SOR JUANA INEZ

Write a 750-word formal academic essay in which you compare and contrast the cultural values found in SOR JUANA INEZ story with the values of African American culture.

SOR JUANA INEZ

Any writer who characterizes herself as “a lowly nun, the humblest creature of the world,” and yet can cite from a doctor of the Church, St. Thomas; a light of classical pagan learning, Quintilian; the New Testament story of Mary’s visitation with her cousin Elizabeth; and an Old Testament story about Saul from 1 Samuel in less than the space of her first two paragraphs is telling her reader a thing or two about humility — its fair bounds, and its fair restrictions. What this humble nun will go on to do, in effect, is argue that study in the name of learning is neither an act of pride or worldliness but a natural action of the soul.

Indeed, though it is couched in the most gracious of terms, with elegant turns of thought and language and with an impressive but never gratuitous display of erudition, the March 1, 1691, argument advanced by the Mexican nunSor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) in her Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz is an impassioned defense of intellectual freedom as both serving and fulfilling the will of God. That she undertakes this defense on behalf of her gender should not prevent us from imagining that it extends, by implication, to every human being, as indeed it should.

· An earlier piece of Sister Juana’s writing, a polemical commentary on a sermon by a Portuguese Jesuit named Antonio de Vieyra, was published without Sister Juana’s knowledge by the bishop of Puebla. While he paid her a very high compliment by acknowledging that her argument was worthy of publication, a compliment he further compounded by asserting in the title he assigned the piece, Athenagoric Letter, that it was worthy of Athena as well, the bishop nevertheless recommended in a letter which he prefaced to Sister Juana’s commentary that henceforth the good sister should confine herself to less worldly and more religious matters, in keeping with her station and her vocation. He used the pseudonym “Sor Filotea de la Cruz” in signing the letter, suggesting that his was “friendly” advice; hence, Sister Juana’s reply is addressed to “Sister Filotea.”

Two separate issues dovetail in Sister Juana’s situation, and she is willing to admit the dilemma exists. For it is not simply that Sister is a woman that compels “Sister Filotea’s” friendly admonition; it is that Sister Juana is a nun. Her having taken vows requires that she devote her life to God; inasmuch as she has taken up the profession of writing, on her own and unbidden by her superiors, there is the hint that she, a religious, may be succumbing to the lure of vanity and worldliness. Sister acknowledges a full awareness on her part  that the bishop’s warning is not ill intentioned but intended for her own good: “I know well that your most sensible warning is not directed against [the commentary on Vieyra’s sermon], but rather against those worldly matters of which I have written.” The good sister had published secular poetry and drama. No harm there again, particularly in view of the fact that those writings had earned her a reputation as the “Tenth Muse” and continue to reserve her a place among Mexico’s most illustrious writers. But, to give the bishop his due, why then be a nun, one might ask. So Sister, if she is to defend herself, must defend herself both as a woman and as a person who has embraced a religious vocation and yet finds in writing, and reading, a natural outlet for expressing and fulfilling the needs of her spiritual life.

This latter dilemma is not unique to Sister Juana or the Mexico of the Inquisition. There is very much a matter of personal choice and personal obligation reflected therein, making Sister’s reply all that much less parochial and therefore that much more noteworthy. Reconciling worldly and spiritual pursuits has never been an easy task, but must be doubly difficult for artists, whom neither the needs of the world nor the demands of eternity seem to encourage in their lonely and often driven endeavors. For just one equally outstanding example, the nineteenth-century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a convert to Catholicism who eventually entered the priesthood, abandoned the writing of poetry once he had taken up holy orders; and he resumed writing poetry again only after his father superior encouraged him to write a poem on a tragedy at sea involving five exiled German nuns. The resulting poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland, regarded as one of the great masterpieces of English Victorian literature, would not have been penned at all had Hopkins followed his personal inclination to renounce poetry writing as a vain and worldly pursuit for a priest — and the poem was written only because, as a Jesuit, Hopkins had taken a vow of obedience.

So although she calls her Reply “a simple narrative of my inclination toward letters,” Sister Juana’s spirited defense of her pursuit of a life of letters and learning while devoting herself to her religious duties is in fact an exceptional document, arguing, as it does, that the inclination toward learning in her is the product of nature, not nurture or willfulness. She begins her actual defense with an appeal to the highest authority, calling her desire to write “this natural impulse that God placed in me.”

So, too, she has the evidence to back up her case. At age three, having followed an older sister to a school for girls, she became so “inflamed with the desire to know how to read” that she convinced the teacher to give her instruction as well. Reading, for her, became an avenue to knowing, until she found that “the desire for learning was stronger than the desire for eating.” Years later, agonizing that she should give up her love of books for her love of God, she came even closer to discovering how, if this desire to know is a disease, then her reading and writing are its symptoms, not its cause; for her books put aside, she discovered that creation, as it were, became her book: “I looked on nothing without reflection.”

It is the life of mind that Sister Juana is really defending — the life of the mind and the right of each individual, male or female, religious or layperson, to live that life as fully and as richly as any other life. In the immediate context of her own life choices, then, she justifies her insatiable acquisition of knowledge by insisting that her main intent and final goal were and remain the mastery of that “Queen of Sciences,” theology. For how else, she asks, can one come to recognize God’s hand in His creation except through our knowledge of it in all its sundry aspects and disciplines.

But the good sister is no fool. She knows that very few think of bookishness as being next to godliness; that indeed, those who acquire learning and wisdom only arouse the enmity and envy of others rather than their respect and admiration. “A mind that is a storehouse of wisdom can expect nothing but a crown of thorns,” she concludes, nor does she blush at the direct comparison she makes between her own condition and the life of Christ. Sister Juana makes the good student, the lover of knowledge, a hero, but a lonely and misunderstood hero, particularly if he is a she.

So Sister Juana attacks the very bastion of male privilege, the patriarchal authority set up in Scripture wherein there appear to be constant admonitions for women to keep silent. That silence, she argues,  may very well mean that they are required to reflect upon the Word of God, as she has done, rather than that they are enjoined from ever expressing themselves openly in those forums reserved to her time largely for males.

This argument she backs up with the recitation of a litany of learned, or at least highly accomplished, women throughout the ages, covering, once more, those four great categories of human endeavor: from our classical, pagan heritage, figures such as Athena/Minerva, the very genius of wisdom; from the  Old Testament, such heroic figures as Sheba, Esther, and Anna; from the New Testament, among the many other women who played significant roles in Jesus’s life, she singles out for particular attention the Mary  of the Magnificat; and from contemporary history she calls up images of women who have benefited the Church and society, both queens and saints, not the least among them St. Teresa of Avila, herself widely renowned as a writer. “What then is the evil in my being a woman?” she asks. Still, Sister Juana promises that she will henceforth be silent (unless “Sister Filotea” insists otherwise); for, Sister Juana concludes, if her devotion to learning and love of books and of writing are in fact weaknesses in her, they are weaknesses only inasmuch as they compel her to break the bonds of humility and foster an intellectual pride that is its own undoing. And so, even in renouncing the world, Sister Juana asserts her essential point, and that is that her pursuit of knowledge has always been for the good of her soul, as God intended it be.