diced b Jos e S. Arc a, - non

THE ROLE OF FERDINAND BLUMENTRITTIN THE PUBLICATION AND PROPAGATIONOF THE NOLIHarry SichrovskyBefore trying to evaluate the above, it is necessary to examine therelationship between Ferdinand Blumentritt and Jose Rizal. Theirs was oneof the most moving and most beautiful friendships in history at the same timethat it was also most unusual. On close examination, there could hardly betwo more different, disparate, and unequal characters and human beings thanthese two. Their individual uniqueness may begin with language, nationality,colour, and country. Then one can add their social background and their styleof life. Blumentritt was head-master of a higher institute of learning, anImperial civil servant, his loyalty to the Habsburg throne never in doubt. Hewas the respected head of a family, the accepted patriarch. All in all, amainstay of the traditional order, of the establishment, as we would saytoday. He was a symbol of the unshakeable middle class society on which theEmpire rested, the very personification of stability and conservatism.Consider now Rizal. The offspring of a wealthy dynasty of traders andlandowners, but also bourgeois intellectuals and cosmopolitan thinkers. ButRizal was first and foremost an Asian, a revolutionary, the restless spirit whostalked from country to country, the rebel and conspirator whose aim was tooverthrow the accepted order in his native country even if that order was thecolonial order of a foreign nation. Unlike Blumentritt, Rizal never had thetime or patience to raise a family, but he seemed to prefer the hasty loveaffairs in the various countries of his Odyssey.Between the two there was only one point in common, which in the endproved to be the most controversial: they both professed the Catholic faith.But whereas Blumentritt would consider himself the loyal Catholic subject,his friend would prove to be not only the enemy of the friars, but a fighteragainst the secular power of the Church, not hesitating to overstep thepermissible mark of theological principles.Yet all this proved to be no hindrance to a life-long friendship in whichRizal considered the Austrian as a kind of brother, sometimes even a father.And what at first glance might have seemed incompatible proved to be the227