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Chikuro Hiroike, Modernity, and Morality
Peter Luff

Accounts of the crafting of Moralogy naturally begin with the unique character,talents and life experience of its creator. But they cannot stop there, for the final
form that Chikuro Hiroike’s thinking took in the Treatise was also greatly inﬂuenced
by the very singular features of the times and the places that he inhabited. In fact
these particularities not only helped shape Moralogy’s content, but also made its very
creation achievable and necessary. So the world as Hiroike encountered it deserves
as close study as the man himself; a precise account of the questions it put to him
enhances our understanding of the answers he gave.
Much of the course of Hiroike’s life was shaped above all by the impact of modernity on Japan（filtered through the process of Westernisation）; it made Moralogy
possible by giving him the very narrow window of opportunity he required to create it.
One of many examples of this point is fact that Hiroike was able to move on from acareer as a schoolteacher in Kyushu to scholarly activity on a much wider stage.
Such an opportunity would not have existed had he been born even a generation
earlier, say in 1836 instead of 1866; he would, in that case, already have been 46 whenWaseda University was founded in 1882, effectively denying him the possibility of thedoctorate on the history of oriental law that shaped much of the thinking of theTreatise. Shifting his birth back in time even a decade or two would make manyother key events difﬁcult, if not impossible, to imagine.
Even more significant, though, were the ways in which modernity created theurgent need for Moralogy, and so shaped its essence. In its broadest context,
Chikuro Hiroike’s life and work strove to meet the challenge that modernity posed to
the world in respect of moral conduct. Moreover, since this challenge had a global
impact, Hiroike, in parallel with ﬁgures in other countries seeking to meet it at about
the same time, inevitably had to look for a solution that did not just apply to Japan.
So, in the widest perspective, Moralogy represents one of several attempts across theglobe in the early 20th century to resolve the problem of deﬁning the essence of moral
conduct, a problem that has characterised, indeed defined, modernity, since it first2

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appeared in the world.
No deﬁnition of ‘modernity’, including this one, will pass unchallenged, since few
phenomena are more studied or contentious; modernity’s opaque complexity makes it
far, far easier to criticise the various offerings of others than to produce a formulationthat will satisfy all. Different academic disciplines take entirely incompatible approaches to characterizing the concept, and everyone has to begin by choosing
between them. The sociologists laid early claim to the term, but as has been rightly
noted, after surveying their initial failings at the ‘abstract analysis of the emergence ofmodern society’, whether Comte’s ‘crudely abstract schema of successive epochs’ or
the problem of the ‘constant tension between nomothetic generalization and ideographic data’ that entrapped Weber and Durkheim, it is a relief to turn to the great 19th
century historian, Jacob Burckhardt. He argued for ‘the Renaissance as the period of
the discovery of the individual...that mark it as the ﬁrst modern epoch’, and while we
may not agree with this characterization, at least ‘his method is historical, i.e., heaccepts the uniqueness of the events and their time-bound and linear nature. Thereis no search for scientiﬁc laws that govern human society in general or the transition
from one type of society to another. He is thoroughly immersed in the speciﬁcity of.1）
the Renaissance’（Garner, 1990, pp. 49 ─ 40）
Since modernity wrongly claims a universality and inevitability for itself, fully
acknowledging the role of speciﬁcity and contingency in its appearance is indispensible to understanding it properly. Here it will be argued that modernity was inorigin, and remains in essence today, solely the product of Western civilization.
Granted, its external manifestations（science, technology, industrial urbanization andmass society notable amongst them）have been exported and adopted elsewhere, butthey do not constitute modernity’s essence. Many historians（not just Burckhardt）
have rightly detected its spirit well before those external features ever appeared, andeven in the entirely ‘modern’ 21st century that spirit remains conﬁned to those areas of
the world dominated by the West, to its continuing bewilderment and distress.
Modernity emerged in the humanistic movement of the Italian Renaissance,
issuing from a deep ﬁssure in Western civilization that opened in the very laying of its
foundations. That cleft, between Greco-Roman thought and the Christian faith, was1） Burckhardt’s claim to have identiﬁed the place and time of the ‘discovery of the individual’ has beenmuch disputed, not least by post-modernists with a view of ‘the individual’ very different to his（cf. J. J.
Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism（Palgrave: 2004）, pp. 5 ─ 7）. Others have been moreconcerned to antedate ‘the discovery’ than grapple with 21st century redefinitions of ‘the individual’,focussing, for example, on ‘interiority’ or ‘selfhood’（which function effectively as synonyms for ‘theindividual’）in the 12th century Renaissance. But while recent studies, e.g. Laura Ashe’s Early Fiction in
England（2015）and Susan Kramer’s Sin, Interiority, and Selfhood in the Twelfth-century West（2015）, may
highlight the signiﬁcance of the invention of ﬁction or of the new theological understanding of autonomy inearly medieval Europe, for reasons given below even such ‘transformative’ innovations cannot be taken as
evidence of the origins of modernity.

