Introduction

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648 or 1651–1695) was born in San Miguel de Nepantla, Mexico. She was a Catholic nun and a feminist avant-la-lettre. She has been lauded as Latin America's most famous proto-feminist and as Colonial Latin America's first great poet. Sor Juana is also considered the last great poet of the Spanish Baroque, because Mexico, known at the time as “New Spain,” was one of the most important Spanish viceroyalties in the Americas. Given the colonial status of the Mexican territory, Spain could – and did – claim the figure of Sor Juana as part of its own artistic canon, even if the nun never set foot outside of Mexican soil. During her lifetime Sor Juana was already celebrated with epithets such as “American Minerva” and “Phoenix of Nepantla.” Also, as is the case with New England writer Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672), Sor Juana was recognized as the “Tenth Muse.”

This chapter applies the related ideas of “heterodoxy” and “paradox” to Sor Juana's personal understanding of her Catholic faith. Sor Juana pushes the boundaries of orthodoxy without necessarily crossing lines into the heretical, a position that Robert McClory (2000) identifies as “faithful dissent.” This is a virtually unexplored angle of analysis when one considers that traditionally most critics want her in one camp or the other: orthodox believer versus heretic. The category “faithful dissenter” is much more profitable for describing how Sor Juana's faith pushes the envelope in relation to women and their standing in the church. As a cloistered nun who also was a public intellectual and quasi-official poet of the court (see Patronage, Spoliation, and Forms of Government), Sor Juana pushes against limitations in freedom of speech for religious women and seeks to expand the range of acceptable intellectual and spiritual activity for Catholic women (see Gender Rights in Nineteenth‐Century World Literature; and Gender and Representation). Sor Juana's faithful dissent matters to World Literature because it offers a powerful example from early modernity of the type of negotiations that women with a theological and a philosophical vocation had to undergo in order to establish creative dialogue with a long-standing intellectual tradition that often silenced them. As female intellectuals and artists continue to strive for greater visibility, Sor Juana's example remains more relevant than ever, as evidenced by her increasing inclusion in the curricula of women's studies programs worldwide.

Sor Juana's efforts creatively to engage with tradition are illustrated by the epistolary dispute that marred her final years (1690–1695). Two of her letters provide a framework necessary for understanding this polemic. The first one, chronologically speaking, is Critique of a Sermon (Crisis de un sermón), written in 1690. The second one is her most famous letter, the Reply to Sister Filotea, written in 1691. The Reply is Latin America's first manifesto of female intellectual independence; it has been justly compared to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ([1792] 1985).

The circumstances around the composition of both letters are as follows: around 1690 the cloistered, Hieronymite nun Sor Juana was one day in the parlor of the convent. Through the grating that separated the nuns from their visitors, she was critiquing the famous Sermon of the Mandate that the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio Vieyra had preached in the Royal Chapel of Lisbon in 1650. An acquaintance of Sor Juana's was very impressed with her theological speculation. This person requested – as Sor Juana herself states in the letter she was about to write – that the nun write down her critique and send them a copy. From this request was born Critique of a Sermon, the title Sor Juana gave her written critique of Vieyra's sermon.

The story of the parlor encompasses not only the controversy which marred the last years of Sor Juana's life, but rather it entails the circumstances that enabled the production of a unique document in the history of ideas in Latin America. The Reply to Sister Filotea reveals the seeds of female intellectual emancipation. After having received Critique of a Sermon, Sor Juana's acquaintance published it without the nun's permission and under the much less modest title of Letter Worthy of Athena (Carta atenagórica). The publication was prefaced by another document, Letter of Sister Filotea, dated 25 November 1690. In this letter, the “God-loving nun” in essence scolds “Sister Philosophy,” the “knowledge-loving nun” (an astute distinction that we owe to Argentine critic Josefina Ludmer, 1999, 91) for her dedication to secular studies and for an alleged lack of dedication to the study of the scriptures. Although sincerely complimenting Sor Juana's intellectual abilities, the Letter of Sister Filotea ultimately seeks to chastise Sor Juana for her incursion into a field of knowledge that was regarded as special province of the male, namely, theology. Although Sor Juana theologizes in her poetry and her plays, Critique of a Sermon was her only direct attempt at writing an essay of theological speculation.

