Is it possible for the Filipino nation to trace its emergence to one library?
If, as a scientist once said, "A great library contains the diary of the human race," then the library of Asia’s oldest existing university, Santo Tomas, starts the firsthand account of how the Philippines came to being and who the Filipino really is.
It is but natural for the Dominican-run University of Santo Tomas (UST) to bring out the most valuable among its collection of 12,000 or so rare books in time for its 400th founding anniversary next year, but rather than exhibit them as curiosities like the Crown Jewels or even the Shroud of Turin, the "Pontifical" institution has decided to place the library, and itself in the process, in the context of the global forces that shaped history.
The result is Lumina Pandit: An Exhibit of Historical Treasures, the UST library’s multimillion-peso quadricentennial exhibition that speaks of "spreading the light."
IN THE BEGINNING...
The story begins with the arrival of the first Dominican friars in 1587. The new colony was thought of as a jump-off point to the more challenging missionary lands of China and Japan, but the immediate task was to evangelize and educate the natives.
The missionary zeal of the sons of St. Dominic de Guzman took them to Luzon, where one of the members of the first group of friars, Miguel de Benavides, founded Nueva Segovia and became its first bishop; Bataan, birthplace of Tomas Pinpin who became the first Filipino printer and author; and Binondo, the Chinese enclave that produced the first Filipino saint; among other outposts.
Christianization needed catechism books, and so with the help of Chinese artisans, the friars built a printing press of engraved wood blocks, producing the first three books printed in the islands in 1593.
The xylographic Doctrinas Christianas on display are mere facsimiles however -- the one in Chinese is in the Vatican; the one in Spanish, Tagalog, and pre-colonial Baybayin alphabet ended up at the Library of Congress in Washington after being found in Italy in 1947; and Shih-Lu: Apologia de la Verda-dera Religion, in classical Chinese, is in Madrid. The organizers are lobbying to bring all three to Lumina Pandit.
Nevertheless, Pinpin’s masterpiece, Librong Pag-aaralan nang manga Tagalog nang Uicang Castila (1610), the first book in Tagalog, is on exhibit as an example of the output of a movable-type press, introduced by the Dominicans a decade after xylography. After shifting between Bataan and Binondo, that press eventually ended up in UST, where it is regarded as the second-oldest continuing press in the world after Cambridge’s.
It’s not just the press that antedates UST. The library itself is older than the university, having been founded out of the estate of Bishop Benavides in 1611. Benavides -- the third bishop of Manila who insisted on a referendum on the Spanish occupation and decried colonial abuses such as tributes and forced labor -- wanted a college-seminary and donated his books as well as P1,500.
Other bishops, friars, and university professors followed suit, expanding the collection.
"Without fanfare," as the Spanish Dominican historian Fidel E. Villarroel wrote in a scholarly article on the library, the earliest of UST’s books arrived from the galleons of the yearly Manila-Acapulco trade, "from the chests and boxes containing the personal effects of hundreds of missionaries." Understandably, most of them were religious and in Latin.
The Dominican procurator in Madrid made sure there was a budget for new books for UST, which inevitably became the channel for new ideas out of Europe, in a country that was at the crossroads of globalization. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 brought in even more books from the Old World.
OF COPERNICUS AND CENSORS
For three centuries, the library stayed in Intramuros or what was then Manila, until most of the books were moved to a bigger campus in Sampaloc in 1927. The rest followed in 1944, fortunately before most of the Walled City was destroyed during World War II.
UST is displaying the sixth volume of the rare and brittle first edition of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, printed in Nuremberg in 1543. It contains the Copernican heliocentric theory, approved by and dedicated to no less than Pope Paul III. Rizal quoted it in El Filibusterismo, proving that these precious volumes were accessible to students, unlike the laboratory equipment which the novel says were brought out of the cabinets only to impress visitors. Indeed, as Fr. Villarroel says: "the library of yesteryears is the rare books section of today."
Still, two friars complained of the library’s deficiency in a confidential report in 1886. "There are hardly any books in History, Literature, Philosophy, the exact and natural sciences, published in the present century...," Fr. Villaroel quoted them as saying, although adding they might have exaggerated a bit to "[prod] their superiors into action."
