Introduction

Rarely in the history of Mexico—perhaps never on any other occasion—has a figure been so studied, so poorly studied, so understood, and so misunderstood as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

The biography of the “tenth muse” is well known. All critics agree that her precocity and talent were extraordinary. However, when it comes to interpreting the events that marked her existence, opinions tend toward what amounts to a “black legend”—that is, finding fault and obstacles, insinuations and missteps, in her religious vocation, in her renunciation of writing, in her explicit intention to attain holiness, and finally, in her surrender to the care of her plague-stricken sisters, with contagion and death as the result.

Everyone builds her up or tears her down as they please—or as the fashion of the moment (and the grant money) dictates. Rosario Castellanos made a small inventory of what has been transmitted about Sor Juana:

Frivolous damsel of the viceregal court, a bird that allows itself to be ensnared in the nets of an impossible love from which she can escape only by seeking refuge behind the sacred walls of a convent. There she finds the consolation of solitude and gives vent to her nostalgia in sonnets and other trifles. Like all those chosen by the gods, Sor Juana dies young—and they lived happily ever after.[1]

Nine out of ten literature students will repeat this story, while the general public has been supplied with countless “anecdotes” about Sor Juana’s life: from the idea that the Catholic faith—especially her confessors and bishops—set countless traps to confine her to silence, declaring her the lover of the vicereine. In between, she is highlighted as the first feminist of the New World or as a hermetic poet. And when pressed on what Mexicans actually know about one of their finest writers, they come out with the opening lines of the redondilla composed to mock masculine foolishness: “You foolish men who accuse women without cause…”[2] On occasion, great truths begin to reveal themselves through the simplest things—those which, in the ordinary course of events, remain veiled to the eyes of specialized critics or of great writers who find in “that rarest phoenix” the traumas that afflict them or the vindications they pursue.

To begin (and to end), it is necessary to spend a little time investigating why she made the decision to enter conventual life. The spiritual meaning of that decision is the most eloquent precursor to her desire to live among books and seek holiness. If Sor Juana lived 27 years cloistered in the convent of the Hieronymites, was it because she was fleeing from the world to avoid scandal? This question leads to another, much closer to the Catholic faith: if Sor Juana lived 27 years in the convent of the Hieronymites in Mexico City, was it not because she wished—in addition to studying and writing—to attain holiness and eternal life?

This brief essay—with the scholars’ permission—aims at nothing more than a review of the reasons why Juana Inés chose the place where she would spend far more than half of her earthly life, weaving the fabric of her dwelling in Heaven.

On the Way to the Convent

At the age of eighteen years and nine months, Juana Inés decided to enter religious life. On August 14, 1667, she made a first entry into the convent of San José—also known as Santa Teresa la Antigua—with the Discalced Carmelites in Mexico City. The decision, while not entirely firm, was by no means arbitrary. She was acquainted with the life and work of Saint Teresa of Jesus, the reformer of the Carmelite Order. Already one of Juana Inés’s motivations reveals itself: to combine the loftiest heights of mystical beauty with literary creation. Saint Teresa was a figure of the utmost importance in Spanish mysticism and in the literature of the Golden Age.

Juana Inés surely thrilled to Teresa the Great’s “I die because I do not die” and was prepared to climb to the summit of the Interior Castle, in order from there to scan the vast horizon of the human heart and of the beauty of Christ.[3] According to the Book of Religious Professions of the Monastery of San José of the Discalced Carmelites of Mexico City, founded there in the year 1616, Juana Inés de la Cruz was received “as a nun and chorister” on the already-mentioned August 14, 1667 (a Sunday), with the viceroys (the Marquesses of Mancera) in attendance. But she did not profess. On November 18 of the same year, she left the Carmelite convent.

