In my article published on the feast of Blessed Nicolas Steno last year, I set out to very briefly set the record straight on a man whose legacy is too often misconstrued by nonbelievers. When I saw that Bishop Barron’s ministry Word on Fire had published a new children’s book about Steno, I knew I had to buy it and see how the man was being treated from a Catholic perspective. I assumed from the outset that Steno’s apologetic defence of the global flood and frequent appeals to Scripture and God’s power in his scientific work would either be sheepishly downplayed or framed as an embarrassing but forgivable artefact of his 17th-century ignorance. After all, as the Benedictine Fr. Martin Gander pointed out nearly 130 years ago already, in the wake of Hutton and Lyell’s irreligious paradigms, many Catholics have become ashamed to even approach the biblical flood in geological terms out of pure fear of losing their scientific reputation, even in cases where such a catastrophe affords better explanatory power than the alternative.[1] Unfortunately, the way this book treats Steno’s methodology is actually much worse than I expected. Rather than presenting a more-or-less accurate account of Steno’s methods under a lens of historical snobbery, Mr. Salerno instead presents Steno in a way that one would expect of someone who had not actually read Steno’s work and had only superficially skimmed some secondary literature. However, it does not seem likely that the author was unaware of Steno’s real positions given the detail with which this book is otherwise written. Whatever the degree of wilfulness involved in this misrepresentation, suffice it to say that this book does not paint an accurate picture of its subject.
Before discussing this further, I should note that there are a few positive elements to the book. The illustrations are skilful, and the physical design and layout of the book evokes a pleasantly antiquated feeling. The pacing and narrative style are not bad either, and the second half of the book, which focuses on Steno’s personal conversion and ecclesiastical career, is quite appreciable (at least until the conclusion). I think the author has a genuine and commendable desire to draw attention to a less known yet very important figure in Church history, but they go about it in the wrong way. The main issue with the work concerns its treatment of Steno’s two main geological treatises.
When reviewing a children’s history book, nit-picking the accuracy of every detail is fruitless. Rather than providing the resolution of an academic dissertation, the book only needs to provide an engaging general summary of the source content to be good. However, the summary given still has to paint a truthful picture, and this is where the book fails, especially as a work marketed to inspire devotion to Steno both as a scientist and as a saint. After a fair summary of Steno’s education and work as an anatomist, the book begins to address Steno’s famous dissection of a shark in 1666 and his subsequent identification of the “tongue-stones” as real petrified shark teeth. It frames the topic on pages 18-20:
“The origin of tongue-stones and other fossils had puzzled thinkers since ancient times. Fossils that resembled shark teeth and seashells were commonly found in places miles inland and high above sea level, even on mountaintops! How could this be? Since fossils bore an uncanny resemblance to the petrified remains of living creatures, some scholars believed that’s exactly what they were. But this was not a popular theory, because it didn’t seem to explain how shells and shark teeth became embedded in solid rock far from the ocean. Some people speculated that fossils fell from the sky, but the most common opinion was that the strange rocks simply grew in the earth, sprouting up from the ground like plants.”
The author represents the inland location an elevation of marine fossils as having been an unanswerable mystery to those of the first opinion. However, those Christians who viewed the fossils as buried remnants of real organisms did have an explanation for how they ended up so far inland and on top of mountains: the biblical flood! Since the early centuries of the Church, Christians like St. Isidore of Seville,[2] Procopius of Gaza,[3] Eusebius of Caesarea,[4] Pseudo-Eustathius,[5] and Tertullian[6] pointed to marine fossils on mountaintops as proof of the world’s catastrophic burial under water and silt. This was, for the most part, a uniquely Christian notion amidst the pagan ancient world: among the pagan Greeks, the followers of Plato believed the primordial flood had not covered all the mountaintops,[7] and the followers of Aristotle, or Peripatetics, believed that fossils were generated by the innate power of the earth. Among the pagan Romans, Pliny the Elder recorded the folk belief that the “tongue-stones” had rained from the sky.
The unique position of the Church Fathers and ecclesiastical writers held firm in the Christian world through the Middle Ages[8] and early post-reformation period. However, by Steno’s time, the Renaissance humanists had spurred a renewed interest in the peripatetic doctrines within the sciences, and several notable Christian scholars were once again wondering if the hidden forces of the earth could produce such facsimiles. Steno, however, favored the view of the ancient Church, as we will see.
