Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon & Around the Moon

Introduction

Opening Passages: From the Earth to the Moon:

During the American War of Secession a new and every influential club was formed in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. We all know with what rapidity the military instinct developed itself in this people of shipowners, merchants, and mechanics. Simple shopkeepers stepped over their counters transformed into captains, colonels, and generals, without having passed through the School of application at West Point; nevertheless, they were soon equal in the art of war to their colleagues of the Old World, and, like them, obtained their victories at the cost of an immense expenditure of bullets, money, and men. (p. 5)

Around the Moon:

During the year 186- the whole world was greatly excited by a scientific experiment without precedent in the annals of science. The members of the Gun Club -- an assembly of artillerists founded at Baltimore -- had conceived the idea of placing themselves in communication with the moon -- yes, with the moon! -- by means of a cannon-ball. Their president, Barbicane, the originator of the idea, having consulted on the subject the astronomers of the Cambridge Observatory, took all the measures necessary for the success of the extraordinary undertaking, which had been declared feasible by the majority of competent men. After having opened a public subscription, which realised nearly 30 millions of francs (£1,200,000), he commenced his gigantic works. (p. 209)

Summary: The Baltimore Gun Club, founded during the Civil War, is a club of artillery enthusiasts, who find themselves puzzled as to what they should do when the Civil War ends. All this enthusiasm for artillery, and no opportunity to use it, and, what is more, the political climate is such that it seems improbable that the President of the United States could be persuaded to rectify the suggestion, say, by invading Britain. It is enough to make an artillerist very depressed. But Impey Barbicane, president of the club, has a plan: to make the biggest, most powerful cannon that has ever been made and shoot a projectile to the moon, to see if they can communicate with any inhabitants there. Using the most advanced technology, like gun cotton and aluminum metal, it just might be possible. Donations pour in from all over America, and even from the world; even the French donate more than a million francs, although in their case it is because they think it will be hilariously funny when it fails. But the French have perhaps not reckoned on the audacious practicality of Americans, and there is one Frenchman -- Michel Ardan, noted adventurer -- who sees even more potential to the project than Barbicane. Barbicane wants to shoot something to the moon. Ardan wants to go there.

It has become common to think of science fiction as 'stories about the future', but while Verne has a few of those, it is worth remembering that this is a rare thing for him. Verne's stories are not generally about the future, but about the present or near past. He is not asking himself, "How might people get to the moon in the future?" He is asking, "If we tried to go to the moon right now, how might we try to do it?" He then extrapolates as best he can to fill the apparent gaps and get an exciting story out of it. It's not a story about what might be done in the future; it's a story about living in an exciting time in which, for all one knows, there might already be a plan in the works to do it.

Likewise, it's important not to overstate the extent to which Verne is trying to predict anything. Because of his enthusiasm both for state-of-the-art technologies and for letting the genuine science of his day structure part of his stories, as well as his attempt to think through these various adventures logically, he hits remarkably often, but he's not trying to be a prophet. For one thing, he is regularly dealing with the unknown: he knows that he is entering realms in which speculation necessarily has a heavy share. But, as Michel Ardan notes, they are speculations about problems that can't be solved unless one actually goes and sees. Scientists can extrapolate all they please in the most rigorous way possible, and it's still the case that they can't fully know that they have accounted for everything until they have actually tried it out.

Verne is also particularly interested in satire. For these two works, it is especially true of From the Earth to the Moon; Around the Moon has traces of this origin, but is mostly just an attempt to tell the story of an incredible journey. From the Earth to the Moon, like its later sequel Sans dessus dessous, is in part a send-up of Americans. How do you get something to the moon? You'd need to blast it off the earth at high acceleration, like a projectile from a cannon. What nation on earth could possibly be imagined to have ambitions so vast and optimism so unlimited that they might spend that much money to build a gun that big to do something that crazy? Only the Americans. In Around the Moon the landing of the projectile when it falls back to earth is made possible because the U.S.S. Susquehanna is in taking soundings of the Pacific floor in preparation of a less crazy, but still breathtakingly ambitious, project to connect every island in Oceania by submarine telegraph cable, and the book ends with an anticipation that the Baltimore Gun Club may someday soon form a company for interstellar travel.

Verne also satirizes the French, in the form of Michel Ardan, but Ardan's entrance shifts us out of a story that is primarily satire into a story that is primarily an adventure, because it moves it from being the quirk of a nation, and, what is more, a bunch of warmongers, into being a project of humanity itself. All of that immense technological and scientific expertise had been poured into war and into the interest of single nations. The technology inevitably was impressive, so much had gone into it. What couldn't we achieve if we poured ourselves out in the same way for scientific exploration and for all of humanity?

