Book Burning in the Philippines

Regular readers of my articles know that I read a lot, as I drop a title now and then into a blog, usually with a quote that has important meaning. I do this in part to suggest to readers that there are great treasures to be found in books. College students will often be seen in coffee shops with a course book in hand, but as a literate society, the broader masses in the Philippines lag behind modern countries in exploring history and science and the whys and ways of heart and mind and acts.

Bonfire of the Vanities

Grab a book, I suggest. The riches to be found there are enormous. Ignore the taunts of the lesser minds who would hang the title of "librarian" on your reputation. They are simply following the tried and true Filipino tradition of raising themselves up by tearing someone else down. Don't concede an inch to their under-nourished psyche.

Because National Bookstore stocks only a limited number of American fictional titles, I find myself going through my collection and re-reading those that have passed from clear recollection. It takes about a year to fade from memory, wedged out by other readings and my lazy ability to recall anything but what I had for breakfast two hours ago.

I just finished "The Rule of Four" by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, first published in 2004. What a wonderful book. The blurb on the back says "If Scott Fitzgerald, Umberto Eco and Dan Brown teamed up to write a novel, the result would be "The Rule of Four". That is so true. It has the heart-felt poignancy of love and friendships tested, and murder; the deep richness of renaissance history; and the intrigue of puzzles and riddles and the eternal battle between the Church and its critics.

The book is about a book, one filled with secrets to be decoded pointing to hidden treasures. The mysterious, coded book is "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili", a real book of unknown authorship. Four (fictional) Princeton students attack the book brilliantly, dealing with two murders pertaining to the book, love, and the shenanigans of college life. They find out who is the real author of the book and they unravel the secrets hidden within.

I can't go through the entire plot here, but wanted to focus on the essential historical conflict that is at the core of the book. The characters are real. Florence, Italy is the center of the art world in 1498. The powerful leader of the Church there is Savonarola, an evangelical preacher with great charisma. Opposing him is the author of the mysterious book, Francesco Colonna.



Savonarola



Savonarola believed that art and literature were undermining the Church, causing men to think wild and sinful thoughts and do wild and sinful deeds. He began the practice of annually, at Easter, burning all the sinful materials he could gather up. Paintings, sculptures, and books included. This became known as the "Bonfire of the Vanities", for Savonarola preached that those who would create such works were totally self-absorbed and not properly faithful to God.

Here is an excerpt from "The Rule of Four" that explains why Francesco Colonna hated Savonarola:

" . . . Francisco couldn't stand Savonarola. To him, Savonarola represented the worst kind of fanaticism, everything that was wrong with Christianity. He was destructive. Vengeful. He refused to let men use the gifts God gave them. Francesco was a humanist, a lover of antiquity. . . . He stood at the other end of the intellectual universe from Savonarola. To him, the greatest violence in the world was against art, against knowledge."

We live this eternal battle of faith and its rules, versus the free mind and its expressions, today in the Philippines. To the Church, education about sex is sinful because of Man's weakness and proclivity to move always to the darker side, in simple and blunt terms, fornicating their eyeballs out. To the humanists of the Philippines, a woman has a right to decide how to treat her body.

In Florence, the humanists won out, for the human spirit cannot be confined by pushing it into a cave, no matter how sin-free that cave is portrayed to be. Today Florence remains the center of the World's artistic expression.

I suggest that Filipinos resist being pushed into a cave by a Catholic Church that adheres to doctrines centuries behind the times. Specifically consider the RH Bill and the Divorce Bill. They are compassionate legal instruments that the Church would paint as sinful.

It is not sinful to be educated. It is not sinful to be kind or reasonable. The Philippine Catholic Church would have it otherwise.

It would, today, in 2011, burn certain books.