The Filipino as 'gentle genius'

The title above is partly owed to someone I’ve admired a long time, someone I daresay deserves the Journalist of the Year award year after year.

I speak of Juan L. Mercado, whom I take it runs something called DEPTHnews singlehandedly, in that capacity providing some dailies regular gems of "think" pieces passed off as features.

The last I read of these, last week, titled "Revisiting a gentle genius‚ in his new books," was not exactly appreciated for the characteristically scintillating insights, scholarship, and quality of prose. Still, Johnny Mercado hardly ever goes wrong. In this case, he recalls his admiration for and friendship with Fr. Horacio de La Costa, S.J.. More than this, he plugs the four-volume set of the genius-writer’s works recently published by the 2B3C Foundation, Inc., and co-published by Philippine Province of the Society of Jesus and the Ateneo de Manila University.

The magnificent collection, compiled and edited by Roberto M. Paterno, is made available in an elegant white box adorned only with the author’s signature. The four volumes are: Selected Essays on the Filipino and His Problems Today; Selected Writings of His Youth, 1927-45; Selected Studies in Philippine Colonial History; and Selected Homilies and Religious Expectations.

I thank Mr. Mercado for reminding me that my four-volume set has been awaiting appreciation and similar promotion, er, recommendation, for some weeks now. I should thank him too for the following quotes from that recent DEPTHnews piece:

"The speaker then (at a Jakarta seminar, presumably in the late ’60s or early ’70s) was Horacio de la Costa: priest, Harvard-trained historian; Ateneo professor; first Flipino to head the Jesuits in the Philippines. Later, he’d become one of the four special counselors to Jesuit Father General (some whisper sotto voce: the ‘Black Pope’).

"When he died, at 60, in 1977, Fr. De la Costa had become known as the ‘gentle genius,’ as columnist Carmen ‘Chitang’ Guerrero-Nakpil and others who knew him insisted. Did his academic record match that of another Atenean: Jose Rizal?"

Mr. Mercado also recalls visiting Fr. De la Costa at the Jesuit headquarters by the Vatican. "At the visit’s end, he slipped an ordinary postcard with a picture of the Hundred Islands. Scribbled on the back was one homesick line: ‘Has Rome got anything to compare with this’?"

Now, I’ve heard some post-grad UP wiseacres, and their professors, say that Fr. De la Costa’s writings on Philippine history have become lamentably outdated, that he was elegant and eloquent, indeed, as a thinker and a writer, but that it’s been a pity how the march of history, or perhaps more importantly, the clipclop of hooves that is the incremental, necessarily advancing, appreciation of fresh input has rendered the good father’s erstwhile brilliant theses somewhat passé.

Of course this talk over the beer-laden tables at the PCED Hostel terrace could be likened to all the fashionably radical commentary of generations of iconoclasts over at Diliman. There is value to it, too, as in dubious preferability over topics like movie censorship and enhanced breasts.

But every writer or thinker in this country has also long been told of the reverence and awe that should accompany the collective regard for Fr. Horacio de la Costa; read: the man and his pen.

Infinitely should we be grateful therefore that the Jesuit mentor’s memorious students saw fit to celebrate his 25th death anniversary with the publication of the monumental, four-volume set. Equalling my own level of gratitude for this happy development, per se, is my appreciation for having once been a confrere of the volumes‚ editor, Bobby Paterno. As members of the Film Ratings Board at a golden time in the ’80s, we ourselves had sat together to discuss a film’s quality vis-a-vis its display of boobery.

Soon after we ran into one another at a Loyola Heights function some months back, I found myself the giddy recipient of what Mr. Mercado has stressed is "a must for any library. (E-mail Fr. Jim Reuter at nomm@surfshop.net.ph)"

Bobby Paterno has accomplished a tremendous, once-in-a-lifetime task of utter commendability. For over a year must he have pored over the voluminous writings of a genius, selected and compartmentalized the finest gems among an unquantifiable cache of clearsightedness and wisdom, and now gifted us all with this set. Thanks, Bobby.

