Man has at last comprehended that he is [only] man; he has given up analyzing his God and searching effectively into the imperceptible, into what he has not seen; he has given up framing [descriptive] laws for the phantasms of his brain. In vain do the friars cry out from the pulpits… they disregard the fact that their wares are [by now] stale and unserviceable… The gods are going away!
Since we should be fully certain by now (go back to chapter 3 if you retain doubts) that Rizal did not retract and died a martyred freethinker, all the more must we be convinced that he shared Tasio’s near-death thoughts and creed capped by the passage above. Even as the hero’s own religious creed remained a personal Masonic rationalist thing, with its concept of a nonsectarian Deist-Theist God, it bore some agnostic elements in regard to his God’s specific qualities and intentions and relationship with the world. It was continuously and irreversibly deepening in that probing skeptical direction, and putting on more and more agnostic features. He mentioned this with Pastells when he defended his unbeliever’s creed as a product of reasoning and scientific reflection on nature and conscience, rather than a matter of revealed faith. It practically knew nothing certain his God’s specific qualities, nature and commands. In this view it can be true for him to say, “The gods [of revealed faiths especially] are going away!” Dr. De Pedro of course must deny this, for in his mind how could Rizal at the end have so freely, sweepingly, even exuberantly retracted as told in the Church’s broad five-sentence document? Note that if the quoted passage above could have been Rizal’s as well, it does rather confirm this review-essay’s claim about his bone-deep scientific rationalism, one immune even in death from Hellfire-backed pleadings to reconvert back to the old faith.
Recall that his many foreign admirers stressed his being a man of science. The American Governor-General Cameron Forbes in the mid-1910’s expressed this view well in an often cited passage worth recollecting:
From the day of Socrates, who was put to death… for teaching the young men to think for themselves, down to that morning in December 30,1896, when Rizal was done to death… the page of history have run red with the murder of men of science.
Testimonials like that showing Rizal’s philosophical and scientific questioning mind can be multiplied from his writings. These show a deeply inquiring and curious mentality about practically everything, and extending to topics about Gods, their alleged attributes and revelations. Consider the still mostly critically unread humanity-raising essay-letter of 1889 from London. Though addressed to Philippine women of the Malolos area, he clearly meant it for everyone of his countrymen. Some of its main advice and points: “Pass everything, including what I say, through the sieve of reason.” And why is that? Because, to paraphrase, “Deceit lurks everywhere with its deceptions even in your gardens of learning, even in your own self.” You can hardly get a more scientifically skeptical and agnostical thought and remark than that. Apply such principles of independent doubting and questioning on your own revered friar-priests and their claims to preach the true religion of Jesus Christ, his rationalist letter-essay urged. His critical review of mentor-friend Pi y Margall’s rationalist book, Struggles of our Times, publicly praised its systematic skeptical approach as a scientific virtue instead of a sinful vice. He recommended the book, with its historical finding of a purely human Jesus, whom his followers misrepresented and misunderstood.
His most revealing letters to retraction-soliciting Fr. Pastells surely contained agnostical overtones about God and His alleged attributes, intentions and relations with the world. Not knowing really for certain what these were or were not supposed to be; being confused about it all but still believing in a Deist-Theist conception of God; approaching this unfathomable subject not through what people called faith but through factual reasoning and categorical dictates of honest conscience, he confessed to being confusedly overwhelmed by the entire subject. No, he did not believe in a God that intervenes with miracles. Awareness of these letters and admissions may have led Jesuit Bernad in his 2004 book to refer to Rizal repeatedly as an agnostic! In truth, he was not a full or complete agnostic.
