RIZAL'S HIGH MORAL STANDARDS

I recently re-read the last chapter in RIZAL: MAN AND MARTYR and was struck by these words found in the last chapter.


Moral Life

This book has said so much about Rizal's high moral standards that little more need be added. The men who knew him best are most emphatic in saying that he lived "the noblest, cleanest life of his generation." "He made himself certain rules of conduct, and to these he adhered with the stern inflexibility of an ascetic. . . The beauty of righteousness seemed to rule out of him all promptings to the coltish excesses of youth; that and the dignity of his love and his conception of the gravity of his mission."

"They punished me for the least lie," said Rizal of his parents. "His constant desire to know the truth was," as Padro de Tavera says, "his most notable characteristic. "

Dr. Baldomero Roxas says that Rizal's friends could depend upon his word better than upon the oath of other men. "If Rizal says a thing, it is as good as done," was one of their common sayings. His passion for truth was so great that he not only spoke it, but what is harder, he lived exactly what he spoke. He never gave himself any exceptions to what he regarded as right.

"I do not think Rizal would be popular if he lived now," recently said his friend General José Alejandro, who lived with Rizal in Brussels and Ghent . "He was too Puritanical, too much of a rigid disciplinarian for our day. We all admired his severe self-discipline. Nobody else I ever knew lived such a life as his. I lived with him and I know that his inner life was even better than the world realized."

The greatest tribute to his honesty was paid by his enemies. They deceived him with their "trap," and then permitted him, though a prisoner, to wander alone during four years along the coast of Mindanao . Sometimes officials even hinted that he might escape if he wished. But he had promised not to violate his parole, and José Rizal in all his life never broke a promise! No man on earth could persuade him to do what he considered dishonorable. "Not even the least connivance at a rescue would taint his word, not even by allowing other men to entertain the thought that his faith could be tainted, and not even in dealing with a government that had dealt perfidiously with him."

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I just don't believe that Rizal would lie to save himself or the movement. He was, to a fault, a person who was zealous about his personal integrity. He could have easily escaped and joined the Katipunan and I think even his captors may have been hinting for him to do so. He refused to do so. He refused to escape from his ship on the way back. He had given a pledge and he stuck to it despite what it would cost him in his life.

I just don't think his words in his "Manifesto to Certain Filipinos" and "Additions to My Defense" were lies. It just wasn't his nature.

For those who believe that other witnesses are correct in saying that he was a secrete disciple of the Katipunan and a separatist by violent means I would like to ask one question, when was the earliest date of such a declaration (I think by Pio Valenzuela but I could be wrong). If these declarations came years and years after the death of Rizal, I wonder why it took a long time for them to say what they said. (I'll probably end up red faced because I really don't know the answer to this question).

My suspicion is that well intended people said what they did because they wanted to keep the Rizal who was, through his writings, the "soul of the revolution" as the Spanish declared in point of fact beyond his writings even if they had to stretch the truth.


Robert Yoder