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Los Ilustrados Pedro Paterno fell almost into oblivion as soon as he passed away in 1910. Some scholars needed to mention him eventually because of his role during the revolution or his exchange of letters with Jose Rizal and his family, but he is not the most palatable individual in Philippine history. His personality did not help much, to be honest. He was a bit flamboyant, far from humble and willing all too often to be surrounded by people of distinction, both in Spain and the Philippines. His desire to be always at the top was at times very explicit and provoked merciless sarcastic comments from Pardo de Tavera. León María Guerrero called him an “incorrigible snob”, although his grandfather, the first León Ma Guerrero served with him at the Malolos Assembly and the Aguinaldo cabinet. Resil Mojares, only recently, presented a more balanced view of this figure in his formidable Brains of the Nation (2006). I am of the opinion, however, that he was an outstanding individual, and he deserves recognition for his many achievements. Pedro Paterno was born in 1857 in Sta. Cruz, Manila. His roots were both Filipino and Chinese, and the family prospered thanks to their lighterage business in the port of Manila. He studied at the Ateneo and was one of the first Filipinos to have pursued further education in Spain. He studied philosophy and theology at the Universidad de Salamanca, the oldest in Spain, and received a doctoral degree in Civil Law from the Universidad Central de Madrid, today’s Universidad Complutense. I am not sure, but he might have been the first Filipino to get a PhD abroad. The early compromise of the Paternos with the Philippine cause can be exemplified by his father, who was sent as a prisoner to the Mariana Islands in 1872, as he was seen to be a conspirator against Spain. Paterno, in the meantime, led the life of a distinguished gentleman, living with great leisure in the very center of Madrid, in a house where he received the most distinguished intellectuals of Spain: Emilio Castelar, Ramón de Campoamor and José Zorrilla, among others He undoubtedly used his money wisely to gain influential friendships. In 1880 he envisioned for the first time the creation of a “Biblioteca Filipina,” a book series of Philippine authors. He was the first to realize that literature was a tool that could help to legitimize the idea of a Philippine nation. He was the first one to see that complaining about colonial grievances was not enough to obtain independence. An intellectual battle had to be made, one asserting the creativity of the Filipino people, their capacity to create meritorious literary works, the existence of history prior to the arrival of the Spaniards and, most importantly, the consistency of a distinctive Filipino identity. His intellectual and literary career, no matter the flaws it had, was motivated by this noble impulse, and not just by the desire of getting recognition. Poesías Líricas y Dramáticas (1880) and Sampaguitas (1881) were books of poetry in the romantic fashion, and in 1885, he published Ninay, the first modern novel ever authored by a Filipino. He abandoned literature temporarily and started to write books on pre-hispanic Philippines, anthropology and history in a very prolific way. With the exception of his contemporary, Isabelo de los Reyes, no one dared to attempt such an important task: to write about the Philippines, finally, from a purely Philippine perspective. Scholars have criticized those works for their lack of methodology or excess of imagination, but those faults are typical of anthropological and historical works at that time in Europe as well, with very few exceptions. His role in the Pact of Biak-na-Bato (1897) was one of a peacemaker, a neutral middle person between the revolutionaries and the official government in order to stop a war. Peacemakers are very much appreciated today: their goal is to avoid bloodshed, But Philippine historiography has found the revolutionaries more likable. Paterno wasn’t a traitor or coward at all: he just believed revolution was not the right way to achieve the desired goal. Lastly, he was briefly imprisoned by the United States colonial government. Upon his release, he started a newspaper, wrote a few operas, more histories and short The Two Passions of Pedro Paterno, The First Ilustrado: Literature and the Philippine Homeland THE B I B L IOPHIL E S AND EXPLORERS AUCTION 2023 38 stories. His engagement in politics, taking part in an electoral campaign, was stopped by his sudden death. Paterno could have devoted himself to a lavish and easy life, to just supervise family businesses, as many others did at the time. He, instead, chose the intellectual battle in the years when very few dared to do it, where the mere fact of writing could lead to detention and execution. And despite his