There is a paradox—one, no doubt, among many—about contemporary Euro-American culture. On the one hand it has developed a capacity for systematic, and critical, ‘self-consciousness’, unequalled by any other, or by its own ancestral cultures. This is exemplified by the development in the last hundred years, practically from zero, of the human sciences, in particular of psychology and sociology. In Academe, at any rate, the intellectual leaders of our culture live in a world of ‘meta’s’—‘metahistory’, ‘meta-science’, ‘meta-psychology’, and meta-sociology too, I shouldn’t wonder. A capacity and techniques for reflexive thinking have been carried much further than ever before. In the Christian dimension of our culture the ecumenical movement and above all the Second Vatican Council illustrate the same trend; the Church ‘self-consciously’ reflecting on what it means to be Church—and whether and how far it is succeeding in being Church. Ecclesiology (the Church reflecting on itself), is now a most important branch of theology. A hundred years ago, when the word ‘ecclesiology’ itself had a different meaning, the Church’s reflecting on itself was rarely more than one weapon in an arsenal of polemical apologetics.

On the other hand Euro-Americans, in their cultural leaders and in the mass, still retain by and large the serene uncriticised assurance that their—or should I say ‘our’?—culture is normative, and that it is the only authentic realisation of human potentialities. It is, to be sure, not the only way of being human or organising human society, but it is certainly the best, and the only one that has a future.