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never bridged, indeed could never have been bridged. Many attempts to span thetwo were made, but none succeeded, and in Italian Renaissance humanism the gap
between them widened to a gulf, creating a division within Western civilization that
endures to the present, and which led to what was in effect a state of cold civil war.
This conflict is often portrayed as a dispute over the existence of God, of religion
versus secularization, but since the developed Christian conception of God owed
much to Plato, this cannot be the story’s essence. Rather, at root the struggle was,and remains, one between two antithetical and incompatible views of the essence ofmoral conduct. Neither party to this dispute has, to date, triumphed. Both havesucceeded only in inﬂicting serious damage on the other. It is this ruinous impassethat confronted Chikuro Hiroike as he came to maturity in the far west of Japan, andhis life’s mission was to try to ﬁnd a way to circumvent it.
If, in accounting for the emergence of modernity, it is accepted that no real
synthesis between Latin Christianity and Greco-Roman thought was possible, thepuzzle is why it was ever attempted in the ﬁrst place and why so much effort continued
to be invested over many centuries in an endeavour doomed to fail. The initiative fora synthesis came nearly exclusively from the Christian side of the divide, and almost
from the outset some there had serious misgivings about its wisdom. Jaroszynski
notes the view of some early Christians that pagan philosophy should have no place intheir culture on the grounds that it was trying to supplant the Bible. He also cites
early authorities like Tatian and Tertullian who argued that pagan culture was not justunnecessary to their faith, but could actually draw people towards heresy（2007, p. 77）.
A strong case can certainly be made that early Christian hostility was not tophilosophy per se, but primarily to the help it afforded to heresy. The overriding
focus of the ﬁrst apologists was on the dangers within, not outside, their community;
to take a well-known example, even in Tertullian’s Prescriptions against Heretics（with
its oft-quoted rhetorical questions, ‘What has Jerusalem to do with Athens, the Churchwith the Academy, the Christian with the heretic?’）, Greek philosophy was largely thevictim of collateral damage inﬂicted during the main assault on Christian heretics like
Valentinus and Marcion.2） The balance of fear tilted even further away from philosophy and towards heresy once Christianity attained a dominant status in the Roman
Empire in the 4th century, a state of affairs that was to remain unchanged for centuries.
Jaroszynski（2007, pp. 79 ─ 80）draws attention to evidence from the 11th century2） Thus in chapter 7 of The Prescriptions, Tertullian calls down ‘A plague on Aristotle, who taught them[the heretics] dialectic, the art which destroys as much as it builds, which changes its opinions like a coat,
forces its conjectures, is stubborn in argument, works hard at being contentious and is a burden even to
itself.’ Granted that this is an attack on a general aspect of the philosophical method on the grounds that itnever arrives at certainty, it was the use to which heretics put that method which really roused Tertullian’s
ire. When it suited his purposes, he himself was far from averse to wielding weapons of argument forgedby Greek philosophers.

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Benedictine monk and cardinal Peter Damian, and the 13th century pope, Gregory IX
in this regard. Damian, sometimes viewed as a member of the ‘Tertullian family’,
was certainly capable of writing such trenchant dismissals of the ancients as thefollowing.
I reject Plato, prying into the secrets of hidden nature...Pythagoras also...I
count for little...I likewise turn aside from Euclid, stooped from his perplexing
studies of geometrical ﬁgures. Finally, all the rhetors with their syllogisms andtheir sophisticated quibbles, I consider unworthy...May the simplicity of Christ
instruct me, and may the true ignorance of the wise break the bonds of myuncertainty...Let my guardian angel tell me that which all the unskilled dialecticians are ignorant of; let the wise speak of unlearned things which ignorantwisdom does not understand.（Resnick, 1990, pp. 115, 117）
But it is also the case that Damian, himself ‘well trained in the arts and in dialectic’, was far from opposing ‘every use of dialectics or philosophy in the life of faith’,and his real targets were those of his contemporaries within the Church whom he felt
aimed to ‘overturn true doctrine’, ‘pseudo-intellectuals who would boldly apply theirskills in dialectic to questions touching on God’（ibid., pp. 115, 119）
. Much the same
point can be made about Gregory IX’s letter of 7 July 1228 to the theological faculty of
the University of Paris, in which he cautioned them to ‘teach pure theology unfermented by worldly learning and cease adulterating the word of God with theﬁctions of philosophers’（Young, 2014, p. 49）.
So why did even those within the Christian tradition most suspicious of pagan
philosophy not turn their backs on it completely? Had the original status of Christianity as ‘a marginal branch of Judaism whose founder left no known written works’（MacCulloch, 2009, p. 9）remained unchanged over the centuries, this might just havebeen possible. Although, thanks to the conquests of Alexander the Great, Judaism
had for centuries been immersed in a sea of Greek language and culture, it kept its
head above water by drawing very clear lines between itself and that culture（though
not without passing through at least one severe internal crisis, the revolt of Judas
Maccabeus and the cleansing of the Temple of Jerusalem）. As Gruen notes, many
Jews in the Diaspora as well as Palestine were thoroughly Hellenized, but while theirHellenic environment could be taken as a given, ‘their Judaism remained intact’（2016,p. 23）. In distinguishing itself from, and indeed claiming superiority to, the Hellenicworld, Judaism had the advantages of a religious identity with clear boundaries both
geographic and ethnic（the former being potential rather than actual in the diaspora）,
and a claim to chronological priority. It could, and did, assert that Greek culture andphilosophy was derived from Jewish thought, and any who sought to upset this orderof precedence were simply ignored by rabbinical Judaism. Philo of Alexandria, forexample, tried to ‘mediate between Hebraism and Greek philosophy...unifying theChikuro Hiroike, Modernity, and Morality

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Bible and Platonism’, despite the difficulties involved in trying to combine ‘the‘personal’ God of the Scriptures and the ‘abstract’ God of philosophy’（Bonazzi, 2009, p.
239）. This fate of his attempt is very revealing; Philo’s writings were to have apowerful inﬂuence on Christianity, but none on Judaism.
Early Christianity was far more receptive to such ‘mediation’ than Judaism
because it was an aftercomer and also because it found itself in a different, and aweaker, position. By choosing to adopt a universal and therefore multi-faceted
mission to the Gentiles, it forfeited the coherence and adamantine nature of Judaism.
Whether that choice owed more to the ‘Great Commission’ described in the conclusion to Matthew’s Gospel or to Paul of Tarsus can be debated, but either way it meantthat Christianity had perforce to address itself to ‘Latin-speakers, Greek speakers andthose speaking Oriental languages’（MacCulloch, 2009, p. 3）in ways that were
culturally as well as linguistically understandable to each of them. In seeking toconvert pagans, therefore, more understanding of their erroneous ways could beshown than to those of heretics. The writings of a leading 2nd century apologist,
Justin Martyr, demonstrate this well. In contrast to his overt disagreements with the
Gnostics, in his search for ‘effective missionary tools’ he tried to ﬁnd common groundbetween Christian ideas and classical philosophy, and even sought ‘complementarity’with elements of pagan religion like the Sibylline Oracles（Toca, 2017, p. 260）
. Whilethe new religion spread quickly to the seat of the Empire in Rome and points west, its
main impact initially was in the Hellenic eastern Mediterranean, where its adherents
were often regarded with disdain as ignorant outsiders, especially in the urbane,
civilized environment of great cities like Alexandria.
To win acceptance in a hostile and dismissive world, then, the price to be paid forvanquishing prejudice and suspicion was a tolerant attitude towards pagan thoughtcharacteristic, for example, of Justin Martyr and therefore of his pupils, including
Tatian. Forbearance was not just a tactic, however. It also reﬂected the fact Justin
himself was a convert, and in this he was far from alone; many of those most instrumental in Christianity’s initial expansion in the Hellenic eastern Mediterranean also
did not encounter the faith until adulthood; and, like Justin, they could not unreasonably look back on their youthful philosophical training as having prepared theground for their conversion（and much of the same is true with Augustine in respectof Cicero’s Hortensius）. Rejecting any further participation in pagan religion was
relatively easy for these converts, but stripping themselves of their education, and of
its habits of thought, was another matter entirely. Nor indeed was this necessary, oreven desirable, for Greek philosophy retained great value for the converts, and for
those they instructed, as a training in method, even if much of the content of its
teachings might need re-evaluating or discarding in the light of Scripture. As Osborn（1997, p. 44）puts it,