Sor Juana's classic Reply to Sister Filotea is a protest against censorship written with “anguish, humor and intelligence” (Montross 1980, 17). But, the Reply is not merely born out of Sor Juana's anger at being unfairly accused of a lack of dedication to the scriptures: in reading Sor Juana's complete works, the religious theme appears often and in various forms, from the mythical allegory in The Divine Narcissus (a sacramental play in celebration of the Eucharist), passing through multiple sets of carols in celebration of liturgical festivities of the church, to the more pious and less known Devout Exercises and Offerings for the Holy Rosary. The Reply is a reasoned apology, carefully crafted around the canons of not only classical rhetoric, but also those of the family letter, as demonstrated by Rosa Perelmuter (1983, 151), and containing expressions, as Sor Juana herself says, of “homey familiarity.”

Researchers agree that behind the veil of “Sor Filotea” hid Bishop Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz. He held jurisdiction over the Convent of Saint Hieronymus where Sor Juana had professed and then was living. Octavio Paz and others speculate about a potential bond of friendship between Sor Juana and Fernández de Santa Cruz. According to Paz: “The friendship between Sor Juana and the bishop went way back, as shown both by the tone of Sor Juana's Carta [atenagórica] and the tone of the prologue [Letter of Sister Filotea] which was affectionate in its severity” (1995, 520).1 If we accept this hypothesis, we must wonder what might have motivated the bishop to take on the persona of Sor Filotea in the first place. Was it a betrayal and an act of silencing? Or, was it a compliment (albeit ambiguous) and an opportunity to invite Sor Juana to express and defend herself? Should the bishop have written without the disguise, Sor Juana wouldn't have been able to reply without violating ecclesiastical decorum. Toward the end of the Reply Sor Juana introduces an ironic word game that suggests that she knew who was behind “Sor Filotea's veil.” Sor Juana says: “If the style, my most venerable Madame, of this letter is not the one owed to your dignity, I ask you to excuse my homey familiarity … it would not be so, should I see you without the veil …” (De la Cruz 1994, vol. 4, 468).2 Sor Juana plays with the double entendre of the word “veil” to signify both the veil worn by a nun and a piece of cloth used to disguise one's identity.

Sor Juana's name sounded on the lips of inquisitors. There is evidence that in the inquisitorial assessment of the sermon of a Jesuit named Palavicino, the Inquisitor Judge Agustín de Dorantes referred to Sor Juana as “a woman intruding as a theologian and scripturist” (AGN(M), Inquisición, quoted in Camarena 1995, 300).3

Sor Juana's inclination to theological speculative thinking seems to respond to a desire to reconcile faith and reason from within a space of intellectual inquiry. Dogmatic theology seeks to underpin the truths of faith with a philosophical foundation, or as the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, “to bring [these divine truths] nearer to the human mind” (Pohle 1912, n.p.). In the early Church Fathers, Sor Juana finds an inspiring example of this type of intellectual activity that, while occurring within the parameters of the church, still by its very nature tests the validity of certain propositions, thus stretching the limits of orthodoxy, in order to go deeper into the truths of faith. The present chapter emphasizes the importance of thinking about Sor Juana and her intellectual output outside the narrow binary between orthodoxy and heresy.