Current commitments may prevent this reader from plowing through all four volumes at a solid stretch, mayhaps in solitary confinement. But browsing has never been this amply rewarded, whatever page was chosen at random, let alone turned with sheer expectation of further delight.

The very first essay in the second volume, an address given at a Jesuit Mission Benefit Dinner in New York City on November 6, 1970, had been published under the title "To Find Itself: A Young Nation’s Mission." Time has not robbed it of any whit of charm, clarity, or contemporary relevance. Whatever datedness there is only applies to certain details within the dramatized realm of the "historic present."

"When I was younger, and Father [Robert] Gannon was younger still – that is to say, a very long time ago – mention of the Philippines inevitably evoked in the American imagination a picture of blue skies and palm-fringed shores, with every palm tree held upright by a Filipino leaning against it, strumming a guitar.

"Whether or not it had any relationship to reality, that was the image. One wonders what the American image of the Philippines is today. Perhaps none whatever; simply a blank. Why should there be? Americans have a lot more important things than the Philippines to think about these days. But if image there is, it must be a quite different image from that of former years, if only because the realities are diferent.

"Certainly, despite typhoons, earthquakes, and assorted calamities, the palm trees are still there, as befits the world’s largest exporter of copra. But of the guitar-strumming boys, one has probably gone off to manage a copper mine, another is a Jesuit running for the Constitutional Convention, and a third commands a unit of the New People’s Army, and has a price on his head.

"It is still possible for an airline (which shall be nameless) to describe the Philippines in a television advertisement as ‘a lovely cluster of islands peopled by lovelies,’ for there are, admittedly, a few lovelies scattered about. But it is no longer possible, if it ever was, to think of the Philippines as the most carefreee of combinations, a land of the morning where it seemeth always afternoon.

"How think of it, then? What’s happening in the Philippines? What are we up to over there? Perhaps the shortest way to decribe what we are up to is to say that we are a people trying to find itself.

"We are trying to find out what we can do by ourselves. If we applied whatever skills we have to the resources God has given us, and if we went about the task in our own way, is there something of value we can achieve that can truly be called our own?

"We have been under tutelage for four hundred years; almost from the beginning of our recorded history. Under tutelage; a minor among peoples, as the legislation of imperial Spain explicitly put it; or in the phraseology of imperial America, a possession, a dependency, a ward.

"Now we are free. We have been free for sometime. And we have come to realize that to be free is more than merely to be rid of external constraint. It is, above all, to be self-possessed, as a person is self-possessed.

"And that is what we are up to. We are trying to acquire a personality. We are trying to possess ourselves."

From the first volume is a piece written when the author was but in his early 20s. Although conducted on a much lighter vein, as form following function – on the decidedly lighter topic of "the Ateneo spirit..." – here retitled "Anatomy of the Atenean," it too has that power of grace attending farsightedness.

"... For days after a crucial basketball game, Currey’s would be murmurous with zestful Pindars going lyrical over the prowess of the ‘team,’ or minor prophets hurling jeremiads at umpires. The general assumption, accepted by all, unquestionable, beyond dispute, seemed to be that the Varsity Basketball Team was unbeatable; an assumption now largely exploded. At that time, however, Ateneo never lost a game but there was some catch in it somewhere. It is well that this legend has been discredited, for it is a foolish sort of vanity. And yet it was not altogether to be condemned, for it was the excess of a virtue: the virtue of loyalty, a callow loyalty, if you will; but it made the ‘Hail Mary’ team call time out in a tight corner and gasp a prayer; and it made the little boys of the Third Division fish out their rosaries and say them on the stands of the Armoury, during a crucial game, when the Ateneo was losing by one point and there was half a minute before the gun."

Indeed, Fr. Horacio de la Costa is quintessential Atenean, quintessential Filipino, quintessential genius – all of the first true water.

Thank you for the memories and the magnificence. Thank you, Mr. Juan L. Mercado. Thank you, Mr. Roberto M. Paterno and the 2B3C Foundation. Thank you so much for the wealth of grace and wisdom, Fr. Horacio.