St. Nikolai Kasatkin and Fr Alexander Men on World Religions
St. Nikolai Kasatkin and Fr Alexander Men on World Religions
A lecture given at Chevetogne
I was in Japan when Nikolai Kasatkin was recognized as a saint
and as founder of the Japanese Orthodox Church given the title
"equal of the apostles." I wished to know him as well as possible
and so I set myself the task of translating his sermons , which
were written in the Japanese of 100 years ago, as remote from
modern Japanese perhaps as Slavonic is from Russian, so much
has that language changed. So the Orthodox priest's sermon can
sometimes be mostly the explanation of the meaning of the text
of the Gospel from the old language, somehow perhaps an
Orthodox situation? Anyway it is also so in Japan.
But gradually I filled a notebook
with these sermons deciphered as if from a code and I was
struck by the figure of this man...First by his titanic will,
a true soldier ,or samurai, of Christ living in considerable
isolation for 50 years and yet building a national church.
Beyond this at many points I was struck by his pastoral spirit--
how he reached out to the Japanese trying to find the words
they could receive, making adjustments(of the date of Christmas
into December so that they could celebrate the New Year) and
when there was war with Russia, telling them to pray for the
victory of their nation.
Fr. Alexander Men ,as we are gathered to consider, was a great
pastor in his very different circumstance.
There is however,different though the circumstnaces of Japan
in 1900 and Russia in our times, one point at least where their
pastoral visions can be said to overlap and that is where I should
like to share some words from one of St Nikolai's sermons.
Fr Men wrote a six volume history of world religions showing
how all are part of God's guiding of the world to the
encounter with Christ. "Everything that rises must converge"
as Fr Teilhard de Chardin said.
St Nikolai, with less study in world religions and less reading,
nonetheless out of the pastoral need to explain to Japanese believers
how Chsitianity could fit to the history and culture of their
country came to a similar vision of things which he began to develop
from his first encounters with Buddhism, staying for some time in
a Buddhist temple in Tokyo while the Holy Ressurection Cathederal
was being built. His first encounters with the native religion
Shinto had been less positive, being threatened with death by a young
Shintoist whom however impressed by Nikolai's courage and calm,
became a convert and the first Orthodox Japanese priest. And Nikolai
saw good also in the Shinto heritage.
Later I will return to the consideration of the significance of
Fr Men's work on world religion but first I should like to lay
out in some detail, and as a basis, an outline of a key writing
by St Nikolai on this.
He expresses his experience of and evaluation of Japanese religion
in a long letter of report to the Holy Synod in Moscow but also
he expresses the essence of all of this simply but clearly in the sermon
"The True Religion and the Ethics of the World" which he gave
at the Tokyo Cathedral to seminarians on Holy Thursday 1910.
He begins by considering the missionary situation.
"In our world here and today there are of course those who say
that in this Japan we have had fine morals since ancient times
so the religion from foreigh lands is unnecessary.
However we also are fully aware of Japan's fine ethics...Japan has
the very finest. Shinto with its purity and honesty, Buddhism with
its mercy and compassion, and Confucianism which instills Jusstice
and love."
However all these things are finally related to the world of
action and are in themselves not the full word "of the heavenly
father and of the human soul".
Buddhism and the other religions are "like nursemaids who have
brought up this Japanese nation antil now but have not power
to bring them to the heavenly father." Because of these old
faiths Japan has a high morality and a people of good character and
"they have received great grace and in an age when any number of
nations have fallen Japan has endured over all the centuries
since its foundation...this is surely the protection of God answering
to this people's virtue."
And it is also a grace of God that the true teaching has entered
this country...and the land will be still more blessed."
It is always a mistake to say that because one has ethics one
needs no further knowledge of truth.
Imagine ,he goes on a village whose good reputation the Emperor
hears and invites them to come and visit his palace, and they
say "we need no good beyond that of our village."
This is the provincialism of those who say that they do not need
to hear of Christ although their teaching ,Buddhism and Confcianism
"originally procedes from God and Buddha and Confucius did no more
than tell what is engraved in the heart."
Natural religion is in iteself incomplete...
"to preach Christianity and introduce this people to the Heavenly
Father is to bring ever greater blessedness to this Japanese nation."
Some doubt the idea of divine miracles in history or intervention
but "As we are living in this world we are always and everywhere
within a miracle of God...this world is entierely
miraculous..."
This is ,in summary, St Nikolai's sermon.
We would note that St Nikolai does not engage what could be said
to be a deeper metaphysics of Buddhism, for example the sense of
"Nothingness" and "Void" as later Chrsitian writers
will do. Nonetheless his orientation of in a sense full acceptance s in the
spirit of the early Christian Fathers who regarded Greek and other culture
as being ,like the Hebrew Old Testament, a good to be accepted as
the ground which is completed in Christ. The phrase Nikolai uses
of "nursemaid" is a early Christian expression for previous
philosophy and religion.
Without then a direct connection to the work of Fr Alexander Men perhaps
we could say that the vision of St Nikolai Kasatkin ,born out of the
pastoral situation in Japan, both reaches back to the vision of the
early church fathers such as St Justin who said that all that is good
is the heritage of Christians, whatever its source, and unites to and
supports the vision of the world moving through the ages to God which
was in Fr Men's work on religions and at the heart of his pastoral
work also.
So for one thing we see Fr Men as in the tradition of St Stephen of
Perm, St Innokenty Venniaminov and here clearly St Nikolai Kasatkin,
in openness to the cultures of those we approach in mission, and
as to other religions the case is explicit in St Nikolai.
But I think there is something further.
The volumes on world religions by Fr Men were of course intended
not for Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims but for a Russian people
made largely secular and separated from all religious knowledge by
the long period of oppression of all faith. So the purpose of the
work was first of all to restore an orientation to the world
of faith for Russians.
However in the future I could forsee a further importance of
Fr Alexander's work being realized-- that it is a building of bridges
to other families of humanity and their faith. This is in accord
with the example of early Christians such as St Justin who said
that all that is good in human culture is our inheritance in
Christ, and it is explicitly stated by St Nikolai as we have seen,
but it is a work of bridge building which has hardly begun and in
which Fr Men's work can perhaps come to seem an early and significant
accomplishment within this work.
Fr Raimundo Pannikar of India said
"Christ is the bridge where Christianity and Hinduism meet".
This is also the Christocentric openness of Fr Alexander Men,
the realization that we are completed in all of the others,
and they are completed in us, and we and they and all things
are completed in Christ...the Christ who fills the future
as Fr Teilhard spoke so well of or as in Boris Pasternak's
poem of the centuries coming to Christ like barges on the
river of time...
This vision which is in Fr Alexander Men of convergence of
faith can open out perhaps a new dimension of importance
to his work on world religion, as it extends the work of
St Nikolai and others before him.
Thank You.