Heterodoxy, Paradox, and Dissent

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the origin of the word “heterodox” back to the seventeenth century: “(originally as a noun denoting an unorthodox opinion): via late Latin from Greek heterodoxos, from heteros other + doxa opinion)” (n.p.). Sor Juana's heterodox views, ones “not conforming with accepted or orthodox standards or beliefs” (Oxford English Dictionary, n.p.), about women and their right to be subjects of knowledge, may be best understood within the context of paradox, and ultimately, of faithful dissent. Containing the Greek prefix para- (contra) and suffix -doxa (opinion), the word paradox means “against established opinion.” It expresses the notion of a “strange idea, opposed to what is generally held to be true or to the prevailing opinion” (Moliner 1994, 634). Another connotation of the word is: “Expression in which there is an apparent incompatibility, which is resolved in a deeper thought of the one that enunciates it …” (Moliner 1994, 634). Both “heterodoxy” and “paradox” are concepts that represent non-conformity with the established opinion. The difference between the two is rooted in paradox's underlying resolution of a contradiction that is ultimately only apparent; as for “heterodoxy,” the notion of “other opinions” contains no latent resolution. In testing the limits of dissent, Sor Juana embraces paradox as a tool that allows her to cope with heterodoxy, itself a kind of midpoint of non-conformity somewhere between orthodoxy and heresy.

The dominant scholarly discourse on Sor Juana has been traditionally shaped by the binary “orthodoxy (Catholic scholars) versus heresy (anti-establishment),” while the middle ground of faithful dissent and its fruitful application to Sor Juana's case has tended to be overlooked. According to Alejandro Soriano Vallés, the debate about Sor Juana's faith “is framed in one of these two ‘sides’: anti-establishment criticism, which raises the confrontation of the nun with the establishment, and the Catholic one, supportive of the notion of her fidelity to orthodoxy” (2000, 12). Soriano Vallés himself represents the “Catholic side” of Sor Juana's criticism. Also, Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, S.J., the editor of the definitive edition of Sor Juana's Complete Works (1951) is one of Sor Juana's most venerable Catholic critics. Marie-Cécile Bénassy-Berling assumes a nuanced position when she states that “the work of the poetess shows no trace of curiosity about the occult sciences … But she undoubtedly had some knowledge of this Florentine culture [and] found an interest in several works or currents related to Neoplatonism” (1983, 141). Bénassy-Berling sees the nun's Egyptian interest within the context of the role of Egypt as “cradle of culture” (1983, 149).

For Paz, Sor Juana's “intellectual abjuration” ultimately springs from the “fact” that her faith is “incompatible” with her intellectual vocation.4

Sor Juana's interest in Hermeticism has been the subject of much critical debate. In her poetic masterpiece First Dream (Primero sueño) (c. 1685), Sor Juana includes a reference to Ars magnae lucis et umbrae (1645) by German Jesuit and Hermetic thinker Athanasius Kircher (c. 1602–1680). She alludes specifically to Kircher's pioneering depiction of the magic lantern. Kircher is credited with contributing to the invention of this artifact (Houstoun 1957, 462). According to Elías Trabulse, at the very core of the First Dream there is an attempt to describe in poetic form what Kircher had described in “scientific” language, namely, that musical harmony is what orchestrates the relations within all of creation (1979, xv–xvii). Sor Juana makes other references to Kircher in the Reply to Sister Filotea and in other poems.

Karl Vossler was the first scholar to establish the connection between Sor Juana and Athanasius Kircher. Paz resumes the academic dialogue Vossler and Ricard had initiated about a possible “hermetic revelation” in Sor Juana and claims that the Hermetic tradition reaches Sor Juana via Kircher (1995, 476–477). In the 1980s, critics such as José Pascual Buxó (1989) and Manuel Durán (1983) also argued to a greater or lesser extent in favor of the presence of such a revelation. Buxó (1989) explores possible similarities between the First Dream and the Corpus Hermeticum, as he inquires whether Sor Juana creates a syncretism between Aristotelian Thomism and Hermetic Gnosis. Durán also defends the thesis of the hermetic influence via Kircher in Sor Juana's poem. For Durán, however, the most important message of the poem – the impossibility of reaching absolute knowledge vis-à-vis the importance of intellectual pursuit rather than results – is more Kantian than hermetic.

Soriano Vallés, on the other hand, maintains the “absurdity” of the “Sor Juana-Kircher-Bruno-heterodoxia chain, to which Paz is so inclined” (“Fe y Hermetismo,” n.p.).5 Soriano Vallés argues that “the heterodox face that Paz seems to believe to have encountered in Sor Juana … is only rooted in the disproportionate importance granted to the pseudo-Hermetic Kircher by Paz himself” (“Fe y Hermetismo,” n.p.).

