Under such heavenly guidance, even the very beasts of the forest ministered to the growing community. When Odon had completed the early church, which Jean de Salerne modestly speaks of as an oratory and chapel, replaced, a century later, by a larger one, the bishop came to consecrate the building. Forgetting the poverty of the monks, he brought with him such a lordly retinue of attendants and servants, that the abbot was sorely troubled as to how his guests were to be worthily received, and suitably fed. On the day of the ceremony, when the grey dawn had driven westward the shadows of the night, a great wild boar emerged from the neighbouring forest, and ran, at full speed, to the monastery. The guardian of the church, who was busy adorning the exterior porch, struck with terror at the sight, retreated hastily, shut the door behind him, and drew the bolts. But the fierce animal, fierce no longer, began to lick the door—leaving upon it marks of white foam—and to tap gently with its hoof, as though to beg admittance. But all who saw the beast, fled, until, weary with much knocking, it lay down across the threshold. When the bishop and his suite arrived, a cry of terror rose from the company. They aroused the neighbours, who came, armed with sticks. But the boar, instead of shewing fight, offered himself voluntarily to death, and his flesh, prepared with all the art of the monastic cooks, satisfied the refined tastes of the prelates.
Every day Cluny grew in grace, in wisdom, in numbers, in riches, in influence, in power civil and spiritual. One after one, she founded new monasteries, and reformed those already in existence, until, under Odilon, in the beginning of the 11th century, a cluster of priories had been built upon lands ceded to the abbey, and Cluny was attaining an importance greater than any other order had acquired until that day. In the plains, upon the summits of the hills, by the banks of river and stream, in the depths of the forests, in the solitude of the valley, even in remote and silent places, were springing up little communities of monks, whose clocher, was, for the peasants, a symbol of charity, of refuge, of God come down among men;[73] and every year, nobles, not a few, gave lands in the neighbouring comtés to the Abbey of Cluny.
The great fervour with which the monastic revival was received, had been due, in part, to the awful miseries of France during the 10th century, and in part to an almost universal belief that the year 1000 a.d. would herald the second coming of Christ, and the end of the world; but, by the time that year had passed without the advent of any of the expected phenomena, the more clear-sighted, perceiving the immense possibilities which the religious revival shadowed forth, for the welfare of a people crushed beneath the harsh feudal laws of the time, saw therein an additional inducement to encourage monastic effort. Gratitude for preservation had also its effect. All omens were propitious for the rise of Cluny to great glory.
In the year 1024, a lady of noble Burgundian family, knowing that the hour was come in which she should give birth to a child, and following the custom of the time, summoned a priest, who, by the sacrifice of the mass, should assure her a happy delivery. At the moment when, while consecrating the host, he was wrapt in fervent prayer, there appeared to him, shaping itself upon the golden bottom of the cup, a child's face radiant with a heavenly light. At the conclusion of the ceremony, he hastened to tell the mother what he had seen, and, finding the child already born, predicted that, God granting him life, the boy was chosen out for a great destiny, and would surely be found worthy, one day, to minister the cup in which his birth had been thus signalized. To the great joy of the mother, that hope was gloriously fulfilled; for the son born under such happy omens was Hugues, the greatest of the great abbots of Cluny, he, under whom the abbey, and, indeed, the whole church of Rome, was to establish an authority never before dreamed of in Christendom.
Braving the anger of his father, Delmace, an ambitious and violent Seigneur, who would fain have seen his son don the knight's armour rather than the monk's cowl, Hugues, already ardently set upon a life of piety, obtained admission to the monastery of St. Marcel de Chalon, which he soon left, in order to place himself under the protection of Odilon, the then abbott of Cluny. This new father of the young Hugues was one of the best beloved of the abbotts of that monastery. Lacking the austerity of his predecessor, Odon—the great reformer whose energies had given new life to the Benedictine order—Saint Odilon, this "dernier et le plus méprisable des frères de Cluny," as he styled himself, though short and thin in person, was, at the same time, robust and virile; a humble, grave, sympathetic, fatherly man, whose pale face could flush with anger, and his gentle voice become terrible in rebuke of wrong-doing; one whom the sins and sorrows of the living and the dead[74] touched to the heart, as attested by the many healings with which legend has credited his name.
Such was the man, already abbot for more than forty years, under whose worthy protection young Hugues placed himself. The new-comer, elected abbot on the death of Odilon in 1048, soon showed himself to be of yet sterner stuff even than his predecessor. Humble as regards his personal pretensions, kind and charitable to the poor and needy, he had, nevertheless, an eye which could read in their faces the souls of men; and he was fired with a holy ambition for the glory of the church.
In bringing about the realization of these dreams, he found a worthy ally in that Napoleon of the Church, Hildebrand (Gregory VII.), one of the four monks, who, from a cell at Cluny, passed to the throne of St. Peter.[75] We need not here deal at length with that long struggle—the most significant event of the eleventh century—between the civil and religious rules of Christendom, in which Gregory succeeded in enforcing, if only for a time, the most tremendous and all-embracing claims that the church has ever advanced; but I shall be excused for recalling again that extraordinary scene enacted, in 1076, on the castled summit of the craggy Apennine hills, the rock of Alba Canossa, where the representative of temporal power, Henry IV., King of the Germans, attired in a penitent's garb of coarse wool, waited barefoot, through three bitter winter's days, in the courtyard of the castle, upon the pleasure of God's vice-regent on earth. Hugh, then Abbot of Cluny, was present at that scene; and it was largely owing to his mediation, backed by the influence of the Countess Matilda, that Henry was at last admitted to the royal presence.[76]