0.5 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 5  (Page 3/14)

It is necessary to underscore a trait that may not be perceived at first sight: Rizal, by constitution, had a Romantic temperament… [a] reaction to the dryness of the Enlightenment….The Romantic spirit fed on (exaltation of feelings and) on contradictions in opposition to cold reason… Remarks like that appear in many parts of his pro-church book including these below reminiscent of a similar one first made by Unamuno:

It should be said that the originator of how the freethinker Rizal could retract so completely during the entire last night of December 29-30, 1896 was not De Pedro but the world’s best Cervantes expert ever (according to Harold Bloom). Unamuno offered this flimsy hypothesis in his long Epilogue in W. E. Retana’s first complete biography of the hero, published in Madrid in 1907. Otherwise full of praises for his fellow liberal schoolmate (a couple of years ahead) he uncritically accepted the basic retraction version of Balaguer and Pastells. Recall that his was first declared anonymously in January-February 1897 in Barcelona, then made official for the Church later in the year in Rizal y su obra . Unamuno glossed over Rizal’s science, philosophy and history studies and lifelong life of thought and insisted wrongly that he remained essentially an amateur in regard to freethinking rationalism’s foundations and depths. The latter did not dive deep into the sustained depths of anti-Catholic Voltaireanism. Enlightenment rationalism’s sociopolitical agenda attracted him mainly. In his mostly poetic and Romantic heart of hearts some essential embers of his boyhood’s fond faith burst ablaze with such blinding light and inspiration that he could not resist.

That’s how his otherwise highly admired Madrid schoolmate accounted for the spontaneous retraction at death’s doors. And why it could be manifested so piously, so passionately, so completely all nightlong of December 29-30, 1896. Unamuno did no critical research on it, seemed ignorant of Rizal’s utterly profane Voltairean essays beyond the novels, the fully rationalist essays, and so on as he spun yarns about the weak nature of Rizal’s character: indecisive like a Hamlet, Romantic poetic dreamer like a Quijote, repelled by reality’s impurities, desiring bloody revolution and recoiling from its rivers of blood. Unamuno coined a word for him: a Catholic freebeliever! Philippine historians and biographers, the wildly hailed filmbio years ago by producer-director M. Abaya, jumped on that bandwagon. De Pedro should have given credit to Unamuno for their shared views. He didn’t.

A Secret Budding Freethinker by 18?

By all accounts he seemed possessed of an inborn sensitivity to injustice. You feel that in Noli me tangere bristles in its implied criticisms of inept and corrupt administration. What should be equally regarded inborn and inherent in is author is his passionate intellectual curiosity to find out and ask deep questions as to the why of things, events and appearances. In sharp contrast to his peers he read voraciously both school and non-school books to quench an inner yearning to know and think a lot more about what he was finding out. That inborn drive could not be completely smothered or channeled into culturally and religiously correct ways whether at home, with one’s peers, or with his Jesuit and Dominican professors. When still a teenager at around 17 he started manifesting telltales of his dangerous doubting and questioning nature, as he himself implied in the important May 9, 1895 letter to Blumentritt. He alluded to in his Memorias that he started writing a year later. It broke into a poetic epiphany restrained an coded just enough to escape the theocratic censors’ radar as a prize-worthy poem addressed to Philippine youth. But he in effect challenged it desperately to revolutionize its brains and minds, a central obsession of freethinkers worldwide they will tell you, since it is a core-aspect of the freethinker’s creed. This paraphrasing summary in verse catches the prize-winning poem’s essence, and the emerging permanent aspects of its young author’s core-identity, his internal image of himself. It just kept constantly developing throughout his short life of 35 years.