eccentricities, he always presented himself with pride as a Filipino, as a person who felt, in his own words, “the patriotic fire.” We can safely say that Paterno’s first and last love was literature, and specifically romantic literature. The first books of poems, all of them published in Madrid and generously distributed among members of the capital’s high society, were a double operation to make himself known as a cultivated man of letters and, at the same time, to defend the existence of an autonomous literary system separated from the Spanish one, publishing his books in a “Biblioteca Filipina”. As for his poetry, according to Portia Reyes, “Paterno’s poems brandished grandiose, metaphorical imagery painting an over-sentimental, romantic picture of the islands and their people. The verses celebrated loveliness, family, the indefatigability of the human spirit and other pleasing universal themes. ...Paterno stressed the simplicity and exquisiteness of the colony to attract Spanish interest in the islands.” Paterno, trained like Rizal in readings of authors of Spanish, French and German Romanticism, wrote poems in a somewhat old-fashioned style, but in a sincere and confessional tone, with numerous references to the Filipino homeland he missed and praising his idealized Filipino dalaga. In the last years of her life, already ill and widowed, Paterno did not write poetry, but rather short stories about love and manners which were part of a bog project titled “Aurora Social”. Amor de un día. En el pansol de Kalamba [One day’s love. At Calamba’s Pansol] is a tragic love story between a textile worker from Santa Ana who decided to pass a day with her friends in the medicinal waters of Pansol, Calamba. Very rare. Si quieres gozar de un cielo siempre rico de alegrías, resplandeciendo en estrellas como de gozosos días; la tierra henchida de aromas, de murmullos ardorosos como el nupcial lecho alegre de dos jóvenes esposos; si quieres siempre gozar, gozar hasta el dolor, ven a la hermosa Manila, la patria del amor. If you want to enjoy a heaven always rich in joys, shining with stars as of joyful days; the earth filled with aromas, with ardent murmurs like the bridal bed of joy of two young spouses; if you always want to rejoice, to enjoy to the point of pain, come to beautiful Manila, the homeland of love. Portrait of Don Pedro Paterno 3 9 L EÓN GA L L E R Y Los Ilustrados Imagining the Nation Paterno felt the need to imagine the Philippine nation and vindicate it in the metropolis. His historical and ethnographic essays were an attempt to show to the Spanish, for the first time from a distinctly Filipino perspective, the origins of Philippine culture, its evolution and development over the years, and the present civilizational state. Paterno presented himself in Madrid as an expert on the Philippines, but he also tried to define and extol the Filipino identity, pointing out the reasons for its high degree of cultural development and comparing it with the greatest civilizations in history. It is this intention that animates the various ethnohistorical and his essays on cultural anthropology that he wrote from 1887 onwards. His methodology was not very orthodox and many of his assertions are pure inventions, but Paterno knew well that in order to justify the nation he needed myth, and he put all his strength into this creation. In La antigiua civilización tagalog, Paterno argues that the cultural development of the archipelago occurred in three stages; the first, represented by the Aetas -whom he calls aborigines- constitutes the most primitive phase and predicts that they are destined to disappear due to their lack of intermarriage. The second state is formed by the Tagalog culture before it was Christianized. The last phase, the contemporary one, the one with which Paterno defines himself, is the Christianized Tagalog culture, in which the ancestral virtues are perfected by Catholicism, understood as a civilizing agent to reach moral perfection. In La familia tagalog Paterno chisels some facets of Philippine culture with unbridled idealism and a display of erudition: the explanation of Philippine customs is often compared to the functioning of the similar customs or social institutions in Ancient Rome, China, Mongolia, India or Polynesia. Paterno focuses his description of the family by addressing patriarchy - insofar as the man is the necessary provider of the family - monogamy, courtship, marriage, childcare, fidelity, religious ceremonies, family festivals, the private life of the family at home, adoption of children, blood compact, kinship, inheritance, adultery and divorce, which is justified by how sacred their individual freedom has always been for the Tagalogs. There is no need to insist on the extraordinary rarity of both printed works, foundational works of Philippine intellectual history from a local perspective.