The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Church” that, she avers, is permission-giving and not withholding. An earlier reference to Christ’s “Mother the Synagogue” (par. 23) and the one to “our Holy Mother Church” cited above are part of Sor Juana’s recurrent association of motherhood with creativity and wisdom.
Through all these modes of discourse, Sor Juana expresses pain, regret, and anger regarding her personal situation. She praises, begs, rejects, persuades, ridicules, chides, defends, and teaches the bishop and the imaginary jury—her future readers. She plays every role, accused and accuser, subject and superior. She asks the bishop to put himself in her place, and then rhetorically puts herself in his, thus challenging the hierarchical order. Finally, not forgetting her officially inferior position, she insists on her spiritual equality and on exercising her God-given reason, poetic gifts, and free will. In the process, she displays her intellectual peerlessness while mouthing the expected clichés of the rhetoric of feminine ignorance and tendering the requisite offer of retraction, should anything be said that might be condemned as heresy.
The Issues at Stake
To understand the letter Sor Juana wrote in 1691, it is necessary to know something of two other letters preceding the Answer. She wrote one; the other, by the bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz—“Sor Filotea”—was the letter to which she was most immediately replying in the Answer (see Appendix). The circumstances surrounding the composition of these two earlier letters were discussed in the sections “Conflict Intensifies” and “The Bishop, the Answer and—Silence,” above; we return to the letters here to explore their content.
Letter to Her Confessor. The first letter was written by Sor Juana in 1681/82 (i.e., a decade before the Answer) but was not recovered until 1980. Sor Juana did not intend it for publication.37 In it, she addressed her confessor of more than a decade, Antonio Núñez de Miranda, one of the most knowledgeable and influential citizens of New Spain.38 The letter relieves him of his responsibilities to her for absolution of sins and spiritual guidance—in essence “fires him”—a right every nun had been assured of since the Council of Trent (1545–63). Going beyond personal appeal, Sor Juana’s letter criticizes the narrow-mindedness and repressive authoritarianism, the un-Christian and unintelligent dogmatism of the whole imperial establishment, including that of other nuns and laywomen, young and old. The recently recovered letter thus gives us a new view of the political and hierarchical tides Sor Juana had to ride as well as some notion of how she kept them from overwhelming her.
From the first lines of the letter to its conclusion, irony and rhetorical questions heighten Sor Juana’s outrage. Specific themes and rhetorical devices (indeed, actual statements and questions) made later in the Answer are already posed in this private letter to Núñez: for example, regarding her right to write poetry and to study and her concern for the sanctity of her soul.
This letter of 1681/82 is the source of the most concrete and unadorned information about Sor Juana’s activities that we have from her own pen—the “who, what, and when” with regard to support for her Latin and music lessons, the provision of her dowry to enter the convent, her receiving visitors, and the commissioning of several writings such as the Allegorical Neptune. Sor Juana attacks Núñez’s reputed remark, that had he known she would write poetry, he would have “married her off” rather than put her in the convent. “Indeed, my most beloved Father,” she replies, “…what direct authority was yours, to dispose either of my person or my [free] will?” She makes clear that her godfather paid her dowry: Núñez had no such power, although she acknowledges “other affectionate acts and many kindnesses for which I shall be eternally grateful.” The personal information given privately to her confessor contrasts sharply with such frequently considered passages as Sor Juana’s love for her convent sisters and theirs for her and other selectively anecdotal autobiographical sections of the 1691 Answer. Thus, when Sor Juana’s two letters are examined together, the Answer’s “autobiographical” passages reveal theatrically heightened and fictionally selective motifs and demonstrate the artfully constructed nature of the later, intentionally public essay.
Letter from “Sor Filotea.” The second letter necessary for an understanding of the Answer to Sor Filotea de la Cruz delivered praise, censure, and admonishment from one “Sor Filotea.” As we have seen, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, bishop of Puebla, wrote that letter and signed that pseudonym when he had it printed in 1690 as a preface to Sor Juana’s “Letter Worthy of Athena.” The Answer is a point-by-point retort to the bishop of Puebla, yet few have considered the Answer in this light. Much of what Sor Juana says and how she says it was determined by her reaction to his letter. (See Appendix, pages 222–231, for full text of this letter.)
The central tenet of the bishop’s prefatory letter to Sor Juana is that all but divine knowledge should be eschewed, especially by a woman. The humanities are useful only as “slaves” to sacred studies. “Filotea” does not believe women should be barred entirely from learning, so long as learning does not keep women from assuming “a position of obedience” or incline “our sex” to presumptuousness. The bishop (in female disguise) warns Sor Juana:
I am quite certain that if you … were to form a detailed idea of divine perfections (which is allowed us, even amongst the shadows of our faith), you would at one and the same time find your soul enlightened and your will set aflame and sweetly wounded by the love of God, in order that the Lord, who has so abundantly showered Your Worship with positive favors in the natural world, should not be obliged to grant you only negative ones in the hereafter. (OC 4.696 and Appendix, below.)
Accompanying this threat to the salvation of Sor Juana’s eternal soul are the bishop’s admonitory references to several great (male) religious figures who spurned all worldly learning. By way of answer, Sor Juana will cite other figures, male and female (or the same men, at different periods in their lives), who embraced secular as well as sacred studies. In paragraph 11, she implicitly scolds and ridicules the bishop, demonstrating her complex understanding of the limits to what we today call binary oppositions: “In sum, we see how this Book [the Bible] contains all books, and this Science [of theology] includes all sciences, all of which serve that She may be understood.” She protests compartmentalization and argues for the continuity of knowledge, sacred and profane; for the use of reason to strengthen faith; for conciliation of orthodoxy and free will; and for the intellectual parity of women.
In his letter the bishop interweaves acceptance and rejection of verse writing. He posits that Sor Juana had imitated the “meter” of St. Teresa and St. Gregory of Nazianzus;39 he urges her instead to imitate their religious subject matter. The bishop’s assertion makes no sense, specifically because the two saints are not among the poets who influenced Sor Juana’s masterful use and innovation of metrical and prosodic form, nor does her prose bear any resemblance to St. Teresa’s. Moreover, we may recall that her most important commissions were church-related, the subject matter being utterly religious. In the Answer, Sor Juana refutes this notion of her lack of religious subject matter: first, by emphasizing the intellectual attention she gives to sacred texts; second, by proving that poetry itself can be inherently sacred. In some of her most forceful pages, bringing her defense to a close, she contests her unfitness, as a woman, to write. Indeed, through citation, both St. Gregory and St. Teresa become witnesses for Sor Juana’s side of the argument: Gregory putting forth the view that toleration of one’s enemies is as much a victory as vanquishing them; Teresa as a woman officially authorized to write. Clearly, Juana Inés had decided that if she had to tolerate her enemies, she would at least contest their ignorance and their hypocritical dissimulations. At the end of her reply she essentially unveils “Sor Filotea,” fully acknowledging the difference in status between her and the bishop: “For in addressing you, my sister, as a nun of the veil, I have forgotten the distance between myself and your most distinguished person, which should not occur were I to see you unveiled” (par. 45).
The Answer as Self-Defense. Sor Juana’s Answer, then, was a wise refutation of supposed “offenses.” In setting up her self-defense, Sor Juana kept the potentially hazardous Inquisition in mind.40 While it is not known how much real cause she had to fear being called