Come let us go to the Mountain of the Lord

 

If you are a student of revival history, then you have probably heard of the Azusa Street and Welsh Revivals along with the First and Second Great Awakenings. You may have heard of the national prayer meeting revival or of Cane Ridge, but chances are that you likely haven’t heard of the Cluniac Revival. The reasons for this abound. Firstly, all of the moves of God I mentioned above were in America or England and all took place in the past 300 years. And being that they are relatively recent (at least as it pertains to the entire 2000 year history of the Church) they could be considered Modern Revivals because they took place in societies that to some degree resemble our own. But the Cluniac Revival is very different from these because it took place over a thousand years ago in primarily France and Germany.

 

The backdrop of this awakening was that of a Europe that was just recovering from the ravages of Nordic invasions from the North and Islamic invasions from the South. Life had begun to stabilize again due to the unification of regions under the leadership of kings who - with their united territories - had been able to push back the invaders and protect the people from the murderous invading hordes.

 

This unification occurred as once loosely congregated tribes of farmers had – in the midst of these invasions – chosen to regionally congregate together by swearing allegiance to a Lord or Duke who had raised and provided for an army. These regions found even greater protection by joining forces under the rule of a king.  But with this security came the trade off of a different society built upon a hierarchical structure that placed the king at the top, the rulers of each land just below him and then the people subsequently below them.    This form of government, that came to be known as Feudalism, solidified as kingships were passed through family lines in the newly budding nations of Europe.

 

But at the advent of these freshly forming kingdoms the royals found themselves with a stark problem. They needed to educate their administrators.

 

Education was a scarce commodity in those days tracing back to the 5^th century when the Western Roman Empire was overthrown by tribal warlords. When Rome fell, much of the vast wealth of culture and knowledge that it possessed was nearly lost. I say nearly because a significant portion of the writing of the Greco-Roman world was in fact preserved by an unlikely group of otherwise insignificant people.

 

This group of recluses and strangers were the monks of the ancient Christian Church – who had hundreds of years earlier left Roman society all-together because they saw it as corrupt and had congregated together to seek God in the desert.  And in a strange turn of events, it was these contempto mundi monastics who had preserved the writings of ancient Roman culture through their practice of copying ancient manuscripts and preserving them in their cloister libraries.

 

The fact that the very people who forsook the world and it’s wisdom were the ones who ended up preserving it is a weird thing to consider. But perhaps it isn’t so strange when we realize that said individuals weren’t leaving the world because they hated it but rather because they hated how being in the world caused their passions to get the best of them resulting in their stumbling into sin. Many things can be said about Monasticism in the early Church but in my opinion we should primarily view it as a movement of people who sought a genuine life of encounter with God.

 

Sometimes seeking God will cause you to do things that are considered strange. Sometimes you yourself may look back and think you actually were a little weird as well but if your heart is genuinely about knowing God then you can be assured that He will use you. And it may end up being in a way you may not have expected. Similar, perhaps, to how He used these world-denying monks to preserve the beautiful things He had put in Roman culture.

 

~📜~

 

And so started the Cluniac Revival.  Monks, who were the torch-bearers of both spiritual and worldly knowledge, were sought after by kings so that they would have an educated royal court.  And from this came a great spiritual renewal in Europe.

 

Much of Europe was already Christian and had been Christian for some time but it was during this renewal that many of the values that we associate with the Christendom of the Middle Ages – things like chivalry, honor, duty, nobility – became instilled within European culture. And it happened when the monks began to teach the administrators and kings of Europe not only about how read in Latin and apply Aristotle’s understanding of Logic to the challenges of their administrative duties but also about their responsibilities and callings as people who God had set apart to lead a nation.

 

This turning of the nations towards to council of the Lord has echoes of Isaiah 2:2-4 which reads:

 

Now it will come about that
In the last days
The mountain of the house of the Lord
Will be established ^[a]as the chief of the mountains,
And will be raised above the hills;
And all the nations will stream to it.
³ And many peoples will come and say,
“Come, let’s go up to the mountain of the Lord,
To the house of the God of Jacob;
So that He may teach us ^[b]about His ways,
And that we may walk in His paths.”
For ^[c]the law will go out from Zion
And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
⁴ And He will judge between the nations,
And will mediate for many peoples;
And they will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning knives.
Nation will not lift up a sword against nation,
And never again will they learn war.

 

In my next post we will discuss the pitfalls of this movement but before we do perhaps it may be good to dwell upon the wonder of what was going on in those days.  Here were the rulers of nations seeking out the instruction about how to live from those who had given themselves to God.  Kings would send their entire courts and even their future heirs to these monasteries so they could learn how to serve their kingdom with a sharp mind and a noble heart.

 

While it will take the return of Jesus for this to happen perfectly, we should let the hearts of the royalty in those days inspire us.  So that we – like the kings and administrators in the Middle Ages – would seek the council of God so that we could head out into whatever occupation we may have as wise and pure-hearted people who seek to serve those who God sends us to.

 

Let us climb the mountain to seek You so that we may serve the world with a pure heart.  Amen.