Con la Sangre de mi Corazon: Repainting the World of Rizal's Noli Me Tangere

merging from the darkness of the stair-well while visiting the former monks’

quarters in the church of San Marco, I en-countered one of Florence’s more famous art-works: Fra Angelico’s Annunciation. Some-time in the initial half of the fifteenth century, the good Dominican friar had been given the task of decorating the walls of the cells and common areas of the cloister with images for the contemplation of his brothers.

Fra Angelico’s choice of the angel’s visit to Mary as the subject matter for the very first painting seen upon ascending the steps is quite appropriate. Walking up the staircase marks a transition from the social encounters of the world outside to the seclusion of the individu-al rooms. Before the monks retired, they were being presented with a scene that depicted the moments surrounding Mary’s fiat.

Having drunk in the pleasures of the An-nunciation, I continued with my exploration.

Con la Sangre de mi CorazónRepainting the World of Rizal’s

Noli Me Tangere

Ino Manalo

Each country has its own inner geography where her spirit dwells and where physical force can never conquer even an inch of ground…

R a bi n d r a nat h Tag o r e ( 1 8 6 1 – 1 9 4 1 )

I soon came upon a cell with an arresting de-piction of a scene from the Resurrection nar-rative: the meeting of Christ and Mary Mag-dalene outside the tomb.

Glancing at the caption, I was quite struck by the fact that the mural in the tiny room was actually known as a Noli me tan-gere. An idea began to take shape: could José Rizal have seen this very same painting I was now beholding?

Later on I would find out that our nation-al hero had visited Florence after he had al-ready finished writing his novel. Yet the idea had taken hold of me: was there any relation-ship between the Easter morning scene and Rizal’s most famous work? 1

a Biblical UneaseFilipino scholars are well aware that José Rizal took the title of his first published book from the Bible, from the words that

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Christ directed at Mary Magdalene on the day of the Resurrection.2 What goes practically unmentioned in Philippine letters, however, is the fact that, as with other scenes from this most-read of sa-cred tomes, the Easter morning interlude has actually been the subject of count-less works of art as well as of theological debates in the European world. As one source opines:

Noli me tangere: Just three words but they were to result in millions of others. The complexity of the exegetical interpretations of this utterance in John 20:17 is enor-mous, as is its impact on the visual arts.3

In support of this, Barbara Baert notes:

No other utterance by Christ has been the subject of as much discussion by the first Church Fathers as Noli me tangere. “Stand up and walk” has never achieved the same intellectual and emotional impact. Even “Lord, why has Thou forsaken me” does not come close.4

Baert was among the leaders of a re-search program, which, under the broad-er objective of reviewing perspectives on Mary Magdalene, hoped to concentrate on the “Noli me tangere” episode. The program envisions that “the disciplines of exegesis of the First and Second Testa-ments, art history and practical theology will collaborate in this project to investi-gate the meaning, reception history, and present-day relevance of … John 20:17.”5

The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has this to add:

It is, doubtless, the only “scene” whose ti-tle is an uttered phrase…Although other phrases of Jesus (or those of other char-acters) have also taken on the status of an exemplary citation or a fixed phrase… they have not, for all that, become the title of a scene and then of a pictorial motif. By contrast, Noli me tangere has achieved this to such a degree that it is possible to speak of “a Noli me tangere” just as one speaks of a “Resurrection”….6

Annunciation (before 1438) by Fra Angelico. Convent in San Marco, Florence.

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In his book, also entitled Noli Me Tan-gere, Nancy provides a list of almost fif-ty creations inspired by John’s passage as fashioned by various artists including well-known masters such as Giotto, Fra Angelico, Dürer, and Titian.7 While this list only begins with the Renaissance, it can be noted that “representations of John 20:17 begin to appear in Western art in the ninth century.”8

Sermon dealing with the verses from John. Here, Luther suggests that Mary Magda-lene was unable to recognize Christ be-cause she was still in the “old skin of Eve.” Similarly, those in the audience who also had difficulty perceiving the Redeemer were compared to the “old Adam.”11

Meanwhile, during roughly the same period but on an island on the other side of the world, a Dominican priest was

sharing his thoughts on the same topic with his congregation in what would be-come the Philippine province of Bataan. Fr Francisco Blancas de San José was re-counting in Tagalog the entire Easter nar-rative as pieced together from all the Gos-pels. Interestingly, when Mary Magdalene finally identifies Christ, Fr. Blancas reports that she cries out “Maestro mío!” Yet, just a few phrases earlier, the good saint had been speaking in the local language!12

On a couple of occasions, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a famous British preacher who was drawing large crowds in London at the time when Rizal was visit-ing this city, discussed John 20:17. In one of his Easter sermons, Spurgeon reminded his audience to pay heed not to “carnalize”

There has, likewise, been a long histo-ry of theological dialogues on the mean-ings of Christ’s statements to Mary Mag-dalene on Easter morning. Joseph Crehan, for example, reports on what Bishop Ori-gen of Alexandria thought of the enigmat-ic passage, as far back as the second cen-tury.9 Crehan introduces into his essay the question on whether the prohibition from touch only applied to women. It is because of perspectives like this that, as Barbara Baert has pointed out, the “Noli me tangere” episode had sometimes been used to justify the exclusion of female par-ticipation in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church.10

More than a thousand years after Ori-gen, Martin Luther preached an Easter

Left, Noli Me Tangere (1440-41) by Fra Angelico. Convent of San Marco, Florence. Right, Titian's Noli Me Tangere, (ca. 1514). The National Gallery, London


It should be clarified that there has been a lot written on the national hero and religion including the whole debate about his retraction. Typical of this is Eugene Hessel’s The Religious Thought of Rizal.19 Hessel discusses the characters of Rizal’s first novel only in as much as they reflect the author’s religious views.

Rizal seems to have been well ac-quainted with the Bible and Bible schol-arship. Certainly, he held strong opinions on religious issues such as the existence of Purgatory. Church intellectuals like Pope Gregory the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Origen appear in the pages of the Noli. For that matter, Rizal noted in the diary that he kept while in Spain that he had pur-chased a Bible on 1 February 1880.20 Then again, he had brought up in a letter that that he was aware of the controversial reli-gious views of Joseph Ernest Renan21 who, in one of his books, suggested non-divine explanations for Jesus’ miracles and career.

Despite these indications of Rizal’s theological interests, however, Filipino scholars have never thought it necessary to explore whether the scriptural source of the title of the national’s hero premiere work signaled an exegetical reading. In an introduction written in 1959, Leon Ma. Guerrero makes this observation about his translation of the Noli:

I did not think it wise to translate the title. The words are taken from John XX, 17, and are spoken by the risen Christ to Mary Magdalen, but the incident would seem to have no connection with Rizal’s story.22

Filipinos are not alone in assuming that there is no other link between the Biblical passage and the novel, save for the famous three words. When the aforementioned philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, pronounced that “the formulation…has had the good fortune to be occasionally taken up as a ti-tle by works that have no explicit relation to the evangelical scene,” he specifically

spiritual matters and to keep in mind that much of what Christ had said was beyond the knowledge of ordinary mortals.13 The point worth remembering here is that Spurgeon represents a theological per-spective on “Noli me tangere” that is con-temporary with Rizal’s sojourn in Europe.

The focus of most of the debates is the enigmatic nature of Christ’s words to the Magdalene. As one source notes:

What do they mean exactly? Do not touch me? Do not hold on to me? Do not ap-proach me? What kind of pure supposi-tions lie at the basis of the prohibition? What attitudes does it imply? Why was Mary Magdalene’s gesture rejected in the first place? The succinctness of the Bi-ble text allows for a variety of interpreta-tions and presentations down through the centuries…14

The discussions underscore how John’s verses have captured the popular imagina-tion for many years. They also show how the Easter passage has been utilized in contested ways by various interlocutors who have chosen to dwell on the aspects they considered relevant. None of the treatises and artworks produced on the subject, however, seemed to have entered the Philippine discourse on the works of the country’s national hero. In the words of a Filipino social critic: “it was almost as if we presumed that Rizal had simply in-vented his title!”15

An initial review of the literature on Rizal would bear this point out. Perusing Rizal in Retrospect, a collection of essays edited by Carlos Quirino in 1961, yields nothing on Biblical connections.16 The same is true of Himalay: Rizal, compiled by Patricia M. Cruz and Apolonio Chua for the Cultural Center of the Philippines, three decades later.17 Even Understanding the Noli, an anthology spearheaded by a Jesuit scholar, to which mostly priests con-tributed, was silent on the matter.18

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cited as an example what he termed “the celebrated novel by the Philippine writer José Rizal.” Nancy goes on to report that the novel had also “been brought to the screen and made into a musical”23 indicat-ing a more than passing interest.

The inclination to ignore the Biblical discourse may well have come from the author himself. For Rizal had made this observation about his novel:

Noli Me Tangere es una satira y no una apo-logia...hay en el pesimismos y negruras , y es por que veo mucha infamia en mi pais; alla los miserables igualan en numero a los imbeciles…[Noli Me Tangere is a satire and not an apologia… There is in it “pessimism and blackness” because I see much infamy in my country; there the miserable equal the imbecile in numbers] 24

One scholar opines that it is the oft-cited 5 March 1887 letter (translated from the French) to the painter Félix Resurre-ción Hidalgo, which best expressed the aim of Rizal’s celebrated work:

Noli me tangere, words taken from Saint Luke, means “do not touch me.” The book contains, therefore, things about which none of us have spoken until now; they are so sensitive that they cannot be touched by any person. As far as I am concerned, I wanted to do what no one has dared. I wanted to answer the calumnies which for so many centuries have been heaped on us and our country. I described the social situation, the life, our beliefs, our hopes, our desires, our complaints, our sorrows. I unmasked the hypocrisy, which, under the cloak of religion, was impoverishing and brutalizing us… I have raised the curtain to show what is behind the deceitful, elo-quent words of our governments.25

Furthermore, in his own dedication for the Noli, Rizal declares:

Regístrase en la historia de los padecimien-tos humanos un cáncer de un carácter tan maligno que el menor contacto le irrita y despierta en el agudísimos dolores. [Re-corded in the history of human sufferings is a cancer so malignant a character that the least touch irritates it and awakens in it the sharpest pains.]26

The initial paragraph of the dedication ends with the words:

…tantas se me presento tu querida imagen con un cáncer social parecido. […hath thy dear image presented itself showing a social cancer like to that other.]

As many authors have pointed out, Rizal was mistaken with regard to his bib-lical reference.27 The Easter utterance does not appear in Luke but is, as already men-tioned, a line from John 20:17 of the Latin Bible. What passes without comment is the intimation about the goals of the nov-el. There seems to be a general consensus that the Noli should be read only as a real-ist exposition of the ills of Philippine soci-ety in the late nineteenth century. For who was to argue if the national hero himself intoned that “the incidents I relate are all true and they happened; I can give proofs of them…28

Not surprisingly, Cayetano Sánchez Fuertes summarizes the Noli in this way:

By way of synthesis, then, we can say that when he published his novel, Rizal wanted to lay before the Filipino people the true story of the events that took place in Cav-ite, as well as the social situation in 1872 and after.29

Likewise Ferdinand Blumentritt pro-vides an opinion (as translated from Ger-man by his good friend Rizal) from the na-tional hero’s own time and from a Europe-an perspective:


El objeto de Rizal al escribir el Noli Me Tangere dar forma plastica a los abusos de la administración, al desamparo en que se hallan los reos políticos, acusados con razón o sin ella, a la inhumana dureza y crueldad que usan en todas sus acciones los ambiciosos [Rizal’s objective in writing the Noli Me Tangere (is) to give tangible form to the abuses of the administration, to the sense of abandonment to which politi-cal prisoners, rightly or wrongly accused, are consigned, to the inhuman hardship and cruelty employed in the actions of the ambitious]

For that matter, the repeated mention of a cancer, which is characterized as “so-cial” in the Noli’s dedication, had clarified for everyone what was not to be touched as implied by the title. It was clear that the problems which Rizal had uncovered were so painful that even the mere mention of them may cause great discomfort.

The medical metaphor is also favored by Raquel A. G. Reyes in her book, Love, Passion and Patriotism. Yet, Reyes is ac-tually the rare Filipino academic who, in connection with Rizal’s novel, brings up the fact that the Easter episode from John has been the subject of many works of art. Despite these visual arts references, how-ever, Reyes concludes that: “Rizal had its most popular image in mind, “Noli me tangere” being common parlance for a cancerous type of ulcer that particularly afflicted the face.”30

The emphasis on a realist exposition may have resulted in a situation where it is often forgotten that Rizal had not creat-ed a political or sociological treatise but a work of literature. As the blurb at the back of a book which reassesses the literary val-ue of the Noli Me Tangere and the El Fili-busterismo states:

Hindi ganap na pinahahalagahan ang mga nobela dahil malimit na nakaukol ang

pagbasa sa mga kabuluhang pampolitika ng mga ito. Bihirang basahin ang mga nobela bilang nobela—bilang akdang pampani-tikan.31 [The novels are not accorded their full importance because readings are lim-ited to political significance. Rarely are the novels read as novels—as literary works.]

Virgilio Almario, National Artist for Literature and author of the aforemen-tioned book, has intoned that:

“malaki ang aking paniwala na isang daki-lang nobelista si Rizal”32 [I firmly believe that Rizal is a great novelist].

Others are of the same opinion as can be seen in the following passage cited by Almario from Petronilo Daroy:

The novels of Rizal are important in the sense that they created a literary canon, a way of observing details, of organizing the continuity of narrative actions, of constitut-ing characters and analyzing their motives different from the established terms of the literature of the time. Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo belong to the category of realism and naturalism and to the tradi-tion of literature that begins with Balzac and Zola.33

What can be discerned in this quote is the tendency to categorize Rizal and con-nect him with the literary traditions of Eu-rope and America. With varying degrees of academic acceptance, the great novels of the national hero have been linked to Rafael María de Labra y Cadrana, Francis-co Pi y Margall, Benito Pérez Galdos, Har-riet Beecher Stowe, among others.34

Virgilio Almario, however, objects to this literary bracketing:

“Laban sa panukala ni Daroy, hindi ko ip-ipiit ang imahinasyon ni Rizal sa molde ng pagsulat nina Balzac at Zola” [Contrary to

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Daroy’s proposition, I will not constrain Rizal’s imagination within the same mold as Balzac’s and Zola’s writings].

As an alternative to the French writers cited by Daroy, he points to the influence of Philippine poet, Francisco Balagtas.35 What is interesting to note though is the fact that, despite the remarkable range of possible in-spirations put forward in a discourse which encompasses American, French, Spanish and Philippine traditions, there is no men-tion of a source that is actually acknowl-edged by Rizal himself: the Bible.

Perhaps, the hesitation to examine the biblical connections was influenced by the perception of Rizal’s anti-Church stand. No less than the Roman Catholic church itself had affirmed this in its 1956 statement that pontificated against pass-ing the bill which would make the teach-ing of the national hero’s works manda-tory in Philippine schools. The statement warned that “in these two novels we find passages against Catholic dogma and mor-als.” Instead of reading the books in their entirety, the church hierarchy made the suggestion that only relevant and presum-ably acceptable passages be gathered to-gether in an anthology to be compiled by a committee.36

The view that a biblical quotation was not appropriate for a novel which cri-tiqued Catholic practices may be among the reasons why Charles Derbyshire de-cided to use The Social Cancer (taken from a phrase in the Noli’s dedication) as the title for his early twentieth century Eng-lish translation of Rizal’s first tome. Per-haps Derbyshire’s choice of title may arise from a certain unease which could be for-mulated in this way: Why did Rizal select a Latin phrase from a Gospel passage that seems unrelated to his avowed task of ex-posing the ills of Filipinas?

As a way of placing a balm on this un-ease, it may be suggested that it is time to

counter with a new question representing a whole other world of inquiry: Is it pos-sible that the relationship between Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and that of John is more than just titular? As this essay will try to show, the Easter episode can help in re-framing and even uncovering the Noli’s central metaphors.

Rereading Rizal is an undertaking which will easily run afoul of widely-held pre-conceived notions and convictions. Such preconceptions are, in part, what must have led to the view that “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the in-numerable centres of culture.”37 For this reason, the present essay will rely primar-ily on an analysis of the novel’s text in the broader setting of the discourses on John 20:17. On the other hand, there can be no denying that Rizal’s stature as the premiere national hero overshadows everything that he has ever written. This is why some effort is also devoted to reviewing wheth-er any support for the perspectives raised may be found in Rizal’s declarations and actions with regard to his canonic novel.

The Impetus for InquiryJohn Schumacher has posited that José Rizal deliberately chose to write in Span-ish and not in French (which at that time was the language of Continental dis-course) because he wanted to direct his work to the members of his Patria. Rizal is supposed to have decided that his audi-ence would be the minority of his compa-triots who, after centuries of domination by Spain, had mastered and presumably become literate in the colonizer’s lan-guage.38 Benedict Anderson refines this observation further by noting:

He tells us why he wrote in Spanish, a lan-guage understood by only three per cent of his countrymen, when he invokes “tú, que me lees, amigo o enemigo….” He wrote as much for the enemy as the friend...39


What can be extrapolated from Ander-son’s quote is that Rizal’s intended reader-ship would have encompassed individuals who had traveled to or been born in Eu-rope. This would include members of the Church and the officialdom raised and educated in the Peninsula or in Spanish households and schools in the archipela-go. Also included would be Rizal’s fellow expatriates. Such an audience would cer-tainly have had a wide exposure to Euro-pean traditions40 like the discourses that, as already described, provided the inter-textual contexts in which the “Noli me tangere” utterance was imbedded.

This then qualifies as the first impetus for a rereading of Rizal’s works which takes into consideration a wider network of meanings arising from the verses of John. After all, it can be assumed that a number of the Noli’s Europeanized readers may have actually searched for a connection between the novel and the Gospel.

It must be immediately pointed out that a tentative review of what Rizal’s con-temporaries had written about his book does not turn up any discussion which clearly indicates an awareness of an exten-sive Johannine link.41 Yet it can be suggest-ed that when Jean-Luc Nancy declared earlier that Rizal’s Noli had “no explicit re-lation to the evangelical scene” he is actu-ally revealing that it had crossed his mind to review the novel (and even the movie and musical of which he is, surprisingly, aware) to ascertain if any such relation existed.

