A free-religious road less travelled by: From Czechoslovakia to Japan and England and back again . . .

A path through the Cow Hollow Wood, Waterbeach, August 2026

At the moment I’m deeply immersed in the thinking of the Czech Unitarian and free-religionist, Norbert Fabián Čapek. This is because, with my colleague Ruth Weiniger, I have just finished a translation of his most important book, To the Sunny Shore: A Guide to Living Joyfully, and I am currently writing a new foreword to that. As part of the writing (or is it an unfolding?) of that piece I have been following up a number of interesting leads and thoughts. 

Now, one of the people Čapek most deeply admired was Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, and whilst checking a reference to him I stumbled across a paper by Peter Luff called, ‘Fellow Spirits: The Life and Thought of Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, Contemporary of Chikuro Hiroike’. Given my deep interest in Japanese philosophy and religion, I willingly allowed myself to be drawn down the road ‘less travelled by’ and read the paper, not least of all because I had absolutely no idea who Chikuro Hiroike was. So, before I go on, here’s a potted biography of him found at the ‘Moral Education’ website:

Chikuro Hiroike (1866-1938) ‘Remarkable polymath, extensively well read across world civilisations generally as well as contemporary western social science. He systematically recorded and reviewed laws and philosophies. He interpreted his own Shinto beliefs in ways which were open to the thinking of others, with built-in caveats against exclusively nationalist preoccupations. He saw education as vital for human development, with ‘Supreme Morality’ as central to it. The University of Reitaku with its Institute of Moralogy [Moralogy Foundation] are current expressions of this.’

Now, Peter Luff’s paper is interesting to me for many Masaryk-related reasons, but here I want to concentrate on the way it ends. Luff points out that Masaryk and Hiroike had huge amounts in common, but because they lived ‘at opposite ends of the earth . . . it might seem [that they] were destined never to meet.’ However, he tantalisingly notes that ‘such an encounter was, fleetingly, possible, for Masaryk made a brief stop in Japan between April 16th and 20th, 1918.’ Alas, however, that meeting did not occur. But then Luff then concludes as follows:

Nor would religion necessarily have proved a barrier [between them]. Masaryk was very clearly a Christian, but he located his own role in the world outside of any established religion: 

“I consider neither the Church nor theology to be religion, or at least not the whole of religion... The Church must continue to care for the soul and attend to practical morality. If that is what the priests did, they would be closer to Jesus. Nearly every family has its moral problems, recognizing them and restoring the soul sinking beneath them should be the duty of all priests ... the task of Christianity is ... to become the true herald of practical love and reviver of souls ... What we need is freedom of scholarship and research, intellectual integrity in matters of religion, tolerance; not spiritual indifference, no, but faith, living faith in something higher than ourselves, something great, sublime, eternal.” 

Given such an approach, an encounter between Masaryk and Hiroike would surely have been fruitful. Such a meeting did not take place in 1920; that is no reason, though, why it should not do so now.

I confess to delighting in Luff’s ‘conclusion’. It’s a reminder to me of how much I agree with something Terry Eagleton once said: we should strive ‘to keep the past unfinished, refusing to accept its appearance of closure as the final word, springing it open once again by rewriting its apparent fatality under the sign of freedom’ (Terry Eagleton: Hope without Optimism, Yale UP, New Haven 2015, p. 32).

Well, Luff succeeded for me in springing open history and, at least in my own heart/mind (心), Masaryk and Hiroike were now meeting, and fruitfully! Not only that, but, of course, Čapek was at the table too — to see what I mean just read through the translation I posted a few days ago of Čapek’s 1936 piece ‘Whither Leads the Religion of the Modern Man?’

Anyway, I was sufficiently intrigued by Luff’s paper that I quickly managed to get hold of Hiroike’s The Characteristics of Morality and Supreme Morality (1966), and as I write, a copy of An Outline of Moralogy (1987) is winging its way to me from Sweden.   

Now, on the back cover of The Characteristics of Morality and Supreme Morality, there are, as always, positive quotes from well-known people, and one of those quotes is from the English historian, Arnold Toynbee: ‘Moralogians are really coping with common human problems.’ 

From what I have read of Hiroike so far, I would wholeheartedly agree. Indeed, because I am a minister of religion — and so often find myself with people struggling to navigate through those common human problems — it’s why I am so intrigued by what I am reading . . . well, at least so far. 

Anyway, continuing down this ‘road less travelled by’, I spent a fruitful hour listening to a few recordings of Toynbee speaking and during that time I came across Toynbee’s short talk for the US radio programme, ‘This I Believe’, the contents of which chime wonderfully with Masaryk and Hiroike’s own way of thinking and talking about such matters. It is with a transcript of this talk that, in a moment, I’ll conclude this blog post.  

But before I do that, listening to Toynbee reminded me that my own great free-religious exemplar, Imaoka Shin’ichirō, spoke very positively about Toynbee a couple of times, and in an undated essay called ‘What is Free-Religion’ he wrote the following:

‘Free-religion is neither a new religion ranking among existing religions nor a unification of them. Free-religion is immanent in them, being their essence and goal. All particular religionists become free-religionists by recognising the immanence of such super-particular religion within them. Unitarians, Protestants, Catholics, Hindus, Buddhists, Shintoists and Muslims can all become free-religionists under the said condition. 

This reminds me of the fact that the famous British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote on the visitors’ album of the Ise Grand Shrine on the occasion of his visit there. “I feel in this holy place the underlying unity of all religions.”  Although the famous Buddhist poet Saigyo visited the same Shrine, he was not allowed to enter the holy place because he was a Buddhist. But he wrote a poem to the effect, that tears flow down due to devotion to something divine and inexplicable. While Toynbee, a Christian in England, could grasp the unity of religions, i.e., religion behind religions in the Shinto Shrine; Saigyo could feel the essence of religion beyond Buddhism and Shintoism there even though he was prevented from entering the holy place. I understand, therefore, that both Toynbee and Saigyo were typical free-religionists and Shintoism may be called free-religion if experienced as Toynbee and Saigyo did.’

Imaoka-sensei also wrote the following, highly relevant passage in an essay called ‘The Meaning of Longevity’ written in 1980 when he was ninety-nine years old:

‘I read history with a sense of personal rejuvenation. The famous British historian Toynbee observed that for a historian, there is no need to strictly distinguish between the ancient, medieval, and modern eras; to the historian, everything is the present. No matter how ancient an event, it is viewed as something occurring before one’s very eyes in the “now”. I believe that meeting historical figures through study and returning to the past to find rejuvenation constitutes a form of longevity. This is a completely different kind of long life from merely surviving for eighty or ninety years in this world. To grow old is to age not only toward the future but toward the past—returning to and living long within the past.’
 
So, for a few hours today I found that this ‘road less travelled by’ had brought me to a table at which, astonishingly and quite unexpectedly, I found Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, Chikuro Hiroike, Norbert Fabián Čapek, Arnold Toynbee and Imaoka Shin’ichirō all talking together with each other about common human problems, agreeing, and sometimes disagreeing, but always in a free-religious spirit. Marvellous, life-affirming, rejuvenating stuff.  

Being existentially present at this table in my heart/mind (心) also served as a reminder of why I did not enter the world of academia but, instead, became a minister of religion and a kind of constructive free-religious philosopher/theologian. As an academic, one is simply not allowed to take seriously (let alone join in and make a report about) the kind of meeting and conversation I have just described. The academic world — according to its own important, needful and worthwhile disciplines — can only accept the past as closed and finished. All well and good, not least of all because we don’t want people making things up! It remains vital to know that Hiroike and Masaryk never met, and neither did they gather around a table in conversation with Toynbee, Imaoka and Čapek, and with Peter Luff and me acting as hosts! But my role as a free-religious minister is always to be ensuring that in other ways the past is kept unfinished by refusing to accept its appearance of closure as the final word, and always seeking ways to spring it open once again by rewriting its apparent fatality under the sign of freedom. At the very least I hope that, in a small way, this blog post might spring open the past in a helpful way for at least one or two readers. Enjoy!

And now, as promised, here are Toynbee’s words.

I Agree With A Pagan
Arnold Toynbee — London, England

I believe there may be some things that some people may know for certain, but I also believe that these knowable things aren’t what matters most to any human being. A good mathematician may know the truth about numbers, and a good engineer may know how to make physical forces serve his purposes. But the engineer and the mathematician are human beings first—so for them, as well as for me, what matters most is not one’s knowledge and skill, but one’s relations with other people. We don’t all have to be engineers or mathematicians, but we do all have to deal with other people. And these relations of ours with each other, which are the really important things in life, are also the really difficult things, because it is here that the question of right and wrong comes in.

I believe we have no certain knowledge of what is right and wrong and even if we had, I believe we should find it just as hard as ever to do something that we knew for certain to be right in the teeth of our personal interests and inclinations. Actually, we have to make the best judgment we can about what is right and then we have to bet on it by trying to make ourselves act on it, without being sure about it.

Since we can never be sure, we have to try to be charitable and open to persuasion that we may, after all, have been in the wrong, and at the same time we have to be resolute and energetic in what we do in order to be effective. It is difficult enough to combine effectiveness with humility and charity in trying to do what is right, but it is still more difficult to try to do right at all, because this means fighting oneself.

Trying to do right does mean fighting oneself, because, by nature, each of us feels and behaves as if he were the center and the purpose of the universe. But I do feel sure that I am not that, and that, in behaving as if I were, I am going wrong. So one has to fight oneself all the time, and this means that suffering is not only inevitable, but is an indispensable part of a lifelong education, if only one can learn how to profit by it. I believe that everything worth winning does have its price in suffering, and I know, of course, where this belief of mine comes from. It comes from the accident of my having been born in a country where the local religion has been Christianity.

Another belief that I owe to Christianity is a conviction that love is what gives life its meaning and purpose, and that suffering is profitable when it is met in the course of following love’s lead. But I can’t honestly call myself a believing Christian in the traditional sense. To imagine one’s own church, civilization, nation, or family is the chosen people is, I believe, as wrong as it would be for me to imagine that I myself am God. I agree with Symmachus, the pagan philosopher who put the case for toleration to a victorious Christian church, and I will end by quoting his words: “The universe is too great a mystery for there to be only one single approach to it.”