The moment you idealize culture and pursue culture as an end unto itself, you kill the possibility of its coming to fruition. Culture is not contrived so much as it is discovered within the personalities involved in and dynamism of a common pursuit. To idealize it and pursue the ideal usually amounts to idolatry. When this happens, when one loses sight of the whole point of a culture, that culture becomes institutionalized, hollow, and bloated. Why? Because culture is not an end, but a means — a means to obtaining a greater end. So, culture must be set in relation to something well beyond itself. It must be at the service of another and not itself. We even see this in the word’s etymology, which reveals its ties to the concept of “care.” The word culture literally means “to tend, guard; to till, cultivate” — preparing the soil for crops. One tends and guards and tills and cultivates for the sake of the harvest, not for the sake of tending, guarding, tilling, and cultivating.
Pope Benedict XVI picks up on this in regard to the monastic pursuit and the resulting monastic culture. He says:
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.1
Creating a culture or preserving some romantic memory of a past one would be an exercise in idealism and would take them away from the real. God’s revelation and the search for God was (and is) the primary thing. This is the distinctive feature of monasticism. It is this alone that the monk ultimately pursues in solitude, in a life marked, not by distraction, but by purity of heart. Seek God. Search for God. But how?
Here, we begin to see distinctive elements of what would become a monastic culture always set in relation to, and subordinate to the fundamental search for God. Pope Benedict XVI continues:
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…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.
The search for God requires a culture of the word. Why? Because God meets us in his word (logos) and his Word (Logos), the Son, has taken flesh in the person of Jesus. This culture of the word involves learning, but it also involves liturgy — speaking or giving God’s word back to him, offering a word of response. Benedict XVI indicates as much when he says, “We ourselves are brought into conversation with God by the word of God. The God who speaks in the Bible teaches us how to speak with him ourselves.” The highest form of this response appears in the liturgy, as we join our words with the Word in his perfect response to the Father.
So, we have established that culture emerges organically from the pursuit of a more fundamental thing. Culture is a means and not an end and the moment it becomes an idealized end to be pursued for its own sake, it risks becoming an idol and is effectively dead (which is what an idol is per Ps 115:4-8). Thus we can define culture, at least tentatively, as the organic (i.e., living) set of customs, practices, and language that allow a group of people to best pursue and accomplish a common aim. A culture ceases to be a culture when it loses sight of its aim and it becomes something else (a dead letter, an idol, etc.). The whole exhausting business of “corporate culture” and all the bells and whistles that many companies pump into propping up their “winning culture” (which is usually little more than creative efforts to satisfy the psyche of their employees through consumerism and boost morale) proves this point. Most people are taken with this stuff initially (because it feels good), but eventually realize it’s just a facade and the wizard is just a guy behind a curtain.
The Monastic Charism at the Service of Relationship with Christ
Michael Casey, OCSO helps drive all these points into a deeper, personal space in his book on the Rule of St. Benedict entitled Strangers to the City. Fr. Casey says, after reflecting on various facets of monastic culture:
We have to be careful in speaking about the monastic charism. There is a danger that we objectify it to the extent that it becomes a commodity rather than a relationship. In fact, the heart of all monastic observance is communion with Christ realized in prayer, in love for the brothers and sisters, and in the sacramental overlap of these relationships in the liturgy. Christian monasticism is not a system of spiritual self-improvement; it is a means that some people need to sustain and deepen their relationship to Christ. Everything else is secondary to that goal.2
Like Benedict XVI, Casey explains monasticism specifically, and Christianity in general, in terms of relationship. God, and contact with him, is the fundamental thing. Communion is the fundamental thing. This communion is realized in prayer. It is realized in charity. And, it is realized in the overlap of prayer and charity that is the liturgy, a prayer wherein God’s charity meets ours (i.e., our love of God and neighbor) and gathers up our meager offerings and brings them, through himself, to himself. Christianity is not a self-help, self-improvement plan. Even if the self is improved, its not by becoming a kind of idealized version of itself. Rather, the best version of the self is not the self, as a kind of highly individualized and self-sufficient monad, at all. The best version of the self involves coming out of the fallen and broken self and becoming someone else entirely. Thus, we can say monasticism and the resulting monastic culture serve conversion and is effective only insofar as it cultivates conversion.
Let’s listen to Fr. Casey as he finishes his assessment:
Christianity defines self-realization in terms of relationship with God. We also affirm that the “way” or “road” by which human fulfillment is obtained is a dynamic and deepening personal relationship to Jesus. Juridicizing theology has been able to void this distinctive imperative by making salvation a matter of some objective work that Jesus did on our behalf (“redemption” which supplies us with “grace”) or, alternatively, the effect of our moral adherence to what Jesus did and taught. Any system of spirituality based on such extrinsic benefits is superficial and unable to sustain life in hard times. Christian religion is a matter of following Christ, being formed by his teaching and imitating his example. In time we become more Christlike and move towards that state of communion in which we can say, “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).
Becoming oneself, becoming who you are, happens in communion — in a dynamic relationship with God. More specifically, the “way” to such self-realization via relationship is with Jesus himself — the “object” of Christian faith who reveals God as the true “subject” who loves us deeply. Stiff, transactional, and extrinsic theologies block spiritual arteries causing a kind of spiritual heart attack. The spiritual life dries up, the free movement of the Spirit coagulates. Conversely, we find Christianity marked by a profound sense of discipleship and a willingness to be open to boundless conversion offers a path forward. This is what it means to seek God, and to seek God with one’s whole heart so as to find him (see Jer 29:12–14). And through such seeking and the purification of heart that comes with it, one becomes more Christlike and identifies with the one who, in all humility, identified with us.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I believe I can say this: idealizing culture and substituting it as an end unto itself is to idolize it and is the surest way to kill the very possibility of authentic and organic culture. True culture emerges in response to a pure seeking of a real, yet not completely attained, good. In other words, culture is the living set of customs, practices, and language that allow a group of people to best pursue and attain a common, given aim.
As Pope Benedict notes, monastic culture results from nothing other than seeking God, and it serves this end. Undoubtedly, coming into contact with God, in this case, renews the culture, which opens new vistas for encountering him. We see the organic dynamism, then, between a Christian culture and the purpose it serves, insofar as the roles between means and end are not inverted and the whole thing collapses under dead weight.
Finally, and along the same line, Fr. Michael Casey reminds us that the whole monastic pursuit is a particular manifestation of Christian self-realization in relationship with God through Christ Jesus. Monastic culture serves this relationship or it is nothing at all, because, at the end of the day, it’s God or nothing.
Brad Bursa 
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