With news of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s death, we may experience a sense of serenity accompanying our sense of deep loss. Here was a man of great faith and understanding. There goes one of our shepherds. In days, weeks, months, and years to come, we can learn so much from what Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, has left behind. For now, it seems appropriate to share his “Quaerere Deum” address. Delivered on September 12, 2008 as part of Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic journey to France on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Lourdes, this address offers profound reflections on the origins of western theology and the roots of European culture. The reflections begin by considering the place where they were gathered, the Collège Saint-Bernard. This leads immediately into questions about those who came together there. What were the origins of this place? It was in the search for God:
[I]t 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. 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 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 Scriptures. Thus, by inner necessity, the search for God demands a culture of the word or — as Jean Leclerq put it: eschatology and grammar are intimately connected with one another in Western monasticism (cf. L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu). 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 towards us and we towards 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 which show us the path towards language. Because the search for God required the culture of the word, it was appropriate that the monastery should have a library, pointing our pathways to the word. It was also appropriate to have a school, in which these 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 is also includes the formation of reason—education—through which man learns to perceive, in the midst of words, the Word itself.
A reader can see in this address a way in which to understand theology, faith seeking understanding, as the queen of the sciences. There is a kind of subordination of the secular sciences to the liberal arts, and of the liberal arts to theology. We need to learn to read well, which means we need to learn to sing well. And there is so much more. Tolle et lege.