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No. 86, 2021‘...if by philosophy is meant the practice of argument, as when Clement
claims the necessity of philosophy because one would have to argue to prove it
superﬂuous, then all second-century Christian thinkers（even Tatian）were disciples of Athens. Indeed Christian theology came into existence and European
thought began, because of the practice of argument, which was learnt fromAthens and used according to the rule of faith or canon of truth.’
The impact of Athens was felt directly in the eastern Mediterranean where
Christianity made its greatest initial inroads, but its importance diminished over time.
As it spread further west, Christianity came into increasingly close contact with thethinkers of ancient Rome who had translated Greek philosophy into their own
language and culture, and this became the principal forum in which the western
Church came to engage with classical thought. Establishing a definitive view ofﬁgures like Cicero became completely unavoidable once Christianity established itself
as the imperial religion in the 4th century, for this decisively changed the nature of its
relationship with pagan thought; whereas previously the issue had been one ofconfrontation and coexistence, now it became a question of how to deal with an
inheritance. Yet even though the pressure to make concessions may have eased, theessence of the problem remained.
Of all the repeated and strenuous attempts of the early western Church toreconcile Christian and pagan thought（though not Christianity and pagan religion,
which the Church worked ceaselessly to eradicate）the most distinguished andthoroughgoing was that of Augustine. For him, as for perhaps most Christians of his
era, pagan thought was to be set within bounds, occupying a subordinate position, apart-time auxiliary to faith rather than one of its legionaries. Brian Stock’s recent
study of Augustine’s role in developing the key concept of the ‘self’ highlights how his
thinking on the subject shifted after baptism from philosophical to theological orexegetical. But rather than abandoning philosophical methods, he used them toanalyze concepts that were entirely Biblical in origin. His mature view of the self was.
therefore a combination of philosophy, theology, and history（2017, pp. 3 ─ 4）
Implicit in this approach was the early church’s continuing belief that pagan
philosophy was far less dangerous than heresy, that it could be domesticated andmade useful in the service of Christianity.
century reinforced this perception.

The collapse of the Empire in the 5th

The institutions of the western Church did notjust act to ﬁll the vacuum of political authority this created; they also worked long andhard to preserve the thought of the ancient world during the so-called ‘Dark Ages’.
The texts of the pagan philosophers, together with the Latin language in which many
were written, now became the sole possessions of the Church; they assumed something of the character of a collection of intellectual relics that had to be guarded,treasured even, housed in monasteries, copied and recopied for the benefit ofChikuro Hiroike, Modernity, and Morality

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posterity, treated as resources, adjuncts to faith, rarely if ever to be emulated orsuperseded. In this the western Church was to prove to be vastly overconfident,
mistaken in its conviction that Greco-Roman thought could be eternally conﬁned as anindentured servant with clearly prescribed duties; philosophia ancilla theologiae, inPeter Damian’s formulation. In particular, it underestimated the existential threatthat the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers of ethics posed to it, failing toappreciate how radically incompatible was their thinking with the Christian approachto the world of human behaviour.
The essence of this incompatibility was, in the words of Isaiah Berlin（p. 56）,
between ‘two incompatible ideals of life, and therefore two moralities’. Perhaps it isbetter to use the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ to differentiate them, and we may
question whether they belong to ‘public’ and ‘private’ life as separate spheres. But
Berlin’s point about the unbridgeable gap between their irreconcilably different viewsof the purpose of human beings, and how they should live in this world, still stands.
He outlines these two approaches as follows.
‘One is the morality of the pagan world: its values are courage, vigour,
fortitude in adversity, public achievement, order, discipline, happiness, strength,
justice, above all assertion of one’s proper claims and the knowledge and power
needed to secure their satisfaction; that which for a Renaissance reader Pericles
had seen embodied in his ideal Athens, Livy had found in the old Roman Republic, that of which Tacitus and Juvenal lamented the decay and death in their own
time.’,
Over against this, Berlin continues（pp. 56 ─ 57）...stands in the first and foremost place Christian morality. The ideals of
Christianity are charity, mercy, sacrifice, love of God, forgiveness of enemies,
contempt for the goods of this world, faith in the life hereafter, belief in thesalvation of the individual soul as being of incomparable value ─ higher than,indeed wholly incommensurable with, any social or political or other terrestrial
goal, any economic or military or aesthetic consideration.
From the depths of this fundamental divide between classical ethics, where thecivic virtues claimed pride of place, and Christian morality, where the focus was on
the salvation of the individual soul, modernity was to emerge.
The severe difficulties, indeed the impossibility, inherent in trying to reconcile
ethics and morality was most evident in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante,
who represent the high-water mark of Christianity’s endeavor to resolve the mismatches in the DNA of the West. Aquinas’ attempts to pair the bases of the classicaland theological virtues reveal the full extent of a crisis that, as MacIntyre says, was‘much more than a theoretical question’（2007, p. 167）
. The task was made no easierby the growing availability of Greco-Roman sources, but rather than reject this8

