— Vicar and a gentleman lament why the kids aren't coming to Mass.

— First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it 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 Leclercq 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 out 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 it also includes the formation of reason – education – through which man learns to perceive, in the midst of words, the Word itself.