Even more revealing than his skeptical confessions to Fr. Pastells was his letter to Blumentritt about Anacleto del Rosario in early May of 1895. Sharing news of his former schoolmate’s death with Blumentritt, Rizal contrasted himself to him. Such a blind, unquestioning intolerant Catholic he was, he recollected. But I understood where he was coming from and loved him nevertheless, he recalled. I on the other hand, he confessed, doubted and questioned everything and always required supporting facts for claims. Note that important letter’s confirmation of his adolescence’s freethinker predilections, culminating in his youth’s great ode to free thought and individual freedoms. Recall its gist in verse, this works main epigram. As a scientist standing on the giant shoulders of pioneering modern scientist Galileo, one could say that Rizal showed a deeper appreciation of and commitment to applications of the scientific method and attitude than the pioneering great scientist Galileo himself showed, specially in the latter’s great debate with the Church and its Jesuits, Dominicans and other friar-priests. Fairly recent works on Galileo have illumined and bewailed the latter’s ultimate willing capitulation of science to the ultimate supreme authority of his Catholic Faith. Bone-deep scientific humanist. Rizal never freely surrendered his written convictions of his scholarship and scientific studies as to which process and method of inquiry possessed validity. In view of this I’d have to say, “No, Opus-Dei priest-scholar Dr. De Pedro (and other like-minded historians): Rizal was a fully baked Catholicism-rejecting freethinker. Philosophic Tasio’s agnostical discourse near death spoke for him and his Masonic scientific humanism. Let us bare it all, then, these freethinker depths of his core-identity to clinch our case against the still ruling retraction-respecting nationalistic paradigm of an ultimately Catholic separatist-rebel Rizal killed for it by Spain.
Baring it all
If you need more proof that Rizal’s Enlightenment rationalist readings, studies, meditations had managed to totally transform him in his core of cores to the point of sharing freethinker Tasio’s skeptical near-death discourse, you should carefully read the explosively anti-Catholic satire that had Retana tone down his treatment of it, though he confessed amazement for its erudition. It is the source of Fajardo’s just cited inflammatory quote. I refer to “The Vision of Friar Rodriguez”, which most readers, historians, biographers gloss over. Or give the retraction-influenced false interpretation of dealing mainly with issues and non-doctrinal abuses of the friars at a time when Rizal was very angry with and alienated from them. In that fully Voltairean satire, a deistic nonsectarian God sends the Church’s Angelic Doctor St. Augustine back to Earth to denounce Catholicism’s absolutist claims to truth-and-morals. Rizal practically turned Augustine into a freethinker castigating and exposing friars who claimed to speak for him and for God. De Pedro ignored that satire. And he ignored another possibly more explosive anti-Catholic satire that no biographer or historian has yet dared to analyze and explain fully for the public. I refer to the unpublished and untitled manuscript which one could title more aptly (than its given misleading one) as: “Satire on God, Jesus, Mary, Peter, Priests and Filipinos.” All these entities are spoofed irreverently as only a bone-deep freethinker would. It starts out with a deistic-theistic God back from an inspection of a Bruno-type infinite universe populated by more intelligent life in other solar systems. His gaze over the infinite vastness of creation chances in the direction of the Earth. Shocked and disturbed by its funny and suspicious goings-on, he collars a more informed Archangel to explain it. At a high point in the long explosive satire God is shocked by the sight of a Filipina. She is the matronly lady Antonia introduced by Peter, in finery laden with all sorts of the usual religious externals of holy cords, scapulars, medals, rosary, veil, etc. Maria Clara’s mother in Noli might have worn them in her pious pilgrimages to the Virgin’s Holy Sites here and there asking for the miracle of a long hoped-for conception After being briefed, God reacts with unbearable shock and outrage that anyone could be so superstitious and stupid. He commands Peter to throw her out of his sight!
I could say much more of the utterly irreverent long suppressed and falsely represented satire, including Jesus and Mary’s denunciations of priests and natives immersed totally in their idolatrous deification and veneration without understanding. There is no need, however, to go into all the anti-Catholic Voltairean details of that entirely suppressed and misinterpreted or misrepresented satire. Of course Dr. Pedro ignores it completely. Yes, just as he similarly ignored the extremely self-revealing “Vision of Fr. Rodriguez”, from which it developed more devastatingly. Could anyone else but a thoroughly Catholicism-hating and retraction-immune freethinker have in fact written many such Catholicism-ridiculing satires and essays?
