Herz, Gott, Kreuz: Die Spiritualität des Anatomen, Geologen und Bischofs Dr. med. Niels Stensen (1638–86) (review)

Frank Sobiech's goal in Herz, Gott, Kreuz is to synthesize two seemingly divergent dimensions of Niels Stensen (Nicolaus Steno), seventeenth-century naturalist and churchman. From one standpoint, Stensen appears to principally be an accomplished naturalist. He is the eponymous discoverer of a duct in the salivary glands. He persuasively challenged René Descartes's claim that the pineal gland was the seat of the human soul. He showed that the heart was a muscle like any other, not to be associated, as from antiquity, with the soul or human emotions. His law of constancy in mineralogy indicates that the angle formed by corresponding faces of a given mineral is invariable. He argued from his study of fossilized sharks' teeth for the organic origin of fossils. His speculations in geological history led to the development of his principle of original horizontality (that geological strata form evenly and horizontally and are disturbed from that position only later).

From another vantage, he was first and foremost a deeply religious person and man of the church. Raised Lutheran, Stensen began reevaluating his religious commitments in the mid 1660s. His extensive personal writings reveal how wide-ranging his religious investigations were. He undertook much of this spiritual conversation with Jesuits whom he came to know in the course of scientific research at libraries and schools maintained by the order. A key moment inspiring his ultimate conversion to Catholicism was a Corpus Christi procession in 1667 in Florence, where he had worked extensively under the patronage of the Grand Duke Ferdinand II of Toscana. He was received into the Catholic Church the same year. His scientific renown gave his religious conversion celebrity, and among those to whom he defended his conversion was G. W. Leibnitz. He devoted his energies increasingly to pastoral and theological pursuits. In 1675 he was ordained a Catholic priest. Two years later he was consecrated a bishop and, at the request of the Catholic Duke of Hannover, began serving the small Catholic minority in northwestern Germany, Denmark, and Norway. As an auxiliary bishop of the diocese of Münster and Paderborn, he was considered a good pastor and enjoyed amiable relations with Lutheran officials. His implacable criticism of clerical corruption within his own diocese, particularly as it affected the election of the prince-bishop's successor in 1683, led to his release from office in 1684. The last few years of his life he spent as a missionary pastor in Schwerin, Mecklenburg. An intestinal infection caused his premature death on 5 December 1686, aged forty-eight years. Pope John Paul II beatified Stensen in 1988.

Ever since, biographers have judged Stensen either a Great Scientific Mind lost to religion or a discarnate spiritual writer. Frank Sobiech, in contrast, has been inspired to develop a more synthesizing biographical explanation. Herz, Gott, Kreuz — first a 2003 doctoral dissertation in Church History for the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the University of Münster, now a 392-page monograph — is the result. This is neither an intellectual biography nor a spiritual biography per se, although these are aspects of the work. Instead Sobiech proposes an exploration into spirituality, defined as "the inspired form of the Christian's life of faith . . . in daily life" (24). The book consists of two parts: the first is biographical with an emphasis on Stensen's evolving religious questions and his development from a committed Lutheran scientist to an engaged Catholic pastor. The second part taxonomizes and analyzes the religious themes surfacing in Stensen's writings.

Sobiech's objective is clear: he wants to argue that as a man of science and a man of God Stensen did not suffer from a split personality. Rather, even as they seem over time to reverse in priority, the two dimensions...