Perhaps the closest one can get to a Biblical reading of the Son of Laguna’s landmark novel by a nineteenth century intellectual could be seen in Marcelo H. Del Pilar’s essay “Kai-igat Kayo” which was meant as a rebuttal of Fr Jose Rodri-guez’s own diatribe against the Noli.

Del Pilar does bring up Rizal’s descrip-tion of how Filipinas suffered from a can-cer. He even characterizes the novel as a

cry for healing. Yet, he also observes that the national hero had criticized the same things that Jesus Christ himself could not abide. Del Pilar then goes on to write about how Christ had forgiven many sins but could not tolerate the commercializa-tion of the temple. He compares this com-mercialization to the friars’ exploitation of Philippine resources. Interestingly, even as Del Pilar includes the betrayal of St. Peter and the suffering on the cross in his cata-logue of what Christ had forgiven, he also cites the Magdalene.42

The mere mention of the repentant saint cannot, of course, be used as proof that Del Pilar recognized the Johannine allusions of the Noli. Yet it is still signifi-cant that Mary Magdalene would come up in an interpolation of Rizal’s opus. At the very least, Del Pilar demonstrates an awareness of a member of the Philippine readership that the Calamba Sage’s so-cial critique is better appreciated when it is juxtaposed with the subversive teach-ings of the Nazarene as recorded in the Gospels.

A second impetus comes from the na-tional hero once more. Rizal’s mistaken identification of the source of his title as the evangelist Luke instead of John could be read as a clue that it was the events and images shared by the Gospels (i.e., the Easter narrative), which were playing on his mind when he was explaining his nov-el’s genesis to Hidalgo.

The conjectural nature of the ideas be-ing put forward makes it even more im-portant to turn to the text itself for sub-stantiation. Before doing this however, one more question must be dealt with: are there precedents for the proposal that Biblical references should be explored in unpacking the possible sources and mean-ings of Philippine texts?

Fortunately, this issue had long been eloquently addressed. In his groundbreak-ing book, Pasyon and Revolution, Reynaldo

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Ileto has demonstrated that the imagery and words of the Tagalog Pasyon, the lo-calized narrative of Christ’s Passion which is chanted during Holy Week in the Phil-ippines, served as the source for the ideas, writings, and slogans of the leaders of the Philippine Revolution.43

Patrick Flores provides additional grounds to support the idea of an evangel-ically-based rereading of art works whose subject matter does not, at first, appear to be biblically inspired. In his book, Paint-ing History, Flores examines the fourteen early nineteenth century panels illustrat-ing the Basi Revolt of Ilocos and suggests that these are best understood when jux-taposed with an ecclesiastical implement: the Via Crucis or the Stations of the Cross. As he explains:

The series spins questions on the manner in which reality is made visible and visual through the paradigm offered by both mi-mesis and the catechetical trope of the Via Crucis. Mimesis in the sense that the series seeks to present documentary evidence of what had happened according to a chrono-logical sequence of events, and tropology in the sense that this narrative is governed

by the rhetoric of doctrinal and devotional visual cultur.44

Flores goes on to discuss how the Basi Re-volt series, as dictated by reportage, ends with the execution of the rebels, thus pre-senting evidence that ultimately supports the colonial hegemony. This hegemony, however, is challenged by the devotional visual culture itself, which, as abetted by the trope of the Via Crucis, allows for the imagining of a different, implicit ending. It is the populace’s familiarity with the Sta-tions of the Cross which “foregrounds and sustains the death of the body—the in-fliction of pain and untold suffering—as precondition to resurrection.” This resur-rection is subversive because it “prefigures the idiom for postcolonial aspiration and change.”

A final example can be derived from the great nineteenth-century poet, Fran-cisco Balagtas, who had served as an in-spiration for Rizal. In his essay, “What is Balagtas’ ‘To Celia’ All About,” Epifanio San Juan attempts to unravel the symbol-ism of “Kay Celia,” the dedicatory poem of Florante at Laura, the masterpiece of the Bard from Bigaa.45

Among the many meanings that San Juan manages to excavate is the Edenic imagery evoked by the following lines of Balagtas:

Di mamakailang mupo ang panimdimSa puno ng manggang naraanan natinSa nagbiting bungang ibig mong pitasinAng ulilang sinta’y aking inaaliw.46

[How oft in reverie I beholdThat mango tree nigh which we strolled,Whose hanging fruit you fain would holdHath now my orphaned loved consoled.]47

As his analysis unfolds, San Juan will speak of how an “appeal to the image of the Virgin and son intrudes,” implying a

One of the paintings of the Basi Revolt Series from Ilocos.


lack of logical linkages which will lead him to conclude that the poem’s symbolic res-olution is in the realm of the imaginary. By choosing to translate “dili-dili” in the final stanza of the poem as “imagination,” San Juan is disregarding the fact that, in the nineteenth-century Tagalog-Spanish dic-tionary of Noceda and San Lúcar,48 other equivalents are given including “duda in-terior,” “lo que piensa” and “indetermi-nación.” Likewise, San Juan ignores that, in the painting traditions of Europe, the loss and eventual restoration of Paradise is closely tied to the Virgin. In Christian tropes, what allows for the Salvation nar-rative to unfold is Mary’s fiat. This connec-tion contradicts San Juan’s assessment of an intrusion as well as his view that “any other image of the same archetypal import would serve as well.”

Admittedly, it is cogent to ask wheth-er Balagtas himself was familiar with the import of the intertwined paradisiacal and Marian metaphors in his poem. After all, one would be hard-pressed to identi-fy Philippine images or meditative tracts from Spanish colonial times where the connections between the Virgin and the Garden of Eden are explicitly expounded. At most, one would have recourse to piec-es where the figure of Mary is juxtaposed with symbols taken from the iconography connected to Paradise and the Fall.

An example of such a juxtaposition is a relieve of the birth of the Virgin from Pan-gil church in Laguna.49 This carving shows a reptilian monster with fruits in its jaws, wrapped around a tree, while St Anne and St Joachim contemplate their blessed daughter. Evidently, the monster and the fruits are shorthand for the whole narra-tive of the Temptation in Eden and all its consequences.

The three cases from Ileto, Flores, and San Juan illustrate different ways that Biblical references or to be more precise (and to borrow a term from Flores) the

devotional culture can affect the reading of certain texts. The example discussed by Ileto shows how the words and, ultimate-ly, the performance of a religious narrative engender the revolutionary literature and ideas of the nineteenth century. Patrick Flores elucidates how two sets of paintings can re-encode each other so new interpre-tations emerge which prove to be poten-tially subversive. Finally, the example of Balagtas vis-à-vis San Juan demonstrates that the meanings of a poem can appear or not appear depending on one’s references. Evidently, the ability to bring into play re-ligious metaphors can alter how a literary work will be read.

If indeed the passage from John pro-vides an important clue for analyzing Rizal’s Noli, this is a distinction also shared by Rudyard Kipling’s 1925 short story, The Gardener. In Kipling’s story, an English woman visits the grave of her nephew who was killed in the Great War. While search-ing for the grave site, she comes upon a man who she assumes (like Mary Magda-lene had done) to be a gardener. Where-upon the man tells her: “Come with me and I will show you where your son lies”. Only at this point is the reader given a hint of a hidden interpretation of the entire Relieve of the Birth of the Virgin from Pangil church, Laguna. Photo courtesy of Filipinas Heritage Library

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work: that the woman may have been ly-ing to herself and her community about her true relationship with the dead sol-dier. Interestingly, though Kipling makes no direct reference to the Easter episode, many critics have suggested that a Johan-nine-based reading will help in revealing the deeper meanings of the story.50

The need for a review of Rizal’s meta-phorical landscape becomes more appar-ent when one considers that even the ac-cepted understanding of his novel’s title is far from stable. As many writers have noted, the words “Noli me tangere” still stand on the edge of a slippery semantic slope. Graham Ward, for example, cites five different articles with diverging views as to whether Mary Magdalene actually touched Christ.51 Meanwhile David Mar-no notes:

The ambiguities peak when Jesus says “Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my father.” What this… means is ambig-uous in both (Greek and Latin) versions, in the Greek me mou haptou the verb implies an action in progress (as if she were already touching him, or she were stretching her arm to touch him), but at the same time it is a verb that allows a more general, non-tactile reading (do not cling onto me, do not try to withhold me). In Latin there is a different kind of ambiguity: the verb here is nolere, not to wish—a common way of expressing negative commands, but with an implication of forbidding not only the action but also the desire: “do not desire to touch me.”52

As early as the 1950s, Leon Ma. Guer-rero had already noted that there was an alternative meaning for the title of Rizal’s novel:

Indeed the late Monsignor Knox, in his translation of the Bible into modern Eng-lish, renders the phrase as ‘Do not cling to me thus’, instead of ‘Touch me not’, a

phrase which in any case is much too Vic-torian and demure for our more robust age to read without embarrassment…53

One reason for the different perspec-tives on the correct interpretation of the Easter utterance may well be the fact that, as Benedict Anderson has pointed out, the Noli’s title is actually a “multiple gloss”54. The historical Jesus is believed to have spoken in Aramaic but his words were re-corded in Greek and then translated into Latin.

These tensions between the Greek and the Latin, between not to touch and not to cling, between the tactile and the non-tactile, allow for a shifting horizon which admits whole landscapes of associations.

Seeking John 20:17 inthe Noli Me TangereIn the collection of the Prado in Madrid is another splendid Annunciation by Fra Angelico created several years before that of the San Marco in Florence. In this ver-sion, the left side of the painting is domi-nated by an illustration of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The presence of the ancestral couple shows how the story of the Fall is linked with the Blessed Virgin Mary’s acceptance of her maternal role. In Christian tropes, the Easter encounter also forms part of the narrative which includes the loss of Para-dise, the Virgin’s fiat, as well as the incar-nation, birth, life, death and eventual res-urrection of Jesus. In other words, the An-nunciation’s “Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum” or “May it be done to me according to your word” is actually an antecedent of the Easter utterance, “Noli me tangere”.

To further explain the connections, it is best to revisit Fra Angelico’s murals at the church of San Marco in Florence. It has been said that many of the visual clues of Eu-ropean religious art from the past can no longer be read by contemporary audienc-es.55 In contrast, the Dominican brethren


who were living in San Marco in the fif-teenth century would have been able to decode the various messages imbedded in the paintings on the cloister walls.

In fact, so steeped were the cloistered community members in the iconogra-phy of the Renaissance that Fra Angelico could afford to be more sparing with his use of symbols. While in the older An-nunciation in the Prado, the good monk depicted Adam and Eve in the upper left corner of the painting; in the San Marco version, this same spot is occupied simply by a fence which was obscuring a grove of trees. This is an indication that Eden is still closed to humanity due to the Fall. Clearly, there was no need to insert the Biblical pair in the San Marco version because the oc-cupants of the cloister would have imme-diately understood the paradisiacal conno-tations of the fence blocking off the trees.

Given all these, it becomes evident how the narrative which begins in Para-dise and ends with Easter also binds the

Annunciation in San Marco’s corridor to the Noli me tangere in the monk’s cell. Studying this particular Fra Angelico mu-ral of Christ’s morning exchange with Mary Magdalene, one will see that, in con-trast to the garden of the Annunciation, the trees are now inside the fence, acces-sible to the viewer. This is a joyful remind-er that with Jesus’ death and resurrection, Paradise belongs to the world once more. Indeed, “what had been lost in the first garden had been restored in the garden of the sepulcher.”56 It may also be recalled that when Martin Luther preached on the passage from John, he made references to the “old Adam” and compared Magdalene to the “old Eve.”

Equipped with an understanding that the story of the Fall in the Original Gar-den, the Annunciation, the Resurrection as well as their associated iconographies are, from the European perspective, inter-linked, it is now time to review Rizal’s nov-el. Immediately, it will be apparent how

Annunciation (ca. 1426) by Fra Angelico. Museo del Prado, Spain.

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Paradise references are everywhere in the Noli, indicating the first discernable bond with the Easter episode of John which may even have inspired Leon Ma. Guer-rero to use for the title of his translation of the Noli, “The Lost Eden”. It can be not-ed, for example, that the initial view of the town of San Diego57 which Rizal provides his readers is that of an elysian haven of beauty, plenty, and peace:

En medio de aquel cumulo de techos de nipa, teja, zinc y cabonegro, separados por huertas y jardines, cada uno sabe encontrar su casita, su pequeño nido [in the midst of the clustering roofs of nipa, tiles, cor-rugated iron and palm leaves, separated by groves and gardens, each one is able to discover his own home, his little nest. ]

These arcadian lines are followed by a comparison between the coconut tree and the numerous breasts of an ancient Mother deity which serves to reinforce the sense of the primordial. The idyllic languor, however, is interrupted by a sin-ister presence:

Alla esta el rio, monstruosa serpiente de cristal, dormida en la verde alfombra; de distancia en distancia rizan su correinte pedazos de roca, eparcidos en el arenoso lecho [Yonder is the river, a huge glassy serpent sleeping on a green carpet, with rocks, scattered here and there along its sandy channel, that break its current into ripples. ]

Though discomfiting, the image is ap-propriate. For what is Paradise without a snake? Taken together—the groves, the fertility goddess, even the serpent—ev-erything sets the stage for a narrative of Biblical proportions. Similarly, the salu-briousness of the picnic on the lake is in keeping with the paradise metaphor espe-cially since it is interrupted by a crocodile, a reptile that is cousin to the snake.

The illusion of Eden continues even in the home of Pilosopong Tasio. When Ibar-ra comes for a visit:“the old man took him by the arm and led him to the window. A fresh breeze was blowing and before their eyes spread out a garden bounded by the wide forest that was a kind of park.”

More importantly, Tasio proceeds to enmesh Ibarra in the tendrils of the Gar-den symbolism. He asks “why can we not do as that weak stalk laden with flowers and buds does?” pointing to a jasmine plant which he explains is able to preserve its treasures by bending with the wind. He then compares his guest to a gigantic tree that he had first brought out of the forest as a young sapling, adding that it would not have flourished had he relocated it ful-ly grown. He warns the young man who has been “transplanted from Europe to this stony soil” that he is still in danger of perishing if he does not seek support and learn to be humble.

When Ibarra inquires, by means of a consistently vegetal device, if “this sacri-fice (could) produce the fruit that I hope for?” Tasio replies:

Poner la primera piedra, sembrar, despues que se desencadene la tempestad, al-gun grano acaso germine, sobreviva la catastofe, salve la especie de la destruc-cion y sirva despues de simiente para los hijos del sembrador muerto [You would have placed the first stone, you would have sown the seed, and after the storm had spent, perhaps some grain would have sur-vived the catastrophe to grow and save the species from destruction and to serve afterwards as the seed for the sons of the dead sower].

With these lines, the town philosopher implicates Ibarra as a gardener. By so do-ing, he introduces still another dimension of the Paradise trope. For it should be re-membered that, as narrated by John in his Gospel, Christ was initially mistaken for


the gardener by Mary Magdalene. One source adds that Jesus was “in a figurative sense… a second Adam come to redeem the first fallen gardener by planting virtue in humanity and weeding out sin.”58 More-over, as Gail Gibson opines:

“the meeting between Christ and Mary Magdalene … in a garden was of great in-terest to medieval exegetes who interpreted the garden as the typological perfection of Adam’s fallen garden or as a moral emblem of mankind’s own soul.”59

It is in this sense that one can better understand art historian Georges Didi-Huberman’s assertion that the presence of crimson spots which resemble drops of blood in the flower-strewn field of Fra An-gelico’s Noli me tangere mural in Florence,

represent Christ’s “sowing his stigmata in the garden of the earthly world.”60

What bears emphasizing is that the above discussion has the effect of iden-tifying Ibarra—the gardener with a mis-sion—as a figure that is both Adam-like and Christ-like. With half of the Johannine Easter pair filled in by Rizal’s hero, it is now

possible to posit that in the theater of the Noli, the one who essays the role of Mary Magdalene is, of course, María Clara.

This identification will certainly be met with resistance. After all, the love-ly supposed daughter of Capitán Tiago has been compared not with the woman carrying the jar of ointment but with the Blessed Virgin herself. In fact, the fellow characters of the winsome lass affirm this association. One reads in the Noli of how “all gazed in ecstasy at the beauty of María Clara and some old women murmured as they chewed their buyo, ‘She looks like the Virgin Mary.’”

It can be countered that Mary Mag-dalene was associated with Jesus’ mother. She was supposed to have “achieved such a state of perfection and chastity that she resembled the Virgin Mary whom she loved so much”.61 It can even be seen that, in some works of art, the Magdalene has been portrayed according to tropes associ-ated with the Mother of God.62

Interestingly, Mary Magdalene does make a spectacular appearance in the realm of the Noli. Her statue is part of the procession scene where she is described this way:

Sin saberse la causa de ello, venía Sta. María Magdalena, hermosísisma imagen con abundante caballera, pañuelo de piña bordado entre los dedos cubiertos de ani-llo y traje de seda adornado de planchas de oro. Luces e incienso la rodeaban; veíanse sus lágrimas de vidrio reflejar los colores de las luces de Bengala, que daban a la procesión aspecto fantástico, así que la santa pecadora lloraba ora verde, ora rojo, ora azul. [Rather inexplicably, next came St. Mary Magdalene, a beautiful im-age with abundant hair, wearing a pañuelo of embroidered piña held by fingers cov-ered with rings, and a silk gown decorated with gilt spangles. Lights and incense sur-rounded her while her glass tears reflected the colors of the Bengal lights which… also

Assumption of Mary Magdalene (1672) by Jose Antolinez. The Prado

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made the saintly sinner weep now green, now red, now blue tears.]

