IN THE popular imagination, religion and science are often assumed to be at odds. While science is characterised as pressing on bravely, exploring the origins of existence and pioneering benefits for the wellbeing of the human race, religion is viewed as negative, uttering its dour “no” to every advance. And when people think in these terms about Christianity, the person who probably springs to mind is Galileo. As everybody knows, Galileo was right and the Church was wrong.

My sketch is crude, but these basic assumptions still exist. There are many people who see the Church as opposed to progress, resisting advances in science and in society.

These thoughts occur today because it is the feast of Robert Bellarmine, Jesuit and Cardinal and Doctor of the Church. A contemporary of Galileo’s, he discussed his studies with him on behalf of the Inquisition, as it was then known. And here at once the assumptions of the popular imagination are found wanting, for Bellarmine in fact was sympathetic to Galileo, not condemning him, but advising him rather to be cautious and to distinguish hypothesis from established truth. Four hundred years later it is easy to forget the originality of Galileo’s research and its impact. And indeed Galileo and Bellarmine shared a common mind in their approach to these issues.

This familiar controversy offers us a base for exploring something still more fundamental. At the heart of Christianity lies a conviction about Jesus of Nazareth. It is as simple to state as it is difficult to grasp. We affirm, first, that Jesus is an ordinary human being. That is straightforward enough. But then we hold that he is also divine: Jesus, we say, is God as well as man. That is anything but straightforward. And finally we declare that he is one; in other words, there is an integrated unity in him. Jesus is not some kind of hybrid, part divine and part human. He is not so wonderful a human being that he can be described as divine by a sort of poetic licence, nor is he a divine being come to earth in human disguise. He is as truly and completely human as he is divine, as truly and completely divine as he is human. And in him the human and the divine are united in a relationship which respects perfectly their distinct integrity.

People have always recognised the extraordinary character of this fundamental Christian belief. The earliest Christian centuries are littered with controversies which tried to tame it. There were those who qualified the claim to divinity and others who played down the claim to humanity, and others again who fully accepted both, but refused to allow their integral unity in Jesus. It has never been an easy belief. It is no easier today. But it offers a matrix for understanding how two realities, apparently in conflict, may yet be reconciled.

Conflicts are often a matter of relationship. When we speak of conflict between religion and science, for example, we are dealing with their relationship. How are the two parties to relate to each other? And conflict is often prompted by fear. In this case, there is the fear on the one side that the Church will intrude into the domain which is proper to science, attempting to control research, and on the other the fear that science will be so beguiled by what it finds physically possible that it will discard its moral compass.

Such conflict, however, is not inevitable. The model disclosed in the understanding of who Jesus is reminds us that either unfettered independence or intrusion would diminish both religion and science. Each has a role, but through a union in which the integrity of each is respected. This is not a facile formula, supplying easy answers to difficult questions; it indicates rather an approach which reconciles realities which seem to be opposed.

Bellarmine and Galileo were convinced that religion and science could not ultimately be in conflict. They struggled to reconcile them and in their own lifetimes did not really succeed. That came later. Their conviction, however, was true and we must recognise it and allow it to guide us still.

Monsignor Roderick Strange is the Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome.