Smolensk and the Call (1836–1860)

The making of a missionary: Ivan Dmitrievich Kasatkin, born in 1836 to a deacon’s family in the Smolensk countryside, who passed through the Belsky church school, the Smolensk seminary, and the St. Petersburg Theological Academy; the announcement at the Academy in 1860 seeking a priest for the Russian consular church at Hakodate, and the night-vigil resolve by which the brilliant young student volunteered for a country still closed to Christianity; the tonsure as the monk Nikolai and ordination to the priesthood in June 1860.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

A Deacon’s Son in the Smolensk Countryside

Ivan Dmitrievich Kasatkin was born on 1 August 1836 (Old Style; 13 August New Style) in the village of Berëza (English transliterations vary: Bereza, Beryozha, “Berezovsky Pogost”), in the Belsky district of Smolensk province — territory that today lies in Tver Region (Nicholas of Japan, Wikipedia, which gives the explicit pairing “13 August [O.S. 1 August] 1836”; Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan, OCA; Nicholas of Japan, OrthodoxWiki). [Disputed: the birth-village name is rendered variously — Bereza/Berëza (most sources), “Berezovsky Pogost” (OCA), “Berezovsky” (OrthodoxWiki); the district is Belsky/Belsk, not the “Volsk” that OrthodoxWiki gives in error.] His father, Dmitry Ivanovich Kasatkin, was a deacon; his mother, Ksenia (Kseniya) Alekseevna, died when the boy was about five (OCA; OrthodoxWiki; Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles, mission2nihon, drawing on the standard Russian Life). He grew up, that is, inside the world of the rural Russian clergy — poor, prayerful, and bound by custom to send its sons to the church schools.

That is the road the boy walked. He was schooled first at the Belsky theological school, then at the Smolensk Theological Seminary, from which he graduated near the top of his class; on the strength of that record he was sent, at state expense, to the St. Petersburg Theological Academy (OCA; OrthodoxWiki; mission2nihon). [Disputed: the year of entry to the Academy is given as 1857 by the majority of lives (OCA, OrthodoxWiki, Wikipedia) and as 1856 by a few (OrthoChristian’s Monk Nicodemus Jones; mission2nihon); 1857 is the better-attested, and is consistent with a seminary graduation that same year.] At the Academy he was a strong student, and on the ordinary track he could have expected a comfortable career — a professorship, or a married parish in Russia (mission2nihon; The Apostle to Japan, ACROD).

The World of the Clergy Estate

To grasp how unremarkable, and at the same time how confining, that road was, it helps to set it in the world of the nineteenth-century Russian Church (for the wider institutional setting see Orthodoxy Guide: Russian Orthodox Tradition). Under the Synodal order that Peter the Great had imposed on the Church in 1721, the clergy had hardened into something close to a hereditary caste — a soslovie, one of the legally defined estates of the empire, alongside the nobility, the merchants, and the peasants. By long-settled custom and administrative pressure, the sons of clergy were bound to the church-school track from boyhood. A deacon’s or a priest’s son was enrolled, almost as a matter of course, in the diocesan ecclesiastical school and then the seminary; the network of these schools existed in large part to reproduce the clerical estate from within itself. For a boy like Ivan Kasatkin there was, in practice, little question of choosing some other life. The path from the village to the seminary was the path laid out for him before he was old enough to walk it. This is standard context on the Synodal-era Church rather than a fact peculiar to his biography, but it is the soil in which his vocation grew.

The schools that formed him were poor and severe. Seminary life in this period was, by the testimony of the era’s many memoirists, a hard discipline — meagre food, crowded dormitories, harsh corporal punishment, long hours of rote learning in Latin, Greek, Church Slavonic, theology, and philosophy. The curriculum was demanding and the attrition high; many boys who entered the lower schools never reached the seminary’s upper classes, and only a small remnant of seminary graduates went on to the elite academies. That a deacon’s son from an obscure Smolensk village should have climbed the whole of this ladder — from the Belsky school through the Smolensk seminary and on to St. Petersburg — marks Ivan Kasatkin out as exceptional within his own estate well before any thought of Japan arose (the general pattern is standard history of the Russian Church; that he climbed it near the top of his class is attested in OCA, OrthodoxWiki, and mission2nihon).

The St. Petersburg Theological Academy to which his record carried him was one of only four such academies in the empire — St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Kazan — the apex of the Russian theological school system and the training-ground of the Church’s scholarly and episcopal elite. To be sent to an academy at state expense was to be marked for the higher reaches of the Church. Its graduates supplied the seminary professors, the cathedral clergy of the capitals, the academic theologians, and — through the monastic path — the bishops, for the Russian episcopate was drawn exclusively from the monastic (celibate) clergy. A student of Kasatkin’s standing could reasonably have looked forward to a chair in a seminary or academy, or, had he married, to a respectable urban parish; either would have been a settled, honourable, and comfortable life by the measure of his estate (mission2nihon; ACROD). It is against that horizon of expectation that the choice he actually made must be read.

The Announcement and the Vigil

What turned him from that track was a notice posted on the Academy wall. The Russian consul at the treaty port of Hakodate, Iosif (Joseph) Aleksandrovich Goshkevich, had been served by a chaplain, Father Vasily Makhov, who returned to Russia in 1860 in failing health; Goshkevich then petitioned the Holy Synod for a priest of higher theological education to serve as rector of the consular church and — quietly — as a missionary to the Japanese. An announcement of the vacancy was accordingly placed at the St. Petersburg Academy in the spring of 1860 (mission2nihon; Old Russian Consulate in Hakodate, Wikipedia, on Goshkevich and Makhov).

The tradition is unanimous that the decision came to Ivan Kasatkin suddenly and as a vocation rather than a career move. He had read, it is said, of Japan — the memoirs of the naval captain Vasily Golovnin, held captive there earlier in the century — and the closed empire had caught his imagination (mission2nihon). The decisive moment is placed during an all-night vigil at the Academy, when he was seized by the conviction that he must go to Japan, and go as a monk rather than as a married priest (mission2nihon; Enlightener of Japan: Blessed Nicholas Kasatkin, ROCA / Orthodox America). Of the handful of students who at first put their names forward, the others withdrew when they learned that monastic tonsure and celibacy were required; Ivan Kasatkin did not (ROCA).

The encouragement he received is reported with some nuance, and it is worth keeping the nuance. Most short lives simply credit Bishop Nektary (Nadezhdin), the rector of the Academy, who tonsured him. But the fuller accounts add that Nektary at first hesitated over the venture, and that the support which carried it came from Metropolitan Isidore and, finally, the Holy Synod itself (OCA; ACROD; ROCA). The cleanest statement of the matter is that Nektary performed the tonsure, while the approval to undertake the mission came through Isidore and the Synod over some initial reluctance.

Tonsure and Ordination (June 1860)

In June 1860, in the Academy’s church, Ivan Kasatkin was tonsured a monk and given the name Nikolai (Nicholas), in honor of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, by Bishop Nektary (OCA; mission2nihon). [Disputed: the day of the tonsure is given variously as 21 June (OrthoChristian; mission2nihon), 22 June (ROCA), 23 June (OCA), and 24 June (OrthodoxWiki; Wikipedia), all Old Style; no source reconciles them, and “late June 1860” is the only fully defensible statement.] Within days he was advanced through the holy orders, in a sequence on which the sources largely agree: ordained hierodeacon on 29 June 1860, the feast of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and hieromonk (priest) on 30 June 1860 (OCA; OrthoChristian; OrthodoxWiki; mission2nihon). [Disputed: Wikipedia’s “29/30 July 1860” is a calendar-conversion error; the events were in June, Old Style.]