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classical inheritance tout court, Aquinas and some of his contemporaries strove for asynthesis that would reconcile pagan philosophy, notably that of Aristotle, withscripture. The great stumbling block was the nature of virtue, whose essence alteredradically whenever one moved from the world of ethics to that of morality; Aquinas
had somehow to find an answer to the central problem, ‘How is the practice of thefour cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance and courage to be related to thatof the theological virtues ─ faith, hope and charity?’（ibid., pp. 167 ─ 168）
. To treat
them as somehow equivalent in nature, as belonging to a single category, was to try to
mix oil and water, for as Macintyre goes on to note, the theological virtues of charityand forgiveness had no place in the classical view of the world. ‘Aristotle in considering the nature of friendship had concluded that a good man could not be the friend ofa bad man; and since the bond of authentic friendship is a shared allegiance to thegood, this is unsurprising. But at the centre of biblical religion is the conception of alove for those who sin’（ibid., p. 174）. The gulf here is in fact even wider than
MacIntyre indicates, since there is no Christian equivalent of Aristotle’s ‘good man’; if
the story of the Fall in Genesis is accepted, then all human beings are inevitably
sinners, a point reinforced by Jesus who, when asked whether a woman should bepunished for adultery, answered, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him ﬁrst cast astone at her’（John, 8:7）.
A host of further difﬁculties presented themselves. As Austin notes（2017, pp.
, ‘Aquinas follows Augustine in arguing that the exemplar of human virtue
123 ─ 124）
must preexist in God...It makes sense to see justice, wisdom, mercy, and charity as
participations in divine virtue since God is just, wise, and loving. However, it is notclear that God can be temperate（having no bodily appetites）, brave（needing nothing
to fear）, or religiously devout（having no superior to worship）.’ Aquinas argued that
the Incarnation solved this problem, but at the cost of implying that Christ’s humanexistence must be eternal rather than temporary.
The best that could be done was to arrange the virtues in some kind of hierarchy,
with the Christian ones occupying the higher ground. Thus the theological virtues
are ‘infused’ by God, and here Aquinas ‘completely dismisses Aristotle’s dictum’ that‘virtue always exists in the mean between two extremes’（Anderson, 2020, pp. 27 ─ 28）.
This inevitably means that ‘Aquinas surpasses Aristotle...by making his understandingof virtue dependent on the divine...Charity is that infused habit that constitutes rightappetite for the supernatural, ultimate end, eternal life with God...The infused virtues
alone aim at the good, which is the ultimate end. Hence, without the forming
presence of charity, the intellectual and moral virtues will always fall short of virtue in.
the most proper sense of the term’（ibid., pp. 29 ─ 30）
For Aquinas, ‘acquired’ pagan virtues were only ancillary, subordinate, and thisview persists to the present（Mattison, 2019）. Classical philosophy could be brought

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within the precincts of Christianity, but some parts of the mansion remained forever
off limits, a boundary demarcated very clearly in the greatest medieval attempt at asynthesis between pagan and Christian experience, Dante’s Divine Comedy. On his
allegorical journey, the poet ascends from the Inferno to Purgatorio before finallyentering Paradiso. His guide through the first two of these regions is the Roman
poet, Virgil, the ‘most sweet father’（Purg. 30.39）whom Dante holds in the highest
honor. But Virgil, as a pagan, cannot enter paradise and so yields place to Beatrice（Purg. 27. 126 ─ 129）as the poet’s guide. At this moment,
in me ficcò Virgilio li occhi suoi,
e disse: Il temporal foco e l’etterno
veduto hai, figlio; e se’ venuto in parte
dov’ io per me più oltre non discerno.
Within the limits of the possible, Dante did his utmost for Virgil, and by implication for all ancient Greek and Roman authors, a tribute to the depth of his humanity as
well as of his respect for them. Humanism, though, overturned the barriers set inplace to contain their inﬂuence, and in the process created modernity.
Humanism is widely accepted as a defining characteristic of the Italian Renaissance, though when and why it came into being has been the subject of much recent
scholarly debate. There is a good measure of agreement, though, that its appearance
in the north of Italy was contingent on the unique features of that region in the
medieval period; it was, as Witt notes, highly urbanized, with relatively high social
mobility, growing commerce and industry, and a republican form of government（2012, Introduction）.
How classical thought in general, and its ethics in particular, came to escape thetutelage of Christian morality is, therefore, not simply a tale of the rediscovery of lostancient texts, although this certainly played its part. For such texts, and the humanism they nourished, were available not just in northern part of the Italian peninsula,but throughout Europe. So it is the manner of their reception and use in Renaissance
Italy, and the fact that this process was not controlled by the Roman Catholic clergy,
that matter more. The ‘precocious emergence of Latin ─ literate laymen’ is clearly
very important here, though Witt has cautioned against seeing this as ‘simply acorollary of the Italian inheritance from ancient Rome: namely the existence of anurbanized, republican society and the enrichening effect of regional and internationalcommerce’（ibid）. Even so, he does accept that ‘after 1300 there emerged an
intellectual movement, Italian humanism, which ultimately established laymen’s lives
as equal in moral value to that of clerics and monks...[and that] the advent of
humanism was intimately connected with the broad, longterm changes in Italianpolitical, social and cultural life that were creating the first early modern European
society’（2003, pp. 1, 4）.

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The effect of these changes was to do much more than raise the ‘moral value’ oflay lives; as Witt himself notes（2012, p. 438）
, 13th century developments were ‘to foster
the birth of a self-conscious urban morality that subsequently ﬁrst in Italy and then inwestern Europe as a whole, would challenge and ultimately replace the medieval
ethos dominated by rural, clerical and chivalric values’. We need accept neither thephrase ‘urban morality’ in preference to ‘urban ethics’ nor the term ‘replace’. Butthat humanism was to pose a fundamental challenge to Christian morality cannot bedenied.
Witt’s account of the origins of humanism has been criticised as overly teleological（e.g. Cotza, 2018）, but for our present purposes this is secondary.