The book continues on page 23:
“At this time, there were no detailed theories about the origin and history of the earth… Almost no one had any clear idea how mountains or valleys or continents were formed. It was assumed that the Earth had remained largely static since the beginning of time. Any changes that had occurred since then were thought to have been caused by chaos and disorder that spoiled God’s originally perfect creation. But when Steno looked at the hills and valleys of Tuscany, he didn’t see ruin at all. His keen anatomist’s eye saw how the rock formations and features of the landscape all fit together in a logical sequence – a narrative sequence. He saw order: the kind of order that exists in a well-told story!”
The first sentence is true insofar as there were no commonly accepted naturalistic theories among Catholics about the origin of the planet: The Church viewed the planet as having been created in its entirety by God at once in the beginning. But as for the surface of the planet, there was no commitment to geography remaining static since the beginning. Quite the opposite: the medievals had no problem with a changing surface, molded by catastrophic upheavals. St. Albert the Great, rejecting the peripatetic doctrine that the mountains were formed by ancient seas which moved from place to place over immensely long ages,[9] posited that mountains were formed during dramatic seismic upheavals.[10] Far from taking a novel, gradualistic departure in this regard, as the book would have us believe, Steno actually reiterated St. Albert’s position on mountain formation, though he admitted that it was not clear to him which mountains were formed in this way after the Deluge, and which were formed by it or before it.[11] To him, the geological features that had not been shaped by Noah’s flood had been formed in the roughly 4,000 years afterwards by natural disasters:
“But since the authors whose writings have been preserved report as marvels almost every year, earthquakes, fires bursting forth from the earth, overflowings of rivers and seas, it is easily apparent that in four thousand years many and various changes have taken place.”[12]
Steno points out in the full passage that many of these great events in the ages shortly after the flood would likely have not been recorded by such primitive societies, or else the records were lost to time, but this does not prevent us from attributing to them a catastrophic origin. He makes a good point: there are many geological wonders that could have been explained as products of slow development if their sudden formation had not been recorded. Take the massive Eldgjá canyon in Iceland, for example, which might have been attributed to slow erosion by a stream if we did not know that a fissure eruption carved it out rapidly around 939 AD.
The book goes on to describe “Steno’s principles” of superposition, original horizontality, lateral continuity, and cross-cutting. It is important to note that Steno’s interpretive principles are just that: they are assumptions which can certainly help to make sense of the data, but not testable, proven laws that cannot be broken, since they deal with past events and not the current order of things. This short review is not the place to examine every time these “rules” have been challenged, whether by entire fossils cutting vertically through several layers or by sedimentation experiments demonstrating that multiple layers can be deposited at once. But it should be noted that, contrary to the book’s assertions on pages 28 and 47, none of Steno’s principles imply geological deep time. Regarding the principle of superposition, the book asserts:
“The implications of Steno’s ideas were staggering! If layers of solid rock could be older or younger than one another, it meant that the history of the Earth stretched far back into unrecorded time. Thanks to Steno’s keen observations and innovative ideas, it is now possible to read the secret history of the rocks and learn about events in the distant past by studying the landscape of the present.”