The way the saint is portrayed here is very much in keeping with her traditional image. There is mention of her long hair, her great beauty, her expensive jewelry in-dicative of wealth—all attributes associ-ated with the santa pecadora through the years.63

One should now turn to the way in which Rizal presents his novel’s heroine in a dream-like sequence which the au-thor suggests Ibarra would have witnessed had he been less preoccupied and if he had availed himself of opera glasses:

…habría admirado una de esas fantásticas visiones, una de esas apariciones mágicas que a veces se ven en los grandes teatros de Europa… envuelta en vaporosa gasa, una deidad, una sílfide que avanza sin tocar casi el suelo, rodeada y acompañada de un luminoso nimbo… Ibarra habría visto una joven hermosísima, esbelta, vestida con el pintoresco traje de las hijas de Filipinas, en el centro de un semicírculo formado

de toda clase de personas… chinos, es-pañoles, filipinos, militares, curas, viejas, jóvenes, etc…. y Doña Victorina arreglaba en la magnífica cabellera de la joven una sarta de perlas y brillantes que reflejaban los hermosísimos colores del prisma…entre el tejido transparente de la piña y al rededor de su blanco y torneado cuello pestenea-ban, como dicen los tagalos. los alegres ojos de un collar de brillantes […(he) would have been charmed with some of those magical and fantastic spectacles, the like of which is sometimes seen in the great theaters of Europe…. A deity wrapped in a mist-like gauze, a sylph enveloped in a luminous halo, who moves forward appar-ently without touching the floor…. Ibarra would have seen a beautiful and graceful maiden, clothed in the picturesque gar-ments of the daughters of Filipinas, stand-ing in the center of a semicircle made up of every class of people, Chinese, Spaniards, Filipinos, soldiers, curates, old women and the youth…. Dona Victorina was arrang-ing in the magnificent hair of the maiden a string of pearls and diamonds which threw out all the beautiful tints of the rainbow….From out the filmy piña draperies around her white and shapely neck there blinked, as the Tagalogs say, the bright eyes of a col-lar of diamonds. ]

It is quite apparent that there are many similarities between the two descriptions. María Clara’s personal identity is sub-sumed beneath that of a deity inhabiting a mythical world where only Doña Victori-na’s presence serves as a reminder that one is still in the Filipinas of the Noli. In this sense, the heiress from San Diego is sud-denly freeze-dried so that she comes to resemble Mary Magdalene’s effigy being carried in procession. The fact that Rizal further describes Maria Clara as having skin like ivory and the fact that her feet do not touch the ground all suggest that the lass is herself a statue that could have been among the “masterpieces of Sta. Cruz.”

Relieve of Mary Magdalene from the church of Pililla, Rizal.


The two women are trotted out, only to be bracketed by the populace. One is preceded by a whole pageant of altar boys, the constables charged with crowd con-trol, and the members of the Hermanos Terceros studiously dressed in costumes proclaiming poverty. Meanwhile, the other is enclosed in a semi-circle that is a cross section of society: chinos, españoles, filipinos, militares, curas, viejas, jovenes. It should be noted that the deliberate use of the feminine “viejas” which flies in the face of the Spanish conventional privi-leging of the masculine form may be an-other authorial wink at the expense of the chronologically deceptive Doña Victorina who inhabits the very next sentence of the paragraph. Little jokes like these may pro-vide comic relief but they also excoriate society’s hypocrisy.

The pair is to be glimpsed as surround-ed (rodeada) by mist—one by “luces e in-cienso” and the other by “vaporosa gasa… un luminoso nimbo.” It is this rarified, lumi-nous atmosphere which helps to explain why the two scenes are said to partake of a feeling of the “fantástico.”

The twin Marías have remarkable hair: in the first case it is said to be magnificent while in the other, abundant. Both are dripping with jewels. Both are “hermo-sísima” and are bathed in multi-colored lights. In the case of María Clara, the hues are like that of a prism while for Mary Magdalene, each variation of the Bengal lights is reflected in her tears which turn red, green, or blue. It is on account of these tears that the saint is also associated with pearls64 and it can be seen that a string of the white jewels born of weeping oysters has been attached to María Clara’s hair, further connecting the maiden of the Noli with her lachrymose sister.

Lastly, as if to add another layer of the gossamer to the vaporous shroud of glit-tering smoke, Rizal wraps both women in a fabric that is unique to Filipinas: piña. The Lady of San Diego wears an ensemble

characterized as “pintoresco traje de las hi-jas de Filipinas” confectioned from “el tejido transparente del piña” so sheer that a collar of diamonds is detected beneath. The Lady of Magdala grasps with her fin-gers laden with rings a “pañuelo de piña bordado.”

Knowledge of nineteenth century Philippine garments will reveal that since María Clara is described as wearing a transparent fabric around her neck, then this could only mean that both women are actually arrayed in the same costume. Like the statue of the Magdalene, the daughter of Laguna is most likely wearing a pañue-lo, a large translucent cloth folded into a triangle and worn like a detachable collar or cape. The young heiress’ fashion sense is, of course, understandable given her mi-lieu. What is truly remarkable is that her counterpart from the Levant would be dressed to match.

Of course, it may be argued that the characterization of the pair as beautiful and possessing long tresses may simply be part of the period’s social construction of women in which Rizal himself is implicat-ed. Yet, how to explain away María Clara’s statue-like description which only makes sense when it is understood as a condi-tion she shares with the saint’s figure that is dragged around for the entertainment of the townfolk? How to explain away the smoky clouds of luminescence which en-velop both scenes? How indeed account for the exact same words of “rodeada/rodeaban,” “hermosísima” and “fantástico” as well as the prism of lights and the piña which the two share?

The acceptance of a mirroring of at-tributes lends credence to an imagining of María Clara as the reflection of Mary Magdalene, the Apostle to the Apostles, the woman who, according to John, was the first to see the Risen One. As dis-cussed earlier, the presentation of Ibarra as the Adam-like gardener allows him to be perceived as cast in the mold of Christ.

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Consequently, the celebrated encounters between the Noli’s leading characters may now be viewed through a shimmering mi-metic cloud, amidst which may be per-ceived the silhouette of the Easter episode that has been interpolated for centuries.

María Clara debuts as an active partic-ipant in the narrative of the novel as she prepares to meet her betrothed. Before this point, she is only described. She is ini-tially presented as a phantasm that is not actually seen by the lead male character who is lost in his thoughts. Her life story is revealed in passages which end with the winsome girl as the prize in a treaty be-tween two men who agree that it is her destiny to be given away to a third.

As she prepares herself in anticipation of Ibarra’s visit, the readers have a glimpse of the maiden’s sheltered existence. One catches snippets of her regular routine which includes hearing mass and embroi-dering purses. Into this cloistered life steps Ibarra, creating ripples, just like Christ’s Resurrection appearance forever alters Mary Magdalene’s reality. Yet, this is only the first of a family of resemblances. Like the Magdalene, it is the voice (and not the sight) of the one being awaited that María Clara recognizes, that informs her of his presence.

The lovers’ initial documented tryst on the azotea is inaugurated by a refer-ence to the Paradise narrative, which, as already explained, is the foundation of the Easter account. Each half of the enamored pair is introduced by Rizal as a “sister of Cain” and a “brother of Cain,” indicating ancient relationships which go beyond the romantic. Moreover, since the idyll is on the roofless azotea, it therefore partakes of the open air and free spaces of that first garden from a time before time when the earth was still unencumbered with the structures of humans.

As implied by the “idilio” of the chap-ter’s title, what is conjured on these pages

is a lost Eden. The reader is presented with intimacies suffused with the sweetness of the “first years of our childhood, our joys, our pleasures, and all the happy past which you gave life to while you were in our town.” There are also tales of bathing in “brooks under the shade of the bam-boo,” “butterflies with their rainbow col-ors and the tints of mother of pearl as they swarmed about among the flowers” and even a “crown of leaves and orange blos-soms” whose partner was a crown of vines. Mention is actually made of the “lotus ef-fect” of Europe adding still another utopi-an metaphor. These narcotic reminiscenc-es result in a languid stupor that makes it easy to read into the fondly recounted ju-venile game of giving the Latin and Span-ish terms for the plants and flowers that grew on the riverbanks, an allusion to Adam and Eve’s naming of all that dwelt in Paradise as a measure of their sovereignty.

Yet, in the midst of all this torpor, when Ibarra teases his sweetheart about “that hand which for so long a time you had not allowed me to touch” one begins to feel again the vague stirrings of the Eas-ter injunction. For the memory of the un-touched hand comes with the recollec-tion of the comfort that his fiancée had of-fered at the time of his mother’s demise, a memento of how the Fall resulted in the loss of innocence and the inevitability of death. Later on, when María Clara for-bids access to the letter that she keeps in a pouch near her heart, with the words “You must not touch this,” then it is clear that the full power of the Resurrection narra-tive is in force. For the letter serves as a painful reminder that Ibarra still has much to do to settle his appointed business.

Like Christ in the garden of the sepul-cher, the determined swain must leave the idyll on the azotea to go to the family buri-al plot, to carry out the will of both father and fatherland. María Clara understands all this and when she says, “Go, I won’t


detain you any longer,” it is almost as if she is voicing out what may have been on Mary Magdalene’s mind that Easter morn-ing. The last request of the Noli’s heroine is that Ibarra bring the flowers that she had picked and place them on his parents’ grave—as if in recognition of the evan-gelical truth that the way to salvation goes from one garden to another, passing first through the darkness of a tomb.

Tomb references are found scattered throughout the Noli. There is the final rest-ing place of the Ibarra family in a grove in San Diego, the spot where Sisa and Elías’ bodies were cremated. There is the lake it-self into which the body of Ibarra’s father, Don Rafael, was thrown. There is also the municipal cemetery where the dead lay waiting for a stray animal to warm their bones with their body fluids. One could even add to the inventory, the author’s sly suggestion that the entrance to the fish-pens in Laguna de Bay bear the Latin in-scription taken from what, according to Dante, is written over the gates of Hell itself. A Biblical exegesis is much in evi-dence here allowing for the interplay of death and salvation to shadow a carefree picnic. Finally, Pilosopong Tasio appears to suggest that the whole epic penned by Rizal emerges from the opened tomb much like the story of Salvation itself when he declares:

“observemos bien cómo desarrollará el Destino la comedia que ha empezado en el cementerio.” [“Now let’s watch how Destiny will develop the drama that began in the cemetery”]

A last image remains and it is the one that, figuratively, comes closest to the sep-ulcher in the Gospel story. When Ibarra holds a ceremonial groundbreaking for his school, a deep trench is dug which the guests of honor must enter, a chilling reminder of the burials that must occur

someday in everyone’s future. It may even be pointed out that when Fr. Francisco Blancas de San José preached his Easter sermon in the opening decades of the sev-enteenth century, he described the holy tomb as a “cabaong bato”[stone coffin] and as a “longang bato.” [stony lair]. This idea of a stone coffin certainly approximates the receptacle hewn from rocks and described by Rizal as “tomb-like” and which was to hold a kind of time capsule designed to “preserve for the future the records of the past.” Already a resurrection motif may be detected, for even as valuable pieces are entrusted to the ground, the assurance is given that they will be brought to light again someday.

When the sabotaged superstructure of pulleys and columns collapses on Ibarra, he is momentarily lost in a cloud of pul-verized debris. María Clara is seen to freeze, “pale, motionless and speechless.” Fortunately, the hero eventually reemerg-es: “when the dust had cleared a little, they saw Ibarra standing among beams, posts and cables, between the windlass and the heavy stone….” The young man is amaz-ingly whole, like Christ arising from the sepulcher ready to meet Mary Magda-lene to ask her to share the good news. No wonder that Ibarra’s survival is met with cries of “A miracle! A miracle!”

It should be expected then that one of the novel’s most dramatic moments, the final meeting of the ill-starred lovers in Chapter 55, will be legible through the lens of John 20:13 to 17. To make such a read-ing more productive however, it is neces-sary to revisit certain discussions on one of the most famous scenes in the Bible.

Barbara Baert has explained that the Easter episode consists of three important turns which correspond to three ways of seeing: at first, Mary Magdalene mistakes Christ for the gardener. Second, when she hears him call her name, she recognizes him as her master, crying out “Rabboni”

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or teacher. Third, after he admonishes her with the confusing “Noli me tangere,” it is only then that she has the epiphany which he asks her to share with the rest of the world: that she has witnessed the Resurrection.65

From another source comes a similar observation:

The vision that is given is complex: first indecisive, then supplemented by speech, and finally held at a distance, able to see only the time of knowing that this vision must be allowed to leave.66

These three ways of seeing are mani-fested in the different conventions by which Christ is depicted. When he is shown as a gardener, then the implica-tion is that he is the Christ who has not yet come so that humanity does not fully know him. Portrayed in everyday clothes, he becomes the historical Jesus that Mary Magdalene had interacted with, touched, and come to love. Finally, when he is il-lustrated with his torso exposed and his raiment in disarray, it is clear that Jesus is now the Son of God whose body still bears the marks of the suffering and death by which he had purchased eternal life. Sometimes these pictorial conventions are conflated so that one sees the body of the Redeemer displayed even while his gardener’s tools are still visible. Then again, the torso may be unscarred, an allu-sion that all is returned to a state of perfec-tion by the Resurrection.

This evolving gaze where a viewer’s perception of a subject may change is ev-ident in the final meeting between Ibarra and Maria Clara. Ibarra first regards the young maiden as unworthy of trust. Only after she explains that she exchanged his letter with the epistles of her mother to ensure that there would be no proof of the illicit relationship between Doña Pía and Father Dámaso, does Ibarra see her

in a different, more saintly light. Yet, fal-lible human that he is, he waivers and re-turns to chiding her for agreeing to marry another man. Whereupon María Clara re-plies that she is marrying against her will. She explains that without love she will never belong to anyone.

Only then is it made clear to all in-cluding Ibarra that she is now a revitalized woman, strong in her sense of self. Like Christ who goes from unfamiliar garden-er to beloved mentor and then Savior in Mary’s eyes, the lass from San Diego also makes a transition, in just one scene, from traitor to saintly caricature to a woman who is in charge of her destiny, while re-maining, essentially, Maria Clara.

At this point in the chapter, the nar-rative line of John’s Gospel takes over, re-quiring Ibarra to make good his exit just like Christ, too, had to leave. As the novel draws to a close, the reader knows that the parallelism is complete because the Re-deemer and the young hero are both going to their fathers. Jesus is ascending to Heav-en, while Ibarra is about to embark on the lake whose limpid waters cover the body of Don Rafael. María Clara, just like the other Mary, remains calm as she lets the light of her life go, knowing that this is the way that things must be. What makes her composure even more noble is the under-standing that hers is an act of blind faith, for, as she herself intones, “the future is dark and my destiny is wrapped in gloom.”

In the Johannine narrative, the Eas-ter episode in the garden is followed by the passage on Thomas, the incredulous apostle. The parallelism with the novel is fleshed out even further with the line: “‘But the proof, had you any proof? You needed proofs!’ exclaimed Ibarra, trem-bling with emotion.” The similarities are reconfirmed when Maria Clara says “Ah you doubt me! You doubt the friend of your childhood who has never hidden a thought from you.”


Later on, even while Christ will al-low Thomas to touch his body he will ad-monish him with: “You have come to be-lieve because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”

In a sense, Christ’s description of “those who have not seen” is a reference to the Magdalene too, because she recog-nized him as “Rabboni” from hearing his voice. This indicates that hers was not a faith based on seeing.

Similarly, the Magdalene has also been characterized by Jean-Luc Nancy as “hav-ing eyes that have already been known to see into the night of the invisible.” More-over he states:

You see, but this seeing is not and cannot be touching, if touching itself had to figure the immediacy of a presence; you see what is not present and you touch the untouch-able that holds itself beyond the reach of your hands, just as he whom you see be-fore you is already leaving the place of the encounter.67

It may be suggested that this impeach-ment of the over-reliance on the eyes can also be discerned in Rizal’s novel. At dif-ferent parts of the Noli, the reader will ex-perience passages that emphasize the oth-er senses. One example should suffice:

El cielo era azul: una fresca brisa, que no olía a rosa, agitaba las hojas y las flores de las enredaderas —por esto se estremecían los cabellos de ángel—las plantas aéreas, los pescados secos y las lámparas de China. El ruido del saguán que removía las turbias aguas del río, el paso de los coches y carros por el puente de Binondo llegaban distin-tamente hasta ellos… [The sky was blue and a fresh breeze, not yet laden with the fragrance of roses, stirred the leaves and flowers of the vines; that is why the cy-presses, the orchids, the dried fishes, and

the Chinese lanterns were trembling. The splash of paddles in the muddy waters of the river and the rattle of carriages and carts passing over the Binondo bridge came up to them distinctively…]

It could be further conjectured that since the two significant scenes between Ibarra and María Clara had already ex-pressed the evangelical trope so effectively, Rizal felt that there was no need for a third iteration. This could be the reason why he chose to excise the meeting of Elías and Salome. It is such a short chapter that it seems strange that Rizal would remove it to save space and money as is commonly thought. Reviewing the scene as recon-structed in the Lacson-Locsín translation, one may note the need for the hero (in this case Elías) to leave, to tear himself away from the arms of his beloved, because he must go on to fulfill a promise and repay a debt. Is it possible that the episode was discarded not because it did not contrib-ute to the story but because it would only duplicate and therefore weaken the Johan-nine references of the other two chapters featuring Ibarra and María Clara?

As has been demonstrated, the tropol-ogy of the Easter epiphany, as enshrined in the gospel of John, suffuses and drives the story of Rizal’s famous first novel with some implications even for his second work. Restoring the Biblical connection to the Noli Me Tangere will then give rise to new readings.

Two MariasFor many years, there hung in the Ses-sion Hall of the Father Provincial’s quar-ters at the convent of Santo Domingo, a large painting. It was a portrayal by Juan Arzeo of the great patron of the Philippine Province of the Dominican order, Mary Magdalene.68 One source gives the year of creation as 1830.69 Eventually the canvas was transferred to the Dominicans’ new

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campus in Sampaloc, sparing it from the wanton destruction of much of Manila by the Japanese and the Americans in the last days of the Second World War.

Almost nothing is known about Juan Arzeo except that he had been praised by three different writers for his skill, one of them even likening him to the court paint-er of the Spanish kings. A few other works are signed by him including another large canvas, this time dated to 1836, depicting San Pascual Baylon,70 the very same saint before which the childless, just like María Clara’s mother, danced to ask for the favor of conception.

In contrast to the paucity of data on its creator, the painting of Mary Magdalene speaks volumes. The saint occupies the very center of the work, clad in what may be a yellow robe. Her long hair touches the ground but she does not seem to care. Nei-ther does she notice the exquisitely formed vessel of ointment. Her attention is focused on the crucifix that she cradles in her hands.