The key issue

for us is the relationship between the Church and the new humanism, since this wasto bring about the conﬂict between ethics and morality that set in train and deﬁned
modernity.
The changing assessments and uses of the writings of Cicero illustrate this well,conﬁrming that Italian humanism cannot simply be explained in terms of the rediscovery of texts ─ Cicero had, after all, been influential as far back as the Carolingian
Renaissance of the 8th century, when Alcuin’s treatment of rhetoric ‘merely took over
Cicero’s focus on judicial oratory’（Witt, 2003, p. 12）. True, one such disinterment
has been assigned great signiﬁcance. As Eisner（2014, p. 755）notes, ‘Petrarch’s 1345
discovery of Cicero’s personal letters in Verona has long been regarded as a foundational moment in the historiography of the Renaissance, whether one takes the term
as referring only to a movement associated with humanism or to the period that also
goes by the name of early modern.’ Much has been made of the claims that Petrarch
made about himself in his commentary on these letters; that he had a ‘new historicalself-consciousness’, an entirely new conception of the relationship between thepresent and the past, and that he elevated reason above authority（ibid, pp. 756, 761,
764）
. He is also alleged to have believed that the ‘light’ of the ancient world had been
lost during the Christian ‘Dark Ages’ and that the world of antiquity was superior tothat of his own times（ibid., pp. 783）
. The point remains, though, that while he foundmuch to admire in Cicero, he was very aware of his faults, and in no sense treated him
as a model. Indeed, for Witt, ‘Among Petrarch’s greatest achievements was his
Christianization of the humanist movement, the integration of ancient pagan learningwith Christian literature’（2016, p. 65）.
How successful this attempt at integration was need not detain us, for theimportant point is to contrast it with what came subsequently. As Marsh notes,‘Cicero’s influence on the Renaissance is central to the movement we call humanism...his philosophical works were now read with interest, both as an alternative to the
Aristotelianism of the universities and as a precedent for the gentlemanly discussionof ethical theories and moral questions’（2013, p. 316）
. ‘Gentlemanly discussion’ here

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is a very signiﬁcant phrase, since it is the hallmark of modernity, a sign that a radicallynew setting for considering the most fundamental aspect of human behaviour had
been created. Medieval Rome might be decayed, in ruins, but the status of its
ancient philosophy was to be elevated; handmaiden no longer, it would be treated as
mistress of the house. Greco-Roman ethics would now enter into mortal conﬂict with
Christian morality, with Cicero in the van.
James Hankins has recently provided a detailed account of how ethics came tochallenge morality. While accepting Witt’s argument that humanism antedated the
Italian Renaissance of the 14th and 15 centuries, he argues that Renaissance humanism
represented a new paideuma, or elite culture. He agrees this was in origin Christian,but argues that it was also shaped by ‘a civilizational crisis of great magnitude’ marked
by the disintegration of the authority of the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy, theravages of war and ﬁnancial bankruptcy, the growing challenge of the Ottoman Turksand ﬁnally the terrifying appearance of the Black Death in 1347 ─ 1349. This explains‘why Petrarch and his followers came to believe that a new, more unreserved, indeed
passionate embrace of the pagan civilizations of the past was necessary to prevent thecollapse of Christendom’（2019, ch. 1）, implying that Chris ten dom could not saveitself. It was in dire need of rescue.
Much of Petrarch’s despair certainly takes the form of mortified Italian pride,
resentment at loss of status, and longing for the glory of empire. But it is couched interms of ‘moral decline’, with Italian corruption of the Latin language taken to be oneof the ‘moral effects of barbarism’. Italians had thereby ‘ceased to be human, falling
below the level of beasts’（ibid.）. This amounted to a remarkable revaluation of
Roman antiquity. Far from being a pagan civilization denied the light of the true
religion, it was now deemed morally superior to the Christian present in many
respects, and so able to offer Christendom the key to salvation now it that stood in
desperate need of a moral renaissance.
This inversion plainly had its dangers; how could Christian teachings avoid being
subordinated to pagan philosophy? Only by a rigid separation of spheres, a divorce
between the human（or secular）and the divine that effectively excluded God from theworld. For Petrarch, pagan philosophers, even Cicero, were not fully trustworthy on
the divine matters; hence ‘Human philosophy should rightly restrict itself to the worldof men’, but there it could have free rein. Petrarch’s ‘brand of Socratic phi losophy ...skeptical about pagan theology but eager to exploit the wisdom of the ancient
to reform the sublunar human world, including the world of politics...would become
paradigmatic for humanists’（ibid.）. Ethics, essentially political in nature, now
dominated the secular sphere.
Petrarch’s signiﬁcance, then, was to deepen ‘the admiration for ancient authorsthat had long existed in medieval culture into...a longing for the restoration of lost

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qualities of mind, for the return of ancient virtue...[turning] the new paideuma...into...away of forming the mind, oriented above all to the acquisition of virtue, wisdom, andeloquence’（ibid.）. The central concept of ‘virtue’ was deﬁned and disseminated by avast program of translating the works of Greek philosophers into Latin, to the point
where it was possible to ‘credit Greek philosophy with having invented civility itself,
the moral consciousness that allowed civilization to flourish.’ The dangers of thiswere obvious. ‘Greek philosophy here threatens almost to take the place of religion
as a social glue, but the humanists, however anti-clerical they could be at times, wereas a rule careful not to challenge the primacy of the Christian religion in the spiritual
realm’, not least by differentiating the secular from the eternal（ibid.）.
Warning signs there certainly were, for ‘in some milieux...the paganism of theancient could become an alternative in the realm of imagination...[where] it became
possible to enact...pagan values incompatible with Christianity’（ibid.）. But for themost part, Christian morality was not confronted but largely side-lined, relegated tothe private sphere as preparation for the individual’s entry into the afterlife. Humanism’s ‘virtue politics’ focused ‘on improving the character and wisdom of the rulingclass with a view to bringing about a happy and ﬂourishing commonwealth. It sees
the political legitimacy of the state as tightly linked with the virtue of rulers andespecially their practice of justice, deﬁned as a preference for the common good overprivate goods’（Hankins, 2019, ch. 2）. While in terms of aspirations this may sincerely have been envisaged as preparing the ground for the restoration of Christendom, its practical effect was to create a space in which a thinker like Machiavelli could
ﬂourish.
Hankins argues convincingly enough that Machiavelli was an atypical ﬁgure in
Renaissance humanism, but his writings are compelling evidence that humanist
advocates of ‘virtue politics’ did not just fail in their avowed mission to rescue thecause of religion, but actually weakened it by creating a secular space from which it
could lay morality under siege. ‘Virtue politics’, Christian morality’s self-appointed
rescuer, could not even defend itself against virtù, for as Hankins notes, Machiavelli
rejected the early humanists’ Christian utopia ‘in favor of his more realist dream ofancient Rome, when the Campus Martius echoed to the sound of marching youth andthe altars of the gods swam in blood’（2019, ch. 19）.
Greco-Roman ethics had at its core a mission to produce good, or virtuous,
citizens; hence it was in essence political, concerned above all with the survival andflourishing of the polis, the city-state or the res publica, the commonwealth. This,
too, was Machiavelli’s goal, and given that kings and the church feared republicancommonwealths, they were most unlikely to prefer Machiavelli’s pagan virtù to theChristian virtue of prudence. This may well be the source both of Machiavelli’s‘preference for commonwealths aiming at expansion that lies at the heart of his theory

