0.4 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 4  (Page 6/9)

As I argue here and in the next chapter, Rizal was already a rationalist freethinker in Madrid itself, when still 21 and before the long summer in Paris. His mid-1883 study-vacation in Masonic freethinking Paris merely confirmed it while cumulatively reinforcing it. Note the letter’s references to rationalism’s intellectual and moral concerns for right “knowledge and virtue”. And its age-old revulsion at what freethinkers typically hold as code or synonym for instilled organized faiths: “stupid dogmatism and crude hypocrisy”. The angry reply to Paciano’s anti-priest letter expresses this culminating intellectual and moral disgust of a studious rationalist with “so much fanaticism…[resulting in] so much misery in those Islands…” It doesn’t point, as De Pedro claimed, to a sudden emotional conversion to rationalism driven by conflicting romantic and dark motives involving revenge.

Rizal just kept on developing ever deeper into Masonic rationalism’s scientific humanist depths as his maturer body of works, letters, reflections show. A voracious reader hungry for advanced modern knowledge, he never stopped his scientific and ethnocultural studies beyond masteral and doctoral stages. A freethinker’s utterance that he put in the mouth of one or two admirable characters in the Noli , that Catholicism was not necessarily redemptively and civilizationally superior to the pre-Spanish Filipinos’ religion, he studied further and reinforced in later essays. You might disagree with his conclusions for being biased and bending over backward to make his scorned race and people look good. That does not concern the objectively motivated search for his core beliefs and principles comprising central aspects of his identity. All this leads to the nagging question of why I and De Pedro draw fundamentally different conclusions from basically the same facts, sources, the one same underlying reality. I am forced to say again that from his retraction-influenced paradigm’s perspectives and lenses De Pedro sees the same underlying things accordingly to fit. This need no be a conscious process at all, but subconscious or both. On the other hand I wear seeing and thinking lenses shaped in part by previously evidence-justified retraction-rejecting perspectives. I hold this view to be much more objectively centered on the facts of course.

Inherent Freethinker Predispositions

By eighteen, Rizal in his poem to youth, already showed freethinking tendencies. He must have harbored such inherent dangerous tendencies earlier but suppressed or hid them well. At Manila’s Catholic university he sided with its reforms-seeking liberal students. In his May 9, 1895 letter to Blumentritt he recalled such tendencies back then of freely thinking for himself: “I doubted and questioned everything,” he wrote stunningly.. That probably inborn genetic tendency cumulatively developed fast in advanced modern Europe, including slowly imitating Spain. From facts De Pedro himself mentioned, it strongly appears that he joined church-condemned Freemasonry when he was still a very young 21. We’ll see why, shortly. By 18, feeling increasingly cowled in a kind of Plato’s cave in the Dominican Pontifical University of Spanish Philippines (alluded to in his second novel), he sang out in effect in a famous poem: “Break free this day timid minds from your chains/Shackles fit for brutes bred in dark captivity/ Climb peaks of thought, talent, art, science…” That is a budding inborn freethinker’s song and he was crying out to himself too. Between its lines that barely escaped the censors’ ban, we can feel him already dreaming of modern freethinking Europe there to continue his university and advanced studies in regimes respectful of individual freedoms. Nothing would stop him from doing so, not his Jesuit and Dominican professors, from which he hid this project. Not even his very religious parents who were in mortal dread of the possible loss of his faith, and life too upon return to his country.