The Word and work

“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”. These were the closing remarks of the speech delivered by Pope Benedict XVI during the meeting with representatives from the world of culture, held on September 12 at the Collège des Bernadins. Two themes marked the Pope’s speech: “monastic culture” and the writings of Saint Paul. Their goal was: “quaerere Deum”, “searching for God”: the true “philosophic attitude” which consists in “looking beyond the penultimate, and setting out in search of the ultimate and the true”. Indeed, “quaerere Deum” was the ideal link connecting the beginning and the end of the Pope’s speech. “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 perennial and lasting, life itself”, declared Benedict XVI referring to the “nature of Western monasticism”.”Quaerere Deum – to seek God and to let oneself be found by him, that is today no less necessary than in former times”, the Pope concluded. Hence, the topical relevance of Christian proclamation, whose “fundamental structure” is seen in Saint Paul’s Address at the Areopagus, along with the similarities, “despite the differences” between our “present situation” and “the one that Paul encountered in Althens”. “Our cities – the Pope concluded – are no longer filled with altars and with images of multiple deities. God has truly become for many the great unknown. But just as in the past, when behind the many images of God the question concerning the unknown God was hidden and present, so too the present absence of God is silently besieged by the question concerning Him”.No to “fundamentalism”. The “origins of Western theology” and “the roots of European culture” are linked to monastic culture, the activity of the monks “that were seeking God”, the Pope declared in his opening remarks at the Collége des Bernardins, which the late Cardinal Lustiger desired to be “a centre of dialogue between Christian Wisdom and the cultural, intellectual and artistic currents of contemporary society”. His Holiness thanked also the delegates of the French Islamic community “for having accepted the invitation to participate in this meeting”. To them the Pope conveyed his “best wishes for the holy season of Ramadan already underway”. The pontiff had previously met a Jewish delegation upon his arrival in Paris. “Thus by inner necessity, the search for God demands a culture of the Word”, the Pope explained. “It would be a disaster if today’s European culture could only conceive freedom as absence of obligation, which would inevitably play into the hands of fanaticism and arbitrariness. Absence of obligation and arbitrariness do not signify freedom, but its destruction”, Pope Benedict said. In fact, Christianity “does not simply represent a religion of the book”, since “it perceives in the words the Word, the Logos itself”. 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” amd constitutes “a challenge as we face two poles: one ht eone hand, subjective arbitrariness, and on the other fundamentalist fanaticism”. “Culture of the word” and “culture of work”. Our continent needs not only a “culture of the Word” but also “a culture of work”, indeed the Pope’s speech at the Collège des Bernardins developed these two themes. “This éthos – His Holiness declared expanding the concept of “the culture of work” – should include the idea that human work and shaping of history is understood as sharing in the work of the Creator, and must be evaluated in those terms”. “Where such evaluation is lacking, where man arrogates to himself the status of god-like creator, his shaping of the world can quickly turn into destruction of the world”. According to Christian thought, “God is working; he continues working in and on human history. In Christ, he enters personally into the laborious work of history. God himself is the Creator of the world, and creation is not yet finished”.Proclamation, not “propaganda”. The Pope devoted part of his address to the universality of Christian proclamation, in close relationship with the universality of reason that is present in the human soul: “Christians of the nascent Church did not regard their missionary proclamation as propaganda”, claimed the Pontiff. “At the beginning of all things there must not be irrationality but creative Reason – not blind chance, but freedom”. “The novelty of Christian proclamation”, His Holiness declared, “does not consists in a thought but in a deed: God has revealed himself”. Yet, “this is no blind deed”, rather, it is a “rational” event which needs “the humility of reason” in order to be accepted, “man’s humility, which responds to God’s humility”.