When the news is just too much, I can trust that Pope Benedict will inspire me. When I immerse myself in his words, I am curiously refreshed. I must have been a monk in another life.
A few days ago Pope Benedict was in Paris at the recently restored 13th century College des Bernardins, on the origins of western theology and roots of European culture. The college had been a residence of young monks until the French revolution. The Pope's visit was the official inauguration of what is now a meeting place for the dialogue between faith and culture.
The Vatican publishes the text.
The monasteries were the places where the treasures of ancient culture survived, and where at the same time a new culture slowly took shape out of the old"
That was not their intent. The monks sought the truth. They wanted to find God.
First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past. Their motivation was much more basic. Their goal was: quaerere Deum. Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential – to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself. They were searching for God. They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is.
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it is through the search for God that the secular sciences take on their importance, sciences which show us the path toward language. Because the search for God required the culture of the word, it was appropriate that the monastery should have a library, pointing out pathways to the word. It was also appropriate to have a school, in which these pathways could be opened up
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Quaerere Deum – to seek God and to let oneself be found by him, that is today no less necessary than in former times. A purely positivistic culture which tried to drive the question concerning God into the subjective realm, as being unscientific, would be the capitulation of reason, the renunciation of its highest possibilities, and hence a disaster for humanity, with very grave consequences. What gave Europe’s culture its foundation – the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any genuine culture.