What do we mean when we say ‘Europe’ and write about Europe as ‘a challenge to Christians’? What does it mean to be a European Christian, or rather to be a Christian in Europe? What is the identity of Europe? Identity is closely linked to memory. When a person loses his or her memory, this person’s identity is in danger of getting lost as well. There is a common European memory. This memory is weaker than our national memory and our personal memory, but it exists. It is built up out of numerous elements including: the boundaries of Europe, interdependence, cultural heritage, technological civilization, justice, individualism, fear of Islam, and the Christian past.

Boundaries are vital in determining one’s identity. They fulfil the need for belonging and help to structure life. The boundaries of Europe, however, are very uncertain. When I arrived in Oxford in 1966 as a postgraduate student, I was told that this city of dreaming spires and towers was not a part of Europe. Europe was ‘the continent’; the British Isles did not belong to Europe. Ten months later I travelled to Spain. I learned that, surely, Oxford belonged to Europe, for everything north of Spain was Europe; Spain, however, was not a part of Europe. When I lectured for some days in the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, in 1988, I was told by my hosts that Poland really is the heart of Europe. The little medieval chapel of Lublin castle was supposed to prove their point: gothic on the outside, Byzantine on the inside.

Spain in the Eighteenth century was in two minds about the economic thought of the Enlightenment reaching it from other parts of Europe. The first half of the century has been aptly characterised as a period of ‘ideological hesitancy’, but in the second half the hesitancy came to an end. The liberal cause, and its main instruments the Sociedades Economicas de los Amigos del Pais, made great strides. Political economy, then a brand new science, was welcomed by the liberal statesmen like Jovellanos and Campomanes who flourished under Carlos III. Their primary concern was that Spain might lose heavily if she were too slow getting into the new international market economy, and they regarded works like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as important guides to the industrial and commercial policies Spain should pursue.

Others were more cautious. Intellectuals trained in the Aristotelian tradition were often more concerned about the moral quality of the new economics, and about the moral costs of pursuing the kind of policies that flowed from it. These are concerns which today, after a further two hundred years experience of market economy, are even more alive now than they were then. It is worth reflecting on whether these critics were entirely the reactionary flat-earthers they are customarily dismissed as being. History is written by the victors, and the Enlightenment won this engagement, so it is only to be expected that in our standard accounts the Aristotelian opponents of the Enlightenment come out badly.

Science as we know it today has a long history stretching back to the Greeks and the Babylonians. It is essentially the results of our continuing attempts to understand the natural world, and as such it is conditioned by our culture, by our beliefs concerning what is important and what is not about the nature and purpose of knowledge, and about the structure of argument and the criteria of proof. These factors vary from one culture to another, and together they determine the style of scientific thinking.

It was very difficult to get started, and fatally easy to become trapped in a blind alley. Early civilisations amassed much natural lore, and extensive astronomical observations were made, notably by the Babylonians. But the chief credit for initiating the scientific enterprise belongs to the ancient Greeks.

The whole scientific enterprise, as Alistair Crombie points out in his magisterial treatise, depends first of all on the underlying vision of reality, and then on the arguments used to support and verify that vision. The Greek philosophers provided both the vision and the argument. The first idea was that the vast complexity of the world can be understood in terms of simple elements; once we know these elements we can see how everything else follows from them, giving an integrated knowledge of the whole. The rules of rational inference were codified into the science of logic, and an outstanding example of the power of rational argument was provided by Euclid.

In his recent study of the sources of the modem identity, Charles Taylor coined the phrase, ‘the affirmation of the ordinary life.’ He argues that modem culture has been marked not only by a growing recognition of the dignity and worth of human beings but also by a growing recognition of the dignity and worth of the ordinary life—the life of production and reproduction, of work and family. Taylor calls this affirmation of ordinary life ‘one of the most powerful ideas in modem civilization.’ It has certainly become one of the predominant themes in Catholic theology in the second half of this century.

Taylor notes, however, another ‘extremely important fact about modern moral consciousness. . . . We are in conflict, even confusion about what it means to affirm ordinary life.’ So for example, Catholics may, almost unanimously, describe the post-Vatican II era as the age of the laity, but particular attempts to live the Gospel in the modem world and to theologize about that experience create storms of controversy. The debates surrounding liberation theology, which with its turn to the economic, social and political life of man is nothing if not an affirmation of ordinary life, are one such example.

One particularly illuminating instance of the debates surrounding the affirmation of ordinary life and liberation theology is Juan Segundo’s Theology and the Church: A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger and a Warning to the Whole Church (Minneapolis, 1985). In it Segundo responds to the ‘‘Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation’ issued by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Newman’s writings on the nature of theology, the role of the theologian in the Church, and the nature of personal faith and assent, all receive a great deal of scholarly attention. However, one text where he characterises the nature of the work of a theologian as a continuing activity has been passed over in studies of his writings on theology and seems only to be known in studies of his marian doctrine.

The text is from the Sermon 15 of his University Sermons which was preached on the feast of the Purification, 2 February, 1843 upon the text: ‘But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart’ (Lk 2:19). The sermon begins by introducing the notion of Mary as a pattern of faith (paragraph 1) and then develops the theme by reflection on the significance of Mary “pondering” what was said to her (paragraph 2).

Then he continues: