God and the Cause of Liberty

The Filibusterismo ends as a deathbed dialogue, the oldest form of theological argument. Simoun has concluded from his failure that God is either absent or hostile; the priest answers that Simoun has confused God’s refusal of his means with indifference to his end.

The identification of God with justice is quietly explosive in its colonial context. The friar orders had preached a God of submission, whose will underwrote the existing order. Florentino — a native priest, Rizal’s figure of uncorrupted clergy — reverses the theology: any god who blessed tyranny would not be God. Religion, purified, becomes the strongest ground of resistance rather than its opiate.

Florentino’s God acts in history, but through the moral growth of peoples rather than through conspiracies. He has never failed the oppressed who, every recourse exhausted, took up the sword for their inalienable rights — the priest is explicit — yet He could not prosper Simoun’s plot, which would have redeemed no one. The theology and the ethics converge on the same point: liberation is a moral achievement before it is a political event.

The deathbed dialogue between Simoun and Father Florentino occupies the final chapter (Ch. XXXIX, “Conclusion”).