Editor’s note: In light of the retirement of Fr. Roque Ferriols, SJ, The GUIDON is republishing articles on the philosophy professor from previous issues.
The following article, by Emmanuel F. Lacaba, comes from Vol. XXXV, No. 8 of The GUIDON, published on October 16, 1968. Research for this online special was done by Joline S. Acampado.
THE FIRST time I heard of Roque Ferriols, SJ was four or five years ago, when my brother Pete had him for senior philosophy. My brother didn’t do well in the course, although he once, only once, got one of the priest’s rare 98s. But my brother was bilib na bilib kay Ferriols whom until a year afterwards I had thought of as American, for his name sounded foreign.
I was to discover he was anything but American when, in 1965, enrolling at the college as a philosophy major, I met him at the department room. He was the department chair at the time. He told me and two others (who would later shift to other concentrations) that we mustn’t be too certain about things, that we must keep our minds continually open.
He was then also prefect of Bellarmine Hall, where I stayed for three weeks or so, long enough to find out that he liked to speak Tagalog, which he spoke excellently, and that he practiced yoga (or so I heard), after which period of time I left for the States, as he himself had done in 1951 (he would stay there for eight years).
He wasn’t around when I came back to the campus a year later; he was, I was told, in Mindanao. His memory, however, was kept alive in the Ateneo dorms by Luvi Lim, who a lot of people said looked so much like him they took to calling the poor guy Ferriols, Jr.
Now, two years afterwards, Ferriols, Sr., was back in the college, teaching junior and Indian philosophy and moderating my 3C class.
When Dody Puno, who happened to be the president of that class as well as The GUIDON Features editor, assigned me to interview Father Ferriols, I was quick to seize the opportunity. As my brother—who since Ferriols’ days has become a journalist—is probably finding out, the opportunity to interview two kinds of persons must be literally seized: Beautiful women and brilliant men (although I’m quite sure Father Ferriols, with characteristic modesty, would discount himself from being among the latter. Yet I felt unequal to the task: I could just imagine the school paper’s editorial board frowning on my probably “too personal” account on my subject, on my “clique information” on him. Yet how could one write on a phenomenologist except phenomenologically—subjectively, heuristically, directionally, and all that?
One must, first of all, not make the mistake of capsulizing Father Ferriols. Ultimately, there can be no last word on him, no adequate picture of him. One could say the Ateneo de Manila University Press in 1966 published a “famed Jesuit philosopher’s The ‘Psychic Entity’ in Aurobindo’s The Life Divine” (which he wrote in Fordham for his graduate thesis) or that he spent the days of his “wasted childhood” (“which I had a lot of fun wasting,” he adds) in Sampaloc, Manila, and at the San Beda Grade School and Ateneo High School. But that might be leaving out the fact that he comes to school in pants which are one full inch more than bitin, or that one of his favorite words of advice to his students goes like this, “If you happen to be tempted to read this book, I suggest you yield to the temptation, for there are far worse temptations that that.”
Or one might mention that Miguel Bernad, SJ in his September 4th Graphic article, “Epilogue on the Ruby Tower,” quotes a poem Father Ferriols, a young scholastic then, wrote in March, 1945, on a dead child among the war ruins (Father Ferriols “could doubtless write a more mature and more sophisticated poem today,” writes Father Bernad):
Lulled by soft weeping of leaves,
little one,
Sleep through ne’er ending
hours;
Briefly on earth have your
little feet run–
Brief is the sweetness of flowers.
Dead in the morning of life’s
sad day,
Ne’er shall you feel life’s pain;
Pulling God’s robes with His
angels you play,
Ne’er shall your childhood
wane.
But that might leave out the fact that Father Ferriols uses modern songs and commercials occasionally to emphasize a point: “In phenomenologizing, you must remember: Only you can do it, uh-uh-uh-uh,” or “To understand Marcel, you must soak your consciousness in him: Maglababad kayo sa kaniya.” Or that he is a rich source of insights on sundry matters besides philosophy, from the Sabah claim to Manglapus to the Americanization of the Ateneo and the country to the pill to the richness of Tagalog as a language (although he actually speaks Ilocano, “the language of the gods, ha, ha”).
Like the reality he talks about every day in his classes, Father Ferriols is rich and complicated and can’t be categorized.
