Rediscovering our past

Title

Creator

de la Costa, Horacio

Identifier

Beneath the pile

Language

English

Source

Panorama Volume XII (No. 2) February 1960

Year

1960

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

Beneath the pile Rediscovering Our Past By Horacio de la Costa, S.J. The seventeenth and eight eenth centuries are undoubt edly the most neglected pe riod in Philippine history. There are several reasons for tnis. One is the barrier of language. The younger generation of historians nave had a formal schooling which does not (normally) equip them with even a reading knowl edge of Spanish. Thus, unless they take the trouble to acauire this necessary tool by themselves, the bulk of the source material for the period in question is in accessible to them. They are ob liged to make what they can out of the few documents translated into English—chiefly those in the well known collection of Blair and Robertson. We cannot, of course, be sufficiently grateful to these in dustrious compilers for making available what they did; the point is that this is practically all we have in English, an infinitesimal fraction of what they were unable or did not choose to translate. In effect: our knowledge and interE rotation of two centuries of our istory remain today substantially as they were fixed fifty years ago by two American scholars. But there is more than the bar rier of language between us and the documents. The vast bulk of them is physically inaccessible to the ordinary investigator. The his torian of almost any other nation which originally formed part of the Spanish empire has at his disposal any number of published Panorama collections of documents, more or less critically edited. They may vary in completeness or faithful ness to the original manuscripts, but they are at least usable in the sense that any student may expect to find them in the major public libraries. In the Philip pines, collections of this kind can De counted almost on the fingers of one hand. What indeed do we have? We have Retana’s Archivo del bibliofilo ftlipino, five small octavo volumes; we have Pastells’ edition of Colin’s Labor evangelica, in which excerpts from the Philippine section of the Archives of the Indies are used to illustrate the text; and having mentioned these two, we are hard put to it to name a third. Not that no other documents have been published, but they have been published in obscure periodicals outside this country, or in limited editions long since out of print and now almost as rare as the manuscripts themselves. For basic research in the seven teenth and eighteenth centuries, then, we must go to the manu scripts. Where are they? They are scattered in archives and libraries all over the world. However, the largest concentrations are in the Arch ives of the Indies in Seville and the National Archives in Ma nila. To go to the first is out of the question for all but a happy few Filipino historians. The sec ond is here indeed; but who knows what it contains? It has neither catalogue nor calendar, and lack of funds for mainten ance and servicing has reduced it to a mere pile of rapidly disin tegrating paper. 'J1 hus, it seems impossible at the present time for the schol ar who is not on a fairly generous research grant to undertake any study of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which will be solidly based on an adequate reading of the sources. This con sideration is enough to send most students away in search of greener pastures; the period of the Revo lution, for example, or contem porary social or economic history. Still, if one is persistent and will ing to settle for limited objectives, he has an option. The period is covered by a number of narrative histories and annals written by the official chroniclers of the reli gious orders in the Philippines. Some of these are fairly extensive and detailed, such as that of the Augustinian Fray Gaspar de San Agustin and his continuator Fray Casimiro Diaz. Others run into several folio volumes, such as the Dominican histories begun by Fray Diego de Aduarte. All of them deal not only with the his tory of their particular Orders but with general ecclesiastical and sec ular history as well. In fact, at least one of them, that of the Recollect Fray Juan de la Concep cion, is professedly a general his tory. Its fourteen volumes form February 1960 19 the basis of the one-volume sur vey published in the nineteenth century bv Joaquin Martinez de Zuniga, through which, by the way, Concepcion’s version of many of the events and institu tions of his period has passed, wit tingly or unwittingly, into our modern textbooks. These are definitely secondary sources, save for those events oc curring within their authors’ life times which fell under their di rect observation. They were writ ten from a point of view and un der the impulse of preoccupations which are not those of the mo dern secular historian. Still, an astonishing amount of information can be derived from them, if one only had the patience to read them through and the broad un derstanding to transpose the es sential fact from their antique idiom to ours. But it is precisely this patience and understanding which we lack, and this is the third reason why so large a por tion of our history has been so singularly neglected. For many of us, these “monkish” chronicles are almost entirely worthless, being written by men who were either naivelv credulous or thoroughly bigoted and very often both. This was the position taken by the originators of our nationalist move ment, for reasons understandable enough in the circumstances in which they found themselves. Unfortunately, by making the per petuation of this outdated anticler icalism an act of patriotic piety, we deliberately cut ourselves off from a significant section of our national past, and render our re constructions of it open to the identical charges of naivete and bigotry. t any rate, I see no valid reason for assuming a priori that a seventeenth-century Span ish cleric is congenitally unable to perceive a historical fact, and having perceived it, to express it in suitable language. Incidentally, we may as well clear up a minor point before we proceed. The cler ics in question, be they Augustinians, Franciscans, Dominicans of Jesuits, did not write “monkish” chronicles, for the simple reason that they were not monks. True, Marcelo del Pilar wrote with bit ter eloquence about "monkish despotism”—la soberania monacal en Filipinas—but does the fact that Del Pilar was a patriot justify our perpetuating his inaccuracies? Anv handbook of Catholic in formation will explain the differ ence between a monk and a friar; yet how many otherwise reputable scholars who undertake to write on Spanish or Spanish colonial historv bother to look it up? Ad mittedly a minor detail, from which no argument can be de rived against the essential reliabilitv of their narratives. But then, why are we suddenly so much more exacting when there is a question of a “monkish” chronic ler? Because Pedro Murillo Velar 20 Panorama de believed that a hair of the Bles sed Virgin Mary’s head was in his day preserved in the church of San Pedro Makati, does it follow that his splendid account of the Moro wars does not deserve exam ination? Because Archbishop Par do of Manila spelled Wyclif “Ubicleff”, are we to conclude that he was an ignorant persecutor of Protestants? And while we may rightfully take issue with Gaspar de San Agustin’s delineation of the Filipino character, are we ob liged to throw his evidence out of court even on those points where his idee fixe is not involved? By all means let us read these histories critically; but let us read them. Only by doing so can we reestablish contact with those vi tal roots of our own culture from which the Revolution and the subsequent American regime tended to cut us off. It is some times alleged that we Filipinos have no culture of our own. This is demonstrably false. A more ac curate statement would be that by and large we have no very deep or sharply defined consciousness of how tremendously rich and va ried our. culture is, and this be cause we have been accidentally— and, it is to be hoped, temporari ly-severed from the historic ori gins of that culture. We must re discover our past; and one good way of going about it is to re new our interest in the two hun dred-odd years between the conquista and the opening of the Suez Canal when the Philippines ceased to be merely an archipelago and became a nation.—Philippines International. ¥ February 1960 21 * * ¥ Who's Boss? “Tell me—who is the real boss in your home?” “Well, my wife bosses the servants—and the children boss the dog and cat—and. . . .” “And you?” “Well, I can say anything I like to the gera niums"

pages

18+

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