Eric Voegelin on Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West

Eric Voegelin’s June 1947 book review examines F. S. C. Northrop’s attempt to provide a philosophical basis for peaceful coexistence among the major world powers. Its movement is from exposition of Northrop’s political purpose and conceptual solution, through an appreciative assessment of his place in American intellectual life, to criticism of the historical and religious distinctions his framework obscures. Voegelin separates the value of overcoming cultural provincialism from the adequacy of the philosophy proposed to accomplish it.

The abundant historical material is not introduced for the purpose of interpreting history; it is selected for the purpose of supporting and illustrating a pragmatic solution.

This opening judgment establishes the review’s governing distinction between historical understanding and politically directed selection. Northrop’s “world” is principally the field of power constituted by the United States, Great Britain, China, and Russia, with Latin-American and Roman Catholic cultures included because of their practical importance for American politics. He treats ideological differences as the fundamental source of international friction. His proposed remedy is to clarify these ideologies, determine their compatibility, and construct a composite incorporating their best elements. Voegelin’s account makes the political ambition intelligible while questioning whether such a synthesis can respect the phenomena it combines.

The review follows the book’s progression from Mexico, the United States, and Britain through German idealism, Russian communism, and Roman Catholic culture to a general account of Western civilization. Chapters on China, India, and Japan prepare the concluding solution and its practical qualifications. Northrop selects cultures by their mass influence and calls for scholarship that relates specialized knowledge to conflicts within civilization as a whole. For Voegelin, this ambition explains both the breadth of the undertaking and its exposure to oversimplification.

The philosophical solution is “epistemic correlation.” Northrop identifies Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities as a source of difficulty: it makes the observer responsible for a world of sensory appearances distinguished from the primary reality disclosed by mathematical physics. In response, he posits two equally ultimate components, the theoretical and the aesthetic, extending throughout nature and humanity. Immediate aesthetic experience need not be subordinated to scientific construction. Voegelin quotes Northrop’s formulation:

"Both components are equally real and primary, and hence good, the one being the complement of the other."

The political consequence is reciprocal cultural recognition. Westerners can acknowledge civilizations emphasizing aesthetic experience without treating them as inferior, while those civilizations can recognize theoretical achievement. Each culture should supplement its neglected capacities. Voegelin’s exposition brings out the ambitious passage from an account of reality to a program of international reconciliation: equal primacy becomes a warrant for mutual esteem and cultural enrichment.

His strongest appreciation concerns Northrop’s position within American letters. Despite its global scope, the book chiefly addresses the situation of a Protestant, positivist American discovering values outside his inherited tradition. Its disproportionate attention to the United States supports this reading. The comparison with Henry Adams places Northrop within an effort to recover dimensions of humanity excluded by America’s particular European origins.

Whatever misgivings may arise with regard to the success of the effort, it is only with relief that the reader will observe the spirit of optimistic equanimity in which the author tackles the problem of enlarging the horizon of values.

Unlike a nostalgic recovery of the medieval past, Northrop’s exploration proceeds through confident study of foreign civilizations and remote ages. Voegelin praises this intellectual disposition without endorsing its conceptual results. The distinction matters: openness to unfamiliar values is an achievement even where the framework used to interpret them remains defective.

The concluding criticisms identify that framework as neo-Comtean. Northrop retains the positivist conception that scientific advances determine historical progress and require corresponding revisions of ideology, although his aesthetic component modifies its narrowness. Voegelin disputes the causal necessity of this relation: Locke’s preferred conception of humanity might have directed his interest in science, rather than simply followed from Newtonian physics.

One of the book's most serious defects is the author's uncritical use of the term "ideology," which embraces religion, philosophy, art, political and economic theory, and philosophy of nature.

The theoretical–aesthetic division intensifies this conflation. Physics and theology fall under the same heading, while distinct spiritual experiences disappear. Christianity becomes especially vulnerable when its symbols are treated as scientific theories susceptible to verification or obsolescence. Voegelin instead points toward the problems of cognitio fidei and analogia entis. He also disputes Northrop’s absolute gulf between Eastern and Western religiousness, invoking comparative mysticism and suggesting that Confucian li could be illuminated through comparison with Platonic nomos.

The deepest objection concerns the differentiation of spiritual personality in Hellenic and Hebrew history. By absorbing this experiential development into “theory,” Northrop obscures what Voegelin regards as decisive to Western civilization and presents Oriental civilizations too favorably by overlooking their limitations in this respect. Yet the review ends by reaffirming the political importance of combating Western provincialism and praising the chapters on American and British democratic values. Its enduring issue is whether intercultural understanding can enlarge a civilization’s horizon without flattening the differences among science, faith, philosophy, and spiritual experience.