THE ETHICS OF REVOLUTION

By Adrian E. Cristobal
BUSINESS MIRROR

(Yesterday, we honored once again the eternal memory of Jose Rizal with familiar rhetoric when it would have been better if more of us would read him. To this day, there are those who firmly believe that he retracted his writings. There are also those who believe that he was against the Philippine revolution—without bothering to read what he had to say about it. Let us not only read him but read him attentively. Whatever our conclusions about his retraction and ideas about revolution, at least we shall have a basis for them.)

The death of Elias achieves revolutionary significance the moment society is recognized as a creator of victims in order to execute them. Elias had been condemned even before he was born, and it only remained for society to carry out the death sentence. The civil guards fire at Elias under the mistaken impression that he is Crisostomo Ibarra. The mistake makes an important difference: even the most unjust society makes a pretense of legality. But in this instance, Ibarra is the condemned man. But in executing the wrong man, society has shown that aside from being arbitrary, it is also inefficient: it loses its last refuge, that of order. This marks the moment which makes revolution a moral and logical necessity.

Society makes victims and then silences them—as criminals. The logic is clear: the victim, at a certain point in his calvary, consents to crime and thereby cancels his legitimate grievance. No longer purely the victim, he can no longer pose his innocence against an unjust society. This demonstrates that Ibarra, who "became" Simoun, Kabesang Tales, who became "Matanglawin, " and Balat, Elias's uncle and husband of Sisa, deserved to die. Something in them, something which yielded, softened the legitimacy of their protest.

Elias never yielded. Until his murder, his protest retains a fidelity to origins. As a personal recourse, revenge gives the apologists of an unjust society the right to say: " You pretend to be on the side of justice but you resort to violence as we do. You are a hypocrite, while we, we have our laws and institutions which authorize us to try and convict." In rejecting revenge, Elias proves his wisdom and underlines the moral accent of his protest: the victim, at the precise moment of his rebellion, will not compromise his innocence.

This is not an easy bargain. Elias's bitter family history provides enough occasion for cynicism and violence—more than Ibarra's or anybody else's misfortunes. Since his grandfather had been falsely accused of arson, Elias's family had always been injured and insulted. His grandmother was a prostitute, yielding, if unwillingly, to the corruption of the times, his grandfather, by hanging himself, succumbed to injustice. (Under the morality of the times, suicide was also a sin.) Elias's father impregnated a woman out of wedlock. All society had to do was wait until this family of "criminals and sinners" prove themselves deserving of punishment.

But we know that Elias rejected revenge. He chose to keep his grievance rather than kill Crisostomo Ibarra, the descendant of Don Pedro Eibarramendia, the persecutor of Elias's grandmother and thus the author of Ibarra's cursed destiny. Elias would not visit the sins of the father on the son. As he said to Old Pablo, the outlaw: "I am ready to give up my search for the rest of the family in whose hands my own suffered. I propose to leave for the North and live among the non-Christians of the mountains. I am all alone. Come with me. I offer you a home and I shall be as a son to you as you shall be a father to me." The fatherless victim wants a father in a land of innocence.

Having rejected lex taliones, Elias now faces the temptation of exile, a different form of suicide. This is paralleled by Maria Clara's flight to the cloister, where women are virtuous because they are dead. But this is also impossible, for Fray Salvi pursues her in the sacred, though not sacred, secrecy of the convent. This is also the flight of Sisa to madness, and in the end, Ibarra himself combines madness with murder. But what flight can ever alleviate the totality of human suffering?

Elias rejects revenge, rejects exile, and, having spared Ibarra, tries to enlist the support of this illustrado in struggling for a just society. The result is the following interview:

"My friend, you and I cannot effect and cannot accomplish changes," said Ibarra.

"Yes, alone, we cannot. But suppose we work with the people? Suppose we listen to their grievances and become an example to the rest in spreading the idea of true love for the fatherland?"

"The people ask for the impossible. There is need for waiting."

"Waiting means suffering."

"But if I begin to ask for these things [reforms], those in power will only laugh at me."

"But if you have the support of the people?"

"That I shall not have! I shall not take by force what the government deems unfit to grant. Never! If I see the people armed against the government, I shall go over to the side of the government…"

Elias argues that there has been no liberty without fighting and Ibarra replies, "The truth is that I have no desire for such liberty." Ibarra believes that the people should first be enlightened and that's why he's building a schoolhouse. And yet he knows of a schoolmaster who failed to educate his pupils in the right spirit because the authorities and the parents themselves prescribed the rod and the catechism as the proper curriculum. To Elias's insight that institutions are too harsh and oppressive, Ibarra replies that these are necessary to cow the people and keep them out of mischief, unwittingly admitting that the government must protect itself against the people. Elias believes that there can be no light without liberty and Ibarra believes there can be no liberty without light.