By all means, there was censorship. A painstaking catalogue of these books was assembled for the first time during World War II by two Americans who wanted to keep themselves busy while enduring imprisonment at UST, which was turned into an internment camp for "alien enemies."
The Latin teacher Leila M. Maynard said the words "autore damnato" appeared wherever the name of Erasmus appeared on his works. Lines were deleted with black ink. "The robed figure of the censor with his stern ascetic face seemed very real although three centuries had passed since his hands rested on that page," she said in an article found in the internment camp files and published a decade ago in a larger catalogue by current library prefect Fr. Angel A. Aparicio.
RARE BOOKS AND JESUITS
The oldest in the collection is an incunabulum, the term for books published before 1501 during the infancy of printing. La Guerra Judaica, printed in Seville in 1492, came by way of Amoy, China in 1937. Josephus Flavius, the ancient Jewish historian who lived in the first century A.D., chronicled the failed Jewish rebellion against Rome as a way of dissuading his countrymen from starting a revolt against a mighty empire. The original Aramaic and Greek was translated into Spanish by the scholar Alfonso de Palencia, who dedicated it to Isabel la Catolica, queen of Castille and Leon, on the year Columbus "discovered" America.
The most valuable item in the UST collection is the Polyglot Bible -- the bible in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and Syriac -- printed by Christopher Plantin in Antwerp between 1569 and 1572. Five of the eight volumes, covering the Old and the New Testaments, are in the university library.
It came to UST by a sheer accident of history. In 1768, the influential and politically savvy Jesuits were banished from all Spanish territories, suppressed by the Pope due to the geopolitical conflicts of the time. Assets of the Society of Jesus were confiscated by the colonial government, and UST had the first crack at the Jesuits' books. The Polyglot Bible and many others carry the mark Del Colegio de la Compania de Jesus de Manila. The remaining Jesuit books went to the seminaries of Manila and Cebu.
The Dominicans and the Jesuits had often been in opposing camps. Benavides' confreres debated the Jesuit Molinists over grace and free will; the Pope refused to take sides. In 1898, 30 years after they returned to the Philippines, the Jesuits sought the return of their old Colegio de San Jose, which the Dominicans had annexed as part of the UST colleges of medicine and pharmacy. The Pope sided with the Jesuits in 1910. When the Dominicans petitioned to put the Philippines under the patronage of the Our Lady of the Rosary, the Jesuits were suspected of rooting for the Immaculate Conception. The Pope chose Guadalupe. Today, these scores are settled on the basketball court.
HOW SMART WAS RIZAL?
Lumina Pandit seems to try to settle another score: the matter of Jose Rizal’s grades. Biographies such as those of Wenceslao Retana and Austin Coates make a big deal out of Rizal’s grades in UST and Ateneo de Manila, saying Rizal had a perfect record of "excellent" in the latter but poor grades in the former. Gregorio Zaide thought Rizal was discriminated against. But Rizal studied today’s equivalent of high school in the Ateneo (Bachelor of Arts). He took medicine in UST.
At any rate, UST had the last say on standards; not only was it the only university left as a result of the closure of Jesuit schools after 1768, it also served as the de facto ministry of education. The UST Rector signed all diplomas, even those for lower degrees granted by the Ateneo and Letran colleges.
UST records show there were 24 students in Rizal’s first-year medicine class; by the fourth year, only seven remained, including Rizal. The Spaniards in the class dropped out one by one. Rizal’s grades were actually "good." Moreover, Rizal was among the very few given the rare dispensation to take pre-medicine and first-year medicine at the same time, having decided at the last minute to abandon law studies.
Fr. Jose Burgos, martyred along with Frs. Mariano Gomez and Jacinto Zamora in 1872 for sedition, turns out to be the most brilliant among the crop of national heroes produced by UST, having earned a record eight degrees. Burgos’ Theology professor was Fr. Ceferino Gonzalez, who would later become a cardinal and key player in the elevation of scholastic philosophy derived from Thomas Aquinas as the official Church philosophy, as a response to the wave of liberalism sweeping Europe.
UST may be dismissed as a colonial relic, but Lumina Pandit makes the case that the university nurtured in its heroes the idea that all men are created equal under God, a central Catholic belief. The scholastic tradition preserved by UST and its library -- with a direct line "all the way to classical civilization" -- provided the impetus for nationalism and the Philippines’ story of emergence.
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