The Most Excellent

Apolinario M. Mabini

Apolinario Mabini was born on July 23, 1864 in Barangay Talaga in Tanauan, Batangas. He was the second of eight
children of Dionisia Maranan, a vendor in the Tanauan market, and Inocencio Mabini, an unlettered peasant.

Mabini is a highly educated young man who, unfortunately, is paralyzed. He has a classical education, a very flexible,
imaginative mind, and Mabini's views were more comprehensive than any of the Filipinos. He is a dreamy man, but a very
firm character and of very high accomplishments. As said, unfortunately, he is paralyzed. He is a young man, and would
undoubtedly be of great use in the future of those islands if it were not for his affliction.

In a period in Philippine history which produced many of our greatests heroes, Apolinario Mabini stood out not only as
one of the most heroic in the group but also as its most profound thinker . It is with Mabini the thinker that this study is
mainly concerned. A review of Mabini's writings will reveal that in his theories on man, society, and government, he
borrowed much from the great minds of the past in whose works he was well-read. Mabini's greatness as a thinker,
therefore, does not lie in the originality of his though but in the synthesis he made of the ideas he absorbed for his
models and in the way he applied those ideas to the Philippine struggle for political autonomy. On the hundreth
anniversary of Mabini's birth, a synthesis of his thought is here presented as one more tribute to the memory of a
hero, a statesman, and a thinker.

Apolinario Mabini “Thou shalt cultivate the special gifts which had been granted thee, working and studying according
to thy ability, never leaving the path of righteousness and justice in order to attain thine own perfection.”

Comparing Mabini's generation of Filipino intellectuals to the previous one of Jose Rizal and the other members of the
propagandista movement, Journalist and National Artist of the Philippines for Literature Nick Joaquin describes Mabini's
generation as the next iteration in the evolution of Filipino intellectual development:

Mabini joined the Guild of Lawyers after graduation, but he did not choose to practice law in a professional capacity. He did
not set up his own law office, and instead continued to work in the office of a notary public.[6]

Instead, Mabini put his knowledge of law to much use during the days of the Philippine Revolution and the Filipino-
American war. Joaquin notes that all his contributions to Philippine history somehow involved the law:

"His was a legal mind. He was interested in law as an idea, as an ideal ...whenever he appears in our history he is
arguing a question of legality."
Apolinario Mabini

Like Jose Rizal, Mabini understood what more than three centuries of colonial subjugation and indoctrination by the
religious corporations had done to the consciousness of Filipinos. They had acquired all the wrong notions of what it
meant to live in freedom, how to deal with authority, or how to lead an honorable life. Having been enslaved for
centuries, they wallowed in their misery and vices, and lost the will to improve themselves.

He was bothered by the thought that, because of this, they might not prove equal to the challenge of self-rule. He
hoped to see them confidently assert themselves as free citizens of a republic, rather than live as docile subjects of a
monarchy or of a few homegrown political dynasties. To this purpose, he saw that an internal change was as
necessary to political freedom as the building of new institutions of self-government.

It is worth recalling what Mabini wrote in his introduction to “The True Decalogue,” which was printed on June 24, 1898,
and issued along with the other circulars of the revolutionary government. “[T]o be able to establish the true structure of our
social regeneration, it is necessary for us to change radically, not only our institutions, but also our way of living and
thinking. It is important to undergo an internal and external revolution at the same time; it is necessary to establish a more
solid basis for moral education and to foreswear the vices that we have inherited from the Spaniards.”

Mabini’s Decalogue is a fascinating document, not only because it offers basic lessons in citizenship that remain relevant to
our time, but also because, at a deeper level, it tries to replace the entrenched dichotomies of a religious culture and a
hierarchical society with the more nuanced concepts of a secular and modern society. This subtle subversion begins with
Mabini’s intriguing use of the word “true” (in Spanish, “verdadero”) as a qualifier for the Decalogue. This was apparently
deliberate on Mabini’s part, a decision born of long reflection. In my view, he meant this harmless-sounding document to
be a polemic against the other side of the distinction—namely, the “false” commandments of clerical rule.

Consider The True Decalogue’s first rule: “Love God and your honor over all things: God as the source of all truth,
all justice and all activity; your honor, the only power that obliges you to be truthful, just and industrious.” Notice
that God and honor are made to sit on the same bench. The closest synonym to honor I can think of is self-respect. It is
this, according to Mabini, not God or his earthly agents, that commands us to be truthful, just and industrious.

God himself communicates to us directly through our conscience, says Mabini, a member of the Masonic fraternity. Hence,
the second commandment: “Worship God in the form that your conscience deems most upright and fitting.” One can’t find
a more succinct formulation of religious freedom than this.

It is interesting to observe Mabini weave enlightenment themes into the strands of the deeply religious culture of his
time. He wanted every Filipino to strive for personal perfection, develop his or her God-given talents rather than
passively accept his or her fate in life. In this religious cosmology, he situates love of country. “Love your country
after God and your honor, and more than you love yourself, because your country is the only paradise that God has
given you in this life; the only patrimony of your race; the only inheritance from your ancestors; and the only future
of your descendants: because of your country you have life, love and interests; happiness, honor and God.”

His concept of honor (what I call self-respect) is instructive. Filipinos, he said, must not equate the pursuit of this with
the shedding of blood for one’s country. This is not where honor is found but in the everyday work we do for our country
and for our neighbors—“we are here to work honorably, and later find rest in death, according to the Father of our country.”
He knew that a nation of their own was a strange idea for many Filipinos at that time.

Our colonial masters hid this truth from us for a long time, Mabini said: “[T]hat you have a country and that you owe her
everything, because she is all you have in this world.” Therefore: “Always look on your countryman as more than a
neighbor: you will find in him a friend, a brother and at least the companion to whom you are tied by only one
destiny, by the same happiness and sorrows, and by the same aspirations and interests.”

But, this is not the soaring rhetoric of an ordinary patriot. Mabini was far from being a chauvinist. For a man who never
went abroad for his education, he had a broader view of the human community than most intellectuals of his generation. He
saw nationalism as essential to the attainment of “all the objectives of human life” only “while the borders of the nations
established and preserved by the egoism of race and of family remain standing….” Mabini would, no doubt, have felt
equally at home in the modern world as Rizal.