Sor Juana said little about her brief stay with the Discalced Carmelite nuns; however, in one of her poems she recalls that she suffered a serious illness (she does not specify which one), which caused her to leave the Convent of San José. The rule was surely too rigorous for her: bare feet, living on alms, poverty, chastity, obedience, and enclosure. And, moreover, “not drinking chocolate nor allowing another to drink it”.[4] Had religious cloistered life been a pretext, a kind of trial for herself or for someone else, this failed experience would have been sufficient: no more monasteries or convents; back to the palace balls, the relaxed life, the handsome courtiers (it is said that Juana Inés added dazzling physical beauty to her grace and intellect), and to letters—which, though difficult for a woman to access in the first half of the seventeenth century, could bring her enormous satisfaction. She would also be able to drink chocolate again.

But as it happened, 98 days after having walked out through the doors of the Convent of San José, on the 24th of 1669, the following year 1668, she entered the convent of San Jerónimo and Santa Paula. This fact, significant in itself, has been the subject of endless discussion. At its core lies an unavoidable question: why did Juana Inés abandon her brilliant palace life and exchange it for a cloistered convent?

This is one of the enigmas of Sor Juana. Many authors have speculated on various hypotheses. It must be said that it was neither romantic disappointment, nor fear or incapacity for marriage, nor pragmatic calculation, but rather the desire to secure the eternal salvation of her soul and to have time to be with her best friends, her books, as she herself affirms in the Reply to Sister Philothea of the Cross. The choice of the convent over the palace was a magnificent display of that fine discernment and sovereign freedom with which Juana Inés de Asuaje acted throughout her life. Above her own inclinations she placed the reasons of her understanding, illuminated by faith.[5]

But let us allow her to authenticate these words in the first holograph entry in the Book of Professions[6] of the Hieronymite convent, which she made—already under her religious name—on the 20th of the same month of February but in 1669, following the completion of a year of novitiate:

I, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, legitimate daughter of Don Pedro de Asuaje Vargas Machuca and of Isabel Ramírez, for the love and service of God our Lord and of our Lady the Virgin Mary and of our glorious father Saint Jerome and of our blessed mother Saint Paula, make vow and promise to God our Lord and to your grace the Doctor Don Antonio de Cárdenas y Salazar, canon of this cathedral and judge provisor of this archbishopric, in whose hands I make profession in the name of the Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord Don Fray Payo de Ribera, Bishop of Guatemala, Archbishop-elect of Mexico and its governor, and of his successors, to live and die for all the time and span of my life in obedience, poverty without any property of my own, in chastity and perpetual enclosure, under the sole rule of our father Saint Augustine and the constitutions granted to our order and house; in witness whereof I sign in my name today, the 20th of February of the year 1669.

María de San Miguel. Juana Inés de la Cruz
Prioress
God make me a saint.[7]

From this manuscript several conclusions may be drawn. We will mention only three. The first is nominal: she had gone from being Juana Inés de Asuaje y Ramírez de Santillana to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The passage from the world to the cloister. Form is substance.

The second: to devote herself to the service of God, rigorously observing the Rule and Constitutions of the Convent of San Jerónimo, without complaint and without placing letters above everything else. The third and decisive one: she professed while asking for the grace of holiness (she knew very well that holiness was not obtained by an “automatic pass” to Heaven through the cloister—though it could be obtained through martyrdom—something that at that point did not particularly interest her—or through the heroic and everyday virtues of prayer and devotion to others).

Furthermore, the convent of San Jerónimo was neither a closed nor an isolated place. On the contrary, it was in full flourish. When Sor Juana professed, there were 87 nuns (plus herself) cloistered within. And in the year of her death in 1695, “85 nuns were able to attend her burial in the lower choir of the church of San Jerónimo”.[8] She spent 27 years and three weeks cloistered. Can there be any doubt about her religious vocation?

The Narrow Gate and the Road Less Traveled

“The Convent of the Nuns of San Jerónimo of the imperial city of Mexico was the peaceful sea in which, to be a pilgrim, this pearl enclosed herself to grow,” says the Spanish Jesuit Diego Calleja, Sor Juana’s first biographer, beautifully.[9] Why did she end up there? She certainly did not do so because the Hieronymites had a vacancy to spare. Nor did she do so by fleeing from marriage, out of worldliness, by mandate, or on a whim.

