2023-06-07 18:31:43
“… My Master, and you, changing your opinion, believe me that from the first days those in which the child begins to speak, you can, if you observe him well, and have patience, teach him to use reason, that is, accustom him to think and make his true reasoning “. (Eugenio Espejo / Firsts of the Culture of Quito). In the image, a portrait of Eugenio Espejo. Photo: Taken from eugenioespejoenlared.blogspot.com
Eugenio Espejo He was born in Quito on February 21, 1747. Luis Chusig his parents called him. The meaning of his last name in Quichua is ‘owl’. He later took the name of Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo.
His father, Luis Santa Cruz and Mirrorwas originally from Cajamarca, Peru, who arrived in Quito at the age of fifteen as an assistant to the priest and doctor Fray José del Rosario, according to a review by Philip Lous Astuto, in his work ‘Eugenio Espejo 1747-1795: Ecuadorian reformer of the illustration’. His mother was Catalina Aldaz, from Quito and daughter of a freedman. ‘Eugenio Espejo was the prototype of the fusion of three currents: the indigenous through his father, the white and the black through his mother’.
It is said that he learned the basics from his father, although it is considered that he entered the ‘Escuela de primeras letras’, run by the Dominican parents, in Santo Domingo. He later studied with the Jesuits, before his expulsion by Carlos III. exists in the Golden Book of the University of San Gregoriothe certificate of graduation of the young Eugenio Espejo as a teacher, on June 8, 1762.
experimentation and reasoning
Philosophy at first worried Espejo, especially the classics greeks, romans y french. The astronomy books of Copernicus, Newton y Tycho Brahein vogue at that time. Through reading he learned several languages, among them the Frenchhe latin and the Greekand his maximum fondness: literature.
Experimentation and reasoning were two pillars of his thought. Then the Illustration, a movement that arose in France at the beginning of the 18th century. After so many readings and lessons he graduated from master of philosophy with five aces The Saturdays were the spaces for discussion and relief. That’s where some problems arose.
He devoted 12 hours to study and to insatiable, sometimes disorderly reading, which later led him to organize an archive. There he had the idea of forming a library in 1792. He was director of the first public library of Quitofollowing the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and Overseas in 1767, which consisted of 40 thousand volumes.
Surrounded by books, in 1792 two scientific works appeared: ‘Memory on the cutting of quinas, on the conservation of the cinchona tree, and ‘Vote of a robed minister of the Audiencia de Quito’, in which he analyzed the economic situation of the country.
According to Menéndez and Pelayo, the sources of Espejo’s aesthetic ideas were the readings of Muratori, Fr. Bouhours and Barbadinho.
doctor and researcher
In 1765 he entered the San Fernando College of Medicine and in 1767 he graduated as a doctor. He was interested in research and did studies on smallpox. and he began to write newspapers -many of them by hand-. One of them was ‘El Nuevo Luciano’, an imaginary dialogue between two characters.
Later, the newspaper ‘Primicias de la Cultura de Quito’ appeared in print on January 5, 1792, which had seven editions. He also wrote sermons for his brother, the clergyman John Paul, and translated from Greek the ‘Treatise on the Wonderful and Sublime’, by the Latin writer Dionysius Cassius Longinus.
Mirror pedagogical ideas
“We are destitute of education. It would be flattery, vile flattery, to call the people of Quito enlightened, wise, rich and happy, You are not: we speak with the language of holy writing; We live in the grossest ignorance and the most deplorable misery”. (Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo/Primicias de la Cultura de Quito, p. 136).
“You, my teacher, are assuming that the boy reaches a certain age, or at a certain time in childhood for reason to develop and leave the ties with which it was tied to a life, so to speak, purely sensitive. .
But it is not so, my teacher, and you, changing your opinion, believe me that from the first days those in which the child begins to speak, you can, if you observe him well, and have patience, teach him to use reason, that is, accustom him to think and make his true reasoning”. (Eugenio Espejo / Firsts of the Culture of Quito)
Espejo, endowed with ‘a rough style, difficult syntax, elliptical turns, a complicated way of conducting the themes in two and three planes’, according to Leopoldo Benites Vinueza’s appreciations, used the dialogues to build his penetrating and incisive discourse, published on more than one occasion with pseudonyms, an understandable attitude towards the threats of power.
His only faith was in the young
mirror was a pedagogue of journalism. ‘Sometimes persuasive, other times vehement, almost always aggressive, at all times the pen is for Espejo a way of teaching, a pedagogical way of procuring a progressive path of ideas and customs’. Sometimes a strange and frequent tenderness flows from him when he talks about youth. He has faith in her. The only faith of a skeptic.
In the midst of the prejudices that surrounded him and at the center of the violent onslaught of the mastiffs of hate that always persecuted him, his only faith was in the young people to whom he wanted to bring the lights of the new thought. In this, as in other aspects, Espejo was a man of the Enlightenment. A believer of the Enlightenment Age. A man focused on the current that clandestinely reached remote colonial America.
Espejo’s journalism, like that of John Montalvowas a pedagogical expression, a way of making the written word a means of teaching, of raising concerns, of awakening rebellions’, according to Benites Vinueza.
three masterpieces
The ‘Nuevo Luciano de Quito, ‘Marco Porcio Catón’ and ‘La ciencia blancardina’ pursued the intellectual improvement of the people of Quito. In the first he tries, in nine erudite conversations, to stimulate the study of literature, handwritten version, with the pseudonym Don Javier de Cía. Apéstegue and Perochena, which circulated in 1779.
The second, written a year later, under the name of Moisés Blancardo, is an apology for the clergy. There he criticized and ridiculed the ‘New Luciano’, in twenty chapters, and questioned the teaching of certain Jesuits, among them Sancho Escobar.
‘La ciencia blancardina’ –the second part of ‘Nuevo Luciano de Quito’, according to Espejo- is the response to the insults of the Quito censor, Juan de Arauz y Mesía, who described Espejo as a heretic, impious and atheist.
To understand Espejo you have to place him in his time. On more than one occasion he stressed that “he was a good Catholic and that his criticism of people or institutions never reached the most sacred: the Church and his dogma,” says Espejo, according to Philip Louis Astuto.
Commotion in Quito
Efren Aviles Pino, in ‘Enciclopedia del Ecuador’, describes the last days of Espejo: ‘On the morning of October 21, 1794, there was a great commotion in the city of Quito, when some stone crosses -of those so beautiful that characterize the frontispiece of the old Quito churches-, appeared adorned with little red taffeta flags, with an inscription in Latin that said: ‘Salve Cruce Liber Esto. Felicitatem et Gloria Consecunto’. (‘Under the Protection of the Cross, be Free, Obtain Glory and Happiness’).
‘The Spanish authorities immediately began an intense investigation to discover the perpetrators of said act, which they described as subversive, and finally suspicion fell on Espejo, for which reason on January 30, 1795, the President of the Royal Audience of Quito, Chap. Luis Antonio Muñoz de Guzmán appeared at the library for which he was in charge and ordered his arrest, proceeding immediately to confiscate papers, books, brochures, blurred thoughts and everything he considered insurgent literature.
Espejo was persecuted and unfairly imprisoned. Accused of flyer, subversive y libelista, heretic y slanderer of priestsdied sick and poor on December 27, 1795, in the arms of his sister, Manuelawife Jose Mejia Lequerica.
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