Chikuro Hiroike, Modernity, and Morality

13of republics’ and of much of his ‘probably well-deserved reputation as a neo-pagan in
conflict with Christian values’（Pocock, 2010, p. 151）
. But in any event, Christianmorality was to be sacrificed without hesitation if it obstructed the goal of theMachiavellian state, namely empire. Moreover, since military strength mattered
overwhelmingly in achieving this, rulers and citizens were to be valued solely on the
grounds they contributions to the expansion of the state. This meant not simply
ignoring Christian morality, but actively undermining it whenever it obstructed theprocess of politics. Elements of Christian morality such as humility had no place inthis new, or reborn world of ethics, as Pocock goes on to make clear:
Glory is a pagan value, and Machiavelli may be read as consciously reversing
the morality of Augustine, for whom libertas and imperium were expressions of
the libido dominandi. Or is he indicating that pagan and Christian values wereboth open to Europeans of the Renaissance, but could never be reconciled? If so,
the republic is a pagan rather than a Christian polity. Machiavelli apparently
preferred the ancient religion that worshipped the gods of the city, as more
conducive to political virtù than were Christian meekness and paciﬁsm.（ibid., p.
152）
The implications of this new ethics were radical. Isaiah Berlin, in his summationof Machiavelli’s outlook, rightly notes（2013, p. 46）that, ‘There is no serious assumption of the existence of God and divine law; whatever our author’s private convictions,an atheist can read Machiavelli with perfect intellectual comfort. Nor is there piety
towards authority, or prescription ─ nor any interest in the role of the individual
conscience, or in any other metaphysical or theological issue.’ Eternity had thus
effectively been abolished. The secular and its ethics alone remained.
Machiavelli is often described as a, if not the, founder of modern political thought,
bequeathing to the future ‘an important paradigmatic legacy: concepts of balanced
government, dynamic virtù, and the role of arms and property in shaping the civic
personality’ that was to have particular importance in the history of Britain and theUnited States（Pocock, 2016, Introduction）. If, as argued above, ethics is essentiallypolitical in nature, why is Machiavelli also not deemed to be a founder of modern
ethical thought? Partly this was because his virtù was very limited in scope, designed
quite speciﬁcally to remedy what he took to be the problems of the early 16th century
northern Italian city state, rendering it a far narrower concept than the ‘virtue’ thatwas the legacy of more mainstream humanist ‘virtue politics’. The highly militarizedvirtù that characterized the citizen soldier did not resonate with the monarchicalgovernments of the 16th and 17th centuries; they feared an armed populace and could,
at need, hire mercenaries to do their ﬁghting, looking to their civilian populations as
an economic resource rather than cannon fodder.
Nonetheless, the secular space created by ‘virtue politics’ and the Greco-Roman

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texts that it prized continued to exist, albeit usually on the margins. The new ethics
did not disappear, and Christian morality could not reduce antique philosophy to its
previously ancillary status, not least because Christendom was so badly fractured by
the Protestant Reformation of the early 16th century. As with the early Church,
institutional Christianity once again gave priority to the danger of heresy, of deviant
Christian belief, rather than to the challenge of classical thought. True, Luther was
far less enamored than his opponents of Aristotle in particular and pagan philosophy
in general, but the ﬁssiparous nature of Protestantism, its military struggle for survivalwith the forces of the Counter-Reformation and the disputes within its ranks overissues like salvation meant that it had little time or energy to address the world of
secular thought. For its part, the Catholic Church continued to regard Aristotle inparticular as a useful ally; its 1616 condemnation of Galileo was in part justiﬁed on the
grounds that his claims did not accord with the geo-centrism of both Aristotle andPtolemy, as well as contradicting the authority of the Bible. While symptomatic of abroader trend in which ‘for the ﬁrst time Catholic teachings hardened into theses（ordogmas’）that were no longer open to critical discussion, even by sympathetic
believers’（Toulmin, 1990, p. 78）, the Galileo affair had even greater significance; itrevealed the obsolescence of any campaign against classical philosophy. For
modernity and its ethics had begun to slip the leash of Greco-Roman thought and toassume its mature identity.
The early Italian humanists who dominated the adolescent phase of modernity
had been students in the presence of masters; for them, salvation meant above all else
rescuing, disseminating and studying the texts of the Greco-Roman world, whose
authors were for them guides who could reveal how to restore the civilized standards
destroyed during the Dark Ages of barbarism. This fundamental sense of inferiority,of a lack of confidence akin but not identical to modesty, did not disappear whenhumanism expanded north of the Alps in the 16th century. It characterized, forexample, the ‘restatement of classical skepticism’ made by Montaigne, who ‘claimed
in the Apology that unless some one thing is found of which we are completely certain,
we can be certain about nothing : he believed that there is no general truth about
which certainty is possible, and claimed that we can claim certainty about nothing’（ibid., p. 42）. This presumably ruled out Christian moral teachings as divine inorigin, but it also had implications for ethics, for as Toulmin（1990, pp. 75 ─ 76）notes:
Aristotle saw intimate connections between ethics and rhetoric: for him,
every ethical position was that of a given kind of person in given circumstances,and in special relations with other speciﬁc people: the concrete particularity of acase was of the essence . Ethics was a ﬁeld not for theoretical analysis, but forpractical wisdom, and it was a mistake to treat it as a universal or abstract science.