Dying a Freethinker with a Smile
So has De Pedro and practically everyone else totally ignored the highly self-revealing satire dealing with the “Death of a Freethinker”. It certainly spoke for its author too, I would say, just as he spoke through Tasio’s near-death discourse we’ve previously examined. Here’s the gist of this still suppressed and unknown work. I’ve never heard anyone mentioning let alone analyzing it in its proper context, though it seems to role-play his own imagined future death as a bone-deep freethinker. It goes under that title, “A Freethinker” in an obscure publication of Rizal’s complete essays mandated by law for translation, then publication in various parts for official purposes. Hardly anyone has taken the time to seriously read it. It bears marks of having been written in Dapitan’s leisured tranquility, after the Archbishop and his Jesuits’ failures at reconverting the hero into the old absolutist faith. The satire’s main freethinker subject is a middle-aged learned teaching physician so similar in essential characteristics and beliefs with Rizal himself that you cannot help thinking of him role-playing his own imagined death at such a future date. He is passionately pursued over the years to return back to faith by a theologically trained younger family friend. He is confident of succeeding eventually no matter the years it takes through patient presentation via Catholic Apologetics of the reasonableness of the Church’s claims. To cut through the story’s long complications, let us just say that for health reasons upright popular freethinking doctor falls terminally ill. “Now is my opportunity at long last at succeeding”, the theologian-friend tells himself. He sincerely wants to save this otherwise admired older friend from the eternal fires of Hell, for his being such a hard-headed infidel. Our piously arrogant would-be savior here may have also been under the influence of the popular saying, “there are no atheists, agnostics, freethinkers in foxholes and deathbeds”, especially when assisted by a caring knowledgeable agent of God.
Please understand I’m dramatizing a bit and just sticking to bare gist of this untold Rizal story. The still impenitent freethinker is dying. His close younger friend, the conversion-seeking theologian impatiently waits for his last great chance to try conversion again. He eagerly responds to his dying older friend’s invitation to visit right away. He hopes now to encounter a more religiously vulnerable doubter, one possibly more open to the grace of faith. He soon finds out the reason for his deathbed visit. The parting bone-deep freethinker wants his immediate family members and closest friends, including his piously bullying theologian-friend, to solemnly witness his dying last words, thoughts and wishes. He barely is able to do so most emphatically. Alas, it has absolutely nothing to do with a last wish to reconcile with the Church, to reconvert, or to retract and confess. It concerned strictly internal family business that needed final action and witnessing. Then he dies right way peacefully, contented with either and internal or external smile on his face at this last achievement of his, including dealing the piously arrogant would-be savior his comeuppance. Or, maybe, a much-needed lesson in humility. The bitterly shocked “Hound of Heaven” cannot believe what had just transpired before his very eyes. He lets it all sink in, this parting bombshell of a core-deep freethinker. Horrified and bitter, he takes comfort in self-deluding thoughts and lessons for him like: “This should teach me to stop trying hard to reconvert and save these hardheaded freethinkers… ah, let the devil just take them all to Hell.!”
Yes, amazed and shocked readers who before this didn’t know about this suppressed and ignored satire: there is such a mid-1890s from our amazing iconic subject. In it he sort of role-played himself being pursued sooner or later, even unto death by whom he regarded as piously arrogant bullying would-be saviors. The previously cited Fajardo made much of Rizal’s written comments on the “retraction-fraud” perpetrated over his much admired Voltaire’s dead body. Which showed “he naturally suspected that he may be made a victim of a similar foul deed.” He felt the need to take precautions. Fajardo would have enjoyed knowing about Rizal’s unknown “Death of a Freethinker”, as confirmation of both his (Fajardo’s) and Rizal’s same train of thought. This was not the only precaution he took. There was the death poem barely finished and delivered in the nick of time, with its draft and other messages most likely in the shoes. Ironically in a cruel twist of fate his extended family neglected to recover these in time from the unconfined corpse in the moist ground. Nor did they clearly firmly state the death poem’s historic manner of pre-arranged delivery in the stove-lamp after the execution, with the death cell’s pile of keepsakes and other personal items but went along overall with the retractionsts’ antedating of its finishing and delivery. Thus was Rizal’s precautionary surprise bombshell of a death poem, with draft and other messages in the shoes, foiled.
Very likely did Rizal write the semi-autobiographical satire in Dapitan. It seems inspired by self-satisfied confidence culminating from failure of a similar reconversion campaign waged by Fathers Sanchez and Pastells and others to win his soul back for their faith and its theocratic Church. He showed the same courtesy toward the powerful Jesuits, as with Pastells in the last fifth letter to him firmly ending their highly intense and extended discussions heading nowhere. Basking in the inner afterglow of defending his Masonic scientific humanism, it occurred to him to put its gist in a satirical story-form. This could have been after he wrote his long poem about his forced retirement in Dapitan, written as if serenely celebrating a similar triumph of constancy to his own reasoned beliefs. The surprise ending of his “Death of a Freethinker” satire, let me repeat, bears a similarity with what actually happened in his death cell. Just through with the Jesuits’ last-ditch efforts to win him back for the Church for most of the entire day, he just barely had time to pull off the surprise bombshell package of poem, its draft and other messages to forestall frauds and rumors that would be spread about his death. Alas, the retractionists defused and turned “the bomb” into a dud. Their antedating of its entire final finishing (with no draft and other messages) eased the way for more misrepresentations, false interpretations and free translations from the Spanish text. Thus was the tender-defiant poem’s true character killed along with its author’s core-identity. And who really killed him for what hidden religious motives. Even so, he briskly walked to his place of execution with remarkable coolness and lingering smile on his face thinking that his forestalling death poem with draft and other messages would make it to an understanding world. That should teach those piously arrogant would-be saviors more lessons in humility, he likely thought as well with a philosophic smile.
