Remembering the Ateneo’s ‘Immortals’
/The Ateneo de Manila was a cross between a prep school and an Ivy League college in the United States. Renowned as a Catholic school run by American and Filipino Jesuits, it rivaled its erstwhile neighbor, the De La Salle College on Taft Avenue in Manila, as arguably the “best exclusive male school” in the Philippines. It dated back to 1859 and had been the Alma Mater of the national hero, Dr. Jose P. Rizal. Its seal declared “Lux in Domino” or “Light in God” as its guiding goal.
The original Ateneo de Manila in Intramuros with its cadets.
The Ateneo, with its liberal Anglo-Saxon and Philippine approach, was a counterpoint to the more conservative Fil-Hispanic and Dominican Sto. Tomas University on España street in Manila. The latter had transferred in the ‘30s from its original 1611 seat in Intramuros and still kept close cultural ties with Spain through its academic traditions. UST’s fortuitous move in the 1930s preserved its magnificent library and museum, which would have perished in the WWII Intramuros holocaust of 1945. The UST still harbored Spanish Dominicans and kept quaint Victorian practices such as rigid separation of the sexes in classrooms and on stairways.
On the other hand, the Ateneo was a modern Catholic riposte to its secular neighbor in Diliman, the University of the Philippines, which had been founded in American times. They had also been neighbors on Padre Faura Street in Manila before their mutual exodus to Quezon City. Both institutions now hug Katipunan Avenue, recalling the revolutionary body that had powered the Philippine Revolution of 1896-98. They each mirrored Philippine progress in different ways. I had the good fortune of studying in both universities and knowing the Ateneo “immortals” in the persons of Bienvenido Lumbera, Eric Torres, and Roque Ferriols, whose recent deaths within months of each other (September 28, September 13, and August 15, respectively) we now deeply mourn, together with such outstanding U.P. counterparts as poet Virginia Moreno and director Antonio Mabesa.
A literary wag had once likened the rivalry between the Ateneo de Manila and the University of the Philippines to the Apollonian and the Dionysian dichotomy in Greek culture. The Ateneo (appropriately deriving its name from Athena, the goddess of wisdom) was cool, analytical, and rational in its approach while the U.P. was, like the God of wine Dionysius, orgiastic, experimental, and spontaneous. Of course, such clichés were inaccurate. The widely different Ateneo and “Peyups” (as the U.P. was more familiarly known) academic communities allowed much cross-pollination with each other.
The Ateneo had its share of Society of Jesus luminaries, such as its first Filipino president Francisco Araneta, the historian Horacio de la Costa and the philosophers Jose Cruz, and Roque Ferriols. In an odd circumstance, the Philippines had been classified in American times as falling within the New York province of the Jesuits, and it was thus from this state that at least three generations of Jesuits came to mold the Ateneo de Manila and its other branches in Cebu, Cagayan, San Pablo, Naga, Davao, and Zamboanga. It was only later that a Philippine Jesuit province was formed.
By 1965, lay Filipino men and women had begun to make their mark on the university. Though it was still an exclusive men’s college, the Ateneo had allowed a trickle of cross-enrollees from women’s schools and had women professors with impressive credentials in faculties such as English, Chemistry, Mathematics, Communication Arts, and Behavioral Sciences.
The College was housed in a series of concrete buildings in the modern brutal style, which recalled the austerity of the postwar era.The covered gymnasium facing Katipunan Avenue featured a huge blue eagle which became the iconic image of the school.When it was installed, it had occasioned, to little effect, a vociferous protest from the artist-critic in residence, Emmanuel “Eric” Torres.
The Ateneo Gymnasium with its iconic eagle (Source: The Guidon)
The Ateneo Administration building in Loyola Heights
The English Department had among its distinguished professors Rolando Tinio, Bienvenido Lumbera, Salvador Bernal, Miguel Bernad, Eric Torres, and Nicanor Tiongson. The Ateneo had followed a traditional American canon derived from the Jesuit curriculum of the United States. Now, influences from the U.P., U.S.T., and various U.S. Midwestern schools that these teachers had studied at came to the fore. There was also a new emphasis on Filipino literature. The pioneers of this new trend were Bien Lumbera and Nic Tiongson.
Rolando S. Tinio (March 5, 1937-July 8, 1997), a magna cum laude Philosophy graduate of the U.S.T. and M.A. in Creative Writing of Iowa University, was the enfant terrible who in the mid-‘60s founded the Bagay school of poetry (in colloquial Taglish) and introduced scintillating Pilipino versions of European literary classics, among them Richard II, Oedipus Rex, and The Cherry Orchard. His proclivity for things British came from his Bristol University training while his sharp wit terrorized inquisitive colegialas at Q-and-A portions of college colloquia. To be directed in one of RST’s plays was to know the iron discipline that must explain the success of Shakespeare’s and Chekov’s plays. Tinio oversaw the smallest details of costume and design, even sewing some of his wife, Ella Luansing’s stage attire. I can still hear his stentorian voice and see his broad-faced smile to this day.