The Renunciation in the Choice

It is worth pausing on what the monastic option actually cost, because the tradition is right to treat the vigil as a turning of the whole life rather than a change of assignment. To answer the Hakodate notice was not merely to accept a distant posting; it was to forswear the alternative life that his training had opened to him. By choosing tonsure over a married parish, Ivan Kasatkin gave up the prospect of a wife and family — no small renunciation for a young man of twenty-three — and with it the warmth and ordinariness of a settled clerical household. By choosing Japan he gave up his homeland, the only world he had known, exchanging the Russia of his fathers for a country at the far edge of the earth whose language he could not speak and whose people he had never seen. And by choosing the mission he gave up the secure career his record had earned him, trading the near-certainty of a professorship or a good parish for a closed empire in which his very faith was, by the law of the land, a capital crime (the renunciation of a Russian career is drawn out in ACROD; the facts of celibacy, distance, and danger are common to mission2nihon and ROCA). The monastic name itself sealed the exchange: in receiving the name Nikolai he took on a new identity ordered wholly to the work ahead. This triple renunciation — of family, of homeland, of settled prospects — is the spiritual logic the tonsure expresses, and it is what distinguishes a vocation from a mere posting.

There is, too, a providential shape to the whole sequence that the sources notice and that bears a sober word here. A boy is born in a village so obscure that the lives cannot even agree on how to spell its name; his mother dies when he is five; he is poured, like thousands of other clergy sons, into the church-school machinery of the Synodal Church. Out of that anonymity he rises, by gift and labour, to the top of the empire’s theological schooling — and then, at the moment when the prizes of that schooling lie open before him, he turns from all of them toward a country that has no Church, no converts, and no welcome, to spend himself there for half a century and end as the apostle of a nation. Stated plainly and without embellishment, the arc is striking on its own terms. The collection records it not as a marvel to be exclaimed over but as the pattern of a calling: the unlikely instrument, taken from a hidden place and fitted, through an ordinary and disciplined formation, for an extraordinary work.

He was twenty-three years old, a newly ordained hieromonk with no experience of pastoral work, no knowledge of Japanese, and an appointment to a country where the preaching of his faith remained, by the law of the land, a capital crime. The naïveté of the undertaking is part of its meaning, and Nicholas would later be candid about it. What he carried with him was a theological formation, a gift for languages, and — soon to be tested on the road across Siberia — the example and counsel of an older missionary who had done the same thing a generation before in Alaska and the Aleutians. That meeting, and the long journey to Hakodate, belong to the next file (see Arrival in Japan (1861)).

See Also

• Arrival in Japan (1861) — the journey across Siberia, the meeting with St. Innocent, and the first years at Hakodate
• Sawabe the Samurai — the first convert, who came to kill the young hieromonk
• The Diaries of St. Nicholas of Japan — the primary record this guide draws on for his inner life and self-assessment
• Orthodoxy Guide: Russian Orthodox Tradition — the Synodal Church and its academies that formed and sent him
• St. John of Kronstadt — the great contemporary Russian pastor who would later support the Japanese mission

References

• Saint Nicholas, Enlightener of Japan. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, February 3. (Deacon father; mother’s early death; seminary and Academy; tonsure; first converts.)
• Nicholas of Japan. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Nicholas_of_Japan). (Birth 1 August 1836; schooling; tonsure 24 June 1860; ordinations.)
• Nicholas of Japan. Wikipedia. (Explicit O.S./N.S. pairing for the birth date; chronology cross-checked, used to locate sources.)
• St. Nicholas of Japan, Apostle to Japan (Monk Nicodemus Jones). OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/51599.html), from the St. Herman Calendar 2011. (Academy entry; the 14-hour study; the catechist method.)
• Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles (Part 1). mission2nihon (mission2nihon.substack.com), drawing on the standard Russian Life. (Goshkevich and Makhov; Golovnin’s memoirs; the night vigil; the velvet cassock and journey, treated in the companion file.)
• Enlightener of Japan: Blessed Nicholas Kasatkin (Presbytera Doreen Bartholomew). Orthodox America / ROCA (roca.org). (The withdrawal of the other candidates; Metropolitan Isidore’s support; the journey.)
• The Apostle to Japan (Fr. Edward Pehanich). American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese (acrod.org). (His formation and the renunciation of a Russian career.)
• Old Russian Consulate in Hakodate. Wikipedia (used to locate the Goshkevich/Makhov sequence and the consular church).