Music
The corporate nature of the interaction with the Word was also expressed in song, with the monks being united to their community and with the larger heavenly host of angels in worship of God.
Worldview
The culture of the word, which developed deep within Western monasticism from the search for God, and understands the world as being the continual result of the historical action of God in time, also finds expression in the way the Scriptures are understood.
After examining the ways to find the Word within the word at a deeper level, the Holy Father spoke of the tension between freedom and obligation, a tug-of-war that Europe is witnessing today.
"It presents itself anew as a task for our generation too, vis-á-vis the poles of subjective arbitrariness and fundamentalist fanaticism. 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," the Pontiff warned.
Work
The search for God that the monks embarked on also involved "labora" or work. They viewed human work and the shaping of history as "sharing in the work of the Creator." This worldview is essential, Benedict insisted, because "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."
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With the society collapsing, the monks sought God, but they did not think that they were forcing their worldview on people. Rather, they saw their faith as the truth about creation, "They saw their faith as belonging, not to cultural custom that differs from one people to another, but to the domain of truth, which concerns all people equally."
Turning to the present-day situation of Europe, Pope Benedict XVI said that although it "differs in many respects from the one that Paul encountered in Athens," "the two situations also have much in common. Our cities 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."
"Quaerere Deum - to seek God and to let oneself be found by him, that is today no less necessary than in former times," he asserted.
"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," the Holy Father cautioned.
Pope Benedict concluded his address by re-emphasizing that "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."