All these details have much to convey since they may be read as markers of what is known about the repentant saint. Schol-ars have clarified how the Mary Magda-lene that most people are familiar with is a construct involving the conflation of many women from the Gospels. Into the saint have been folded Mary of Magdala; Mary of Bethany; Mary of Egypt; the woman who anointed Jesus feet with fine oint-ment in the house of Simon the leper; the woman from whom was cast seven devils; the remorseful woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears, wiped them with her hair and then anointed them. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the Magdalene was a reformed prostitute71 and yet this is an idea which continues to persist.

Features in the Arzeo painting that have Gospel basis would include the pres-ence of the ointment vessel along with the saint’s long hair both of which allude to

the feet-wiping scene. Meanwhile, the cru-cifix in the Magdalene’s hands is a refer-ence to her presence at Golgotha though Mark, Matthew, and Luke state that Jesus’ friends had to watch from a distance. It is only in John that one reads of a Mary of Magdala standing by the cross.

Details without Gospel basis would in-clude the color of the saint’s garment for as Michelle Lambert-Monteleon has pointed out, at the time of the Renaissance, yellow was reserved for women of ill repute.72 Ar-zeo may have opted for a golden robe for his subject because of her undeserved and unscriptural association with prostitutes.

Other apocryphal references abound. To the saint’s right, one will see the mouth of the cave where stands another cross fes-tooned with the symbols of the Passion. Beyond is a bright sky across which birds are flying. Beneath the birds is a large drag-on. These images reflect a rarely encoun-tered narrative about the Magdalene: a

Mary Magdalene (ca. 1830) by Juan Arzeo, UST Museum


source reports a tradition that when the Repentant One went to live in a cave, St. Michael guarded the entrance to keep evil spirits out. This tale is clearly the reference point of the symbols on the right, except of course for the fact that the heavenly sentinel has been replaced with a Passion cross.73

To Mary Magdalene’s left are another set of attributes that do not appear in gos-pel accounts. There are objects such as a whip, an hourglass, a skull and a book which are only mentioned in non-Bible sources.74 The whip may allude to self-sac-rifice and the purification of the body. The skull and the hourglass refer to the pass-ing of time and the inevitability of death, while the book speaks of the Word of God.

It is perhaps the setting that restores Mary Magdalene to the context of the Easter encounter retold by John. For the cave may be perceived as a reference to the sepulcher which Jesus had vacated in his triumph over Death. Mary has figu-ratively reclaimed the tomb as her own place of meditation, sacrifice, and renewal. The angels strewing flowers above her and the stream may be seen as portents of the promised return to Paradise, the answer to the yearning for rebirth.

What this fine work indicates is that the painting’s Philippine creator and/or commissioner may have been conversant with a wide range of discourses on the Magdalene. One sees a familiarity with a variety of details culled from the Repen-tant One’s tales. The painting represents the intersection of complex currents of knowledge which have managed to tra-verse the oceans.

One wonders what other Magdalene traditions had reached the Philippine ar-chipelago. Were people aware, for exam-ple, that the penitent saint was usually characterized as young, rich, and beau-tiful? Were people aware that she was

supposed to have given her jewels away?75 When contemplating these details, a vague recollection begins to stir. Do not these traits describe someone else?

In European traditions, Mary Mag-dalene is, in fact, linked with leprosy. As Susan Haskins, in her landmark book on the saint, reports, the Magdalene’s cha-pels were often placed outside town walls, because they were “associated with leper hospitals, of which Mary Magdalene, with her supposed sisterly relationship with St. Lazarus, was a patron.” 76

Evoking the image of the leper at this point in the essay stirs a waxing memo-ry of another María. A query presents it-self: would the members of the Philip-pine public that read Rizal’s book have discerned a connection to the saint in the incident where the young heroine reaches out to a social pariah and gives him an in-credible gift?

Then again, a legend is recounted that the Blessed Virgin Mary and her namesake from Magdala shared a special affinity for each other. As proof of their relationship,

Image of Mary Magdalene from the side altar of Binangonan Church in Rizal

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the mother of Jesus gave Mary Magdalene a relic, a piece of the prepuce of the Holy Infant obtained from his circumcision.77 Such a fragile object would have certainly been housed in its own relicario or locket.

A question then begs to be asked: was Rizal aware of these linkages? Had he come across these stories while in Eu-rope? At the very least, he could have had the chance to study a number of images of the Magdalene while in Madrid. At the time Rizal was a student at the Academia de Bellas Artes, for example, there were at least three portraits of the Repentant One which were already in the collection.

Could Rizal have heard stories about the Magdalene while still at home? Cer-tainly, the Laguna de Bay region where the young Jose grew up had many images of the Lady of Magdala. Two towns in this vicinity (Pililla and Magdalena) had the Magdalene as their patron.

Gradually, with the revelations on the affinity with lepers and the gift of a relic, the image of the santa pecadora begins to fade and what comes into full focus is María Clara. This is as it should be, for, as Virgilio Almario has pointed out, the Noli Me Tangere of Rizal really traces the trajec-tory of the maiden’s awakening.78

At the beginning of the novel, María Clara is shown in all her innocence. Hers was an existence that was shielded from the harshness of life. Life, though, has a way of intruding. Her encounter with the leper probably marked her real initiation into a more complex world, for her impul-sive act of charity did not bring unmiti-gated applause. With the sudden arrival of Sisa and her macabre dance with her diseased partner, the young heiress would have to confront the fact that the abomina-tion that is untouchability is everywhere and no one is spared, not the insane, not the leprous, not even the beautiful.

By the end of the Noli, María Clara could now see her realm with different

eyes. She had come to understand that as a bastard fathered by a priest who must have forced himself on a helpless woman, she was not exempt from the blows, she was not immune to the whispers.

When the time comes to bid her loved one farewell, she stands ready to give a full accounting of herself. Upon hearing her story, Ibarra is so moved that he calls her a saint: “Tú eres una santa!” With these words, metaphor and metonymy have merged. María Clara of the imagination has become Mary Magdalene the inspi-ration. Unfortunately, the import of this moment is obscured when Charles Der-byshire translates “santa” as “angel.”

Could Derbyshire have sensed that “santa” is a dangerous compliment? At any time the heroine is in danger of petrifica-tion. Instead of a living person she may be frozen into a statue to take her place in the mockery of a procession. Even Ibarra—perhaps because his own epiphanies are still a novel away—regresses and accuses his fiancée of infidelity.

María Clara will have none of this. In her eloquent defense of herself she in-tones what is probably one of the most moving lines in the entire novel:

…pero sabe que yo amo una sola vez, y sin amor jamas seré de nadie. [But know, that I have loved but once and without love I will never belong to any man].

It will be seen that she does not actually swear undying fidelity to the young swain but declares that without love she will be-long to no one. Once more, Derbyshire’s translation loses the full impact of Maria Clara’s self-actualization. He renders “na-die” as “no man” instead of “no one”, in-sinuating a masculine agent when, in fact, Rizal’s choice of words suggests that the heroine may have been asserting her own will. This is borne out by the fact that, ear-lier in the same conversation, Maria Clara


tells Ibarra that she does not want his peace for peace she would give herself: “ No quiere esa tranquilidad que me rega-las; la tranquilidad me la daré yo misma.” She ends the Noli as her own person.

María Clara does something else that sometimes surprises readers. Contrary to what is expected of a nineteenth-century maiden, the young lady takes her lover’s face in her hands and kisses him. Repeat-edly, on his lips she would kiss him: “Ma-ria Clara cogio la cabeza del joven en-tre sus manos, le beso repetidas veces en los labios.” Even Almario79 would not be able to suppress what is tantamount to a whistle.

With this last gesture the heroine dem-onstrated the power of the tactile that is the incantation at the very core of the nov-el. She ignores what Vincent Ferrer had said in his sermon about Mary Magda-lene: that saints and saintly women should not kiss.80 She shows the world that hers is not a heart of ivory. She is fully human and unwilling to be dragged through the streets against her will. She is a lustful, yearning woman who needs to know the feeling of lips upon lips, who possesses the passions, desires, and the ecstasies to match every Magdalene ever painted that had thrust out her breasts and stretched out her hands, hoping, one last time, to touch perfection.

This is what makes her self-sacrifice so poignant. This is what makes her decision to enter the convent, rather than partici-pate in the travesties around her, so pain-ful. For that which will be secluded and cloistered is not a saint but a living, feel-ing, breathing sinner.

A Latin American scholar has posited that part of the santa pecadora’s appeal was the fact that she was clearly aware of the needs of the flesh.81 Seeing that the Mag-dalene may have been the real inspiration for the Noli’s heroine, one can now fully appreciate a Maria Clara who can defy her

supposed father, reduce a powerful friar to tears, and ultimately, let go of her own lov-er even as she kisses him with all the pas-sion that such a relinquishing requires.

In the Fili, María Clara’s reliquary is ex-changed for a gun. Yet, it will be seen that guns do not always win revolutions. Ibarra fails to pry open the convents to claim his prize. María Clara eludes him once again, returning instead to the God that is her God, the Father that is her Father. For it is as she had said before, she belongs to no one but herself. In the face of her hard-won self-actualization, one can only do as Elías did. He took off his hat and bowed.

For Rizal, María Clara was Patria, she was Filipinas. The author has Ibarra tell her this during their idyll on the azotea at the beginning of all things. This is why her song on the lake is all about the joy of liv-ing in one’s country. This is also why her song is so sad. Wondrously, Mary Magda-lene is Filipinas too. For she is, after all, the saint after whom the Philippine province of the Dominicans is named.

Appreciating the connection between the two Marias within the discourses on the Johannine Easter narrative allows one to see an exchange of roles. While in John it is Christ who is perceived in three dif-ferent ways by Mary Magdalene, in the Noli, it is the Magdalene’s surrogate, Ma-ria Clara, who is subjected to this shift-ing view during her last encounter with Ibarra. This effectively supports Almario’s assertion that it is the Lady of San Diego and her enlightenment which are the true focus of the novel just as it is Christ who is the focus of the Gospels. Such an asser-tion makes sense since Maria Clara is Pa-tria. If the young maiden could awaken to the realities of her world and take action, so too could Filipinas.

Raquel Reyes’s discussions on Rizal’s attitudes towards women’s bodies should serve as reminders not to read the actua-tions of Maria Clara as indications of the

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national hero’s progressive gender atti-tudes.82 Indeed the perceived valiant ges-tures of the maiden from Laguna were probably more rooted in the author’s con-cern to animate what was essentially his central metaphor for Patria. As such, it is not so much women who could blaze a trail to a better life but Filipinas itself as embodied by the Noli’s heroine. The ca-pacity to find her own peace, to realize that she belongs to no one but herself, the power to defy convention, these are attri-butes that Rizal is claiming not for Phil-ippine womanhood but for his beloved Patria.

Austin Coates noted in the last chap-ters of his biography on Rizal that Maria Clara was “the only major character whom it is difficult to visualize particularly by comparison to the other robust characters around her.”83 What is finally clear is that, all this time, scholars like Coates may have been searching in the wrong place. If they had only known how and where to look, they would have seen that a vivid portrait of the heroine of the Noli has been carried in processions or hung in many a home and church in Filipinas. More importantly, such a portrait has long occupied a place of honor, dominating the Session Hall of the Father Provincial’s Quarters at the Convent of Santo Domingo.

Touching the UntouchableJean-Luc Nancy has pointed out that the phrase “Noli me tangere” implies a context which is situated “in a register of warn-ing before a danger.”84 As such, the phrase will always carry this inherent imperiled sense with it, no matter how it is used. It is perhaps for this reason that Rizal sought to initially conceal his work’s title. When he instructed Evaristo Aguirre to refer to his novel as “Sampagas”85 it was as if he was hoping to subsume darker insinua-tions under an innocent layer of perfumed blossoms.

The entrancing power of the novel clearly does not just lie with the savagery with which it exposed the conditions of the colonized archipelago. It may also have to do with the prohibition implied by the title, a prohibition which is generally tak-en to apply to the realm of touch. What this suggests is that even before the Noli’s social expositions and diatribes can be analyzed and reanalyzed in the search for clues on Rizal’s political agenda, it must first be recognized that the novel should be approached through a privileging of the tactile.

In this regard, one can now see that Rizal’s Noli is peppered with passages made piquant by that most basic instru-ment of the touch: the hand. This is in keeping with Barbara Baert’s observation on the “Noli me tangere” passage, where what she calls the “typology of hands” underscores the importance of gestures: “The way hands are presented is indisput-ably an essential element of the analysis of Noli me tangere. The message ‘do not touch me’ is understood from the conven-tion of the hands.”86

To this may be added Nancy’s words:

In its pictorial representation, Noli me tangere usually gives rise to a remarkable game of hands: approach and designation of the other; arabesque of slender fingers; prayer and benediction; suggestion of a light touch; a brushing; an indication of caution… a promise or a desire to hold each other or to hold each other back…. Not only are they often at the center of the composition, but they are actually like the composition itself…87

Unscrolling the gestural landscape of the Noli then is almost like surveying a retablo of statues with different manual configurations. The very first hand to ap-pear in the novel is that of Tía Isabel who extends hers “to her countrywomen to be


kissed exactly as the friars do.” One sees in this early scene that the basic ironies, the inner inversions, and the foundation-al tensions of the entire tome are already being fleshed out. This detail is espe-cially poignant since Capitán Tiago will, later on, perform the same act with the priests—though it is he who will be doing the kissing.

As the opening chapter unfolds one sees “hands crossed behind…backs” and fists striking the arms of chairs in anger. Later on, the reader will understand the chagrin involved when Ibarra “slowly with-drew his extended hand” after it went un-acknowledged by Fr. Dámaso. This embar-rassment makes the comfort of other ges-tures even more palpable: the soft feeling of both the lieutenant’s and María Clara’s hands on Ibarra’s shoulder. The lieutenant was trying to empathize with the saddened young man who was contemplating “a country where everything is so unstable,” while the maiden was easing the burden of her fiancé at the death of his mother.

There will also be more violent actions such as the blows that many characters in the novel endure, be they unruly spec-tators in a procession or a petty official’s irrepressible wife. Sometimes, gesticula-tions can even be ironic as in the case of the pious women reaching to kiss a priest’s

hands only to be flicked away. It was al-most as if Rizal wanted to create a parody of his own novel’s title.

What is critical to note here is that all throughout Rizal’s novel, hands are carry-ing the story along. This is in keeping with the tradition observable in paintings of the “Noli me tangere” scene where, small as it is, “the hand has often played a decisive role in the organization of the design, like a second-degree sign arranging, indeed in-dexing all the scene’s other gestures.”88

The renewed emphasis on the tactile, coupled with the restored scriptural link-ages make another of Nancy’s remarks germane:

If art and culture have seized upon this phrase, it has doubtless been to recover something in the Gospel that the latter had been seeking outside of itself, in this gap intrinsic to touch, in this insurmountable edge-to-edge that has also made touching, as Freud picked up, a major stake in taboo as the constitutive structure of sacrality. The untouchable—of which, to our West-ern eyes, the Hindu figure of the pariah is the most striking example—is everywhere where there is the sacred…89

This brings up a very important point that an evangelically-based rereading of

Images of hands. Left to right, from Tanay church, Rizal. From Pakil church, Laguna. From Tanay church, Rizal.

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the Noli uncovers: the issue of untouch-ability. For Rizal’s novel is full of referenc-es to tactile prohibitions that help to nail together the hegemonic social structures of Filipinas.

The most obvious example is that of the leper. The world of San Diego, for all its Christian pretenses, had no space for those who were suffering from dreaded illnesses. The reader sees how the town’s one leprous individual was consigned to living in an interstitial space like the cem-etery, with only the refuse of the dead for company. As pariah, he was exiled in his own country and excluded even from the cash economy. For as the novel eloquent-ly points out, what is the use of currency when nobody will accept it from one’s hands?

When the leper strives to reach be-yond the areas circumscribed to him, he is punished. When he saves a child who had fallen into a canal he is ordered flogged for “better be drowned than get the disease that you have.”

It is all these that María Clara defies in a manner which, once more, foregrounds the tactile. By giving her bejeweled reli-quary to an untouchable, she is literally turning the world of the Noli upside down. For her little locket contains within it a sliver from St. Peter’s boat that Jesus had ridden. As such, in this entire realm that claimed Christ as its master, it was the one thing that could be said to have touched the person of the Savior himself.

The leper responds in kind. Though he is no longer a creature of commerce, he rejoices, understanding how the value of María Clara’s gift is not a function of metal or gems but that of an object that had been willingly transferred from her hand to his. He presents her with his own princely ges-ture that is worthy of the world of subtle connections evoked by John: he buries his forehead in the imprint that the maiden’s feet had left in the dust.

At this point, the story takes a turn that emphasizes the structural and met-onymic links chaining together all forms of untouchability: Sisa enters the scene and commences to dance with the lep-er. The horror with which her act is met by the onlookers further exposes the real horror which is society’s hypocrisy. That Rizal is challenging the complacency of his readers is evidenced by the fact that he has María Clara turn to Ibarra to say: “What have you been able to do for that poor woman?”

Clearly, what Rizal is exposing here is a hegemony that brutalizes its women and its marginalized, then vilifies and os-tracizes them for being unable to resist their own brutalization. This is best illus-trated by the story of Elías whose grand-mother was forced by the cruelties of a dysfunctional system to become a prosti-tute for whom “honor and shame no lon-ger existed.” She then joined the masses of those who had lost their names. With the erasure of identities, those who society had cast out became known only as “the convict, the prostitute, the scourged,” gro-tesque variations of the untouchable.

Sisa herself is another example. The mere fact that she was paraded around town by the Guardia Civil in a burlesque of the great processions, already marks her as another hapless effigy to be laughed at, ridiculed, avoided, deprived of social con-tact. Her humiliation is total, for the ostra-cizing gaze is structural and therefore ev-erywhere. Even if she is not seen by any-one, there would still be the air and the light of day or “el aire y el luz del día”. Is it any wonder that she becomes touched in the head, or in Spanish, “tocado de la ca-beza,” preferring an escape to her memo-ries of primordial gardens in the company of vanished children?

Many of the novel’s women are actu-ally part of this pageant that generates untouchability as spectacle, thus further


enabling the subjugation of the subjected. Riding at the head of this imagined pa-rade, unperturbed that the leper and Sisa are still dancing beside her, is Doña Vic-torina who is so blinded by her subservi-ence to the system that she does not see that, as she flounces about, she is making a mockery of herself. Next comes Doña Consolación brandishing her whip which she uses on Sisa, which she threatens to use on Doña Victorina, which is like the one used on the leper, and which is ulti-mately used on herself. Then there are the women of the soldiers, the women who do not wear the tapis, whose skirts are yellow and green, who are singled out by the fact that they are easily recognized by their costume as the querida or mistress-es of the soldiery. Here clothing is impli-cated as markers for the judgmental gaze, colluding in the construction of the pros-tituted in the same way as Mary Magda-lene’s golden dress.

