As a brilliant theologian and author, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz wins our gratitude not only for her gifts but especially for the tormenting difficulty of expressing them in a society which fiercely condemned women's intellectual prowess. Even though mystery surrounds the end of her life, we can trust that her dramatic turn-around was guided by the same courage and wisdom which informed her earlier choices, and which inspires us to live up to our own potential. — Patricia Carlson

"From the moment I was first illuminated by the light of reason, my inclination toward letters has been so vehement that not even the admonitions of others . . . nor my own meditations... have been sufficient to cause me to forswear this natural impulse that God placed in me."

Sor (Sister) Juana Ines de la Cruz was a seventeenth-century nun, the first great poet of Latin America, and one of the earliest champions of equality for women in the church. She has been called a genius, a saint, a heretic, and an early feminist. The degree to which she may have reconciled these various identities is the source of her attraction and, ultimately, her mystery.

Juana was born on November 12, 1651, in Mexico, then called New Spain, in a small town not far from Mexico City. Raised by her mother's family - her parents were evidently unmarried - she displayed from her earliest childhood an extraordinary passion for knowledge. She learned to read and write by the time she was four and mastered Latin after only twenty lessons. As she recalled of her childhood, "In me the desire for learning was stronger than the desire for eating." By the time she was six-teen her reputation for brilliance, augmented by her famous beauty, had brought Juana to the attention of the viceregal court. She lived there for several years as a lady-in-waiting and became a popular member of elite society. But then suddenly, at the age of nineteen, she turned her back on the court and entered the Convent of St. Jerome in Mexico City.

There is no evidence that she was motivated by great piety. In fact she was later frank in describing her repugnance for "certain conditions" of convent life. Nevertheless, she said, "given the total antipathy I felt for marriage, I deemed convent life the least unsuitable and the most honorable I could elect if I were to insure my salvation." No doubt it was in part the name of St. Jerome, translator of the Bible and patron of all scholars, that dictated her choice of a convent.

Happily, the convent lived up to the promise of its name. Within the cloister she was able to amass one of the great personal libraries of her day - several thousand volumes - and to indulge her voracious appetite for learning of every sort. She could discourse intelligently on history, rhetoric, philosophy, art, architecture, geometry, astronomy, and many other fields. At the same time she wrote volumes of poems - passionate love poems, religious allegories, historical odes. These constitute one of the great literary outputs of the baroque era. She wrote plays, musical librettos, and scholarly monographs. All these were well known in the viceregal court, and her fame extended to Spain. The watershed in her life occurred in 1690 when she first ventured to write on matters of theology. She was moved to cross this threshold by reading a forty-year-old sermon by a famous preacher which struck her as idiotic. In response she wrote a long and brilliant critique, certainly the first theological work by a woman in the New World. This elicited an open letter from the bishop of Puebla, who praised her orthodoxy and her insight, but then condescendingly urged her to restrict herself to activities more becoming to a member of her sex.

"There is no creature, however lowly, in which one cannot recognize that God made me; there is none that does not astound reason if properly meditated on."

This released a tightly wound coil in Sor Juana. After several months she responded with a lengthy treatise. In this letter, composed with devastating irony and self-restraint, she defended her compulsion to learn as a God-given calling, one that she was powerless to deny. Even if she were deprived of books, she said, all the world was her university: "There is no creature, however lowly, in which one cannot recognize that God made me; there is none that does not astound reason if properly meditated on." At the same time she championed the equal rights of women to learn- in with an erudite appeal to Aristotle and Cicero, Scripture, her patron St. Jerome, his holy helper, St. Paula, and all other learned women saints. I/You foolish men," she wrote, "accusing women for lacking reason when you yourselves are the reason for the lack." It was a bold and unprecedented manifesto. In the eyes of many church authorities it was also outrageously presumptuous. What happened next is not in doubt, though the meaning of it is open to interpretation. After Sor Juana's "Response," her confessor would have no more to do with her. Soon after she made a public renewal of her vows and consecrated herself to the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary - a document she signed with her own blood. She then dispersed her famous and beloved library, distributing the proceeds among the poor. She wrote no more. In 1694, while nursing her sister nuns during a virulent outbreak of plague, she succumbed to the dread disease and quickly died on April 17. Some critics have seen in Juana's last years the marks of a profound conversion; her silence is akin to that of Thomas Aquinas, when he realized that all his great words were as straw. The proof is in the mystical charity she displayed in her final days. Others, including Octavio Paz, see her actions as a humiliating exerc ise in self-abnegation, an expression of her powerlessness as a woman. Just as her options dictated that she enter the convent in order to be a scholar, so her options as a woman religious dictated that she renounce her learning - renounce herself - in order to stay alive. The issue was not her orthodoxy. The issue was her gender. The alternative was the Inquisition. Still, the mystery lingers. Though not conventionally pious, Juana embraced the religious life as a means of pursuing the call to learning - a vocation she believed to come from God. Ultimately it proved difficult, if not impossible, to negotiate the claims of these vocations. And so the question remains: Did Sor Juana's elected silence represent an act of faithful submission or a betrayal of herself, her true vocation, and thus of God? Which was ultimately the greater rebellion: to stand up to church authorities or to submit? Her only answer is silence. No one can answer the riddle of Sor Juana who has not tried to walk her path.

Additional reading: A Woman of Genius: The Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

Read a poem by Sor Juana