Reading: Weekday

Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI 4
at Collège des Bernardins, Paris – in 2008

From the perspective of monasticism’s historical influence, we could say
that…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.

…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…

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 which was theirs to find and to follow.
This path was his word, which had been disclosed to men in the books of the sacred
Scripture…

Because the search for God required the culture of the word, it was
appropriate…to have a school, in which these pathways could be opened up…the
monastery…[a school of the Lord’s service]…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…

The Word which opens the path of that search, and is to be identified with
this path, is a shared word. True, it pierces every individual to the heart. Gregory
the Great describes this a sharp stabbing pain, which tears open our sleeping soul
and awakens us, making us attentive to the essential reality, to God. But in the
process, it also makes us attentive to one another. The word does not lead to a
purely individual path of mystical immersion, but to the pilgrim fellowship of faith…

The God who speaks in the Bible teaches us how to speak with him ourselves.
Particularly in the book of Psalms, he gives us the words with which we can address
him, with which we can bring our life, with all its highpoints and lowpoints, into
conversation with him, so that life itself thereby becomes a movement towards
him…

This particular structure of the Bible issues a constantly new challenge to
every generation. It excludes by its nature everything that today is known as
fundamentalism. In effect, the word of God can never simply be equated with the
letter of the text. To attain to it involves a transcending and a process of
understanding, led by the inner movement of the whole and hence it also has to
become a process of living. Only within the dynamic unity of the whole are the
many books one book. The Word of God and his action in the world are revealed
only in the word and history of human beings…

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.

4 Pope Benedict XVI. Address at the Collège des Bernardins, Paris, Friday, 12 September 2008.