From the Earth to the Moon was clearly conceived by Verne as a standalone work. Its ending, taken on its own, shuts down the possibility of a sequel, although it leaves enough ambiguous to invite speculation about what might have happened. Verne seems to have had a taste for stories that ended in disaster; in a number of cases where the story does not end that way, like The Adventures of Captain Hatteras and Hector Servedac, it is only so because his publisher made him change it. He ingeniously manages to find a way to get Around the Moon -- a character in the previous book turns out to have made a serious mistake -- but there's also something of a disconnect in characterization, particularly with Ardan. In the original book, Ardan brings a poetic touch and shifts the story onto new ground; he comes across as flamboyant but informed. He comes across as considerably less informed and more flamboyant in Around the Moon, because his character has to have a different function in that book, as a counterweight to the overly serious Barbicane and Nicholls, as a way to give an opportunity for exposition, and as a way of keeping a story about being stuck in a small room from getting too dull. But there are other things that maintain a kind of continuity through both books, and not least the theme, that our adventures are all the more extraordinary for being shared with others.

Favorite Passages: From the Earth to the Moon:

As no one seemed to doubt this assertion, Michel Ardan continued.

'My dear hearers, if we were to believe what certain narrow-minded people maintain, humanity would be enclosed within a magic circle, and condemned to vegetate on this globe, without ever being able to reach the planetary spheres. This must not be. We shall travel to the moon, we shall travel to the planets and to the stars, as we journey today from Liverpool to New York -- easily, rapidly, and with safety; and the atmospheric ocean will soon be crossed as well as the oceans of the moon. Distance is a relative term which will soon be reduced to zero.' (p. 132)

Around the Moon:

'Bravo!' cried Barbicane. 'Do you know, Michel, that for an artist you are intelligent?'

'Yes,' replied Michel, negligently; 'we are all like that on the Boulevard des Italiens.' (p. 336)

Recommendation: Recommended.

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Jules Verne, From the Earth & Around the Moon, Wordsworth Editions (New York: 2011).

Wesley and Wilberforce

Feb 24, 1791

My Dear Sir,

Unless the Divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise, in opposing that execrable villany which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils; but if God be for you who can be against you. Are all of them together stronger than God? Oh be not weary of well-doing. Go on in the name of God, and in the power of His might, till even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall vanish away before it. That He who has guided you from your youth up may continue to strengthen you in this and all things, is the prayer of,

Dear Sir,
Your affectionate servant,
John Wesley

[Robert Isaac Wilberforce & Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce vol. I (London, John Murray: 1838), p. 297.]

Aquinas for Lent X

Spiritual needs are relieved by spiritual acts in two ways, first by asking for help from God, and in this respect we have "prayer," whereby one man prays for others; secondly, by giving human assistance, and this in three ways. First, in order to relieve a deficiency on the part of the intellect, and if this deficiency be in the speculative intellect, the remedy is applied by "instructing," and if in the practical intellect, the remedy is applied by "counselling." Secondly, there may be a deficiency on the part of the appetitive power, especially by way of sorrow, which is remedied by "comforting." Thirdly, the deficiency may be due to an inordinate act; and this may be the subject of a threefold consideration. First, in respect of the sinner, inasmuch as the sin proceeds from his inordinate will, and thus the remedy takes the form of "reproof." Secondly, in respect of the person sinned against; and if the sin be committed against ourselves, we apply the remedy by "pardoning the injury," while, if it be committed against God or our neighbor, it is not in our power to pardon, as Jerome observes (Super Matth. xviii, 15). Thirdly, in respect of the result of the inordinate act, on account of which the sinner is an annoyance to those who live with him, even beside his intention; in which case the remedy is applied by "bearing with him," especially with regard to those who sin out of weakness, according to Romans 15:1: "We that are stronger, ought to bear the infirmities of the weak," and not only as regards their being infirm and consequently troublesome on account of their unruly actions, but also by bearing any other burdens of theirs with them, according to Galatians 6:2: "Bear ye one another's burdens."

Summa Theologiae 2-2.32.2

Aquinas for Lent IX

...in the Mass there is supplication until the Body and Blood of Christ, since in them there is the commemoration of holy things from which we gain confidence to ask for benefits. In the mystery of the consecration there is prayer since it is meditation on those things that Christ did. Up to communion there is intercession for the living and the dead and for oneself. At the end there is thanksgiving.

[Thomas Aquinas, Commentaries on St. Paul's Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, Baer, tr., St. Augustine's Press (South Bend, IN: 2007) p. 23. This is from the commentary on I Timothy.]