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15

This approach, characteristic of Montaigne, did not survive long into the 17th
century, which saw a sustained campaign to dethrone Aristotle from his position of
inﬂuence. Yet what was not to change was the belief that ethics was entirely secularin nature. Indeed that belief was reinforced, since ethics now became exclusively theprovince of philosophers who deemed themselves to possess the greatest insight into
the nature of the world. A representative figure here is Spinoza, whom Fraenkel
situates in a tradition of ‘philosophical religion’ that stretches back to Plato. This
represents the complete reversal of the formula of Peter Damian; now it is a case oftheologia ancilla philosophiae
The key to understanding a philosophical religion is its moral-politicalcharacter...something ordered to what is best ─ whether an organism or thecelestial spheres, a human life or a political community ─ is taken to be rationallyordered...the rational principle that accounts for this order is identiﬁed with God.
The conception of God as Reason is the metaphysical foundation of a philosophical religion...the best human life...is ordered towards attaining Godlikenessthrough the perfection of reason...how does [this] square with the God of
traditional religion who speaks, gives laws...and so forth... The answers...is...asystematic claim that non-philosophical devices are necessary to order a religious
community towards what is best（2012, pp. 6, 7, 11）.
Reality fell far short of such aspirations even during the lifetime of Spinoza（letalone after it）, for many reasons other than the hostility of traditional religious
institutions in Europe. For one thing, philosophers continued to prove themselves
an exceptionally fractious group, adept above all at demolishing the opinions of others
and so most unlikely to arrive at a consensus or to provide the kind of clarity and certainty necessary for a moral life. Even worse, perhaps, the very concept of ‘reason’had shown itself to be mutable, a subject for debate. The transition from the ‘reasonableness’ of late Renaissance humanism to the ‘rationality’ of Descartes is one that
Toulmin both chronicled and lamented.
From 1650, European thinkers were taken with this appetite for universal
and timeless theories...it overwhelmed Aristotle’s warnings about the need tomatch our expectations to the nature of the case...Ethics and politics joined
physics and epistemology as ﬁelds for abstract, general, eternal theory. Like agreat Moloch, this appetite for theory consumed all branches of practicalphilosophy: case ethics, practical, rhetoric, and all.（ibid., p. 83）
This was confirmation that the essence of philosophy was disagreement about
fundamentals, and that it was a ﬁeld of enquiry where change seemed more a matterof fashion than of cumulative progress. Toulmin certainly judged that the turn totheory was little short of a disaster for philosophy, arguing that a return to the‘reasonableness’ of the 16th century was necessary to extricate the discipline from theStudies in Moralogy

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cul de sac in which it found itself trapped in the 1990s.

No. 86, 2021

One does not have to accept

his premises or prescription to agree that the impact of the thinkers of the 17th century
did create very severe problems.
For Descartes, rational thought could not rely on inherited tradition: empirical procedures rooted in experience rather than theory were in his view compromised, since they perpetuated the folklore of a given culture and period, andrested ﬁnally on superstition, not reason...Wherever possible, then, the rational
thing to do was to start from scratch, and to insist on the certainty of geometricalinference and the logicality of formal proofs...
The ideals of reason and rationality typical of the second phase of Modernity
were, thus, intellectually perfectionist, morally rigorous, and humanly unrelenting. Whatever sorts of problems one faced, there was a supposedly uniqueprocedure for arriving at the correct solution...Unfortunately, little in human life
lends itself fully to the lucid, tidy analysis of Euclid’s geometry or Descartes’
analysis.
It is unsurprising, then, that a critique of Descartes’ methodology, particularly as
it applied to thinking about ethics, was neither long in coming nor sympatheticallygentle in tone when it did arrive. The so-called ‘British moralists’, notably Hume, lay
in wait, and charity was not their strongpoint, as we shall see.
Toulmin’s judgment that Descartes represented the ‘second phase of Modernity’is certainly perceptive, but we might amend it by saying that, with Descartes, moderni ty achieved maturity, emancipating itself completely from the tutelage of theclassical world. Rather than incorporating ancient thought into his philosophy,
Descartes was looking to supersede it, and had high hopes that all would see thewisdom of what he was proposing; as Sorell（1999）notes, ‘...Descartes did not think
Aristotle had to be criticized or refuted for his inﬂuence to be undone...He hoped that
his metaphysics would make Cartesianism look a better ally of the Catholic Church
than Aristotelianism.’ Those who came after him, notably Hobbes, were far lessreticent about the shortcomings of pre-modern philosophy, especially when it came toquestions of ethics. As Stauffer notes, Hobbes argued that all prior moral philosophy
had caused political chaos, The sophists of the past , including Plato, Aristotle,
Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, being the champions of anarchy（2018, p. 14）.
With Cartesian geometry, the birth of calculus and the advent of Newtonianmechanics, those who were now becoming conscious of themselves as modern could
point to achievements of their own era that outshone those of the ancients. Their
growing self-conﬁdence and sense of independence became clear during the so-called‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’ that broke out in France and Britain at theturn of the 18th century. It has been claimed that this ‘Battle of the Books’, as Swifttermed it, ended with honors even; ‘All those activities that seemed to work by

Chikuro Hiroike, Modernity, and Morality

17

accumulation, such as the sciences and philosophy, were won for the modern, while
all those that seemed to depend on imitation, such as literature and the arts, were left
securely in the hands of the ancients’（Levine, 1991, p. 2）. But the 18th century was toprove that philosophy was far from being a discipline that worked by accumulation.
Cartesian rationalism, despite ﬁnding plenty of disciples, did not prevail even in his
native country, for ‘The philosophy of the French Enlightenment was not marked by atendency towards abstract, pure, or transcendental reason, but was rather marked bya suspicion toward such understandings of reason and by a turn toward corporeal
sensibility’（Lloyd, 2018, p. 151）.
Things were even worse across the English Channel; the leading ﬁgures of the‘Scottish Enlightenment’ proved yet more hostile to Descartes than their Frenchcounterparts, as Hope（1989, p. 23）makes clear.
...Francis Hutcheson（1694 ─ 1745）was optimistically telling his students thatman is naturally virtuous: pagans can be good in spite of not being Christian...[saying when challenged] he did not mean that no part of virtue rests onlove of God, but that even non-Christians are endowed with some moral
sense...Although Hutcheson was no sceptic, he set an example as a free-thinker
who challenged religious dogma. Hume drew more from him than that,
however. In particular he adopted both Hutcheson’s theory of moral sense andbattery of criticisms of moral rationalism. Hutcheson warned against taking
reason as the source of moral knowledge. Reason is essentially reﬂective andits ideas have to come from somewhere else. Moral ideas originate in certain
kinds of pleasure and displeasure, which reason cannot feel...He was the ﬁrst ofthe ‘math e mat i cal’ utilitarians: he urged measuring right and wrong by thegreatest happiness of the greatest number.
In their turn, Hutcheson, Hume and Smith, the empiricist ‘British moralists’,
came under fire from Kant, who wished to restore reason to its position on thecommanding heights of ethical thought. While, as Kim notes, Kant conceived of his
task in its broadest aspect as being ‘to effect a synthesis of both the rationalist andempiricist elements in thinking and develop them into a highly original theory ofcognition and its objects that is superior to his predecessors’, he did in fact weight thescales against the empiricists, founding ‘morality on the elusive yet rich notion of purereason at the center of his moral ediﬁce’（2015, Introduction）. This abandonment of
any real attempt at synthesis was further evidence that philosophy was unable to ﬁnd
ﬁrm and common ground on which to fulﬁll its self-appointed task as teacher of ethics.
Like Toulmin, MacIntyre sees this as the inevitable consequence of abandoning
Aristotelianism. Again, one need not agree with either his diagnosis or prescription
to accept that the philosophical patient has suffered paralysis after being forced toswallow ethics whole.

