4 April 1893

Dapitan

Dapitan, 4 April 1893

VERY REV. FR. PABLO PESTELLS

MY VERY REVEREND FATHER,

I received in time your gift, the work of Mgr. Bougand, which I am reading most attentively and with the greatest interest. It is one of the best works of its kind that I have seen as much for its lucidity as for its eminently Christian and conciliatory spirit, as for the light that animates its author as well as for his convictions. If the work of Mr. Sarda is that of a champion or a polemicist, that of the word, let us see if its perusal will modify my faith, or if the faith that Your Reverence misses is reborn; if not we have to content ourselves with what God furnishes each one.

Your Reverence need not be surprised that I should answer your esteemed letter of 2 February rather late. It is very painful for me to do so and had it been possible, I would have preferred to be taken as discourteous rather than to hurt directly your convictions in this discussion.

With Your Reverence it was more pleasant for me to confine myself strictly to the defense of my ideas rather than to take the offense. But Your Reverence challenges me and there I go, to regret, but with naked hand for neither do I want to use weapons nor do I have them, for I lack books to prove my citations.

We are entirely agreed in admitting the existence of God. He doubt it when I am convinced of mine? Who recognizes the effect, recognizes the cause. To doubt God would be to doubt one’s own conscience and therefore it would be to doubt everything and then for what is life?

Well now, my faith in God, if the result of reasoning can be called faith, if blind in the sense that it knows nothing. Neither do I believe nor do I do not believe in the qualities that many attribute to Him. I smile at the definitions and lucubrations of theologians and philosophers if that ineffable and inscrutable Being. In the conviction that I find myself before the Supreme Problem that confused voices want to explain to me, I cannot help but reply: “It can be, but the God that I forebode is very much greater, much better, – Plus Suora”[1]

I do not believe Revelation impossible, rather I believe in it, but not in revelation or revelations that every religion or all religions pretend to possess. In examining them impartially, comparing them, and scrutinizing them, one cannot fail to recognize in all of them the human fang and the stamp of the time during which they were written. No, man makes his God in his own image and likeness and then attributes to Him his own works, as the Polish magnates chose their king after imposing upon him their will. And all of us do the same, and Your Reverence also when you tell me: “He who made the eyes will not see? He who fashioned ears will not hear?” Pardon me Your Reverence, but now that we have spoken of the bull of Anacreon, let us hear him bellow: He who made horns would he not know how to gore? No, what is perfection in us can be an imperfection in God.

No, let us not make a god in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a small planet lost in the infinite spaces. However brilliant and sublime our mind may be, it will be a tiny spark that shines and is extinguished in a moment, and alone it cannot give us an idea of that blaze, of that fire, of that immense light.

I believe in Revelation, but in that living revelation of Nature that surrounds us everywhere, in that mighty voice, eternal, incessant, incorruptible, clear, distinct, universal like the Being from which it emanates, in that revelation that speaks to us and penetrates into us from [the] time we are born until we die. What books can reveal to us better that goodness of God, His love, His providence, His eternity, His glory, His wisdom? Coeli enarrant gloriam Domini et opera manum ejus anuntiat firmamentum.[2] What more Bible and what more Gospel mankind wants? Ah! Does not Your Reverence believe that men have done wrong in searching for the divine will in parchment and temples instead of searching it in the works of Nature and under the august canopy of the heavens? Instead of interpreting obscure passages or obscure phrases that provoke hatred, wars, and dissensions, was it not better to interpret the facts of Nature to adjust better our life to its inviolable laws, to utilize its forces in perfecting ourselves? When have men begun in fact to fraternize but when they met the first page of the work of God? Like the prodigal son who was blind to the happiness in the parental home he looked for other abroad, humankind has wandered about miserably and full of rancor during many centuries.

I do not deny that there are precepts of absolute necessity and utility that are found clearly enunciated in Nature but these have been placed by God in the heart, in the conscience of man, his best temple, and for this reason I adore more this God, good, provident, who has endowed each one of us continually the book of revelation, who holds open to us continually the book of revelation, His priest speaking to us incessantly in the voice of our conscience.

For this reason the best religions are the simplest, the most natural, the most harmonious with the necessities and aspirations of man. Here is the principal excellence of the doctrine of Christ.