However, as even the UC Berkeley Museum of Palaeontology admits about this “law”:
“It should also be remembered that Steno’s law is a statement of relative time, not absolute time: two rock layers, in principle, could have formed millions of years apart or a few hours or days apart. Steno himself saw no difficulty in attributing the formation of most rocks to the flood mentioned in the Bible.”[13]
Steno suggested that the fossiliferous upper layers of the Apennines had been laid down by the Deluge, whereas the lower layers, absent of fossils, were the original surface of the pre-flood world, “produced directly by the First Cause”.[14] The museum refers to this as “the first use of geology to try to distinguish different time periods in the Earth's history”. Perhaps that is accurate, but it remains a huge stretch to paint Steno as a forerunner of geological gradualism and deep time, especially when the chronological distinction of layers in question was between the miraculous creation of the world in Genesis 1 and its miraculous destruction in Genesis 7. Nor did Steno insist that the present is the key to understanding the past, as Hutton and Lyell would. Instead, anyone who takes the time to read his two translated geological works will find that he interpreted his observations of the present in relation to both Scripture and ancient historical sources, which “those who in their reading of history wish to escape the name of credulous, consider myths.”[15]
We now move to the crux of the issue with this book: its treatment of Steno’s view of the origin and position of marine fossils. After a fair summary of Steno’s work on suspensions and sedimentation, it says on pp. 29-31:
“It became clear to Steno that fossils like the tongue-stones were indeed the remains of aquatic creatures that had lived in ancient rivers, lakes, and seas, and which had become buried in sediment after they died. Over time, as the sedimentary layers hardened into rock, the durable parts of these organisms – their bones, shells, and teeth – were likewise turned to stone: they were fossilized. The slow, steady work of erosion eventually brought these fossils back to the surface. Steno wrote up his theories in a brief paper called De Solido…[etc.]”
Like Steno in 1666, we have quite a toothy specimen to dissect here. Firstly, Steno originally laid out his theories of fossilization in 1667 in a short paper with a very long title, which we will abbreviate to Canis Carchariae Dissectum (hereafter Canis). He published De Solido, more commonly known as The Prodromus, in 1669, with the support of the Holy Office itself. Modern translations of both are available in PDF form at the links given above and elsewhere. It is true that Steno generally viewed the process of fossilization during the flood as the result of top-down sedimentation, whereas a modern flood geologist, benefitting from greater knowledge of fluid dynamics and possessing more complete fossils, would view most marine fossils as having been buried in the Deluge’s rapid lateral flows. More importantly, however, I invite the reader to scan Steno’s texts for themselves to see if he appeals merely to “ancient rivers, lakes, and seas” to explain the inland position of marine fossils. They will find instead that Steno presents two possibilities for any given fossil: (A) the animal was deposited in its present place when the whole planet was covered under water during the great Deluge, or (B) the animal was buried at the bottom of the sea, then transported to its present location by seismic activity. While both explanations figure prominently in Canis, he focuses especially on the former in The Prodromus.
In Canis, Steno finds the first explanation satisfactory for fossils found high on inland mountaintops. He appeals to Scripture, and even quotes Tertullian: “A change occurred in all the world when it was covered with all the waters; even now mussel shells and conches range about the mountains seeking to prove to Plato that the very peaks have been under water.”[16] Steno finds the second explanation plausible for places near the ocean. He gives the example of fossil shark teeth found in the middle of the island of Malta. In Steno’s mind, perhaps Malta had once been below the ocean, and then a “sudden ignition of subterranean emanations” raised it above the surface.[17] Both explanations are far from gradualistic.
In The Prodromus, his more mature work, Steno doubles down on the flood explanation, using it as the critical mechanism for his discussion of the Apennine Mountains of Tuscany – surely it was impossible to imagine fossils being moved that far inland just by an earthquake. He sees clear substantiation for both the universal submersion in Genesis 1 and the Deluge, setting out to show “the agreement of Nature with Scripture”[18] by presenting six facies, or stages, of the earth’s history. Princeton historian of philosophy Daniel Garber provides a helpful summary:
“Having enumerated the six facies starting from the most recent, Steno then went through them beginning from the earliest, reviewing the connection between his naturalistic account and the biblical account of the Earth’s development… The earliest stage, illustrated in fig. 8.2, #25, shows a flat Earth, with successive strata all parallel and horizontal with respect to one another. But covering these strata is water… In this first terrae facies, what would later become the “flat tops of the highest mountains were covered with water.” By the second stage, illustrated in fig. 8.2, #24, the water had disappeared from the surface, but “huge cavities” formed in underneath the top strata. The lack of support from below then caused FG to buckle and break, resulting in the third stage, illustrated in figure 23. This produces both mountains (the highest strata left on f and g) and valleys (the result of the broken planes). This, Steno claimed, was the period of the great Deluge. The next stage, stage four (fig. 8.2, #22) occurred when the resulting cavity filled with water from the Deluge which, in turn, brought sediment with it forming new strata. These seas, teeming with life, were much higher than seas are today, resulting in marine life well up into what are now mountains: “The production of hills from marine deposits testifies that the sea was higher than it is now, and this not only in Tuscany but also in very many places far enough from the sea.” Stage five (fig. 8.2, #21) involved new cavities forming under the planes, as the waters of the Deluge receded. These, in turn, resulted in further breakage of the planes due to the weight of the water (fig. 8.2, #20). This resulted in the current state of Tuscany, and the world.” [19]
This leads us to the ultimate flaw with The Riddle of the Tongue-Stones: it makes absolutely no mention of Steno’s treatment of the Deluge and the history of Genesis, which factored so heavily into his work and cannot be missed by anyone who reads it. Mr. Salerno may be uncomfortable with Steno’s inclusion of biblical events in his theory of geology, but by conspicuously omitting one of Steno’s most fundamental concepts in a book that is supposed to provide an informative summary, he is doing the man a huge disservice. For my part, I am not claiming that all the details of Steno’s theories square with a modern understanding of geophysics, or that his particular applications always line up with how a 21st century “creationist” (if I must use the term) might describe the flood depositions. We do not need to wind geology back to its 17th-century state to believe in the global flood, nor should we. Still, it is clear that Steno confidently allowed Scripture and Tradition to dialogue with natural science on the topic of the earth’s history, and he did not introduce any sort of gradualistic or “uniformitarian” theory, which is not the impression you would get from reading this book.
Some might claim that Steno’s use of Genesis and the Deluge in his work was merely incidental due to the religious climate of the time, and that his core, distillable concepts were simply about the natural processes of sedimentation, regardless of their particular history. Andrew Dickson White even went so far as to claim that Steno merely paid Genesis lip-service to escape the Church’s censure, while actually putting forward a fundamentally secular theory of geology.[20] Aside from the fact that this view does not agree with the clear diction and structure of Steno’s work, as has been demonstrated, it also contradicts his expressed intentions. Gottfried Leibniz, who knew Steno well, recalled:
“I remember hearing him tell us about this often, and that he rejoiced in contributing, through natural arguments, and not without benefit for piety, to a belief in the sacred history and the universal flood.”[21]
Clearly, Steno was passionate about the sacred history of Genesis and the Deluge and wanted his scientific work to help inspire faith in these events. After his conversion in 1667, Steno’s focus in life was apologetics, and he led many of those he met to conversion. His scientific career was no exception. Steno’s commitment to the tradition of the global flood was more than incidental in the late 17th century; faith in the miracle was under attack in the climate of enlightenment rationalism, especially in Steno’s home turf of Holland. In 1661, the Dutchman Isaac Vossius published De Septuaginta Interpretibus, in which he argued, against the consensus of the Fathers, that the Deluge had only been a regional flood limited to Palestine. The Sacred Congregation of the Index condemned the book in 1686, the same year Steno died.[22] In 1670, Steno’s former classmate Baruch Spinoza published Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in Amsterdam, in which he also asserted that the flood was limited to Palestine, and that it had not destroyed the entire human race, despite what God allowed Noah to believe in his ignorance.[23] The Congregation of the Index condemned this book in 1679, after Steno had publicly corrected Spinoza’s philosophy and privately denounced him to the Holy Office.[24]
In summary, The Riddle of the Tongue-Stones fails to do justice to Steno’s legacy. The book obscures this great Catholic’s approach to the intersection of faith and science, in a manner that is hard to excuse for a work claiming to be historical nonfiction. Regardless of one’s particular viewpoint, only the pure, undistorted truth of history redounds to the glory of God, who is Himself the Truth. Let God be true though every man be false, as it is written, “That thou mayest be justified in thy words, and prevail when thou art judged.” (Romans 3:4).
April 4, 2025
Feast of St. Isidore of Seville
Christian Bergsma
Footnotes:
[1] Gander, Die Sündflut in ihrer Bedeutung für die Ergeschichte – Bible und Geologie (Münster 1896), p. 106.
[2] St. Isidore, Etymologies, Book 13, Ch. 22, found in Barney et al., The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge, 2006), p. 282.
[3] Procopius, Commentarii in Genesin, Ch. 8, found in Migne, PG 87 (Paris, 1860), p. 286.
