"WESTERN HUMANISM AND THE FILIPINO"
AN ESSAY BY FR. MIGUEL A. BERNAD

Born in 1917, Fr. Miguel A. Bernad was well-known as a literary critic and teacher at the Ateneo de Manila University. A Jesuit priest, Fr. Bernad earned a doctorate from Yale and explored the English aspect of Philippine literature. Products of his study include several published essays in the quarterly Philippine Studies of the Society of Jesus in the Philippines. Western Humanism and the Filipino explores themes that range from ethics to the question of Philippine identity.

I.

By the humanism of the West is meant something more than just the "humanism" of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was of course a spectacular period of history. It produced many great things: in art, the naturalness of Raphael and Michelangelo; in scholarship a revival of Greek learning and Ciceronian Latin; in education the classical schools of the Jesuits; in architecture the great basilica of St. Peter; and in literature it produced Cervantes and Shakespeare.

But spectacular as was the Renaissance, it was merely a crest in the wave that had been undulating through the centuries. There had been other crests. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries had produced Dante and Aquinas. The fourth century had produced Augustine and Ambrose and John Crysostom. The first century before Christ had produced Cicero and Vergil, Horace and Ovid, Julius Caesar and the Emperor Augustus. And the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ had produced Plato and Aristotle and the Greek tragedians.

There have since been other crests. We like to think that we of the twentieth century are on top of the wave, for we are in the age that has brought the airplane, the X-Ray, the wireless, the explosions of atominc power and the probings of outer space.

Waves do not consist exclusively of crests. There also have been troughs, and sometimes trough and crest were not far apart. The magnificence of Versailles was followed by the French Revolution. The great discoveries that brough European civilization to hitherto unknown world also brought African slavery to America. It brought Puritanism to New England, with its Salem witchcraft and its religious intolerance: which brought from Chesterton the unkind jest that, instead of the Puritans landing on Plymouth Rock, the world would have been much better if Plymouth Rock had landed on the Puritans. In the twentieth century, our amazing advances in science and technology have coexisted with the retrogressions of Dachau and Buchenwald and the brain-washings behind the Iron Curtain.

These are obviously aberrations. They are heresies, troughs of the wave. But there is a humanism is western civilization which unites Aristotle with St. Thomas, Vergil with Dante, Cicero with Edmund Campion, Aeschylus with Shakespeare, Botticelli with Michelangelo, Evelyn Waugh with St. Augustine, the Magna Charta of Runymede with the American Constitution, and these two with the Sermon on the Mount.

Of this humanism there are salient points which define the western concept of man. There is, first, the concept of man himself as a free being, with an innate dignity and an eternal destiny, with inalienable rights which no human power can destroy.

There is, secondly, the correlative concept of society as a help to man, not as his master. This implies that, while society has the God-given right to comple obedience, it also has the God-given obligation to protect the rights of whom it governs. While subjects must obey the law, the legislators have the obligation to pass the right laws: for subject and ruler are both under the law.

There is, thirdly, the concept of art as man's way of creating beauty. Art ennobles human life and renders it more pleasant. But art exists for man, not man for art. Which may explain the differences between a Christiam sarcophagus and the Egyptian pyramids.

This concept of man as a free being with an individual destiny reaches its climax and its synthesis in the Christian religion, which looks on God as Father and the Son of God as Savior. He became man and died for our sins, and He rose again from the dead to make perpetual intercession for men. The Virgin Mary Mother of God through nature, becomes also the Mother of men through grace.

In such a spiritual milieu the great cathedrals were built, the guilds founded, the parliaments convoked and the universities organized. The universities were associations of scholars, chartered by pope and king but in such fashion that neither pope nor king could interfere with their autonomy. This was the original notion of academic freedom.

II.

It would be wishful thinking to say that these ideals of justice, freedom and human dignity have always been reduced to practice in the Philippines. If human rights had always been respected or if the supremacy of law had always been maintained, the history of this country might have been very different from what it has been. Obviously, the wave has had troughs in this country, as it has had them in Europe and America.

Nevertheless, the essentials of that humanism have become accepted principles of our ethics. The Christian humanism of the West has become second nature to the Filipino mind. It has become his native cast of thought. Where these concepts prevail, the Filipino finds himself at home; where they are alien, he finds himself an alien.

This was brought home to him with dramatic clarity during three years of Japanese occupation. During those three years he saw his country invaded not only by alien soldiers but also by an alien mentality. He had been brought up to believe that human life was sacred; that the individual human being was free and had rights which could not be violated without grave injustice; that private property must be respected; that a man accused of a crime must be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and he must be proved guilty in a fair trial in which his rights were safeguarded. These things were foreign to the invader. Physically, the invader and the Filipino had the same color of skin. Spiritually, they were worlds apart.

And yet the Filipino remains Asian despite his sharing in the humanism of the west. His music is oriental although no one appreciates occidental music more keenly than he. His art is permeated with western influences, but it retains a trace of those times, centuries ago, when Indian and Chinese art were almost native to the Islands. His culture is full of occidental influences, but his soul is Asian.

This ambivalence is often reflected in Filipino literature. This writer is of the opinion that the more perfectly this ambivalence is reflected, the more successful the Filipino writer is. The Filipino would only be ridiculous if he tried to be like an American or an Englishman or a Spaniard, which he is not and can never be; but neither can he ever be a Japanese or Chinese or Indian. He can only be a Filipino; oriental in temperament, occidental in culture.

Some would deplore this state of affairs as being a hybrid civilization. They would have the Filipino entirely Asian. To be truly Filipino, they would have him renounce his European and American connections.

Others would have him entirely western, as if he were born on the Mississippi instead of in the Pacific. But perhaps a hybrid civilization is not as deplorable as some would think. Mr. John Pilcher, the [then] British Ambassador to the Philippines, has called attention to the hybrid civilization of England. It is a cause for rejoicing that the Filipino, while being distinctively and irrevocably himself, should have many things in common with other nations. It was Shakespeare's glory to be "not of an age but for all time": it could be the Filipino's glory to be indeed of one country, and yet belong to the world.

In Kuching, Sarawak, in the vast, neighboring island of Borneo, the present writer was once asked to give a lecture on the Philippines. He ended the lecture with the statement (surely not an original one) that Filipinos were proud of the fact that they were a bridge between East and West; that the East not be at enmity with the West; that Filipinos were proud of being Asians, and at the same time were also proud of their western heritage, for they were the heirs of Greece and Rome as well as of China, India and Borneo.

This writer recalls with singular pleasure the warm and outspoken enthusiasm with which the audience - half British and half Asian - received that statement. But he was not quite prepared for the breath-taking declaration made after the lecture by a young, handsome couple from Malaya. They were impressed, they said, with the lecturer's outspoken championing of western culture, and with his equally outspoken pride in his Asian nationality. They added that, for the first time, they themselves were proud of being Asians.

From Bernad, Miguel A. Western Humanism and the Filipino. Pathways to Philippine Literature in English. Ed. A. G. Roseburg. Phoenix Publishing House, Quezon City: 1966. pp.187-190.