She had doubts, as any human being does, as any young woman of 18 or 19 might, seeing her future behind bars, cauldrons, regulations, rigors, and fasts. But in the end, something drew her to the Hieronymites: the influence exercised over her—as a reader and student of Latin—by the founders of the Order to which the Convent of Santa Paula belonged. Marie-Cécile Bénassy-Berling underscores this:

On one hand, (Saint Jerome), the ancient Father of the Church, had been a man especially attached to classical letters…; and on the other hand, he was surrounded by female disciples, Marcella, Saint Paula and her daughters Blesilla and Saint Eustochium. For a believer like Sor Juana, this kind of sign was not of minor importance… And although she could not publicly confess her affinity with these illustrious predecessors, nothing prevented her, in her own conscience, from drawing encouragement and justification from that precedent, and from wishing to be herself a daughter of Saint Jerome in every respect.[10]

Put another way: Juana Inés’s choice of the Convent of San Jerónimo combined the two great desires of the so-called Mexican “phoenix”: to know and to be saved.

She knew (and honored) the famous saying of the holy translator of the Bible (Saint Jerome): “Love Sacred Scripture, and wisdom will love you; love it tenderly, and it will keep you safe; honor it and it will embrace you”.[11] She knew (and loved) the legacy of Saint Jerome and Saint Paula: Saint Jerome distinguished himself among the Fathers of the Church by his enormous interest in cultivating the moral and intellectual virtues of women—something that powerfully captured Juana Inés’s attention and, together with the life of Saint Paula, led her to envision a conventual life in which knowledge and faith could be reconciled. She took into account the letter in which Saint Jerome addressed Saint Eustochium, daughter of Saint Paula, affirming that if all the members of his body “were tongues,” they would be insufficient to define “the wisdom and virtue of Paula”.

Despite her modern critics—who have covered thousands of pages in search of hidden insinuations, hideous pretenses, and unconfessable submissions in Sor Juana’s writings and life—near the end of the Reply of the Poetess to the Most Illustrious Sister Philothea of the Cross (addressed to the Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz), she recalls Saint Jerome and reminds “Sister Philothea” that bonus sermo secreta non quaerit (good speech seeks no secrets). Neither does good action.

The path of holiness by way of ignorance could not—should not—be the path embraced by the soul of Juana Inés. Although at the end of her life she would set aside her scientific instruments, donate her nearly four thousand books, and devote her time to the care of the convent’s sisters—“the most beautiful hour” of Sor Juana, which Dr. Alejandro Soriano Vallès has so profoundly illuminated—the path to holiness she had chosen was what the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar called the Via Pulchritudinis: the path of knowledge of God and penetration into His word through beauty, art, and nature:

If in the practical order Sor Juana Inés chose the convent of San Jerónimo because there she could more freely deploy her irrenunciable intellectual life, in the spiritual order she felt, from the outset, attracted to the figure of Saint Jerome—and of Saint Paula—in whom she gradually deepened until she attuned herself to his way of thinking and acting, to his spirit open alike to virtue and to wisdom, until she arrived at a convinced assimilation of his methods and a loving affiliation.[12]

The path chosen by Sor Juana was just as unconventional for her era as it continues to be in our own. Leaving parties and pageants behind to surrender oneself to wisdom, to fine expression, to prayer and meditation in a convent, monastery, desert, or in everyday life, generated—and still generates—resentments, doubts, criticisms, sarcastic commentary, and outright disqualifications: “something fishy is going on there”; “she did it because she had no other destiny,” and so on.

In a ballad dedicated to the Countess of Galve on the occasion of her birthday, Sor Juana says something that defines her steadfastness, that shows her decision to integrate herself into conventual life, her thirst for knowledge, and her need to soar to the summit, where there are no obstacles and where the love of fine letters merges with the desire for God:

If, because I am enclosed,
you take me for hindered,
for such hindrances
affection has its files.
For the soul there is no enclosure
nor any prison that can confine it,
for the only things that imprison it
are those it fashions for itself.[13]

All of the foregoing is perfectly explained when the name of Saint Augustine of Hippo enters the imagination of Juana Inés’s choice.