Rolando S. Tinio with his inimitable smile
Passing away prematurely at age 60 in 1997, Rolando S. Tinio (named posthumously National Artist for Literature) left a formidable legacy behind him, not the least establishing the Filipino Department in the Ateneo de Manila, the Ateneo Experimental Theatre. He also produced Filipino theatre at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, wrote seminal books of poetry, and even played cameo roles in films (where he once portrayed Cardinal Jaime Sin).
By their students shall ye know the teachers. Ateneo alumni who excelled in writing and were later recognized on the national scene included (to name a few) the brothers Jose and Emmanuel Lacaba, Fernando Nakpil-Zialcita, Alfrredo (sic) Navarro Salanga, Raymundo Albano, Antonio Perez, and Paul Dumol. All of them wrote either for the University magazine, The Heights, or the newspaper, The Guidon.
As editor-in-chief of The Heights in 1964-65, I had the opportunity to work, under the guidance of adviser Bienvenido Lumbera, with such writers as Eman Lacaba, Freddie Salanga, Ray Albano, and artists such as Dez Bautista, and photographer-writer Johnny Nanagas. We published Tinio’s and Lacaba’s Bagay Poetry, portrayed Marian Anderson and Matisse on the covers, interviewed Jose Maria Sison and singer Carmen Soriano. We also printed a Pop Art Heights issue in a Tide Box, occasioning the protest and resignation of a female adviser who felt that we had gone out of bounds by not informing her beforehand.
The ferment of the era was similarly reflected in the atypical version of the yearbook,The Aegis, which in 1969 featured the graduates not in traditional toga-and-mortarboard portraits, but in McLuhanesque poses and attitudes. I had written the essay for the annual, with Lawrence Que as its editor.We also worked together in the Student Council as Activity Representatives. The theme for this generation of Ateneans had been spelled out by Freddie Salanga in the essay, “Down from the Hill,” in which he advocated a less elitist approach by the University.
Student Council members representing the Activities, 1964-1965
Tinio’s trailblazing innovations in Filipino and in theater were paralleled by trends in other departments, notably Philosophy and History.
The First Immortal
Among those who represented the Old Guard and the Jesuit presence was the Reverend Roque Ferriols, S.J.(August 16, 1924 – August 15, 2021), who is now recognized for pioneering the use of Tagalog in philosophizing.
Fr. Roque Ferriols, S.J., who influenced generations of Ateneo students in the “Philosophy of Man”
Fr. Ferriols had been a novice in the Sacred Heart Novitiate during the Japanese Occupation and had experienced the horrors of the war, including visiting prisoners in the dungeons of Fort Santiago and burying the dead among the ruins of Manila. After the war, he studied theology in Woodstock, Maryland and later earned his Ph.D. at Fordham University, New York with a dissertation on the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo.
Among his works are “a collection of essays and translations on selected philosophical literature in Magpakatao: Ilang Babasahing Pilosopiko, first published in 1979; an introduction to metaphysics Pambungad sa Metapisika (1991) in which he discussed the meron (often translated as ‘being’); and a treatise on philosophy of religion Pilosopiya ng Relihiyon (2014) drawing from the Christian existentialist philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, the latter two of which have been canonized in the teaching of philosophy at the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University.”
It is amazing that he did translations in Filipino “from the original Greek, of selected texts from the Pre-Socratics to Aristotle, compiled in his Mga Sinaunang Griyego.”
However, he was anything but traditional and an old-fogey in his approach. As one of my teachers in the “Philosophy of Man,” he espoused a Filipino approach to philosophy through the use of Pilipino and encouraged analyzing Western paradigms through local and direct experience. In this sense, he was Socratic with his constant questioning style. Learning the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty was not just an academic exercise for him, in the manner of Albert Camus. I was fortunate to have one-on-one tutorials with him in my senior year, just before graduation.
Father Ferriols embodied the nobility of the prewar Filipino, belonging to an ilustradoIlocano family (his mother was a Jamias) with a strong intellectual and religious bent (several of his sisters were nuns). He himself displayed an open-minded, non-dogmatic mind. Through him, one understood that the Jesuit ratio studiorum was not a dead letter but a tradition that could live on in the modern world.
Much later, while visiting the senior Jesuits at their Loyola Heights home, I met Fr. Ferriols in the company of his caregiver. His loud, clear voice rang over the Holy Mass being said at the time. He had written a brilliant memoir called Sulyap, in collaboration with his pupil Dr. Leovino Garcia.
Filipinization was also felt even in music, with Filipino church music being composed by Father Eduardo Hontiveros, S.J. with lyrics by Rolando Tinio.
The Second Immortal
A secular product of the Ateneo tradition was art critic Emmanuel “Eric” Torres, who was also a poet and a stalwart of the English Department.
Prof. Emmanuel "Eric" Torres (29 April 1932 - 13 September 2021) was a poet, author, art critic, and former professor at the English Department of the Ateneo de Manila University.