I do not prejudge when I say that only from God can the voice of my conscience proceed. I judge by deduction. God could not have created me for my injury, because what wrong have I done Him before I was created that He should want my damnation? Nor ought He to create me for nothing or indifference because for what are my sufferings, for what is the slow torture of my continuous aspiring? He must have created me for some good purpose and for this I have no better thing to guide me but my conscience, my conscience alone, that judges and authorizes my acts. He would be inconsistent if having created me for a purpose He had not given me means to attain it, like a smith who would like to make a knife and then did not put an edge on it. All the brilliant and subtle arguments of Your Reverence – that I shall not try to refute because I would have to write a compendious treatise – cannot convince me that the Catholic Church is endowed with infallibility. In that also the human fang. It is a more perfect institution that the rest but human in the end, with the defects, the errors, and the vicissitudes proper to the works of men. It is wiser, more skillfully conducted than many other religions as the direct heir of the political sciences, religions, and arts of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. It has its foundation in the heart of the people in the imagination of the multitude, and in the affection of woman; but like all religions it has its obscure points that are clothed with the name of mysteries, puerilities that are sanctified in miracles, divisions, or dissensions that are called sects or heresies.

I cannot believe that before the coming of Jesus Christ, all peoples were in deep abyss of which Your Reverence speaks. No; precisely there is Socrates who dies for affirming the existence of one God, there is the divine Plato. There are virtuous Aristides, Phocion, Miltiades; there are Zoroaster, founder of the religion of force, there Kung Sien of the religion of reason, China’s lawgiver.

Neither can I believe that after Christ everything has been light, peace, and fortune, that the majority of men have become just. No, to believe it there are the battlefields, the fires, the bonfires, the prison, rapes, the torments of the Inquisition. There is the hatred between the Christian nations for flimsy differences, there is the toleration of slavery, if not its sanction, during eighteen centuries. There is prostitution… there is in short a large part of society hostile to its own religion. Your Reverence will tell me that all exists because they have separated from the Church. When the Church was dominant, did not these evils exist? Perhaps in the Middle Ages, perhaps when all Europe was a camp of Agramante? No? During the first three centuries when the Church was in the catacombs, imprisoned it groaned and had no power? Then if there was peace, it did not have it either, it was not due to it for it did not rule. Ah! No, my dear Fr. Pastells; I rejoice to see men like Your Reverence full of faith and virtue maintain a faith and regret the present misfortunes of mankind because that proves love for the faith and generous spirits like that of Your Reverence watch over it; but I rejoice more when I contemplate mankind in its immortal march, always progressing, in spite of its failings and falls, in spite of its devastations, because that shows me its glorious purpose, it tells me that it has been created for a better end than to be a pasture of flames, that fills me with confidence in God who will not let his work to be damned, despite the devil and all our madness.

With reference to the contradictions in canon books, the miracles, I confess that the subject is very hackneyed and boresome to repeat. Everything is explained when it is wanted. The will has an enormous power over the imagination and vice versa. So that I will not speak to you either of the contradiction in the genealogies or of the miracle of the Cana that Christ performed in spite of the fact that he had said that his hour had not yet come, or of the bread and the fishes, or of the temptation, etc. All these things do not diminish the stature of he who enunciated the Sermon on the Mount and said the famous: “Father forgive them…” What am I going to raise is something more transcendental. Who died on the cross? Was it God or was it the man? If it was God, I do not understand how a God conscious of his mission can die, how a God can exclaim in the garden: “Pater, si possible transeat a me calix iste!”[3] Again he exclaimed on the cross: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This cry is absolutely human; it is the cry of a man who has faith in justice and in the goodness of his cause; except the Hodie me cum eris,[4] the cry of Christ on Calvary. All announce a man in torment and in agony, but what a man! And for me, Christ man is greater than Christ God. If the one who has said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing” had been God, those who had laid hands on him ought to have been forgiven unless we say that God resembles certain men who say one thing and then do something else.

Another objection I have to Christ’s miracles is the apostasy of his disciples and their incredulity of his resurrection. Had they been witnesses of so many marvels and his resurrection, they would not have doubted his resurrection. Who returns life to others can very well do it to himself.

Concerning the explanation of the miracles that Your Reverence gives, that He who has dictated laws does not contradict himself suspending them for the specified epochs in order to attain certain purposes without spending anything or altering anything. Only a mediocre administrator goes out of his way suspending the effectiveness of laws; a good one administers in peace without altering or disturbing anything.

Your Reverence calls this foolish pride of the rationalists. Another question still occurs to me: Who is more foolishly proud, he who is satisfied with following his own reason or he who pretends to impose upon others not what his reason dictates but only what it seems to him to be the truth. What is rational never seemed to me foolish, and pride is always manifested in the idea of superiority.

With respect to the people that will settle here, I cannot order anything nor do I wish to do so. We have written them telling them of the advantages and disadvantages of this place so that afterwards they may not be disappointed. We would like to have them come and see for themselves but until now they have not come. According to a fellow townsman of mine, more than fifty families would like to come from my hometown alone. Perhaps the excessive passage that the ships ask is making them think twice of the matter. However, with the new state of things, I am very much afraid that the thing may not be realized any more.

I felicitate Your Reverence for the relative rest that they give you in diminishing the burden that you used to bear.

As always………………………………………………………….

JOSE RIZAL

01-783 [Family]