18

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No. 86, 2021...the dominant moral culture of advanced modernity has continued to be oneof unresolved and apparently unresolvable moral and other disagreements inwhich the evaluative and normative utterances of the contending parties present
a problem of interpretation...[the result was] several rival and incompatible
accounts, utilitarians competing with Kantians and both with contractarians, sothat moral judgments, as they had now come to be understood, became essentially contestable, expressive of the attitudes and feelings of those who uttered them,
yet still uttered as if there was some impersonal standard by which moral
disagreements might be rationally resolved（2007, ix x）.
The problems created by the absence of consensus among ethicists werecompounded by the growing prestige of science and its attendant theoretical andempirical methodologies. This became clear during Hiroike’s lifetime in the attempts to construct a new ethics by those, such as Thomas Dewey, who were greatly
inﬂuenced by the Darwin’s account of evolution as a process of constant change, withno fixed, stable entities. Wishing to see ethics follow biology down this path,
Dewey’s approach to all prior ethical thought could only be eclectic. As Carden
notes, for Dewey the successes of empirical modern science highlighted theinadequacies of moral philosophy which, failing to incorporate ‘the experimental
method of science...tended toward the old dualisms characteristic of the quest for. Thus anyone wishing for at least a modicum of certainty
certainty’（2006, pp. 45 ─ 46）
in respect of moral knowledge, for guidance on how to live in the world, would justhave to learn patience; the task in hand now was the study of moral behaviour, notmoral belief. The only certainty espoused by Dewey and other ethicists of whatever
hue was that the ongoing failure of modern moral（or better, ethical）philosophy did
not indicate any need to take seriously again the teachings about morality that had
been the possession of Christianity since its birth. For ethicists, the answer to thefailure of ethical philosophy was simple; it was more and better philosophy andscience, and certainly not any questioning of the enterprise itself.
This direction of travel could apparently not be reversed, even for philosopherslike Hegel, whose early writings, as Horn（2010）notes, reveal that his ‘interests
emanated from religious concerns’, leading him to react strongly against Kant’slegalistic approach to ethics; what mattered for the young Hegel was ‘the way of love,as opposed to rules of morality, including those dictated by Kantian moral duty’（ibid.）.
Hegel’s subsequent path was symptomatic. Following the work of W. H. Walsh,
Horn describes how, from a starting position where ‘a particular characterization of
the Christian concept of love is promoted by Hegel, not only as the true foundation forany morality, but also as a primary clue into the nature of existence itself’, Hegel shifts
his ground decisively; unity becomes a logical rather than a moral necessity, so thatthe ‘moral/religious question How can we love all of humankind? is changed into

Chikuro Hiroike, Modernity, and Morality

19

How can life be understood as a whole that is both differentiated and undifferenti’
ated? （ibid.）. This trajectory away from morality characterises modernity in its
mature phase, but the result was a proliferation of questions rather than answers.
The only remaining consensus, the sole certainty, was that Christian morality had
nothing of value to offer.
Christian institutions and beliefs, though, while the target in the West ofincreasing criticism on a number of fronts as the 19th century advanced, did notdisappear from the fray; as Chadwick notes,
At the beginning of the [19th] century nearly everyone was persuaded that
religion and morality were inseparable; so inseparable that moral education must
be religious education, and that no sense of absolute obligation in conscience
could be found apart from religion. That moral philosophers taught the contrary
made no difference...therefore those who undertook to provide a system of
morality which should have no links with religion...had a task of exceptional
difﬁculty, a task which was perhaps beyond their power if they wishes to maketheir system of morality no mere theory but a system which would touch theconscience of a large number of ordinary men and women.（1975, pp. 229 ─ 230）
The result, then, was a state of mutually intended destruction leading to apeculiar kind of stalemate. Philosophers of ethics, having banished Christianmorality from their enquiries, had proved themselves entirely incapable of providing
an alternative set of moral precepts to supplant the teachings of a Christendom
apparently fractured beyond repair; some indeed among the philosophers, like
Schopenhauer, accepted that it was beyond their capabilities to provide such teachings. In their turn, Christian institutions and thinkers had failed to recover the
ground lost to the ethics of the philosophers and could content themselves only withpointing out the manifest failures of this new project（MacIntyre is a representative, if
later, example of this tendency; his advocacy of a return to Aristotle and Aquinas may
be more positive an approach than that of most other critics of philosophy, but his
prescription of a pre-Italian Renaissance renaissance is more akin to a sleeping
draught than a cure for the ills of modernity）.
Modernity, then, as it presented itself to Chikuro Hiroike, was a force that had
both won and lost the civil war that characterised Western civilization in the second
half of the 19th century. Its philosophers, resolutely secular and intransigent in theirdenial of the validity of Christian morality, may have achieved intellectual dominancein promoting the cause of ethics. But they had failed to create a coherent body ofteaching about moral conduct that commanded anything like broad social inﬂuence
and acceptance. Given this defeat and the vacuum that resulted, Christian institutions, while often proving themselves inadequate guardians of the moral teachings
that they had inherited, retained some measure of authority in conveying these20

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teachings to society at large.
The West, and in particular the spirit of modernity that had secured a commanding but not completely dominant status within it, therefore presented Chikuro Hiroikewith a difﬁcult and complicated task. Far from being able to provide him a seamlesscloak in the critical matter of the nature of moral conduct, the West could only offer
up some badly torn pieces of cloth and very little in the way of guidance about what to
do with them. Happily, though, modernity also provided Hiroike with some of thetools that he would use to fashion a new mantle for humankind in the shape of
Moralogy. To understand the way he used them to craft this, though, we will needto chronicle how the process of Westernization in Japan unfolded and examine theway Chikuro Hiroike experienced and responded to it.

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