The view from planet Earth: Man looks at the cosmos

by Vincent Cronin

THE VIEW FROM PLANET EARTH offers a fascinating, informed look at the greatest minds in history, from the classical Greeks to the present, and how their views of the cosmos have affected the evolution of our culture and values. In a lively and appealing narrative, Vincent Cronin skillfully blends history and biography to re-create the cosmology of each age through its key figures. Deftly woven throughout are the influences of astronomy and astrology, philosophy and poetry, folklore and religion. The result is a thorough analysis of mankind's preoccupation with the universe, a preoccupation that continues into our time.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Science

348 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Vincent Archibald Patrick Cronin FRSL (24 May 1924 – 25 January 2011) was a British historical, cultural, and biographical writer, best known for his biographies of Louis XIV, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, and Napoleon, as well as for his books on the Renaissance.

Cronin was born in Tredegar, Monmouthshire, to Scottish doctor and novelist, A. J. Cronin, and May Gibson, but moved to London at the age of two. He was educated at Ampleforth College, Harvard University, the Sorbonne, and Trinity College, Oxford, from which he graduated with honours in 1947, earning a degree in Literae Humaniores. During the Second World War, he served as a lieutenant in the British Army.

In 1949, he married Chantal de Rolland, and they had five children. The Cronins were long-time residents of London, Marbella, and Dragey, in Avranches, Normandy, where they lived at the Manoir de Brion.

Cronin was a recipient of the Richard Hillary Award, the W.H. Heinemann Award (1955), and the Rockefeller Foundation Award (1958). He also contributed to the Revue des Deux Mondes, was the first General Editor of the Companion Guides series, and was on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature.

He died at his home in Marbella on 25 January 2011.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent...

Reviews

[William Bies · Rating 3 out of 5]

The decidedly modest and humble contribution Vincent Cronin makes to the scene of current intellectual culture in the dated book presently under review merits inclusion here only on account of the stimulating role it played long ago, in one of those mysterious conjunctions of fate, in awakening in this recensionist’s youthful mind a fitting awareness of the great adventure mankind embarked upon with the Ionian natural philosophers of archaic Greece, back when he was a clueless high-school junior. Nevertheless if we revisit it now we can arrive at a juster perspective on the stature of Cronin’s presentation. Alexandre Koyré in his From the closed world to the infinite universe (to be reviewed in a moment), falls dismally flat. In the present work, on the other hand, Cronin rises to the challenge Koyré so conspicuously misses out on, to rouse in his audience a keen sense of the drama accompanying the monumental change in world-picture that took place during the seventeenth century at the onset of modernity. His boyhood reception of Cronin’s sweeping narrative from archaic Greece to the Apollo moon landing instilled in this recensionist a life-long love (however dilettantish) of the discipline of intellectual history.

Cronin is no scientist, but displays abundant evidence of a humane education and sensibility. What flows from his pen, therefore, given his cosmic theme, is a curious mixture of science and literature. Starting with antiquity and culminating with various literary and artistic movements of the twentieth century, he regales us with a series of miniature portraits of most everyone one would have heard of and of a good number of minor figures whom one wouldn’t have – and even with familiar personages, he offers us a look at an aspect of their individuality not normally encountered, as say with the sisters Emily and Charlotte Brontë and their life-long affiliation with astronomy, as evidenced in their poetry and autobiographical novels. Needless to say, with such a broad scope to his review, encompassing almost three thousand years of intellectual history, there cannot be space for any very close analysis of any one writer in particular. Cronin’s forte rather resides in an apt sense of the significance of things as they unfold and the ability to paint a portrait with a few deft brushstrokes.

Faced with a profusion of material, it will perhaps be most opportune to leave an engagement with the main text to the interested reader and to skip to Cronin’s conclusion. His closing paragraphs are worth quoting in full:

I walked across the lawn. The slice of sky visible from the viewing dome was now replaced by the whole cloudless vault. It had been, I realized, a form of hubris to believe myself at home there. However sure one might feel that the cosmos was underpinned by design, there would always be a nearly equal sense of contingency, an awareness that any theory was surpassed by the reality. My eye settled upon the twinkling Pleiades. I thought of how Homer had seen them, and Sappho, and I began to grope for a foothold. The Greeks had felt, as I felt, both the explicable order, and the inexplicable mystery. This, it belatedly dawned on me, was one of the recurring patterns in history, the sense that man rode the waves less as Sophocles’ mariner than as a surf-rider, poised for a split second of comprehension, then diving into the trough of darkness. John Donne had felt it, then Pascal, and Van Gogh, and Saint-Exupéry. This antiphonal chanting in man’s spirit between the choir of understanding and the choir of mystery a protagonist of the absurd would describe as yet another of the torments of Sisyphus. I did not see it like that at Herstmonceux [site of the Royal Greenwich Observatory], nor do I now. For is it not also a fact – a remarkable one – that without this tension and dialogue there would have been no advance in man’s understanding of the cosmos? If he had been too sure of his early world-picture his wonder would have ebbed and with it the urge to enlarge it; too bewildered by what he saw and he would have hidden in the irrational. If there is design in the cosmos, perhaps it is part of that design that we should continue to fluctuate between despair at ever understanding the cosmos and confidence that it can be understood, the wonder thereby engendered being of great value to man as a reminder of his peculiar condition: a spiritual amphibian completely at home neither in nature nor in supernature. Perhaps it is our lot continually to discover with a surge of excitement newer and more complete world-pictures, only to notice in each a flaw, as a reminder that the perfect picture, which Dante called the beatific vision, does not belong here below. (pp. 312-313)

Let us close with a reflection prompted by the thesis inherent in the last chapter. In a kind of debasement of the distance-scale coinage, the cosmologist of the twenty-first century facilely reckons in megaparsecs as formerly did the astronomer of old in astronomical units; the cosmological horizon at null infinity succeeds to the place once occupied by the sphere of the fixed stars, but, one suspects, subjectively comes to much the same thing, an outer boundary of the knowable world. Shall we posit ergo that, in inflation-adjusted terms, despite everything the universe stays steady in effective size? If so, then the capacity of our intellect will always expand to be equal to the challenge presented to our understanding as we bring an ever wider range of phenomena under our view.

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is funny. When I was young I loved the biographies by Vincent Cronin, especially his Napoleon biography. So when I found this book in a store I bought it. Only to find out that I had read this before – and completely forgotten.

Man looks at the Cosmos. At first it seems it is a history of Astronomy written by a layman. And it is. But there are some odd idiosyncrasies. After talking about the Greeks (that is where he starts) je jumps to the Jews. And after a while it becomes clear that it is not actual astronomical progress he is interested in. But the way people felt about the universe. Which means he has as much to say about Pascal as about Galileo. And the stuff about Pascal (interesting in itself) comes before the section on Descartes.

I love the way he writes and if you are prepared to take his claims with a grain of salt you will probably learn a lot. For example the way Newton’s discoveries made the deistic world view the default view for every educated man on Earth. Benjamin Franklin for example for all his talk on ethics and God never mentioned Christ. Jesus was an embarrassment for educated people.

In the last two or three chapters he tries to show that there must be an (intelligent) design. A pity. It is okay to have your views but presented like this I found it self-destructing. (There is even an appendix written by a real scientist who blows the same horn.)

In a chapter on Science Fiction (nice to have) Asimov’s most famous protagonist is called Hans [!] Seldon. And later the creators of Superman are given as Eigel and Schuster! So, do not believe everything you read here.