In his commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, Dom Sighard Kleiner remarks that we have a deep need and secret desire for a divine correspondence:
Our deepest duty is to perceive the voice of God. Jesus promised to show Himself to the person who loves Him (John 14:21). We have complete confidence in His promise, and that science which, going beyond its limits, wants to cut us off from all transcendence and denies what it cannot reach by its own means we find deceptive. The human soul feels within itself a deep and secret correspondence with the voice of God, Creator and Father, and God Himself has seen fit to confirm our hope by His Word; we have great need of receiving God’s message, we who have no certainty of ourselves. Our intellect is made for thinking, for knowing, for discovering, for finding, but it needs the voice of God if it is not to stray from its proper destiny. God has endowed it with a supernatural sense to perceive truths which are beyond it.
In this, we see one way to understand the human’s unique role as made in the image of God: we require this correspondence, this communion of revelation in love in order to be complete. All ideologies, systems, taxonomies, and other substitutes for this communion will leave us not only satisfied, but spiritually malnourished. It is that malnourishment which fuels so many of the great conflicts in our society and church today.
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