St. Nicholas of Japan, apostle to the phenomenological collapse of all duality

The most recent saint to be called Equal-to-the-Apostles is a special exemplar for our times

I still hope to continue the discussion of thymos and epithymia begun last week, as I have important territory to cover there in addition to what I wrote then. On the occasion of St. Nicholas of Japan’s feast day on February 3/16, however, I find I must postpone that topic to write this post instead.

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The Meeting of the Lord at the Temple, celebrated February 2nd, forty days after Christmas, is a very liminal feast. It features the Son and Word of God as a forty-day-old infant being brought to the Temple at Jerusalem by his virgin Mother. She is fulfilling her days of purification after birthing a son, as prescribed by the Law of Moses, and so this is considered a feast of the Theotokos. But at the same time (see Luke 2:23–24) Jesus is being presented for redemption as the firstborn son, in reference to Mosaic Law concerning Passover, when all firstborn Egyptians were killed and those of Israel were redeemed. For liturgical vestments on this day, blue can be worn for the Mother of God, or white for the Lord. Iconographically, most depictions of the feast center the Mother of God among the five persons present in the biblical account, but some center Christ.

As recorded by the evangelist Luke, present at the temple to receive the infant Lord was the very ancient Symeon, who was informed by the Holy Spirit that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah. The aged Asherite prophetess Anna was also present and praised the Lord (the tribe of Asher being of the lost Northern Kingdom, Anna and Symeon together represent the reunion of all Israel). Symeon prayed to be allowed to die once he saw the baby Jesus, and so this event exists at the threshold of the two covenants, marking the end of the Old and the beginning of the New, even as Symeon called Jesus the glory emerging from Israel and emanating to enlighten the Gentiles.

The feast is also like a crossbreed of the feasts Christmas and Pascha, in that it is tied directly to Christ’s birth and typologically to his death and resurrection by referencing, via the Law, the Passover (Pascha) and the redemption of the firstborn, Christ being the firstborn from the dead (Col. 1:18).

As the threshold between Christmas and Pascha, Old and New, life and death, Mother and Child, Israelite and Gentile, the Meeting of the Lord is the feast of all things in between, the feast of the superposition of two opposing states — of liminality. It is also the feast of lights (Candlemas in the West), when candles are lit marking the halfway point between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. This is called Imbolc in Gaelic tradition, and is associated with St. Brigid, enlightener of Ireland, whose feast day is February 1st, the forefeast of the Meeting of the Lord. If you’re following the pattern, you might then expect another meaningful enlightener on February 3rd, the afterfeast of this holiday which is constantly found between things. The Church in the 20th century at last provided what we seek in St. Nicholas, enlightener of Japan, who reposed on February 3, 1912. In flanking February 2nd on the calendar, the island nation to the west of the Old World (Ireland) is fittingly paired with the island nation to the east of the Old World (Japan). Ancient times are paired with modern times. The sunset and the sunrise. The Meeting of the Lord is the divinizing light shining through the cracks of all cosmic dualities.

St. Nicholas embodies this spiritual idea in his mission to Japan, and as the most recent saint to be bestowed the very honorific title Equal-to-the-Apostles, his life bears a great deal of meaning for all those who exist in the world after him. In many ways the Japanese culture he encountered (first arriving there from his native Russia in 1861) was a kind of cultural forerunner of what the rest of the modern world would become. So his methods of missiology can be important for us to emulate.

By shogunate Japan being a cultural forerunner, I mean the following: Historical events in the first half of the twentieth century, joined by developments in liberal arts and natural sciences, brought about the collapse of dualism on which Western humanism had hitherto been based. Once European souls discovered the no-man’s-land between imperialist trenches in World War I, they were not the same. Quantum mechanics conjured an image of the natural world comprised of superpositions of antinomial realities. Subatomic matter could be measured alternately as particles or waves. It’s not possible to observe it as both, but the math which leads to this conclusion has held up to experimentation and produced phenomenal technologies. Likewise, philosophers brought about the collapse of subject-object duality, whereby a man and his tools, for example, are considered phenomenologically as one. A man and his ideas (another kind of tool) likewise become identified, and new ideologies replace old religions as ways of being.

Shūsaku Endō, meanwhile, author of the novel Silence, about Portuguese Catholic missionaries running aground in 17th-century Japan, likes to describe Japan as a swamp. In doing so he refers to his own 20th-century experience of Japan, but identifies it with Japanese culture of previous eras as well, and meaningfully so. The significance of a swamp is that it exists as the superposition of land and water. In Genesis, the land is brought forth from the waters on the third day, a distinction which is determined by God to be good. In the distinction, we have a microcosm of the macrocosmic distinction between heaven and earth. These distinctions in the oneness of creation exist to teach us the ultimate distinction between Creator and creation, that we may worship that which deifies and not that which is deified. The Mahāyāna Buddhism ingrained in Japanese culture since the sixth century, however, rejects such dualities as land and water — a rejection reinforced by Japanese geography and climate as islands surrounded by water where rainfalls are frequently heavy, and where a staple food like rice is grown on flooded land. Volcanos, for their part, seem not to respect even the distinction between heaven and earth.

Japanese culture shuns dualities. And when it does so, tyrannical structures thrive because the duality of heaven and earth are innate to creation and will reassert themselves with an ungodly vengeance if not respected. In a Western context, think of how easily phenomenologist Martin Heidegger’s professional life adapted to the Third Reich. Now, St. Nicholas’s calling was to translate the Gospel of Christ — the fulfillment of a revelation that starts with “In the beginning God created heaven and earth” — into this liminal culture that exists in the eastern horizon between heaven and earth, and where social injustice is as rigidly practiced as could possibly be.