At the very end of this terrible pageant, a carroza is reserved for none other than María Clara. She is qualified to join her sis-ters because she too has been scarred. She was brought into this world by a mother who can be said to have been “ginalaw” or “tampered with ” by a priest. She is a bas-tard whose beauty raises arguments about heavenly interference, arguments that per-haps mask sly innuendos, knowing looks, whispers behind fans. As Sisa had demon-strated, the gaze is everywhere and falls on everything.

All processions end at the church and it is at the foot of the altar that this ma-cabre ensemble must stop. As Rizal had ably demonstrated, the “frailocracy” or friar rule had actively participated in the manufacturing of the untouchable. It was the friars who refused burial, who threw corpses out of cemeteries, who declared excommunications even while, as Rizal points out, priests were begetting illegit-imate children and then running off to

“America”. Ibarra would soon find out that, for the crime of laying a hand on a friar and inciting rebellion, he would be cut off and driven into hiding. He who once had the world at his feet would learn how it felt to live like a fugitive, beyond the grasp of the State.

Excluded from all the pageantry is a whole other class of persons that present-ed still another face of the untouchable: the Chinese. As the heathen, the govern-ment barely cared what happened to them as long as their affairs did not involve a “Spaniard or a priest.”

Rizal would show his readers that be-hind this non-status of the Chinese, the metonymies still held. For the leper, the original pariah, is described as wearing a “ragged coat and wide pantaloons, like those worn by the Chinese.” He also lives in a ragged shack near the “Chinese cem-etery, having intercourse with no one.”

The structures of exclusion are insidi-ous. At the beginning of the novel, when presented an example of a Chinese wa-ter carrier, who if he “finds it convenient,” could very well draw his water from the river which is also “bath, sewer, laundry, fishery, means of transportation and com-munication,” the reader could easily re-gard this simply as a humorous passage. It takes time to realize that the character-ization which is being created for the wa-ter carrier and all others of his race is one of cunning, deception, and corruption in pursuit of monetary gains. These traits al-lude to dehumanizing stereotypes which society casually supports, even as every-one is happy to deck their homes and al-tars with Chinese lanterns and candles.

The full malignancy of society’s cari-catures is seen when the Chinese are as-sociated with gambling and opium, leav-ing no room for other constructions. Per-haps the only sympathetic picture comes from Pilosopong Tasio who fondly re-calls how China is the home of swallows,

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immigrants who he joyfully awaits each year. He has even taken the trouble to communicate with the people from the lands where the birds originated, asking a friend to write phrases in Chinese.

Confrontations eventually explode as contradictions are ignited by the smoky notions of race. An incident is recount-ed in the Noli’s sequel, El Filibusterismo, where members of the different commu-nities (the natives, the mestizos and the Chinese) decided to face each other in church, every group electing a particular way of sitting that would be distinguish-able from the rest. The natives sat with one leg crossed over the other, the mes-tizos sat with their legs apart, while the Chinese sat with one foot raised on the seat. That the Spanish word “sentarse” which means “to sit” can be translated into about twenty terms in nineteenth century Tagalog90 shows how important sitting positions are in the Philippine con-text. That the participants thought of do-ing what they did indicates how modes of comportment for the human figure are created by and help create the political. That the authorities decided to intervene in this issue implicates the State’s efforts to control and inhibit each person’s larg-est unit for the tactile: the entire body itself.

Was Rizal making a statement about the Chinese? Again, it is difficult to make any conclusions as it is not a simple mat-ter to decipher how nineteenth century ilustrados constructed ethnic boundaries. Racquel Reyes has also pointed out that, alongside his Enlightenment perspectives, Rizal may have also harbored a certain “antipathy towards the Chinese.”91

Still another meaning of “untouch-able” is suggested by Leon Ma. Guerrero who points out that the title of Rizal’s nov-el could well refer to the “invulnerability of the Spanish friar,”92 the sense of being beyond the reach of retribution. Perhaps

it is this second interpretation which Rizal may also have wanted to address with one of the more dramatic scenes in the novel. When the “hand of God” is malicious-ly evoked by Father Damaso to justify a despicable act, Ibarra is so angered that he “dropped a heavy hand on the priest’s head.” With this passage, the author is ac-tually suggesting that the friars are not, af-ter all, as invincible as they appear.

Inner GeographiesWriting on the Easter encounter, Cyn-thia Lewis observed that “Mary’s dialogue with Christ was thought to have suggested a new way of seeing the world around her, of seeing it as a sign of another more real world.”93 This “new way of seeing,” then, may be what Benedict Anderson is refer-ring to when he discussed what he calls the “specter of comparisons.”94

When Ibarra first arrives in Manila, he finds himself staring at the Botanical Gardens and seeing instead its counter-part in Europe. Rizal describes this man-ner of looking with the phrase “demonio de las comparaciones.” Evidently, what An-derson designates as a kind of “double vi-sion” will have a way of bedeviling the per-ceptions of those who have felt the fresh breezes of another continent. This “double vision” too could be what Rizal is alluding to when he advises Ibarra to “see with his opera glasses.” Among the things that such a seeing would have produced would have been “magical and fantastical festivals, the like of which is sometimes seen in the great theaters of Europe.”

Such a seeing would also have identi-fied a splendid emblem that is produced by and helps produce what Serge Gruz-inski has called the “mestizo planet”95 in which Filipinas itself is located:

el arcangel, mordiendose el labio inferior tiene los ojos encendidos, la frente arru-gaba y las mejillas de rosa; embraza un


escudo griego y blande en la diestra un kris joloano. [the Archangel is biting his lower lip and with flashing eyes, frowning forehead, and rosy cheeks is grasping a Greek shield and brandishing in his right hand a Sulu kris.]

This double vision can be quaint and even enlightening, as is the case when Rizal describes San Diego as akin to Rome “but on a scale of nipa and bamboo.” The com-parisons may also be as subtle as the flutter of an eyelash. When María Clara is said to be attired in the pintoresco traje de las hijas de Filipinas, it takes time to realize that a strange external perspective has been quietly insinu-ated. For it can be asked: who considers this quotidian clothing, picturesque? Only then is the external viewpoint unmasked as one that is refracted by a prettifying but ulti-mately subjugating lens.

Anderson himself would later admit that his translation was not accurate.96 Demonio, after all, is not specter but demon. Given the word chosen by Anderson, the opera-tive simultaneity becomes a pesky and ig-norable illusion, at best a glorification of a non-presence.

Yet, as the analysis of the seventeenth century sermons of Father Blancas de San José has shown, the residents of Filipinas consider demonio as a palpable force to be reckoned with in a world whose sentient inhabitants were both human and non-hu-man.97 In fact, this perspective implies that demonio de las comparaciones is not just imbedded in a terrestrial context. Given the sacral inflections of the biblically-in-spired reading being proposed by this es-say, it may now be suggested that what An-derson’s aforementioned translation miss-es is that the comparaciones may actually be situated on the cosmological plane. As such, what is being juxtaposed is not just Filipinas and Europe. The more relevant parallelism being drawn may ultimately be between Filipinas and the heavenly realm.

Within the parameters set by this es-say’s rereading of Rizal, such an interpre-tation makes sense especially when placed in the light of the tropologies that have al-ready been discussed. After all, the scene that ushered in this bi-local way of seeing involves a garden which, in turn, evokes a Paradise allusion, very much in keeping with the exegetical analysis being advo-cated here.

All throughout the novel, Rizal is con-stantly showing his readers how the peo-ple of Filipinas have constructed their world in a way that recognizes the syn-chronized spheres of the physical and the spiritual. Our Lady of Antipolo, for ex-ample, is a constant presence. Prayers are said to her all the time, along with prom-ises of a new silver cane if she were to grant a petition. Her attributes are well known: “She was a very strict Lady, watchful of her name, and according to the senior sacris-tan of Antipolo, an enemy of photography. When she was angered she turned black as ebony, while the other Virgins were soft-er of heart and more indulgent…” What emerges is that this is a statue that has human emotions and participates in the

Demon-like sculpture, Church of Pakil, Laguna

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affairs of the world, even rejecting new technologies such as photography.

In the opening scene of the Noli, it will be noted that Rizal takes care to show that artworks with subjects such as Purgatory and Hell that are inspired by European theology are separate from one depicting “Our Lady of Peace and Prosperous Voy-ages who is worshipped in Antipolo, vis-iting in the disguise of a beggar the holy and renowned Capitana Inez during her sickness.” Moreover, a reference to the sculptor, Bonifacio Arévalo, suggests that the aforementioned piece is probably a kind of three-dimensional tableau pre-served in a glass vitrine. Arevalo is said to have utilized a doll technique while work-ing with wood and cloth to fashion his figures,98 resulting in a more robust tan-gibility than a flat painting. The implica-tion here would be that the Blessed Virgin Mary, in her avatar as the Lady of Antipo-lo who is pretending to be a beggar, is ver-ifiably present on Philippine soil, visiting ailing matrons.

The Lady is also depicted in a carved panel (once hanging in Antipolo church)99 listening to the prayers of sailors from Spanish ships during the Dutch siege of the city of Cavite. Evidently, the Virgin is assisting the Spanish side and thus perpet-uating Hispanic domination. Nonethe-less, the fact that the Lady is intervening in Philippine history while standing on Philippine soil begins to suggest that the Mother of God just may, someday, be per-suaded to listen to the aspirations of the subjugated masses of the archipelago.

The vitrine of the Virgin Mary visit-ing the sick Capitana calls to mind paint-ings of the death of St. Joseph, which were popular icons in the nineteenth and twen-tieth centuries. These paintings depicted the Holy Spouse on his sickbed, attend-ed to by Christ and his mother. In many examples of this genre, one will note that the objects around the dying saint as well

as the setting indicate not only wealth but also a Philippine context, as if St Joseph had elected to spend his last days in a qui-et mansion by the Pasig. What this subtly implies is that those who remain dutiful and loyal to the very end will be reward-ed with a stress-free demise in luxurious surroundings—a reading which actual-ly supports the status quo of the colonial hegemony. More importantly, such paint-ings again demonstrate that the denizens of heaven and the Bible are to be found in the Philippine islands as well. This is the sense too of the religious groups on Mount Banahaw who maintain that the Holy Land had been physically transferred to the slopes of their sacred mountain.100

René Javellana helps explain how these conjoined dual realms came about. He ob-serves that through the masterful bridg-ing of the Biblical and Tagalog experi-ences with the exploitation of symbols employed in sermons and other such in-terventions, preachers like Father Blancas de San José succeeded in “creating an oral world for the Tagalog convert,” which is described thus:

Our Lady of Antipolo at the port of Cavite. Escudero Museum


This created world fed the imagination of the Tagalog listeners and was crucial in the transformation of their culture into one that was Christian. Crucial to this transforma-tion was the metamorphosis of the Taga-log’s imagined universe. The transforma-tion occurred by lacing Tagalog experience within a new context and proposing a world peopled by idealized biblical figures which stood authoritatively outside both the Taga-log and the Spanish (Castilian) world.

It is one of the joys of the Noli to wit-ness the way Rizal deftly portrays how the people of his Patria negotiate with their heavenly neighbors who may be seen or unseen. Sometimes these neighbors are invisible and distant, reachable only through prayer or the occasional ejacula-tion: “Jesús María y José!” At other times, the spirit kingdom may be represented by statues, which can be wiped and kissed, propitiated by flowers or the hastily prom-ised treat. These effigies are everywhere—Capitán Tiago owns an entire army and to “recount the virtues and perfections… a whole chapter would barely suffice.” Part of their charm and utility is that, even for this most pragmatic of men, these statues present insightful social metaphors:

…un Niño Jesus vestido de Capitan Gen-eral, tricornio, sable y botas… esto para Capitan Tiago significaba que aunque Dios añadiese a su poder el de un Capitan Gen-eral de Filipinas, siempre jugarian con él los franciscanos como con una muñeca [a Christ Child dressed as a Captain-Gener-al with the three-cornered hat, sword and boots… which signified for Capitán Tiago that while God might include in His om-nipotence the power of a Captain General of the Philippines, the Franciscans would nevertheless play with Him as with a doll]

There is an instance when a saint be-comes part of the crowd. The exhausted bearers of the statue of St John set their cargo down in the midst of the procession. When they are reprimanded, one of them argues that in “the sacristy they leave him in a corner with the cobwebs.” Whereup-on Rizal presents his readers with this im-age: “So St. John, once on the ground, be-came one of the townfolk….” Such meld-ing with the populace is not surprising when the daughter of the gobernadorcillo is heard to say: “There goes our saint! I’ve lent him all my rings, but that’s in order to get to heaven.” Clearly, young people al-ready comprehend the order of things.

Detail of the Death of St. Joseph. Intramuros Administration Collection.

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Even St. Francis has become familiar-ized. As his carroza approaches, a bystand-er refers to him as “Giovanni Bernardone,” the name by which he was known in his hometown of Assisi. Everyone partakes of this familiarity, for Rizal reports how the stuff of St Francis’s clothing is shared by the entire ruling hierarchy: the guingon habit is worn not only by the statue of the saint, but also by the friars and finally, by the members of the Tertiary Brethren.

One reads of an especially wizened crone who suggests that the miraculous cross to patronize is the one that can ex-pand rather than the one that can perspire. With Solomonic wisdom she would ob-serve that everyone may sweat but only a few can grow.

Occasionally, the negotiations are purely consumerist. This is best illustrated by the scene where Capitán Tiago advises his daughter that she should:

enciende dos velas de á dos reales, una al Señor San Roque y otra al Señor San Ra-fael, patron de los caminantes! Enciende la lámpara de Ntra. Sra. de la Paz y Buen-viaje que hay muchos tulisanes. ¡Más vale gastarse cuatro reales en cera y seis cuar-tos en aceite que no tener después que pa-gar un rescate gordo!” [light two candles worth two reals each, one to St. Roch and one to St. Raphael, the protector of travel-ers! Light the Lamp of Our Lady of Peace and Prosperous Voyages, since there are so many tulisanes. It’s better to spend four reals for wax and six cuartos for oil now than to pay a big ransom later.]

The innate tensions between the two spheres may result in readings which carry the grain of subversion. When still anoth-er procession unfolds in the Fili, a coach-man evokes Anderson’s double vision as he questions his own situation:

“‘En tiempo de los santos,’ pensaba el coch-ero, ‘de seguro que no habías Guardia civ-iles, porque con los culatazos no se puede vivir mucho.’” [‘In the time of the saints,’ thought the cochero, ‘surely there were no civil guards, because one can’t live long on blows from rifle butts.’]

He then turns his gaze on the carroza carrying the Three Kings and proceeds to read the tableau according to the logic of his own world. Such a reading makes him marvel that the dark-skinned member of the trio is not thrown into jail for being so cheeky and playful in the presence of the other two monarchs who he presumes are Spaniards.

More importantly, in much the same way that Ibarra viewed the Botanical Gar-dens, the coachman stares at the King with the dusky complexion and sees instead the legendary Bernardo. Rizal then goes on to explain:

St. Francis receiving the stigmata. Pakil Church, Laguna


Los indios de los campos conservan una leyenda de que su rey, aprisionado y enca-denado en la cueva de San Mateo, vendrá un día a libertarles de la opresión. Cada cien años rompe una de sus cadenas, y ya tiene las manos y el pié izquierdo libres; sólo le queda el derecho. Este rey causa los terremotos y temblores cuando forcejea o se agita, es tan fuerte que, para darle la mano, se le alarga un hueso, que a su con-tacto se pulveriza. Sin poderse explicar el por qué, los indios le llaman el rey Ber-nardo, acaso por confundirle con Bernardo del Carpio. [The Indians in the country places preserve the legend that their king, imprisoned and chained in the cave of San Mateo, will come some day to free them. Every hundredth year he breaks one of his chains, so that he now has his hands and his left foot loose—only the right foot re-mains bound. This king causes the earth-quakes when he struggles or stirs himself, and he is so strong that in shaking hands with him it is necessary to extend to him a bone, which he crushes in his grasp. For some unexplainable reason the Indians call him King Bernardo perhaps by confusing him with Bernardo del Carpio.]

Once the chained king finally frees his right leg, the coachman pledged to of-fer his services and his horses, ready to die if need be. It would all be worth it, for Bernardo will end the reign of the Civil Guard. It is perhaps in recognition of this power to inspire loyalty and mobilize fol-lowers that Andrés Bonifacio and his men would carry out a ritual in a cave in the San Mateo area meant to evoke the impris-oned king’s blessing on the Revolution101.

What is remarkable is that, while Rizal notes how the mythic chained hero has be-come confused with the Bernardo Carpio character of the comedias, an additional conflation may have taken place involving

the Bernardo legend and an even more ob-scure tale also preserved among los indios de los campos. In her research on antings-antings,102 Nenita Pambid has uncovered how the central image of a large talisman continuously sold at the stalls in Quiapo is based on the story of a character called the “infinito Dios.” This story also includes a scene where a finger must be inserted into a cave much in the same way that Rizal de-scribes it, albeit in connection with Ber-nardo. All this just goes to underscore how the national hero’s novels can reso-nate with a deeper stratum of hidden in-ner narratives that lies beneath the surface of the perceivable world of both the Noli and the Fili.

Furthermore, what may also be dis-cerned in this passage on the coachman, the Three Kings, and Bernardo Carpio, is that a kind of hybridity is at play where “mimickry has the effect of undermining authority.103 As with the case of the tab-leau of the Virgin visiting a Philippine ma-tron and other examples discussed here, a reading of an image from the colonizers is localized in the coachman’s mind into a reincarnation that resembles the original but carries with it the possibilities of sub-version. To build on what Javellana had posited earlier, it can be seen that even as biblical figures were idealized, they were eventually transformed by their native in-terlocutors into forms that could allow for the possibility of a reimagining of the co-lonial order.