Leithart's Questions on Simplicity

Peter Leithart on divine simplicity:

Why can we not say something like this: In finite being, certain things are predicable of wholes that are not predicated of parts, yet in the case of infinite being there is no such disjunction between whole and parts. With finite being parts are in a relation of potency to the whole; in infinite being, each part is fully actualized in itself and in the whole. What can’t we say that the parts are eternally inseparable from the whole, and that the parts are actualized eternally in a whole that is actualized in its parts? What prevents us from talking about the equal ultimacy of parts and whole in infinite being? We’re going to introduce a finite/infinite distinction anyway; why can’t it run between “infinite composite/finite composite” rather than between “infinite simple/finite simple”?

(1) If there is nothing predicable of the whole that is not predicable of the parts, at all, then there is no way to distinguish wholes and parts, and therefore the claim that this is whole and that is part is unfounded.

(2) To be a part is by definition to be potential to some whole. Whether it is actualized is irrelevant; we aren't talking about change here but about whether all the parts considered are together potential-whole, even if that potential is actualized. If they have no potential to compose the whole, then either there are no parts, or there is no whole, or there is no composition. If there is no whole, though, there are no parts, and if there is no composition, well, noncompositeness is literally just another name for simplicity.

(3) Having parts is a limitation that is one of the things we recognized as constituting something as finite rather than infinite being. Parthood is an ordering relation; having parts is a kind of dependency; nothing about those parts always or necessarily existing changes the fact that the relation is one of dependency.

(4) Leithart is ultimately trying to suggest that these matters are matters of metaphysics. There are indeed metaphysical arguments on the point. But first and foremost one has to justify why one is talking about 'parts' and 'wholes' in the first place. Is it just a metaphor? Nothing about the doctrine of divine simplicity prevents that, as long as you recognize it is just a metaphor; although we would still need to know why we are using the metaphor. If it's not a metaphor, we need some reason to explain why we are calling them parts and wholes to begin with. Leithart suggests that the argument for divine simplicity makes the assumption that "there must be a close analogy between the part-whole relation of finite being and a similar relation in infinite being". But it doesn't make this assumption; the assumption, to the extent it is made, is made by the compositionist: he is proposing that there is a close enough analogy between the part-whole relation of finite being and a similar relation in infinite being that the latter can be called a part-whole relation. The defender of divine simplicity is denying this: there can be no "similar relation" in infinite being at all. There is no need for an assumption of a "close analogy" if you're denying that there is any similarity justifying the use of the same terms in both cases; you do need a "close analogy" -- at least, one close enough -- if you are going to say that both cases are genuinely cases of the part-whole relation.

There is no room for just making up a new construal of parts and wholes; they have to be actually parts and wholes, which means that they have to have certain basic features that makes it coherent and rational to call them 'parts' and 'wholes'. And Leithart cannot point to any account of parts and wholes in which (a) they are what a reasonable person would normally call parts and wholes but (b) they don't involve any kind of asymmetric ordering or dependency, formal or otherwise. None exists. Anyone who is using 'part' or 'whole' in a way that doesn't involve (b) is using them in a nonstandard way.

(5) But even if none of this were true, the question at hand is the doctrine of divine simplicity. Anyone who is going to reject this, or even question it, has to be considering what the doctrine itself is actually denying -- and it is not denying just any arbitrary meaning that can be attached to the words 'part' and 'whole', by Leithart or by anyone else. It is denying that God is composite in the way it is characterizing composition. Nothing else is even relevant.

Aquinas for Lent VIII

But since while trying to conform himself to some exemplar, a man is occasionally impeded by an intervening obstacle, he therefore removes that which is most capable of being an impediment: the weight of sin. Now, tribulation is as a certain contest. I Cor 9:25: Every one who contends in the struggle, refraineth himself from all things. For just as in a race and contest one ought to lay aside everything that weighs him down, so also in the contest of tribulation....He, therefore, who wishes to run well to God in tribulation must lay aside every impediment.

[Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, Baer, tr. St. Augustine's Press (South Bend, IN: 2006) p. 269.]

The Peacock

Today is the feast of St. Pietro Damiani, better known in English as Peter Damian, Doctor of the Church. From his Letter 95:

Do not as very many do, my brother, pay too much attention to the virtue you may possess and thus neglect passing judgment on the vices you have disregarded. But imitate the example of the peacock which naturally acts quite differently. It has its ugly feet, like those of a chicken, always in view, but displays the spectacular beauty of its tail behind it. In its feet it sees something gross that it may despise, but ignores its tail that might cause it to be admired. Before its eyes is that which causes it humiliation, but on the back it carries that for which it can strut before all other birds. You too should hide that which is virtuous within you, but never fail to view and judge what might be sinful and in need of correction.