I confess I can’t explain quantum physics or phenomenology to you, how it is they work exactly. Nor can I explain precisely, with an insider’s view, how St. Nicholas managed his translation of the Gospel into the fissure of the world known as Japan. But there are many outward indicators of his life that show us something about his process. His first eight years in Japan (1861–1869) were spent merely studying Japanese language and custom. He learned much Chinese writing as well, by way of studying Buddhism. His task at this time, as we see it, was not to make any converts to the faith, but to convert himself, already a fully formed Orthodox Christian, to the culture.

His first convert was not even one he strived to make, either, but one who came to him — in order to kill him. In 1865 a samurai, Takuma Sawabe, offended by the Russian priestmonk’s presence in Japan (where foreign faiths were not legal until 1873), took it upon himself to kill the flockless missionary. St. Nicholas’s words (in fluent Japanese) diverted his intentions, however, and he would become Pavel Sawabe, the first Japanese Orthodox convert, and in 1875, the first Japanese Orthodox priest.

Patience and translation emerge from St. Nicholas’s life as the foremost apostolic activities of our times. Once he did begin founding Christian communities, his focus was on the quality of converts, not the quantity. Translating Holy Scriptures, the divine services, and other useful books was his explicit focus. He said,

Translation is the core of missionary work. Nowadays the work of a mission in general, in any country, cannot be limited to oral preaching alone.... In Japan, where people like reading and respect the printed word so much, we must first of all provide the faithful and those who are about to be baptized with books printed in their mother tongue, by all means well-written and neatly and cheaply published.... The printed word must be the soul of the mission.

To translate the Gospel into a new culture is not as simple as using a dictionary to exchange words and phrases. Ideas and sensibilities natural to the people must be found that are hospitable to Christian expression. For the Word of God to achieve his initial incarnation in the world, he had to build up a nation out of nothing, and it took him a couple millennia to achieve. The first time was the hardest. Since then, every time an apostle plants the Church among a new people, it is like Christ is becoming incarnate again. The Word is become flesh. For radically different cultures, however, this is radically difficult.

My point is that the whole world is becoming radically different from what it was before. Whenever the technology of learning changes, society and culture alter vastly. In ancient times, the switch from oral culture to the written word changed everything. By switching from scrolls to codices (books), a transformation effected by the Christians, everything changed again. The invention of lower case letters in Carolingian times allowed for a boom in scribal productivity and literacy that was no less effective in transforming culture than the printing press some half a dozen centuries later. About the same amount of time after the printing press, along comes audio-visual media and telecommunications. So around the time of epochal change I mentioned before, with the collapse of Western humanism and the dualities on which it was based, people began living in the spaces between: on the wires strung between buildings, in the illusion of motion between frames of a movie, on invisible radio waves that permeate matter.

Then, thanks to the science of quantum mechanics, we get computers. We get mobile telecommunication. Smartphones. The internet and social media are rewiring our brains. I first learned to compose my thoughts in writing during the nineties on WordPerfect. My brain is rigged for nonlinear editing. I know this has been a major contributing factor to the way I read Scripture. All those chiastic, and ksiastic, and triadic, and ogdoadic structures I perceive — I’m discovering them by arranging text in a file on a computer. I am the first generation to learn language this way on a wide scale — albeit I detect many similarities with ancient cultures before literacy was widespread. We’re able to understand texts now in nonlinear ways, according to nonlinear compositions, which appear to be at least in part how they were commonly composed in the ancient world. I suspect this renewed understanding will only grow with further generations. Besides the massive corrosive effect computer technologies have brought upon us, wrecking the human image, fostering tyrannies, there are also relative goods hospitable to Christian expression which we must seek out and make use of. We have to translate the Gospel into this new, foreign culture.

But of course, like St. Nicholas we first must be grounded in the culture of the Church, which miraculously is still possible, even in our own day. And to do this, we must be prepared for crucifixion. For St. Nicholas, Golgotha was surely the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. It is the custom of every local Orthodox Church to pray for their armed forces and civil authorities, and so the Hierarch (St. Nicholas was made Bishop of Tokyo and Japan in 1880, and not Archbishop until 1907) blessed the Japanese faithful to pray liturgically for the Japanese to defeat Russia. He himself respectfully abstained from the matter. When St. Symeon the Godreceiver met the Theotokos in the Temple, he prophesied to her, “Yea, a sword shall pierce thine own soul also,” referring to her experience of Golgotha. A sword piercing the soul is precisely how it must have been for St. Nicholas to see Russia and Japan in a vicious modern war against each other, a preamble to the epoch-shattering Great War.

But he wouldn’t live to see the Great War, being spared also the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War that followed. He died February 3/16, 1912, the day after the feast of the Meeting of the Lord in the Temple. Uniquely for xenophobic Japan, St. Nicholas was widely respected by the Japanese for how fully and lovingly he had absorbed their culture. He was celebrated and mourned upon his death; the very emperor himself personally visited and reverenced his coffin at the Tokyo Cathedral. Having arrived there over fifty years prior, in a country where the Christian faith was banned, without a soul to his mission but his own, St. Nicholas left a church with 33,000 members, dispersed among 266 congregations, with 175 churches and eight cathedrals. In a hostile swamp, in a place between land and water, he founded a national church that has survived as hostile and as swampy an era as our own, and endures to this day — like a deifying light shining forth between the cracks of the world.