The perception of layer upon layer of meanings along with the consistent presence of the heavenly and the spiritu-al heighten the feeling in the novel that the sacred suffuses the very landscape itself. This is not surprising since Rizal grew up surrounded by a feminized ter-rain where mountains like Banahaw, Makiling, and even the Sierra Madre

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suggested primordial deities whose pres-ence charged the earth with an ancient energy.

The writer channels this energy into the Noli so that what emerges is a universe marked by the omnipresence of the spiri-tual. Landscape is sacralized as it is being personified. Even María Clara is united with the environment. Ibarra sees her as the embodiment of various sites in Europe and eventually of Patria itself.

Perhaps the best example of the inter-section of the terrain and of the sacred is seen in the way Laguna de Bay104 is con-structed in the epic of the Noli. Rizal had long been fascinated with this immense inland sea. In an essay in La Solidaridad, he would write: “On the fine sand along the shores of the lake of Bay we spent long hours of our childhood thinking and dreaming about what might be beyond, on the other side of the waves.”105

Laguna de Bay is the locus for the ex-ploration of an animist trajectory in the Noli, but one that is clothed in the robes of the Classical. One finds in the novel, for example, mention of the nymphs of the lake : “las sirenas del lago”. What comes to mind are the lines of a poet much admired by Rizal, Francisco Balagtas:

Masayang nimfas sa lawa ng Bai, sirenas ang tinig ay kawili-wili… [Lake Bai’s nymphs of joy profuse, sirens whose melodies seduce…]

The similarities between Balagtas and Rizal that have been extensively discussed by Virgilio Almario106 allow the reader to consider that the Poet of Bulacan and the Pride of Laguna may have both been us-ing Classical references to conjure an air of erudition and provide proofs of a fa-miliarity with European tropes that would lend their works prestige as well as credi-bility.107 To this, one might add that allud-ing to figures from Greco-Roman sources

suggested how in the Philippines, as in Eu-rope, humans shared their spaces with oth-er beings so that, as discussed in the Town Hall meeting recorded in the Noli, prin-cesses traveling about should always be careful not to encounter a tikbalang.

The lake is practically a protagonist in the novel, the subject of changing portrayals. The lake participates in the evolution of the main characters of the novel. In one instance, this magnificent body of water—which is central to the world of the Noli as it is central to the heartland of the Tagalog people—is presented pristine, like a blank slate:

El lago, rodeado de sus montañas, duerme tranquilo con esa hipocresía de los elemen-tos, como si la noche anterior no hubiese hecho coro a la tempestad. A los primeros reflejos de luz, que despiertan en las aguas a los genios fosforescentes, se dibujan a lo le-jos, casi en el confín del horizonte, pardus-cas siluetas…. [The mountain-encircled lake slept peacefully with that hypocrisy of the elements which gave no hint of how its waters had the night before responded to the fury of the storm. As the first reflec-tions of light awoke on its surface the phos-phorescent spirits, there were outlined in the distance, almost on the horizon, gray silhouettes….]

At other times the lake is stormy, re-flecting the disturbed emotional state of the main actors. The “hipocresía de los el-ementos” foreshadows that things are hap-pening behind the scene which may soon break like a storm. The blank slate will not remain unmarked much longer. Since the bones of Don Rafael repose in its watery depths, the lake merges with the father-land so much so that Ibarra, contemplat-ing death by drowning, tells himself that it would only mean a reunion with his family.

The events that befall the human pre-cinct ensure that even the lake will have to achieve its own epiphanies. In the chapter


on the picnic, Elías’ arms are character-ized as powerful, able to handle the paddle “like a pen.” This implies that something will be inscribed on the waves. Indeed, towards the very end of the Noli, it is the lake that will bear witness to Elías’ death, a tragedy whose only evidence, as detected by the pursuing agents of the State, is what is written on the pages of the lake in blood.

Perhaps the most poignant image—which clarifies how the lake is a site of contestation whose very fate reflects and is reflected by those inhabiting its shores—comes in another part of Elías’ sad tale. When his sister’s corpse is found, by the waters of Laguna de Bay, with a knife through her heart, one suddenly realizes that this is a portrayal of the lake itself. Seen on a map, Lake Bay is indeed shaped like a heart; at its very center is a long narrow island, aptly named Talim or dagger. Recalling further that in the lake-shore churches of Tanay and of Paete,108 there are painfully beautiful statues of the Blessed Mother cradling her son on her lap, her bosom stabbed by swords, then one finally comprehends the vastness of the metaphor that the great lake of the Mother (for that is what Bay means) pro-vides to all who will take the time to pause. Geography and the heavenly are now in-extricable from literature.

It is this exquisite confluence that al-lows the image of the lake to bear the story onwards. From a body of water framed by ylang-ylang and trees of orange, shadowed by flowers and climbing vines exhaling a delicate perfume, readers will see how it will lose its innocence by embracing the bodies of the fallen and oppressed. Finally, in the Fili, one more image of Laguna de Bay is presented:

¡Ve, nosotros te recordaremos! ¡En el aire puro de nuestra patria, bajo su cielo azul, sobre las ondas del lago que aprisionan montañas de zafiro y orillas de esmeralda;

en sus cristalinos arroyos que sombrean las cañas, bordan las flores y animan las libélulas y mariposas con su vuelo inci-erto y caprichoso como si jugasen con el aire; en el silencio de nuestros bosques, en el canto de nuestros arroyos, en la llu-via de brillantes de nuestras cascadas, a la luz resplandeciente de nuestra luna, en los suspiros de la brisa de la noche, en todo, en fin, que evoque la imagen de lo amado, te hemos de ver eternamente como te hemos soñado, bella, hermosa, sonriente como la esperanza, pura como la luz, y sin embargo, triste y melancólica contemplando nuestras miserias! [Go, we shall remember you! In the clear air of our native land, under its azure sky, above the billows of the lake which is en-laced by sapphire mountains and emerald shores, in the crystal streams shaded by the bamboos, bordered by flowers, enlivened by the beetles and butterflies with their

Pieta. Tanay Church, Rizal

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uncertain and wavering flight as though playing with the air, in the silence of our forests, in the singing of our rivers, in the diamond showers of our waterfalls, in the resplendent light of our moon, in the sighs of the night breeze, in all that may call up the vision of the beloved, we must eter-nally see you as we dreamed of you, fair, beautiful, radiant with hope, pure as the light, yet still sad and melancholy in the contemplation of our woes!]

What this jeweled splendor and purity of light imply is that the lake of Bay, itself, has transcended.

Painting with the Blood of My HeartThe writer, Harry Sichrovsky, actually claims in his book on Ferdinand Blumen-tritt, that “Rizal had seen in the Prado Mu-seum in Madrid the famous painting of Correggio which depicts the scene...”109 Unfortunately, Sichrovsky does not indi-cate his sources. It should also be stressed that though the paragraph in which this statement appears dwells on the origin of the novel’s title, no explicit explanation is given for mentioning the painting in the Prado. Evidently, Sichrovsky deemed it unnecessary to explore a Johannine exe-gesis as suggested by his cryptic reference to the painting. A tentative search through the Rizal–Blumentritt correspondence110 did not turn up any mention of the Cor-reggio piece at all.111

Created around 1525, Correggio’s painting of the “Noli me tangere” scene had been highly regarded for centuries. The piece hung for many years in the residence of the Ercolani family of Bologna who had commissioned it. Eventually, it was giv-en as a gift by the Duke of Medina de las Torres to Philip IV of Spain, grandson of the man after whom the Philippines was named. It was noted that a Father Fran-cisco de los Santos was “praising it in an effusive manner” when it was in the El Escorial. It is presumed that it was from

this palace that the painting was finally brought to the Prado in 1839.112

Considering its accession date, and if one were to believe Harry Sichrovsky, it is very possible that José Rizal saw this piece when he was living in Madrid. Interesting-ly, it is reported that Alfonso Ongpín, a well known Rizaliana specialist, had a framed print of the Correggio Noli me tangere in his collection.113 As recorded in an old photograph still kept by the Ongpin fam-ily, the print (which was donated to what was then the National Historical Institue in 1982114) had a caption on its frame:

NOLI ME TANGERE por Correggio 1494–1534Título inspirado por el Dr. Rizal Para su primera novela.

An error in syntax emerges, howev-er, when the last half is translated into

Correggio's Noli Me Tangere (1525). The Prado


English: “…title inspired by Rizal for his first novel.” Nevertheless a couple of chal-lenging questions arises: Had Don Al-fonso been aware that the original of the print was a source of inspiration for Rizal? Or did he keep the piece only because it shared the same title as the national hero’s famous novel?

Returning to the painting, one guide-book describes it this way:

Here Christ appears with his feet crossed in a position of instability which accentu-ates the see-saw motion of the arms, almost as if he were doing a step from a dance… the Leonardesque sfumato appears espe-cially in the flesh, but Correggio softens it… Mary Magdalene is represented with an expression of burning mysticism, as an anticipation of the Ecstasy of St. Theresa by Bernini. Thus her lips are ambiguously part-ed and her penetrating look is riveted on Christ’s gaze… The abundant blonde hair accentuates the Baroque expression. Mean-while her body trembles and draws back as she hears the commanding: Do not touch me from the mouth of the risen Christ.115

Another source points out the dy-namic counterbalances which may be perceived:

en la postura (agachada una, en vertical la otra); en el color (cálido y frío); y sobre todo en la expresión, extasiada una, sereno el otro, pero remarcando entre ambos la di-agonal mencionada a través de una interre-lación gestual, que aparte de enriquecer la iconografía de la escena, es de una enorme profundidad psicológica.116 [In the posture (one bent down, the other in a vertical); in the colors (hot versus cold); and above all in the expression, one in ecstacy, the other serene; what is remarkable is the diagonal line that is traced through the gestural in-terrelation, which apart from enriching the iconography of the scene, is of enormous psychological profundity.]

Examining the painting more closely, one will see that it is divided into two sec-tions with the division running along the diagonal, a device also employed in an old-er Noli me tangere by Giotto. The diagonal creates a brown triangle in the lower sec-tion where Mary Magdalene sits in what is presumably a patch of barren ground. The sense of infertility contrasts sharply with the fecund exuberance of the upper part. Here the figure of Christ is surrounded by luxurious foliage, sun-dappled fields, and glistening skies. At the boundary between the two areas are found the implements of the gardener.

It may be further proposed that the lush countryside is meant to evoke a place de-scribed elsewhere in the Bible: “Then the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and he placed there the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord made various trees grow that were delight-ful to look at and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. A river rises in Eden to water the garden, beyond there it divides and becomes four branches.”117 Meanwhile, the depiction of the dry earth, unrelieved by leaf or blos-som, echoes the tradition preserved in another tome, Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend, in which Mary Magda-lene is depicted as having exiled herself to a wasteland.118 The realization dawns that far removed as the verdant sanctuary may be from the desert of present existence, Christ’s triumph ensures that the Prom-ised Land will once more appear, glimpsed on the horizon, almost close enough to touch. Then again, all these may very well be an allegory of the soul thirsting for the sustenance of the Messiah.

In contrast to the elaborate costume of the woman before him, Christ is very simply wrapped in a cloth that looks to be in one piece. The cloth is not red or white like what one may expect but blue, the col-or of the heavens, Jesus’ destination.119 His

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pale torso is exposed, almost vulnerable. This is clearly an example of a Noli me tan-gere where the central point of contempla-tion is the resurrected body.

Christ’s entire figure participates in a montage of movement. The unstable dancer-like alignment of the torso and the legs plus the fact that one foot has been placed in front of the other (remi-niscent of the Fra Angelico) projects a dy-namism that is barely contained. This, to-gether with the image of Jesus’ foot frozen in mid-step, implies a transition from one realm to another—perhaps it is a hint that the time of migration from the wasteland to a newer, greener world has come.

Jesus’ feet are the only other part of the Redeemer’s body that is exposed. This seems to underscore that they are the point of intersection between Christ’s di-vinity and Mary Magdalene’s humility, the objects of her ministrations with her hair and tears. This may be the reason why, in countless paintings of the Crucifixion, it is the feet of the Savior dying on the cross that the Magdalene embraces.

What draws the greatest attention is Jesus’ right hand, which is poised in the midst of an expression. It is situated at the very heart of the painting, mediating be-tween Paradise and the desert. So power-ful is this graceful gesture that it has been suggested as the reference for Picasso’s tragic Blue Period painting, La Vie.120

In the case of other Noli me tangere ver-sions like that of Fra Angelico and Lavin-ia Fontana, Christ is shown fully clothed, carrying his horticultural implements. This is said to pertain to the Jesus who was not quite known, whose mysteries were not yet fully revealed. Then again it is sometimes conjectured that the Savior was depicted as such because his outward appearance remained that of a gardener.121

It was only through his call that Mary Magdalene recognized him—indicating that there are ways to understand the di-vine other than seeing.

Bronzino’s version, which is in the Louvre, is, like the Correggio, a celebra-tion of the resurrected body, evidenced by the way that Christ’s fine musculature is displayed. In the case of the Bronzino, the main features of the background are arranged along a trail, perhaps represent-ing a kind of odyssey. The trail begins at a lonely hilltop on which stand three crosses; it passes by a structure that may have housed the tomb, before finally los-ing itself in a bed of flowers. What sets off Bronzino’s work from the others is its in-tense sensuality. Right at its heart are the figures of Christ and Mary, their positions outlining a circle. Their balletic gestures also evoke a dance but, in contrast to the Cor-reggio piece, Jesus does not perform alone. Mary Magdalene complements his every movement, further enhancing the sense that there is a deep bond between the two.

It is helpful to clarify that of the paint-ings mentioned here, initial research has shown that only the Correggio and the Bronzino are known to have been in the collections of the Prado and the Louvre at a time when it would have been possible for Rizal to have visited these museums. The national hero had not written specifi-cally about the pieces in the Prado but it seems perverse to suggest that he never saw them given that he lived in Madrid. He had a keen interest in viewing artworks as evidenced by the letter that he did write about another museum, the Louvre. In his July 1883 epistle to his family, he reports seeing in Paris the canvases of “Leonardo de Vinci, Raphael, Titian, and Correg-gio.”122 If anything, this last quote should serve to show that Rizal was familiar with Correggio. Likewise, if indeed Rizal were so inclined and inspired, he could very well have examined other works related to the “Noli me tangere.” The Correggio is part of the Royal Collections in the Pra-do which included various portrayals of Mary Magdalene, alone or with Christ in the context of Biblical scenes.


The insight that emerges from study-ing these paintings is that the Easter meet-ing activates a whole complex of ambigui-ties and epiphanies that have challenged interpretation. Artists have discerned in the scene “not the ecstatic vision of a mir-acle but a delicate intrigue that takes shape between the visible and the invisible, each of the two calling and repelling the other, each touching the other and distancing it from itself…”123 Others have opined that aside from providing an opportunity to explore powerful and contradictory emo-tions,124 the scene presented a special ar-tistic challenge: to what extent should Christ be made recognizable?125

The Johannine passage and its many depictions in the visual arts set off a

seismic field of choices: should one touch or not, should one hold on, embrace or let go? What messages are being exchanged between the two standing there in the early morning light of the garden? What thoughts are rushing through the Magda-lene’s head, what scenes in her life is she reviewing?

These riddles and reflections can form the basis of a novel, the basis for the re-invention of worlds in the search for an-swers or for the right questions. Perhaps Rizal’s Noli may have involved an attempt to reimagine the insights and implications of John’s gospel in the fierce landscapes of nineteenth century Philippines. Yes, it is possible that in the tombs and gardens of the “Noli me tangere”, the Sage from Calamba had found the elements of his story.

Moreover, a deeper appreciation of the nuanced connection between Christ and the Magdalene which the paintings imply, adds a new dimension to an understand-ing of the relationship between Ibarra and Maria Clara. Likewise, the emphasis on the hands and body of the Risen One as seen in the work of Correggio may suggest the need for a deeper inquiry regarding notions of corporeality in the context of the society illustrated in the Noli.

All of these beg the query: was José Rizal aware of the portent and potency of what he may have touched? If he had in-deed stood before the Correggio in the Prado, did he have the lens to read what was written on the wall?

What is known is that Rizal had tak-en courses at one of the top art schools in Spain. He had also once expounded on the “Sense of the Beautiful” opining that painting was the art which pertained most to humans:

la Pintura reproduce cuanto Dios ha cre-ado, crea también como Él, sólo que entre muchas creaciones hay la diferencia entre lo limitado y lo infinito, entre la obra de

Bronzino's Noli Me Tangere (ca. 1560). The Louvre

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un Dios y la producción de un hombre.” [Painting, reproducing whatever God has created, creates also like Him, only that between their two creations there is the difference between the limited and the in-finite, between the work of a God and the production of a man].126

In this quote it may be detected that the national hero viewed the visual arts as reflecting, even in a limited form, the re-alities of the world. This is a stance that he would later elaborate on during his speech at the celebrations of Juan Luna’s and Fé-lix Resurrección Hidalgo’s victories, when he stressed that the winning works helped shed light on the problems of the Patria. As such, it is not too farfetched to imagine that Rizal could indeed discern in the Cor-reggio canvas the incipient images of the social issues he was about to conjure.

On the other hand, if Rizal had really been inspired by a painting in the writing of his novel, why did he not mention this when he explained his choice of title in his correspondence with Hidalgo, the artist? This is in light of the fact that Hidalgo is known to have sent his own letter to the national hero mentioning the collections of what is presumed to be the Prado.127

Interestingly, despite his reluctance to discuss his aesthetic roots and despite protestations that the Noli was a realistic documentation of the ills of society, on a number of occasions when Rizal was asked about what he was up to with regard to his literary works, he would answer that he was “painting”.

