Mexico’s Phoenix and Tenth Muse: Sor Juana InÉs de la Cruz and the Command to Abandon the Classics

Edmund P. Cueva (Xavier University)

It has been recently noted by Andrew Laird (The Epic of America: An Introduction to Rafael Landívar and the Rusticatio Mexicana [2006] 65–67) that the lives of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Cornelius Gallus have some parallels. The latter, who seems to have created the genre of Latin love-elegy, suffered an estrangement from Augustus due to some unknown offence as prefect of Egypt and consequently committed suicide. The former, who was called by her contemporaries “The Tenth Muse” and “The Phoenix of Mexico,” experienced a rift with church authorities and was made to give up her intellectual and literary endeavors. Although she did not commit suicide, nevertheless the Mexican nun of the Order of Saint Jerome lived the rest of her life bereft of the Classics, and that for her was no better than death. This paper will review the struggle between Sor Juana and the church authorities and suggest that it was not solely or essentially a theological dispute that doomed the nun, but rather it was her acquaintance with and reliance on the Graeco-Roman classics and the use of the classical tradition by a religious (and woman) that caused great unease in the church hierarchy.

The controversy surrounding Sor Juana begins with what might appear to be her insignificant critique of a sermon delivered forty years previously by the Portuguese Jesuit, Father Antonio de Vieyra. She noted in her written analysis that the Jesuit had misunderstood one of Christ’s fineza. This publication eventually made its way to Don Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz y Sahagún, the Bishop of Puebla, who published the work under the title Carta Atenagórica (a letter worthy of Athena) because of its laudable, classical, and expansive erudition. However, at the same time the bishop wrote a separate letter under the pseudonym Sor Filotea to Sor Juana castigating her and recommending that she abandon her study of secular letters (i.e. the Classics): “Esclavas son las letras humanas y suelen aprovechar a las divinas . . . . No es poco el tiempo que ha empleado V. md. en estas ciencias curiosas; pase ya, como el gran Boecio, a las provechosas, juntando a las sutilezas de la natural, la utilidad de una filosofía moral.” In reply, Sor Juana wrote her famous, self-convicting Repuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz. The official church response to the communiqué was to require Sor Juana to rededicate herself to her vows as a religious and, most hurtful to the nun, to sell her library of classical texts.