Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Crushed Between Two Bishops
Article by Daniel Daroca.
Before the storm broke, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz inhabited a rarefied world of immense privilege, intellectual freedom, and high-level protection. Ensconced within the walls of the Convent of Santa Paula de Jerónimas, she enjoyed a lifestyle far removed from the typical seclusion of a colonial nun. Her spacious quarters functioned as a vibrant salon where visiting scholars, intellectuals, and dignitaries gathered to converse with the Tenth Muse. This unique autonomy was heavily sustained by the patronage of successive viceregal courts—most notably through the profound personal backing and deep intellectual kinship of the vicerein, María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, the Countess of Paredes. Under this powerful umbrella of state and court favor, Sor Juana was not only able to pursue her scientific and literary studies unhindered, but she also enjoyed the rare privilege of having her works published and celebrated across the Spanish Atlantic world. Yet, this golden age existed under an ever-present, quiet shadow: the looming, suffocating weight of the Spanish Inquisition, whose strict orthodoxy and pervasive surveillance formed the ultimate, fearful backdrop of daily intellectual life in the seventeenth century.
The gravity of her eventual downfall was deeply tied to the subject matter that triggered it: a theological dispute over the nature of divine love. The Portuguese Jesuit intellectual António Vieira had delivered his famous 1650 Mandate Sermon, in which he set out to define and rank the greatest finezas (supreme acts of grace, courtesy, and love) shown by Jesus Christ to humanity. In doing so, Vieira audaciously departed from centuries of orthodox consensus, directly contradicting and critiquing the traditional interpretations previously established by major Church Fathers like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. When Sor Juana was asked to evaluate this text, she penned a brilliant, incisive critique dissecting Vieira's arguments and defending the classical authorities.
This text became the powder keg in a reckless, high-stakes game of ecclesiastical one-upmanship between two prelates of starkly contrasting character and philosophy: Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, the Bishop of Puebla, and Francisco Aguiar y Seijas, the Archbishop of Mexico.
The Bishop of Puebla was a cultured, intellectually ambitious patron who sought to showcase brilliance within his sphere and challenge the traditional dominance of Mexico City. When Sor Juana offered her private critique of Vieira's controversial sermon, the Bishop of Puebla asked her to commit it to writing. Believing she was engaged in a confidential academic exercise, she complied. However, the Bishop of Puebla seized the manuscript as a tactical weapon to strike at his rivals in Mexico City, who held Vieira in the highest esteem. In 1690, he published it without her consent, renaming it the Carta Atenagórica and appending a deceptive prologue under the pseudonym "Sor Filotea de la Cruz." He likely did not foresee or intend her ultimate ruin; rather, he carelessly used her brilliant voice as a blunt instrument to settle a territorial and intellectual score, completely underestimating the fierce institutional backlash.
That backlash was driven by Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas of Mexico City, a prelate who embodied a rigid, unyielding, and intensely misogynistic orthodoxy. To Aguiar y Seijas and the conservative establishment, a woman engaging in public theological debate—let alone correcting a sacred text and contradicting the Church Fathers on a matter as grave as divine grace—was an intolerable abomination.
Caught in the middle of this jurisdictional turf war, Sor Juana was abandoned by the very patron who had exploited her work. When the conservative pressure mounted, the Bishop of Puebla offered no real shield. Forced to defend herself against the snare, Sor Juana wrote her masterful Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz in March 1691, valiantly arguing for a woman's right to intellectual inquiry. Yet, the weight of the ecclesiastical machinery and the constant, chilling specter of the Inquisition were insurmountable. She was left entirely isolated between the manipulative ambition of one bishop and the hostile machismo of the other, culminating in her total capitulation, the sale of her library, a signed renunciation in her own blood, and her silent final years until her death in 1695.
Had she politely declined the bishop's request, perhaps she would have had a few more good years. Yes, we would have been deprived of the Carta Atenagórica, Filotea's prologue, and the Respuesta, but the price she paid in return we can never fathom. After all, let us face it, hardly anyone reads her works today, and few have the intellectual breadth to understand them in all their intricacy and glory.
Before Woolf ever hinted at it, she already had secured a room of her own, her convent cell, and armed herself with books and scientific instruments. Yet, even into her cell, evil entered. The hatred of the Bishop of Mexico, probably envious of her intellect, and the cowardice of the Bishop of Puebla, who used her and left her to fend for herself. That was the price of her intellectual prowess and the fruit of the bishops' betrayal.
I wonder what Juana felt when she had to part with her possessions, and forbidden to write, realized that she had been abandoned. What good then was all her knowledge in that most terrible hour of need?
Perhaps her ultimate tragedy was that she remained pure of heart in a world governed by tactical cruelty, failing to heed the ancient wisdom: be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. She engaged the powerful with the honesty of a true scholar, assuming they shared her reverence for truth, entirely blind to the noose being tightened around her. Her story leaves us with a haunting question for our own lives: when a flattering request or an inviting snare is presented to us, will we possess the discernment to see the lasso before it tightens?
Daniel Daroca
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