W.O.W. PH: Lazy to Know Chief Hero’s Core
His people then as now misperceived him as their nationalistic rebel leader killed for it by his chief enemy Spain. In fact for this unretracting activist freethinker and patriotic humanist of individual rights of his times the main enemy which ultimately killed him behind the legalities was the Church-and-its-theocracy. This framed him to death, against overwhelming evidence of innocence, as a violent rebel in order as well to get away too with another frame-up, that of his complete retraction. core beliefs and deeds.
The religiously and theocratically inspired motives and manipulations behind his death, in order to successfully pull off both the rebellion and the retraction frame-ups, should be regarded as implicit in findings of such Rizalists as the previously cited Dr. Pardo de Tavera and statesman Manuel L. Quezon. Worth recalling is the latter’s reported Rizal Day 1916 Speech and ignored message: “There is not in the writings of Rizal that could point out to us that he had ever advocated the separation of the Philippines from Spain …[although] the desire was there one day to be completely… independent….after acquiring the independence of the individual and his rights….For this reason Rizal attacked the submission of the civil power to the Church, and the bold attempt cost him his life.” Implicitly these support this work’s reformulation of who killed “him’: Church-and-theocracy killed this heroic church-state separatist for basic freedoms, who for this alone more than deserves to be chief hero of his county after all.” Nationalistic zealots may disagree and call him coward and traitor for going against their failed mainly Tagalog 1896 Revolution. (Its leader Bonifacio did upon being told the truth by Dr. Valenzuela, confirmed by top rebel Jose Dizon). But then Rizal’s patriotic humanism was not like theirs. It issued from his core-identity unknown by his people to this day, as if he never lived to influence them in those aspects of his core beliefs, teachings and example. Through the unexpected confluence of such misrepresentations, politics including an early strong U.S. admiration and vigorous support for his elevation to chief hero, he ever turned relentlessly into his country’s accidental (anti-Catholic) national hero, venerated without understanding.
In view of this I am inspired to exclaim: Wonder of wonders (W.O.W.)! His country to this late date in the 21st century remains a world laggard relative to the runaway five advanced nations Rizal mentioned for comparative industriousness and catch-up. His country remains disinclined towards the hard work, including intellectual and moral will, to study and understand its amazing chief hero’s humanist core-identity. One could say further: Clueless it remains on how itgot covered-up by the retraction-respecting nationalistic paradigm in the errors-filled textbooks. Clueless too perhaps on why you could aptly retitle this slim meaty book as “Catholicism vs. PH’s Top Hero & Its Duty of Repair.” All this adds a grandly tragic dimension to the usually heard frustrations of, “ONLY IN THE PHILIPPINES!” Its people as a whole did not bother to find out to understand why and how, above all else, he struggled to the death to someday see, in his oft-repeated words since 18, “a people honest, prosperous, intelligent, virtuous, noble, loyal.” Whose assets and virtues exceeded comparative defects and vices. History still has to prove “him” right when as Asia’s first champion of the Enlightenment he predicted the sociopolitical, intellectual and ethical progress of his people toward comparability with the most advanced bar-raising First World was historically ordained within a century of his times. As the unretracting martyred freethinker of his own death poem he dreamed mostly to someday see his scorned race and people a united moral one of intellect rather than of the old discredited faith. Belief in old Catholicisms’s retraction-respecting false versions to this day about his core-identity and chief mission is testament to both this unique world-hero’s over-optimism and the deep rootedness of his country’s comparative “backwardness…[and] being next to Burma in benightedness today”, as my oft-quoted columnist likes to scold now and then. Think these thoughts next time when you read and reread his magnificent poem to meet him there in his depths for the first time.