Eric Torres had a formidable biodata, as recalled in Wikipedia: “the founding curator of the Ateneo Art Gallery and a former professor at the Department of English. His published works include three poetry collections and numerous monographs and essays on art. He was named one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men in 1961 and received the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature four times, all for his poetry. His art book Kayamanan: 77 Paintings from The Central Bank Collection (1981) received the Manila Critics Circle and Gintong Aklat awards in 1982. Held in high esteem by the arts and humanities community both locally and internationally, Professor Torres had also been a member of committees on art exhibits around the world.”
I met Eric Torres in the Art Gallery of the newly built Jose Rizal Library of Ateneo. His rude shock of curly black hair, flaring nostrils, professorial glasses framing his round, rolling eyes marked him out as a presence. He looked like a defrocked priest to some, and his poetry was duly iconoclastic. He gladly dispensed advice on the ambitious doggerel of young, aspiring poets and noted such budding talents as Virgilio “Pandy” Aviado and Ray Albano. His taste was unerring and indisputable.
From him, we learned such terms as “art brut” and the intricacies of Picasso and H.R. Ocampo. It was rumored that he had a secret connection to the powers-that-be. His columns in the magazines could bestow recognition on young artists, which he generously did. He had a distinguished art collection, to which only a privileged few were privy.
The Third Immortal
The third immortal in this trifecta was Bienvenido Lumbera (April 11, 1932- September 28, 2021), who was awesomely prolific and as coruscating as a shooting star on a dark night.
The immortal Bien Lumbera
I had met Bien as a Professor of English, Adviser for The Heights, participant in “Days With the Lord (Basta Ikaw, Lord )” — a charismatic Catholic renewal movement, even a make-up man for Salvador Bernal’s “Billy Budd.” Just back from his Ph.D. in Literature at Indiana University, he projected the image of a simple, dedicated professor. One would not have suspected the drama and the energy that would burst forth from this Batangueño from Lipa who was quiet, humble and had a mild sense of humor. He would do me the honor of giving a flattering commentary on the launching of my book Gloria (Roman Leoncio’s Kapampangan Translation of Huseng Batute’s verse novel, Lost and Found) at the Department of Foreign Affairs in 2003. This was published by the Center for Kapampangan Studies, Holy Angels University, and given a National Book Award in 2004.
His creativity and doggedness in his pursuits were, in retrospect, breathtaking. It is recounted as follows:
“At the height of Martial Law, Lumbera had taken on other creative projects. He began writing librettos for musical theater. Initially, the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) requested him to create a musical based on Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart. Eventually, Lumbera created several highly acclaimed musical dramas such as Tales of the Manuvu; Rama, Hari; Nasa Puso ang Amerika; Bayani; Noli Me Tángere; and Hibik at Himagsik nina Victoria Laktaw. Sa Sariling Bayan: Apat na Dulang May Musika, an anthology of Lumbera's musical dramas, was published by De La Salle University-Manila Press in 2004.
“Lumbera authored numerous books, anthologies and textbooks such as: Revaluation; Pedagogy; Philippine Literature: A History and Anthology; Rediscovery: Essays in Philippine Life and Culture; Filipinos Writing: Philippine Literature from the Regions; and Paano Magbasa ng Panitikang Filipino: Mga Babasahing Pangko]
“Lumbera also established his leadership among Filipino writers, artists and critics by co-founding cultural organizations such as the Philippine Comparative Literature Association (1969); Pamana ng Panitikan ng Pilipinas (1970); Kalipunan para sa mga Literatura ng Pilipinas (1975); Philippine Studies Association of the Philippines (1984) and Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino (1976). In such ways, Lumbera contributed to the downfall of Marcos although he was in Japan during the 1986 Edsa uprising, teaching at the Osaka University of Foreign Studies.”
I learned later that Bien had been confined for one year as a political prisoner and that while he had not been physically tortured, he had suffered psychological anguish through the screams of his neighbors who were being tortured in the cells next door.
When he was released, he was prevented from assuming his former job at the Ateneo University. He was instead offered a position at the University of the Philippines, where he continued to contribute his deep commitment to Philippine studies and literature. He strongly believed that only by writing in Filipino would our nation truly reflect its national identity. In 2006, Bienvenido Lumbera was named National Artist for Literature.
Even after he required a cane for walking and his talking pace had decelerated, Bien would still be active at the seminars organized by his friend Frankie Sionil Jose (another prospective immortal) at the De La Salle University. My last encounter with him was at the 2019 PEN Conference in Manila.
Looking back, these three professors and their colleagues with whom I had the great fortune of interacting at the Ateneo de Manila University, played major roles in the transformation of the institution as well as its students.
They are immortals because their influence will last for generations, if not forever.
A career diplomat of 35 years, Ambassador Virgilio A. Reyes, Jr. served as Philippine Ambassador to South Africa (2003-2009) and Italy (2011-2014), his last posting before he retired. He is now engaged in writing, traveling, and is dedicated to cultural heritage projects
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