Indeed, the Rule prevailing in the Convent of San Jerónimo was the Rule of Saint Augustine, which, together with the Convent’s own Constitutions, governed the life to which the “maiden of the word” was about to devote herself. It is a general Rule that Monsignor Peñalosa in Alrededores de Sor Juana summarizes in 16 points:

1. Love. “Above all things, dearest sisters, love God and then your neighbor”.   
2. Poverty. No one owns anything. All things are held in common. But the nuns will be provided with what is necessary. 
3. Humility. No religious sister should take pride in any dignity or wealth she may have possessed in the world.
4. Prayer. It must be done constantly at the appointed times, and those who additionally wish to pray alone should not be hindered.
5. Fasting. “Subdue the flesh with fasts and abstinences as far as your strength allows”.
6. They should listen attentively to the readings given during meals. 
7. Grumbling. It must never be given. 
8. Care of the sick. They should be moderate in eating so that it does not harm them. If necessary, consult the doctor. There should be a nurse to care for them. Once recovered, they should return to community life.
9. Modesty in habits and clothing, without seeking to please. Clothing should be held in common in the keeping of one or two nuns who guard it and protect it from moths; they should accept whatever clothing they are given.
10. Honesty. They should guard their eyes so as to keep their hearts safe. “Even if you see men, do not fix your eyes upon them with intent”.
11. They must not receive papers (letters, messages) or anything else in secret, but should place them in the hands of the prioress, who will give them to whoever needs them.
12. Sharing of goods. No nun should appropriate anything for herself. They should prefer the community’s goods over their own.
13. External cleanliness that does not harm inner cleanliness. They should wash their clothing and keep their bodies clean.
14. Diligence. Those in charge of upkeep, clothing, and books should serve their sisters with charity.
15. Care of the tongue. They should not injure or speak harshly to one another. They should immediately remedy any wrong by asking for forgiveness.
16. Obedience. They should be obedient to the prioress even if she rebukes or punishes them. “Let the prioress not consider herself fortunate for commanding, but for serving”.

The Augustinian rule concludes with an exhortation for the Hieronymites to observe it faithfully and thus be “fragrant with the fragrance of Christ”.[14]

With these “norms” Sor Juana would travel the other path: that of holiness. But explaining that—though not justifying it—belongs to another study. We will conclude only by saying, with Father Calleja and against all the slanders that portray her final entry into conventual life as spurious, that she fulfilled the theological virtue par excellence, the one Saint Paul identified as the first fruit of the “fragrance of Christ”:

Charity: Charity was her ruling virtue; if she was not cooking food for them (her sisters) or preparing remedies for those who fell ill, she did not leave their bedside”. But no one loves more than the one who gives their life for their neighbor. “Of a most compassionate and charitable nature by zeal,” she attended to her sisters when “a pestilential epidemic so virulent entered the convent that of every ten nuns who fell ill, barely one recovered… She attended to all without growing weary”. It was useless “to tell her that she should at least not approach those most gravely ill,” “she fell ill from charity” and died “with vivid signs of desire in the hands of her Creator”.[15]

Faced with the great and minor pens of her time (and of ours) who doubted Sor Juana’s decision to take the monastic path, she replied—and her reply still stands—with this sonnet:

Sor Juana entered the convent of the Hieronymites, but she never ceased to maintain a close relationship—from her cell in the cloister—with the cultured society of her time. She corresponded with nuns and noblewomen from Spain, Portugal, and Mexico, with university professors, religious men and theologians, the cabildo of Mexico City, and with the viceregal court, where she was not only known but also admired. It is only fair to acknowledge that she chose her own path—the path toward holiness—which she never saw as distant from knowledge. Indeed, for her, knowledge (her cell was always surrounded by books, musical instruments, and scientific instruments) was a fundamental part of that path. Did she face resistance? Like any woman of her era; like any woman of our era who places riches in her understanding and does not place her understanding in riches.