[4] Eusebius, Chronicle, trans. R. Bedrosian, (Tertullian.org, 2008), Ch. 26. https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/eusebius_chronicon_02_text.htm
[5] Pseudo-Eustathius, Commentarius in Hexaemeron, found in Migne, PG 18 (Paris, 1857), p. 751.
[6] Tertullian, On the Pallium, Ch. 2, found in Roberts et al., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 4 (New York, 1913), p. 6.
[7] St. Theophilus of Antioch rejected Plato’s claim that the flood had not covered the tops of every mountain on the authority of Moses. See St. Theophilus, To Autocylus, trans. M. Dods, Book 3, Ch. 18. Found in Roberts, Donaldson, & Coxe, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. II (New York, 1899), p. 116.
[8] The minority opinion being that of St. Albert the Great, who, recognizing the fossils as real petrified marine organisms (De Mineralibus, Book 1, Tractate 2, Ch. 8), theorized that they were transported inland and raised to their elevation during catastrophic earthquakes (De Causis, Book 2, Tractate 2, Ch. 5). Steno also considered this plausible in Canis, citing one such earthquake recorded by Tacitus, and noted the explanatory power of such catastrophes in The Prodromus, but maintained that the historical Deluge could also explain such phenomena, and he gave it preferential attention in the latter work when dealing with fossils on inland mountaintops.
[9] St. Albert, De Causis Proprietatum Elementorum, Book 1, Tractate 2, Ch. 2-3, & Book II, Tractate 2, Ch. 4.
[10] Ibid, Book 2, Tractate 2, Ch. 5.
[11] Bl. Steno, The Prodromus, trans. J. G. Winter (London, 1916), found in University of Michigan Studies, Humanistic Series, Vol XI, pp. 231-234 & 265. Unfortunately, the modern introduction and footnotes in this edition are no less skewed and misleading than the subject of this review. For the original English translation of The Prodromus, published during Steno’s lifetime (and happily free of the snobbish introduction and footnotes of modern editors), see here: https://archive.org/details/prodromustodisse00sten/page/n11/mode/2up
[12] Ibid, p. 269. The editor here rather obtusely attributes Steno’s mention of “4,000 years” from the flood to his time to a commitment to Ussher’s chronology, seemingly unaware that the general Vulgate chronology supplying this timeframe had existed in the Catholic Church both before Ussher and independently after him.
[13] University of California Berkeley Museum of Palaeontology, Nicholas Steno (1638-1686). https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/steno.html
[14] Bl. Steno, Op. Cit., p. 264
[15] Bl. Steno, Op. Cit., p. 234
[16] Tertullian, op. cit., quoted in Bl. Steno, Canis Carchariae Dissectum, trans. A. Garboe, (London 1958), p. 17
[17] Bl. Steno, Ibid, pp. 43-45.
[18] Bl. Steno, Ibid, pp. 263.
[19] Garber, Steno, Leibniz, and the History of the World, 2, in Andrault & Laerke, Steno and the Philosophers, (Leiden, 2018), pp. 206-207. This work from Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History series provides great details on Steno’s piety and apologetic zeal, though sometimes from an unfortunately hostile and biased perspective.
[20] White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York, 1897), p. 215.
[21] Leibniz, Protogaea, p. 19, quoted in Lærke, Leibniz and Steno, 1675-1680, in Andrault & Laerke, Steno and the Philosophers (Leiden, 2018), p. 70.
[22] According to historian Scott Mandelbrote, who reviewed the proceedings against Vossius in the Vatican archives, three of the external witnesses during the examination tried to defend Vossius’ local flood, but for the Congregation “neither mischief nor moderation was sufficient to counter the general sense that Vossius had denied a miracle. In the process, he had distorted the witness of the Fathers… [etc.].” See Mandelbrote, Isaac Vossius and the Septuagint, in Jorink & van Miert, Isaac Vossius (1618-1689) between Science and Scholarship (Leiden, 2012), Vol. 214, pp. 96-7 & 108-109.
[23] Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (Gutenberg.org, 1997), Part 1, Ch. 2, 79. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/989/pg989-images.html
[24] For a timeline of these events, see Spruit & Totaro, The Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza’s Ethica (Leiden, 2011).