For example, in his reply to Vicente Barrantes’ scathing criticism of his novel he would state:

Pero yo he pintado al lado de lo malo, lo bueno, he pintado un Elías y un Tasio, porque los Elías y los Tasios existen, ex-isten y existen. [But I portrayed the good alongside the bad. I described an Elías and

a Tasio, because the Elíases and the Tasios exist, exist, and exist...]128

He went on to repeat the painterly metaphor but this would not be captured by the English translation:

…temiendo que ese poco bueno que he pintado sirva de ejemplo a los malos y los redima gritan que es falso, poético, exagera-do, ideal, imposible, inverosímil… [fearing that the little good that I described might entice the bad to reform themselves, cry out that it is false, poetic, exaggerated, ideal, impossible, improbable…]129

In Rizal’s preface to the edition of An-tonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Fili-pinas which he had reissued with his own annotations, the national hero declares:

“En el Noli Me Tangere principié el bosque-jo del estado actual de nuestra Patria… “[In the Noli Me Tangere I began to sketch the present state of our fatherland…]130

More importantly, when Blumentritt complimented the young author by saying that his novel was written with the blood of the heart (“mit Herzblut”),131 Rizal would borrow this phrase and recast it in a differ-ent mold when he used it in his open let-ter to Barrantes. What is remarkable is that he would rework Bluementritt’s words in a way that raises the distinct possibility that the painted image may indeed have had an influence on the Noli Me Tangere:

Confieso que he encontrado un acre deleite en sacar a luz tantas vergüenzas y rubores, pero al hacer la pintura con la sangre de mi corazón, quería corregirlos y salvar a los demás…. [I confess that I have found it painful to expose so much that was shame-ful and degrading, but in making the pic-ture with my heart’s blood, I wanted to correct the evils and save other people]132


In Rizal’s rendering, one can actually see or at least imagine the pentimento of the scriptural emerging. The whole state-ment is delivered as a confession that po-sitions the author’s intent as a striving for the salvation of others. Such a striving must first be purified so that what began as “un acre deleite” will be subjected to and strengthened by “vergüenzas y rubores.” The point that must be stressed here is that this salvational act is not relegated to the realm of the cerebral. It is brought forth alive and pulsating with the colors, forms, even the smells and textures of the “sangre de mi corazón.” For how can one evoke this sanguine symbol and not unleash images of the bloody gashes on Christ’s body, on his hands and feet? On the other hand, how suppress the brightness that is “sacar a luz”, how indeed forget the sunny fields beneath promised skies lying just beyond the wasteland?

Rizal actually provides a diagram which may be read as a visual map for the world of the Noli. On the cover of the original copy that he had written in his own hand for the printers to set into type, he would translate into pictorial form the narrative which he had fashioned with the blood of his heart.

In Austin Coates’s biography there is an interpretation of the images with which Rizal had adorned his novel’s germinal copy. What is obvious about Coates’s anal-ysis is that Rizal’s drawings have been de-coded using the framework of the social cancer trope:

At the top all that is best in Philippine life: woman, symbolizing constancy, religious faith symbolized by the tombstone, with a laurel (courage) and the flower of the pomelo, worn by the bride and groom at a wedding and symbolizing purity… The words partly covered by the title are the secret inner dedication by Rizal to his par-ents… To the left of the title, the flower

mirasol, representing youth seeking the sun. The author’s name, meaning the green of renewal, mounting up into the green of the most enduring of all Philippine trees, the bamboo. At the bottom, all that is worst in Philippine life: the helmet of the Civil Guard, the whip and instruments of tor-ture, and the foot (feet) of a friar…133

What happens, then, if a lens recali-brated by all the discussions in this essay were to be used instead?

It may be pointed out at the onset, that Rizal’s cover design is divided along the diagonal just like Correggio’s Noli me tangere. The band for the title divides the frame into two triangular areas. The area to the left is dominated by the silhouette of a woman—a feminine image, while the right has the feet identified by Coates as that of a friar—a masculine image. The dualism of the feminine and the mascu-line seen in the drawing is reminiscent of the painting in the Prado. It will be ob-served in the Correggio that Mary and the barren, thirsting earth, pertain to one side while Christ and his attributes—which in-clude the verdant landscapes of the prom-ised Eden as well as the gardening tools—occupy the other.

Returning to Rizal’s cover drawing, one will observe, beneath the woman’s profile, a strange undulating device. It re-sembles a motif from Classical antiquity: the meandering line. Named after the con-voluted path of the Maeander River in Asia Minor, it is a design seen on the pottery as well as the palace walls of ancient Greece. As an image of the distant past, it could be read in the context of Rizal’s draw-ing as a reminder of a lost utopia. Given its fluvial pedigree, it may be a reference to the aforementioned line in Genesis: “a river rises in Eden to water the garden.…” Then again, the angular curves sketched by the national hero might also recall his own description of the river in San Diego

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which he likens to a “huge glassy serpent,” still another reminder of the antagonist in the first Idyll. In the same way, Coates’s elaborate reading of the mirasol blossom as evoking “youth seeking the sun” could be seen as another paradisiacal reference since flowers are, after all, standard fea-tures of gardens.

Hanging like a pendant from the Clas-sical line is an image that looks like the combination of a circle and a cross. Could this represent the locket of María Clara? If so, then perhaps the crown-like symbol at the other end may well be an elaborate clasp.

Coates says nothing about the mean-dering line but he asserts that the female silhouette stands for “constancy”. Yet it may just as easily be Patria or Inang Bayan personified, as in Juan Luna’s 1886 paint-ing España y Filipinas. Beside it, at the very top of the cover drawing, is a stone cross, which Coates has identified as a tomb-stone. He opines that it represents faith. The more obvious meaning, however,

would be death, an interpretation sup-ported by the presence of plants, which may not be the pomelo and the laurel—again as proposed by Coates—but some other specimens. Rizal himself provides a clue for a more funereal reading when he describes the plants in the San Diego town cemetery this way:

En medio de aquel vasto corral se levanta una grande cruz de madera sobre un ped-estal de piedra…Crecen en toda su loza-nia el tarambulo y el pandakaki: el primero para pinchar las piernas con sus espinosas bayas, y el segundo para añadir su olor al del cementario…[In the center of the en-closure rises a large wooden cross set on a stone pedestal…. There grow in all their luxuriance the tarambulo to prick the feet with its spiny berries and the pandakaki to add its odor to that of the cemetery…]

Incidentally, scrutinizing the pattern on the dress of the repentant saint in the Correggio painting will show a design of thistles, a prickly weed.134

The powerful diagonal of the title band covers the author’s dedicatory lines to his parents. A closer examination135 re-veals that the Noli Me Tangere strip was not pasted on separately. The entire cov-er is done as one whole sketch on a single sheet of paper. To achieve the illusion of an overlay, Rizal had to carefully calculate beforehand which parts of the dedication’s words would partially appear and which parts would be hidden by the band. What could he have wanted to achieve with such effort?

Moving on to the right triangle, Coates explains that the symbols at the bottom are all that is “worst in Philippine life.” An alternative reading begins to present it-self however with what is supposed to be the feet of the friar. As has already been discussed, feet represent the humbling

Detail of Cover drawing of the Noli Me Tangere, National Library


of Mary Magdalene. As Jean-Luc Nancy explains:

She was brought into the world in this state: already bending over the feet of the one she is welcoming, her long hair fall-ing to the ground as she leans over, almost prostrate, not praying, no, but pouring the fragrant oil before taking the feet into her hair…136

It should also be remembered that Christ’s own act of humility was the wash-ing of his apostles’ lower appendages. That Rizal took pains to draw the detail of hair on the legs seems almost superflous. It may have been necessary though to ensure that the feet would not be mistaken as be-longing to the female silhouette which ap-pears on the same axis.

At the lower right corner are what Coates supposes to be the helmet of the Guardia Civil, along with what he iden-tifies as instruments of torture. It will be noted that what is presumed to be a kind of whip or scourge is very similar to ex-amples found in paintings of Mary Mag-dalene.137 For that matter, instruments of torture are part of popular Philippine rep-resentations of the Passion of Christ.138 The helmet could very well be that of a Roman soldier guarding the route to Cal-vary. The link with the Savior is further strengthened when one notes that these instruments occupy a position in Rizal’s sketch analogous to that of the gardening implements in Correggio’s painting.

The last image to discuss is that of the bamboo. Coates sees in this “the most en-during of Philippine trees.” This ignores a more powerful mythic allusion to the cen-tral image of one of the Philippine stories of Creation. Since bamboo groves were, traditionally, the abode of spirits, they rep-resent shelters and havens—in the same way that Pilosopong Tasio’s home in the

forest was a sanctuary of sobriety and wis-dom from the corrupt, anarchical world of San Diego.

Weaving all these together at last, the following interpretation emerges: the me-andering line is the Lost Eden, the idyll in the garden of flowers watered by four riv-ers, forfeited by humanity with the Fall. The line is a reminder of an original grace that continues to inspire admirable acts like María Clara’s giving away of her lock-et. The Patria or Inang Bayan must then avail of the bridge or portal provided by Death to obtain the new Promised Land. This is of course not a physical death, but a spiritual one. It requires the humility of a Magdalene living in a barren desert or kissing Christ’s feet in a banquet or dur-ing his Crucifixion. It requires a process of purification through the sacrifices of the Passion, the trials that Jesus endured. Only then can the sanctuary of Eden be re-stored as the myth of Creation is renewed for the children of the primordial couple that, in Philippine legends, stepped out of the bamboo.

Is it possible that the careful overlaying of the words “Noli Me Tangere” on top of the drawing was a cue? Perhaps the mean-ings of the novel itself would only become apparent when read as symbols operat-ing under the overarching framework of Christ’s utterance during the Easter en-counter as recounted by St. John and even as portrayed by artists like Correggio.

A final thread remains to be drawn out. Revisiting the work in the Prado, one no-tices a seemingly insubstantial detail: un-like Giotto, Fra Angelico, Andrea del Sar-to, Tintoretto, and Poussin, unlike Titian, Hans Holbein the Younger, Schongauer, Veronese and Bronzino, unlike Alonso Cano, Lavinia Fontana, Dürer, Jan Breu-gel the Younger, and Pontormo, Correg-gio alone portrays Mary Magdalene with a diaphanous cloth wrapped around her

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shoulders. Could this be the reason why Rizal made it a point to include such an article of clothing used in the exact same way in his descriptions of both the saint and María Clara in his novel? It will be re-called that Mary Magdalene’s statue had a panuelo de piña bordado while María Clara wore around her neck, a tejido transparente del piña.

If all these is so, then the circle is com-plete: in the “Noli me tangere” as preached and painted through the centuries, José Rizal had finally found the conflicts, the metaphors and, yes, the heroine that would engender the novel that will cap-ture the hearts of a nation, forever.

Do not Cling to MeDo not touch me, do not hold me back, do not think to seize or reach toward me, for I am going to the Father, that is, still and always to the very power of death. I am withdrawing into it; I am fading away into the nocturnal brilliance on this spring morning. I am already going away; I am only in this departure; I am the parting of this departure. My being con-sists in it and my word is this: “I, the Truth, am going away.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli Me Tangere

Jose Rizal’s canonical novel is of-ten only read within a realist framework which focuses on the exposition of the ills of society, the revelation of a “social can-cer”. What this essay has hoped to show is that while a realist reading is certainly valid and surely was instrumental in ral-lying Filipinos against Spain in the late nineteenth century, such a framework has little place for a Johannine exegesis which would probably have been considered contradictory to the critical stances of the national hero. Yet, many nuances are lost when such an exegesis is ignored.

Was Rizal consciously mining the relevant passages of the Gospel of John for his novel’s symbols and even

characterizations? Was Rizal familiar with the theological debates in which his title was enmeshed? One cannot make any sol-id conclusions as there is no mention of an interest in the Easter episode in any of the national hero’s known writings. It may be pointed out, though, that writers are often reluctant to discuss their literary devices. Such devices may well serve only as inter-nal guideposts for authors, aiding them to flesh out their narratives. There would be no need to discuss such structural ele-ments as there is no need for architects to elaborate on the framework or foundation of their buildings.

Did any of his contemporaries notice the many intimate links between the Noli and John’s gospel which have been posited here? Certainly, no texts have surfaced to show this.

Was Rizal inspired by the many art-works that Christ’s utterance to Mary Magdalene had generated? All that the current generation has to go by are an un-substantiated claim in a book and the dis-covery that a Rizaliana devotee had a re-lated print in his collection. Yet, it is also certain that Rizal was very much interest-ed in art, seeing in paintings possible keys for a better understanding of the realities of existence.

Over all, it is quite evident that there is little conclusive evidence in the cor-respondence or biographical accounts of Rizal and his contemporaries which would clearly support the new reading elucidated here. The suggested connec-tions between the Noli and the Easter epi-sode from John are primarily in the realm of the literary text as situated in its broader cultural environment.

The interpretation outlined earlier of the original cover drawn by Rizal himself encapsulates the repainting of the Noli which this essay proposes. Like Adam and Eve in Eden as alluded to by the ver-dant setting of the Easter encounter, the


inhabitants of Filipinas lived in a tropical paradise filled with gardens and groves. This pleasant utopia emerges in the first description of San Diego.

Even the presence of the coconut tree was a reminder of a benevolent Mother Goddess who gifted all her children with fertility and peace. In such an arcadia, the inhabitants could play innocent games, giving names to things while being gener-ous and selfless with their possessions in the same way Maria Clara was with her precious locket.

Yet, just as the serenity of the lake would be broken by a crocodile, paradise will be contaminated by the insinuation of the serpent. The Spanish would arrive of-fering new knowledge, new ways of doing things, new riches. This image of Hispanic interlopers in a primordial paradise is not new. This is shared with various millenar-ian movements as already discussed by writers like Ileto.

In some cases, the learning that the conquerors brought was to be prov-en worthless, a bunch of superstitions

(promoted by the most corrupt officials of the Catholic Church) which kept people ignorant and in thrall. The majority would be captivated, learning to ape the colo-nizers’ ways, often making fools of them-selves just like a Doña Victorina or even a Capitan Tiago.

Sometimes this aping could have ugly consequences. A senseless society was constructed which could actually turn on its citizens violently as Dona Conso-lacion did with Sisa or the sacristan did with Crispin, satraps treating their un-derlings cruelly. Part of this violence was clearly self-inflicted, the result of the pride and selfishness of the people of Filipinas themselves.

Patria was in trouble yet salvation was still possible. But Patria had to be ready to die to herself—she had to experience the prickly plants of the cemetery. Like the Magdalene kissing the feet of Jesus even at the Crucifixion, Patria had to learn to be humble and yet brave, reaching out to the untouchables—the lepers, the poor, the prostituted—or even striking a blow at the impunity of the friars who thought themselves above the law.

The whip and the scourge which be-came the emblems of the Passion of both Christ and Mary Magdalene are remind-ers that Patria would have to endure trials and sacrifices just like Maria Clara who would witness her entire idyllic existence torn apart by the persecution of her fiancé. Only through such an ordeal of fire could the people of Filipinas see with new eyes and finally become aware of the savage re-alities of their world. Only then could they act and make changes as effectively as a re-awakened Maria Clara who was the only character in the whole novel that could re-ally break the heart of vile Father Damaso. She alone could extract a pound of flesh or at least a thimble of tears from her real fa-ther. At the same time, she would actually expose his hypocrisy as he wept over the

Rizal with Inang Bayan. Magdalena, Laguna.

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fact that his beloved daughter was to be-come a servant of the same Church which he himself was supposed to serve.

In fact, Maria Clara’s final actions and ultimate fate make more sense if read through the lens of John 20: 17. The eas-ily overlooked detail casually brought up at the very end of the Noli that the despica-ble Father Salvi would be assigned to the very same nunnery where Maria Clara had so nobly chosen to live out the rest of her days seems almost maddeningly horrible unless one realizes that the heroine of the Noli is not just some damsel who should be rewarded for her good deeds. She is Fil-ipinas herself and though the promise of a better life, of a return to paradise, is waving in the wind like the fronds of the ancestral bamboo grove, a warning is sounded that the future is far from bright. Much would still be demanded of the Patria. Much would still have to be endured.

Among the most painful lessons that Filipinas would have to comprehend is that she must learn not to cling. Though España had given her life, the Patria will still have to withstand untold trials to be able to let go and move beyond the con-tradictions of her past.

In the Fili, Rizal refers to Manila as “bastardo.” This may imply that just as the capital is a bastard so is the country it-self. For Filipinas, like Maria Clara, came forth from illicit gropings in the darkness of a confession box. Rizal was aware that even as he criticized the ills he sensed in the systems of his native land, these were, in truth, the same systems which had pro-duced him. As the son of Patria, the Sage from Calamba himself admits in the No-li’s dedication that “I also suffer from thy defects and weaknesses.” As such, Rizal’s professed goal to “correct” and “save the rest”139 was not easily achieved. Such a correction would involve a self-disem-bowelment, which, though agonizing and bloody, was necessary if Patria were to in-ternalize the realization that it could not

be forced into a union with Spain. If such a union was not obtained through mutual consent, Filipinas was better off belonging to “nadie” but itself. Only then would Fili-pinas not need to rely on anyone else to give it peace.

After the hardship and the sacrifice, the main thing which a Johannine exegesis can gift the Noli is the revolutionary possi-bility of a Resurrection. As the example of the Basi Revolt paintings from the Ilocos has demonstrated, it is the devotional cul-ture of the people that completes the tale in a manner which ultimately critiques the status quo. If the John 20:17 passage is, in fact, enshrined in the metaphors and me-tonymies of Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, this already points to the possibility of a new order which may yet come about despite the collapse of schoolhouses and other good intentions.

Using Mary Magdalene as the inspi-ration for Maria Clara and, consequently, Filipinas, provided further support for the promise of reinvention. Readers may dis-cern in the saint who left behind her trou-bled former life to become the first wit-ness to Christ’s Easter rebirth, a model for the Patria’s potential for reform.

Moreover, the aforementioned theory which arises from the discourse surround-ing the utterance “noli me tangere” that the phrase may actually mean “do not cling to me” allows for a final insight: the sub-version of the colonial order of Filipinas would require that all structures and con-structions, all the laughter and sorrow that went with it would disappear too. Since the new age which Rizal had helped set in mo-tion would be predicated on the total ab-dication of what came before, everything that had been conjured with the national hero’s pen would have to be willingly re-linquished and let free. There would be no time and space for a lack of resolve.

Yet, Rizal himself was probably not invulnerable to the wounding beauty of what, far away in Europe, he was painting


with the blood of his heart. Having grown up by the shores of the great lake of Bay, he was acquainted with the many facets of Filipinas as well as the strange parallel realms of the spirited and the spiritual that drifted through the air, that suffused the afternoons, that entered into the corners

and crevices of gardens and towns. The care with which he described this shift-ing, floating world demonstrates just how he actually loved much of what he was portraying, what he was laying bare, and, what he knew he was, by depicting, also undoing.

n o T e S

1. This experience was recounted in the author’s article, “From Florence’s Renais-sance Glories to the Heart of Our Nation,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, 24 April 2011. San Marco had been opened as a museum in 1869. See http://www.florenceholidays.com/florence-vacation-museums-museum-san-mar-co.html. In a postcard from Rome dated 29 June 1887, Jose Rizal reported that he had just traveled to Turin, Milan, Venice and Florence: see National Historical Institute, Letters Between Rizal and Family Members, 1876–1896 (Manila: National Historical Institute, 1993), 267. By this time, the Noli Me Tangere had already been completed.