I seek to connect the idea of Sor Juana's “faithful dissidence” with a preference for paradox that I argue is better understood in the context of her understanding of herself as a Christian and a Baroque thinker and writer. As a Christian and a Baroque thinker, Sor Juana is doubly paradoxical.

As a faithful dissenter, Sor Juana is attracted to Christianity's innate paradoxes. According to G.K. Chesterton, Christianity is a paradoxical religion. Chesterton argues that throughout its history Christianity has led people to the most disparate judgments. For example, on one hand Christianity has been criticized for its preaching of “The Gospel paradox about the other cheek,” while on the other it has been dubbed as “the mother of wars” (1908, n.p.). Similarly, Chesterton speaks of the paradox of Christian charity that “certainly means one of two things – pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people” (1908, n.p.). Paradoxical attitudes could be extended to the notion of a Messiah, completely God and completely man, who from the most brutal deprivation of the cross fulfills his divine power. Like Chesterton, Søren Kierkegaard sees faith as involving paradox. According to Kierkegaard, faith is “a happy passion … whose object is the Paradox” (2007, 59). As a subject of faith, the Christian gains access to the experience of the impossible (infinity or God as absolute otherness) by taking a leap from rational thought into mystery.

Almost two centuries after Sor Juana's death, Kierkegaard's thoughts on Christian faith present intriguing parallels with the Mexican nun's attraction to the paradoxical nature of Christianity. Traditionally, Sor Juana's First Dream has been read as a chronicle of the defeat of the human mind in its attempt to apprehend universal knowledge. In my article “Sor Juana ante la paradoja de un sueño” (“Sor Juana before the Paradox of a Dream”) (2015), I look at Sor Juana's writing through a Kierkegaardian lens and argue that the resolution of Sor Juana's poem is neither defeatist nor purely fideist, as in the soul accepting its limits and turning to piety. Instead, Sor Juana ultimately stresses the idea of the free will of a soul in full exercise of its ability to choose in its relation to God; thus the soul debates between prideful rebelliousness and obedience as it strives to acquire universal knowledge. This resolution evidences Sor Juana's faithful dissent, as she puts forth the notion of free will as a divine gift that allows the soul even to reject God.

Such understanding of paradox is central to Sor Juana's thought. Both Gracián and Sor Juana are proponents of Conceptismo, a literary movement from the Baroque period. As such, they are both skilled in the art of the ingenious manipulation of the concept, defined by Gracián as “an act of understanding, which squeezes out the correspondence between objects” (1957, 17).

Sor Juana invokes the noble lineage of the sons and daughters of God as her justification for wanting to use the intellect that God gave her to dissent from Vieyra's opinion.

Sor Juana's dissidence can be deemed as a contact zone showcasing the clash between her obligations as a professed nun and her calling to be an intellectual and a poet. The concept of “contact zone” as defined by Mary Louise Pratt informs the negotiations Sor Juana undertakes as she challenges church traditions regarding the role of women within the institution. Pratt defines “contact zones” as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (1991, 34).

Within the contested site of her convent cell as heteropia, Sor Juana writes her critique of Vieyra's sermon as an exercise of writing of the contact zone. Significantly, critique is one of the “literate arts of the contact zone” (Pratt 1991, 37). Sor Juana critiques the intellectual arrogance of Vieyra's claim that no one, not even the Holy Fathers, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine (see Augustine's Confessions), and St. Thomas, would be able to surpass his argument about Christ's “greater finesse” or loving gesture toward humanity. For St. John Chrysostom, Christ's “greater finesse” was washing the feet of the disciples, St. Augustine claimed that it was dying on the cross, and St. Thomas argued that it was remaining with humanity in sacramental form. Sor Juana defends the opinions of the Holy Fathers (a gesture of faithfulness) at the same time that she denounces a double standard (a gesture of dissent) that not only does not see the arrogance in Vieyra's attitude, but lavishes recognition upon him while persecuting her for wanting to exert her intellectual gifts.

