A Reason Open to God

6. Culture and the University

225 t 6. Culture and the University Quaerere Deum From Address to Representatives from the World of Culture at the “Collège des Bernardins” in Paris, Apostolic Journey to France, Paris, September 12, 2008 I would like to speak with you this evening of the origins of Western theology and the roots of European culture. I began by recalling that the place in which we are gathered is in a certain way emblematic. It is in fact a place tied to monastic culture, insofar as young monks came to live here in order to learn to understand their vocation more deeply and to be more faithful to their mission . We are in a place that is associated with the culture of monasticism . Does this still have something to say to us today, or are we merely encountering the world of the past? In order to answer this question, we must consider for a moment the nature of Western monasticism itself. What was it about? From the perspective of monasticism’s historical influence we could say that, amid the great cultural upheaval resulting from migrations of peoples and the emerging new political configurations, 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. But how did it happen? What motivated men to come together to these places? What did they want? How did they live? 226 Culture and the University First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture, or 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. It is sometimes said that they were “eschatologically” oriented. But this is not to be understood in a temporal sense, as if they were looking ahead to the end of the world or to their own death, but in an existential sense: they were seeking the definitive behind the provisional. Quaerere Deum: because they were Christians, this was not an expedition into a trackless wilderness, a search leading them into total darkness. God himself had provided signposts—indeed, he had marked out a path that was theirs to find and to follow. This path was his word, which had been disclosed to men in the books of the sacred scriptures. Thus, by inner necessity, the search for God demands a culture of the word, or,—as Jean Leclercq put it, eschatology and grammar are intimately connected with one another in Western monasticism.1 The longing for God, the désir de Dieu, includes amour des lettres, love of the word, exploration of all its dimensions. Because in the biblical word God comes toward us and we toward him, we must learn to penetrate the secret of language, to understand it in its construction and in the manner of its expression. Thus it is through the search for God that the secular sciences take on their importance, sciences that 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 1. Cf. Jean Leclercq, L’amour des letters et le désir de Dieu: Initiation aux auteurs monasiques du Moyen Âge (Paris: Cerf, 2008). Culture and the University 227 pathways could be opened up. Benedict calls the monastery a dominici servitii schola. The monastery serves eruditio, the formation and education of man—a formation whose ultimate aim is that man should learn how to serve God. But it also includes the formation of reason—education—through which man learns to perceive, in the midst of words, the Word itself. Yet in order to have a full vision of the culture of the word, which essentially pertains to the search for God, we must take a further step. The Word, which opens the path of that search, and is to be identified with this...