Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Agora

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

c. 1648–1695

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Women have the same right to study and knowledge as men, and the soul’s hunger for understanding is natural even where it hits its limits.

Placement

Latin American & Caribbean Philosophy · Latin America & Caribbean · Epistemology, Religion, Aesthetics, Gender & Feminism

Hieronymite nun and poet of New Spain: her “Reply to Sor Filotea” defends women’s right to learning; the poem “First Dream” stages the soul’s quest for knowledge.

Key ideas

Women’s right to knowledge
First Dream
Limits of the intellect

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Influence

Influenced by 2

Augustine

influenced by
In her Athenagoric Letter (1690) Sor Juana defended Augustine’s view that Christ’s greatest proof of love was to die, together with those of Thomas Aquinas and John Chrysostom, against the Jesuit preacher António Vieira, who had claimed to surpass all three. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Carta atenagórica (Crisis de un sermón, 1690); A. Vieira, Sermão do Mandato (1650)
Evidence: AI draft
Augustine › 354–430
Thomas Aquinas

influenced by
Sor Juana defended Aquinas, Augustine and Chrysostom against António Vieira’s sermon on the ‘finezas’ of Christ, arguing in scholastic form (Carta atenagórica, 1690). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Carta atenagórica (1690); Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (1691); O. Paz, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe (1982)
Evidence: AI draft
Thomas Aquinas › c. 1225–1274

Works

1691Reply to Sor Filotea
A letter to the bishop of Puebla, who had urged her to give up secular study: a defence of women’s right to learning and of her own intellectual life.

Position

In 1690 Sor Juana criticised a sermon by the Jesuit António Vieira; the bishop of Puebla printed her critique and, writing as “Sor Filotea de la Cruz”, urged her to turn to religious study. Her Reply defends her urge to know as God-given, cites learned women of the past, and reads Paul’s command of silence as forbidding public preaching, not study. The poem First Dream shows the soul trying to grasp the whole universe – first at a single glance, then step by step – and failing. Shortly before her death she gave up her library, for reasons still disputed. She is read today as an early defender of women’s intellectual equality.

Life & context

Juana Inés de Asbaje was born in San Miguel Nepantla near Mexico City in 1648 or 1651 – the year is disputed – to an unmarried mother. Largely self-taught, she became famous for her learning at the viceregal court. In 1669 she entered the Hieronymite convent of San Jerónimo in Mexico City, where she built a large library and wrote poetry, plays and theological texts. She died in 1695 during an epidemic.