Elias now faces the fulfillment of his promise to join Old Pablo, outlaw chief and potential revolutionary, in spite of his reservation that in a revolution, the first to suffer are the weak and the innocent—unless, perhaps, all the people are in revolt. But he doesn't live long enough to make the fatal plunge because in an insurrection contrived by Fray Salvi (Maria Clara's ravisher) in order to frame Ibarra, Elias is killed instead.

We arrive at the threshold of the matter. Before us stands brightly the sacrificial nature of Elias's death. Society fails to make the victim a criminal and in killing him commits the definitive crime, the murder of the innocent, providing in turn the ethical foundation of revolution.

Elias provides the "objective condition for revolution," Crisostomo Ibarra is able to escape into exile and to return after seven years to make revolution as "Simoun"—but he is doomed to fail. He fails because the meaning of Elias's sacrifice is lost on him. He predicates revolution on the rescue of Maria Clara from the convent, deliberately devising the corruption and destruction of the unwary, the nonbelligerent, the dupe, to realize his project, since for him all are complicit with an unjust society. As Simoun, he sees revolution as an end in itself not as a means to achieve a greater end.

In making Simoun's revolution fail, Rizal "anticipated" Albert Camus's words in The Invincible Summer:

On the one hand, action is self-discipline because of the grandeur of the objects it pursues. On the other hand, these same objects serve as pretexts for permitting any act that will impose them with certainty. No doubt, the action contained within the bounds imposed by respect for freedom and a sense of justice runs the risk of failing and of being destroyed. But if revolutionary action renounces this risk, the guarantees with which it sought to surround itself can easily be forced in lies, dissimulation, cynicism, in short, its own negation.

"Lies, dissimulation, cynicism"—the negation of the ethics of revolution.

More than a century separates the two moralists of revolution: Rizal and Camus.

After he blesses the soul of Simoun, the good Father Florentino, the native antithesis of the friars Damaso, Salvi, and the rest, apostrophizes:

Where are the youth who will consecrate their golden hours, their illusions and enthusiasm for the welfare of their country? Where are they who would generously shed their blood to wash away so much shame, so much crime, so much abomination? Pure and spotless the victim has to be for the holocaust to be acceptable!…Where are you, youth, who will incarnate in yourselves the vigor of life that has fled from our veins, the purity of ideas that have been soiled in your minds and the fire of enthusiasm that has been extinguished in your hearts… We wait for you, O youth! Come, for we await you!

He then carries the iron chest which contains Simoun's fabulous fortune to the cliff (where the idealistic Isagani, who foiled Simoun's plot to blow up the church where a wedding was to take place, used to sit to "fathom the depths of the sea") and consigns it to the Pacific with these words:

May Nature guard you in her deep abysses among the corals and pearls of her eternal seas! When for a holy and sublime end men should need you, God will draw you from the breast of the waves… Meanwhile there you will do no evil, you will not distort right, you will not foment avarice…

In our present understanding, revolutions destroy an unjust society, but for Elias, as Rizal portrayed him, revolution is based on the very principle that society is based on. In the context of Elias's time, this society was supposedly based on Christian principles, but it acted against them. Elias concluded: We are all living under a sacrilegious society.

Elias does not mean a religious revolution, however. To the people of San Diego, the question is where is God? "Oh, if God only existed!" is their lament, for certainly He is not in the church where the frailes, notably Damaso, preside.

There is only one acceptable society, founded on the dialogue between man and the state, between authority and freedom—under God. And if such a society does not exist, it must be made to exist. Ergo: Revolution. One destroys but never reforms a sacrilegious society.

Elias is a rare bird, indeed. Perhaps, he's only real in Rizal's novel, unlike Crisostomo Ibarra, who studied abroad, imbibed liberal ideas, returned to the country to institute reforms, and when thwarted, went into exile and returned as a provocateur (in alliance with oppressors) with a sentimental but ruthless agenda for revolution.

In criticizing the corrupt and abusive people of our times, the late Sen. Claro M. Recto sarcastically said they were not even like Simoun. But who knows now?

Wouldn't we rather pine for Elias, who, as Old Pablo believes, "shall never perish"—even if only in the imagination? As Elias's body went up in flames, Sister Rufa thought that the rising smoke came from a kaingin, the clearing. She couldn't have known its significance, being a minor character in the novel, but Rizal could have meant it as symbolic of the phoenix.

Indeed, Elias must not perish.

One is tempted to say that Rizal could be examining himself through Crisostomo Ibarra by starting, like any illustrado, as a reformist. Spain, after all, had her liberal intellectuals, and the Indios Bravos, though in exile, were beyond the reach of the oppressive clerico-fascist society. They wrote satirical pieces, the best of which was Rizal's Noli/Fili. For his writings, he was martyred as a subversive, filibustero.

He is, finally, Elias.