2. See for example Soledad Lacson-Loc-sín (translator), Noli Me Tangere (Makati: Bookmark, 2006), 427.

3. Barbara Baert et al, Noli Me Tangere: Mary Magdalene: One Picture Many Images (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2006), 43.

4. Barbara Baert “Noli Me Tangere. Six Exercises in Image Theory and Iconophilia” from Image and Narrative, Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative, issue 15 (2006), ac-cessed 19 April 2011, http://www.imageand-narrative.be/inarchive/iconoclasm/baert.htm.

5. Web page for the “Noli me tangere” research project, accessed May 26 2011. http://theo.kuleuven.be/nolimetangere/6/.26

6. Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 12.

7. Ibid, 103.8. See the Introduction in “Noli me

tangere,” http://www.theo.kuleuven.be/nolimetangere/6/.

9. Joseph H. Crehan, “The Dialektos of Origen and John 20:17,” Theological Studies, 11.3 (1950), 368–373.

10. See Baert et al, Noli Me Tangere: Mary Magdalene, 61.

11. Martin Luther, “Christ our Brother: Sermon on John 20:11–18, The Resurrec-tion of our Lord” (28 March 1535).

12. José Mario C. Francisco, SJ, ed., Sermones/Francisco Blancas de San José, OP (1614) (Quezon City: Pulong, Sources for Philippine Studies, Ateneo de Manila Uni-versity, 1994), 253–72. Mary Magdalene’s exclamation is on page 264.

13. The sermons of Charles Spurgeon are available from http://www.spurgeongems.org/sermons.htm. For information on Spur-geon’s life see Rosalie de Rosset’s biography in C. H. Spurgeon: All of Grace (Chicago: The Moody Bible Institute, 2010), 8–15.

14. See Baert et al, Noli Me Tangere: Mary Magdalene, vii.

15. Telephone conversation with Ramon Villegas, October 2010.

16. Carlos Quirino, ed., Rizal in Retro-spect (Manila: Philippine Historical Asso-ciation, 1961).

17. Patricia Cruz and Apolonio Bayani Chua, eds., Himalay: Kalipunan ng mga Pag-aaral kay José Rizal (Pasay City: Cultural Center of the Philippines, 1991).

18. José S. Arcilla, S.J., ed.,Understanding the Noli: Its Historical Context and Literary Influences (Quezon City: Phoenix Publish-ing House, 1987). It should be noted that, as can be seen in the title of the work edited by Arcilla, Filipinos have given nicknames to

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Rizal’s two novels. Noli Me Tangere is known as the Noli and El Filibusterismo is known as the Fili.

19. Eugene Hessel, The Religious Thought of Rizal (Quezon City: New Day Publish-ers, 1983).

20. Esteban de Ocampo, Rizal as Bibli-ophile , (Manila: UNESCO National Com-mission of the Philippines, 1960), 7. The writer is indebted to Dr Resil Mojares for suggesting this source.

21. Ibid, 35.22. Leon Ma. Guerrero, “A Note About

the Translation” in Jose Rizal, Noli Me Tan-gere. Translated by Leon Ma. Guerrero, (Ma-nila: Guerrero Publishing, 1995), xiv–xv.

23. Nancy, 12. The reference to Rizal appears in footnote 17 on page 109.

24. From Jose Rizal’s letter to Vicente Barrantes which was published in the 15 February 1890 edition of La Solidaridad. The letter was translated by Guadalupe Fores Guanzon and reprinted in La Solidaridad, vol. II, 1890 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1973), 86 – 99. The quote is on page 92 while the English trans-lation is on page 95.

25. See Rizal’s letter to Félix Resurrec-ción Hidalgo quoted in Cayetano Sánchez Fuertes, “Literary Sources of the Noli Me Tangere,” in Arcilla, S.J., 58-59. Sánchez Fuertes took his quote from Escritos de José Rizal (Manila: Centennial Edition, 1961), vol. II, book 3-1, 91. The letter (written in Berlin) was unaddressed, but Sánchez Fuertes shares the accepted view that it was meant for Hidalgo. The letter is also repro-duced in Rizal’s Correspondence with Fellow Reformists (1882–1896), (Manila: National Heroes Commission, 1963), 83.

26. All quotations in Spanish from Noli Me Tangere are taken from Jose Rizal, Noli Me Tangere (Manila: Comision Nacional del Centenario de Jose Rizal, 1961), reissued, National Historical Institute, 1995 . All quo-tations in English are taken from Charles

Derbyshire, The Social Cancer: A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere from the Spanish of Jose Rizal, (Manila: Philippine Education Company, 1966).

27. Rizal’s mistake is corrected in a foot-note appearing in Rizal’s Correspondence with Fellow Reformists (1882–1896), 83.

28. Rizal’s Correspondence with Fellow Reformists (1882–1896), 84.

29. Sánchez Fuertes, 59.30. Raquel A. G. Reyes, Love, Passion

and Patriotism (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2009), 177–178.

31. See the back cover of Virgilio Al-mario, Si Rizal: Nobelista (Pagbasa sa Noli at Fili Bilang Nobela) (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2008). Translation by Editorial Team. Unless otherwise noted all translations are by the Editorial Team.

32. Almario, ix.33. Ibid, viii.34. For a discussion on Stowe see Al-

mario, 22–50. For discussions on the other writers cited, see Sánchez Fuertes , 57–112.

35. Almario, viii.36. See Statement of the Philippine Hier-

archy on the Novels of Dr. José Rizal, signed by Rufino J. Santos, D.D., Archbishop of Manila, 21 April 1956.

37. Roland Barthes in “Death of the Au-thor” from Image Music Text (New York: Noonday Press, 1988), 142–148.

38. See John N. Schumacher, The Mak-ing of a Nation: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Filipino Nationalism (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1991), 93.

39. Benedict Anderson, Spectre of Com-parisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Uni-versity Press, 2004), 232.

40. One could add to this the observa-tion in Pheng Cheah and Jonathan Cull-er, Grounds of Comparison (New York: Routledge, 2003), 229, that the Noli’s read-ers would have included non-Iberians. Ref-erence provided by Vernon Totanes.


55. See the discussion in Adey Horton, The Child Jesus (New York: The Dial Press, 1975), 11–29.

56. Edith M Humphrey, book review of Ann Graham Brock’s Mary Magdalene: the First Apostle and the Struggle for Authority, accessed on 26 May 2011, http://www.ed-ithhumphrey.net/Review%20-%20Mary%20Magdalene.htm.

57. In Chapter VI of the Noli, Rizal makes mention that the fictional town of San Diego, the setting for much of the novel, is located in his real-life Philippine home province of Laguna. It may be noted that a number of the Philippine visual art works discussed in this essay are associated with this general region. Implicit in this choice of art works is the possibility that these pieces may actually have been seen by Rizal. It must be stressed that there is no record that Rizal had actually visited the other towns in his area. He does, however, make mention in the Noli of at least two Laguna towns: Pa-ete, as a town noted for its carvers; as well as Pakil, as a town which is the site of the Turumba fiesta.

58. Cynthia Lewis, “Soft Touch: On the Renaissance Staging and Meaning of the ‘Noli me tangere’ Icon,” Comparative Drama 35 no. 1/2 Spring-Summer, 2002. Lewis uses as her reference a sixteenth cen-tury treatise, “Marie Magdalene Funeral Teares” by Robert Southwell.

59. Gail McMurray Gibson, “Resurrec-tion as Dramatic Icon in the Shipman’s Tale,” in Signs and Symbols in Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. John P. Hermann and John J. Burke, Jr. (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1981), 107–8.

60. Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra An-gelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 19–21. Reference provided by Kathleen Burkhalter-Bell.

61. Alberto Ferreiro, “St Vincent Ferrer’s Catalan Sermon on St. Mary Magdalene” in

41. See for example: “Carta de Antonio Regidor,” as well as Ferdinand Blumentritt, “El Noli Me Tangere de Rizal,” both in Cruz and Bayani Chua.

42. Source for Del Pilar’s essay is Magno S Gatmaitan, Marcelo H. Del Pilar, 1850–1896, (Manila: 1965), 399–403.

43. Reynaldo C. Ileto, Pasyon and Revo-lution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Ma-nila University Press, 1989).

44. Flores, Painting History: Revision in Philippine Colonial Art, (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1998), 288–93.

45. Epifanio San Juan, “What is Balagtas’ ‘To Celia’ All About? An Experiment in In-terpretation” in Himalay: Kalipunan ng mga Pag-aaral kay Balagtas, (Manila: Cultural Centre of the Philippines, 1988), 89–100.

46. Ibid, 97–98.47. English translation by Tarrosa Subi-

do, Mabini’s Version of “Florante at Laura” (Manila: National Heroes Commission, 1964), 5.

48. Juan de Noceda and Pedro de San-lúcar, Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala (Ma-nila: 1869), 110.

49. A photograph of a finer version of this relieve was published in Charles Bel-monte, Aba Ginoong Maria: The Virgin Mary in Philippine Art, (Manila: Aba Gi-noong Maria Foundation, 1990), 2.

50. See for example Steven Trout, “Christ in Flanders?: Another Look at Rud-yard Kipling’s ‘The Gardener’,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 35, No. 2,1995.

51. Graham G. Ward, Christ and Culture, (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 121.

52. David Marno, “Between the Visible and Invisible: Pantorno’s Noli me tangere” in Atopia, the polylogic e-zine. Accessed on 30 June 2010, http://www.atopia.tk/index.php .

53. Guerrero, xiv.54. Email from Benedict Anderson on

July 21, 2011.

830 Ino Manalo

74. See Monteleon and Delenda.75. Delenda, 288. 76. Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalene:

Myth and Metaphor (New York: Riverhead Books, 1993), xii.

77. Rosello Soberon, 71–73.78. See Almario, 149-91.79. Ibid, 183.80. See Ferreiro, 423.81. Rosello Soberon, 75.82. Raquel A. G. Reyes, 242–243.83. Austin Coates, Rizal: Philippine Na-

tionalist and Martyr (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1992), 135.

84. Nancy, 13.85. See “Letter of Rizal to Evaristo

Aguirre (Cauit), Madrid, 10 March 1887” in Rizal’s Correspondence with Fellow Reformists, (1882-1896), 88. As an aside, it is interest-ing to note that the patron saint of Aguirre’s hometown, Kawit, is Mary Magdalene.

86. Barbara Baert “Touching with the Gaze: A Visual Analysis of the Noli me tan-gere,” in Noli me Tangere: Mary Magdalene: One Picture Many Images, 45–46.

87. Nancy, 31–32.88. Ibid, 32.89. Ibid, 13.90. See Noceda and San Lúcar, 610.91. Raquel A. G. Reyes, 213.92. Guerrero, xv.93. See Lewis, 64.94. Anderson, 2.95. Serge Gruzinski, ed., Le Planète

Métisse/The Mestizo Planet (Arles: Actes Sud, 2008).

96. Cheah and Culler, 229.97. See Francisco, 331.98. See Arsenio Manuel, Dictionary of

Philippine Biography, Vol. I, (Quezon City: Filipiniana Publications, 1955), 61–65.

99. A photo of this carved piece as well as some data is in Monina Mercado, Antipolo: A Shrine to Our Lady, (Makati: Aletheia Foun-dation, 1980), 96–102. The piece (which

Anuario de Estudies Medievales (AEM) 40/1 (enero-junio de 2010), 426.

62. The Prado owns a painting where Mary Magdalene is being carried to Heaven by angels (El Transito de la Magdalena by Jose Antolinez, circa 1672) and another one where the saint is shown quietly reading like the Virgin at the time of the Annunciation (Maria Magdalena leyendo by Adriaen Isen-brandt, first half of the sixteenth century).

63. See Estella Rosello Soberon, “El Cu-erpo de María Magdalena en un Devocion-ario Nuevohispano: La Corpolidad Femi-nina en la Historia de Salvacion del Siglo XVIII,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 42, 2010, 66 and 69.

64. See Odile Delenda, La Magdalena en el Arte. Un Argumento de la Contrarreforma en la Pintura Espanola y Mejicana del Siglo XVII, 284, accessed 26 May 2011, www.upo.es/depa/webdhuma/areas/arte/3cb/documentos/021f.pdf.

65. Barbara Baert “Noli Me tangere. Six Exercises in Image Theory and Iconophilia.”

66. Nancy, 21.67. Ibid.68. E-mail of Anna Bautista of the Uni-

versity of Santo Tomas (UST) Museum to this writer. 19 May 2011.

69. See Juan Gatbonton, ed., Art Phil-ippines–A History: 1521–present (Manila: Crucible Workshop, 1992), 31.

70. Santiago Albano Pilar, writing in the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, Vol. IV, 310–311. Pilar spells Arzeo with a “c” while Anna Bautista of the UST Museum uses a “z.”

71. A good discussion of how this mis-guided notion was formed is in Michelle Lambert Monteleon, “Heavenly Venus: Mary Magdalene in Renaissance Noli Me Tangere Images (M.A. thesis, University of South Florida, 2004), 11–19

72. Ibid, 44.73. Rosello Soberon, 75.


appears to be the same one that is now in the Escudero Museum in San Pablo City) is thought to date to the seventeenth century and was originally in Antipolo Church which is in the Laguna de Bay (Lake of Bay) Region.

100. Vitiliano Gorospe, Banahaw: Con-versations with a Pilgrim to the Power Moun-tain, (Manila: Bookmark, 1992), 57.

101. Ileto, 99–103. 102. Nenita Pambid, “The Infinito Dios:

The Ancient Tagalog God Inscribed in the Anting-anting and How He was Baptized” in Barilla (Dec. 1989), 4–11.

103. See the discussion of Ania Loom-ba in Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), 178.

104. Laguna de Bay is the largest lake in the Philippines. It is bounded by Rizal’s home province of Laguna and by Rizal prov-ince which was officially organized in 1901 and named after the national hero.

105. Coates, 5.106. See Almario, 256–266.107. See Bienvenido Lumbera, Tagalog

Poetry, 1570–1898: Tradition and Influences in Its Development (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press), 118.

108. The towns of Paete in Laguna Prov-ince and Tanay in Rizal Province are on op-posite shores of the Lake of Bay.

109. Harry Sichrovsky, Ferdinand Blu-mentritt: An Austrian Life for the Philippines (Manila: National Historical Institute, 1987), 38. In his text Sichrovsky spelled Correggio with only one “g.”

110. The Rizal-Blumentritt Correspond-ence, (2 volumes) (Manila: National His-torical Institute, 1992).

111. The author was assisted in this search by Agustin Vibal and the research-ers of Vibal Foundation.

112. See J. Rogelio Buendía, A Basic Guide to the Prado, (Madrid: Silex, 1973), 138. For more background information on the painting see http://www.museodelprado.

es/enciclopedia/enciclopedia-on-line/voz/noli-me-tangere-correggio/, accessed on 5 Octo-ber 2011.

113. Telephone conversation with Lisa Ongpín Periquet on 24 May 2011.

114. The author was graciously allowed by National Historical Commission of the Philippines (the inheritor of the Nation-al Historical Institute) Executive Director Ludovico Badoy to examine the print on 25 May 2011.

115. See Buendía, 138.116. Ignacio Martínez Buenaga,

“Corregio:‘Noli me tangere,’” Colectivo para la renovación de los estudios de historia del arte (CREHA), accessed 13 May 2011, http://www.artecreha.com/Miradas_CREHA/cor-reggio-qnoli-me-tangereq.html.

117. The New American Bible (Iowa Falls: World Bible Publishers, 1986), 9.

118. See Monteleon, 44.119. David Ekserdjian, Correggio (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 158.120. Information on Picasso obtained

on 19 March 2010 from the website http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Noli-me-tangere which used as its source G. Becht-Jördens & M. Wehmeier, Picasso und die christliche Ikonographie. Mutterbez-iehung und künstlerische Position, (Munich: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 2003), 40ff.; pl. 1–4.

121. Lewis, 56.122. See “Letter of Rizal to His Fam-

ily, July 1883” in National Historical Insti-tute, Letters Between Rizal and Family Mem-bers (Manila: National Historical Institute, 1993), 112.

123. Nancy, 23.124. Monteleon, 45.125. Ekserdjian, 58.126. Spanish text from José Rizal, Pro-

sa (Manila: National Historical Institute, 1995), 26-27. English text from José Rizal National Centennial Commission (Manila:

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José Rizal National Centennial Commis-sion, 1962), 31–32.

127. “Letter from Félix Resurrección Hidalgo to José Rizal,” Madrid, 15 Oc-tober 1879 accessed on 26 May 2011, http://www.filipiniana.net/publication/felix-resurreccion-hidalgo-madrid-15-octo-ber-1879/12791881737947/1/0.

128. La Solidaridad vol. II, 1890, (1973), 94. English translation, 95.

129. Ibid.130. Antonio de Morga and José Rizal,

ed., Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (Paris: Li-brería de Garnier Hermanos, 1890), v.

131. Harry Sichrovsky, “The Role of Ferdinand Blumentritt in the Publication and Propagation of the Noli” in Arcilla, 233.

132. La Solidaridad, vol. II, 1890, (1973), 92 and 94. English translation, 95.

Facing page, facsimile of the last manuscript page of the Noli me tangere clearly stating the end date of 21 February 1887 in Berlin

133. Coates, 159.134. Ekserdjian, Correggio, 158.135. This writer had the good fortune to

examine the original Noli manuscript upon the invitation of National Library Director, Antonio Santos, during the turnover cere-monies with the German Embassy in May 2011. The embassy had brought over two German conservators, Monika Schneidere-it-Gast and Katrin Hupeden, to conserve the ur-copies of Rizal’s most famous works.

136. Nancy, 61.137. See for example, Jose de Ribera’s

1636 painting, The Transfiguration of Mary Magdalene in the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando collection

138. See for example the image of Nuestra Señora de la Porta-Baga of Cavite.

139. See Cayetano Sánchez, 58.

Con la Sangre de mi Corazon: Repainting the World of Rizal's Noli Me Tangere

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