El Filibusterismo
From Raymund Addun
A gobierno inmoral corresponde un pueblo desmoralizado; a administracion sin concencia, ciudadanos rapaces y serviles en el poblado, bandidos y ladrones en las montaņas. Tal amo, tal esclavo. Tal gobierno, tal pais!
(To an immoral government belongs a demoralized people; to an administration without conscience, servile and rapacious citizens in the cities, thieves and bandits in the countyside. Like master, like slave. Like government, like country.)
Commentary from RP-Rizal yahoogroups forum: 10 October 2004
The quote is by Father Florentino, during a discussion with the dying Simoun, in the last chapter of the Fili. (El Filibusterismo, 1997, 408)
Simoun: "Then what can be done"? asked the voice of the wounded. Father Florentino: "To suffer and to work!" (El Fili, 1997, 409) Easy for him to say and, unlike many politically timid Rizal critics, we should avoid the temptation of confusing Father Florentino's thoughts on revolution and social change with Rizal's. For Father Florentino neither suffered nor worked; he never practiced nor plans to practice what he preached. [His nephew Isagani however, who exits the novel "with an enigmatic smile" and a plan "to stay permanently with his uncle," appears to want more than "playing melancholy airs" in Father Florentino's "solitary retreat by the sea." (El Fili, 1997, 392; 400)] Earlier in the novel, Rizal provides an account of Father Florentino's life as a "private citizen":
The son of a very rich and wellfamily, possessed -connected Manila of great charm and the happy disposition to shine in the world, he had never felt a priestly vocation, but his mother, because of some promises or vows, compelled him to enter the seminary after long quarrels and violent discussions. She friendship with the archbishop, was of an iron will, and inexorable as are all devout women who believe themselves interpreters of the will of God. In vain did the young Florentino oppose her; in vain he pleaded, in vain he prevented it with his amours and provoked scandals. A priest he had to be, and the age of twenty-five he was. The Archbishop ordained him priest, his first mass was celebrated with great pomp; there were three days of feasting and his mother died contented and pleased, leaving him all her fortune.
But in that struggle Florentino received a wound from which he never recovered. Weeks before his first mass, the woman he had loved most married a nobody out of despair. That blow was the hardest he would ever feel; he lost his moral energy; life became heavy and unbearable. If not virtue and respect for his calling, that unfortunate love saved him from the abyss into which regular and secular curas in the Philippines were often plunged. He devoted himself to his parishioners out of duty, and to the natural sciences out of natural inclination.
When the events of 1872 took place, Padre Florentino feared that his parish, because of the huge benefices it yielded, would draw attention to him, and a pacifist before anything else, he sought retirement, living since then as a private citizen on his family estate, situated on the shores of the Pacific. There he adopted a nephew, Isagani, who according to malicious gossip was his son by his old love when she was widowed; or a natural son of a cousin of his in Manila, according to the more sober and knowledgeable." (El Filibusterismo, 1997, 23-4)
Rizal as we all know reacted differently to "the events of 1872." In an 18 April 1889 letter to Mariano Ponce, Rizal confesses:
"Without 1872, there would not now be any Plaridel, or Jaena, or Sancianco, nor would the valiant and generous Filipino colonies in Europe exist; without 1872, Rizal would now be a Jesuit, and instead of writing the Noli Me Tangere, would have written the contrary. At the sight of those injustices and cruelties, though still a child, my imagination awoke, and I swore I would dedicate myself to avenge one day so many victims, and with this idea I have gone on studying, and this can be read in all my works and writings. God will one day grant me the opportunity to fulfill my promise." (Rizal's Correspondence with Fellow Reformists, 1992, 321)
Unlike Father Florentino, Rizal, at the age of 25, did not enter the priesthood but instead devoted himself to writing the Noli. "Why independence if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow?" (El Fili, 1997, 410). Well, slavery and tyranny will only continue if one does nothing to stop injustice but making pronouncements to the dying. Rizal did more.
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