A Studious Silence

In re-viewing St. Paul's words, the nun proposes in four clearly discernible movements, a novel interpretation which, according to her, is the correct one. First, she relates this Pauline quote to another of Paul's, 1 Timothy 2:11: “Mulier in silentio discat” (Let the woman learn in silence); although she omits the second part of this quote which refers to the aspect of submission that is expected of women. The words of St. Paul addressed to Timothy allow Sor Juana to resemanticize the value of the other silence. Now it is not a passive silence, as the traditional interpretation of the Pauline passage suggests, but a studious silence. Women should remain quiet in the church not because it is not desirable for them to speak, but because it is more conducive to learning.

Second, Sor Juana introduces a new biblical passage, “Audi Israel, et tace”, in which the exhortation to silence is made to men and women alike. Third, she proposes two possible interpretations for the concept of church. It can either be the material enclosure of the temple (pulpits and chairs), or it can express the most transcendental idea of  the church as a community of the faithful. For Sor Juana, St. Paul is referring to the physical enclosure, since women were not allowed to read or preach in public. This implies that the private space of the home is an appropriate place where women can study. To those who understand that St. Paul's prohibition is more transcendental and refers to a universal silence imposed on women by the church, Sor Juana argues that it is simply not true that women must always be deprived of the right to speak.

Fourth, she introduces a small catalogue of prominent Catholic women who have been allowed to study, write, and speak within the church: St. Gertrude the Great, St. Teresa of Ávila (see St. Teresa of Ávila), St. Bridget, and the venerable Mother María de Jesús de Ágreda. Mentioning these women fulfills a rhetorical function that is a recognizable Sorjuanian strategy: claiming powerful foremothers that validate her spiritual and intellectual enterprise. According to Nina M. Scott: “[I]n the course of this autobiographical letter [the Reply] Sor Juana cited a total of forty-two women's names, women considered exemplary for reasons important to her” (1994, 206).

Sor Juana's most powerful foremother within the Catholic tradition is the Virgin Mary. As I explore in my article “Marian Devotion and Religious Paradox in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” (2010), in her Marian carols Sor Juana claims the Virgin Mary as intellectual precursor. By rendering an image of the Mother of God as brave (Lady-Errant) and intelligent (Theologian who teaches the Angelic Schools), Sor Juana strays from a more pious line of representation that insists on the maternal qualities of Mary. In spite of her brilliant defense of women's intellectual rights, at the end of her life Sor Juana was forced by Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas to rid herself of the 4000 volumes in her library and forsake all of her studies. She sold everything and gave the money to the poor. Soon after, Sor Juana died, a victim of the plague that was ravaging Mexico, while caring for her community sisters who had been infected.

Conclusion

In her attempt to give voice to women within the Catholic Church, Sor Juana embraces faithful dissent. This response is part of a creative effort to establish dialogue with a religious tradition that has tended to silence women. Sor Juana's Christian and Baroque outlook, with its intrinsically paradoxical stance, provides her with the ideal framework for her faithful dissent, as she attempts to escape the constricting and punitive binary opposition of “purity” of belief versus outright “rejection” of belief. As a cloistered nun who was also a poet and prominent intellectual, Sor Juana works from a framework of “Christian feminism” in order to expand the range of acceptable activity for women in the church. Even if she didn't manage to convince those who wanted to put a halt to her intellectual activity, Sor Juana's voice prevailed in the long run. Today she is recognized in all justice as Latin America's first “feminist” who planted the seeds for female intellectual emancipation in that region of the world.

SEE ALSO: Augustine's Confessions: Beyond Aesthetics, Ethics, and Cosmopolitanism; Bridge Essay: Gender and Representation: New Approaches to Medieval Literature; Bridge Essay: World Collecting: Patronage, Spoliation, and Forms of Government; St. Teresa of Ávila: The Expression of Spanish Spirituality; “But Women Feel Just as Men Do”: Gender Rights in Nineteenth‐Century World Literature