2016, the world was a different place than when I left. Over the next 8 years, I would watch—sometimes in despair—as the fake overtook the real; as sophistry became louder than virtue; as good people were left behind and fell through the cracks at the hands of people who lost sight of the goodness and dignity of the human person; and the human condition ceased to be lived or understood because everyone seemed to forget the existential stakes. Personalism turned into machineism. Even Christian aesthetics, art, and communication became increasingly saccharine and superficial, often cringe, and the manner in which some of the most important issues of our age were discussed and “debated” lacked heart.

And we lacked hope. You could almost see it, if you looked long enough, draining from our collective eyes. But nobody was looking long enough. Hardly anyone has the ability to be that attentive anymore in our age of distraction. Adhering to reality for even 5 minutes can be a challenge. But when we do, we begin to see the depths of the problem. We begin to see that it’s not going to be solved in November.

Things that were more than merely subjectively satisfying were increasingly hard to come by in the public square, if you believe that a public square even exists. Everything had become siloed, fragmented.

Athens is strong, but it cannot stand on its own. There are plenty of smart people, but how many faithful ones? (I don’t mean religious faith alone—there is faithfulness to one’s friends, one’s family, to one’s responsibilities, literally the ‘ability to respond’ to the wonder and the values that we encounter in the world). Having lost that ability myself at various points, and even recently seeing it diminished, I was alarmed.

I witnessed corruption and naivety among the religious, and more and more incidents of religion being ‘used’ (in a deeply Girardian sense) like a bludgeon to control or purge or seek power.

And the “builders”, the entrepreneurs, the hustlers, the ambitious: we didn’t just lose our moral compass, we lost our spiritual bearings. It's harsh out there. The sand and the dust washes into your mouth as soon as you step outside of the sietch. I realized that I needed to build things inside of myself much more than I needed to build things outside of myself, and that in fact those two efforts are not unrelated.

But I also became acutely aware that I needed support. I need faithful friends. I want to be around people who are intellectually curious, spiritually hungry, and competent builders who are willing to roll up their sleeves and work, who want to build something that endures. Nihilism is not enough. Technology is not enough. Mediocrity is not enough. Lukewarmness is not enough. It will be spat out.

As Dante entered hell, he saw a sign that told all those who entered to abandon all hope. I was looking for the opposite: a sign above a door, be it a basement lounge in New York City or an institution or a classroom or a church, that said: “All you who enter here, prepare to become more hopeful.”

I would normally say that this past summer in West Michigan was “busy”, but I would be lying. There was forced silence, there was plenty of time spent with my daughter on the floor of our Rome, me staring into her face and seeing the future. Out of the silence and the cries came fire.

The wildness of the lake reminded me that the spirit still hovers over those waters. And I often thought about those last lines of Auden,

The meek inherit the earth,

and is neither Charming, successful, nor a crowd;

Alone among the noise and policies of summer,

His weeping climbs towards your life like a vocation.

Out of the shadows and into the deep—it’s time to build The Real.