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205  10 Freedom and Containment in Colonial Theology: Sor Juana’s Carta atenagórica1 Paola Marín The tension between freedom and containment was inherent to the scholastic thought that dominated well-known debates in the humanities and sciences throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in both Spain and her colonies . Although Sor Juana was to state that theology was the “Queen of the Sciences,” her work calls into question the then dominant conceptions of both knowledge and theology. Sor Juana was a sharp social observer and had an extraordinary grasp of the predominant fields of seventeenth-century thought. Her reality as a poet, nun, and female theologian at a time when women were not allowed to discuss religious matters in public, was to weigh heavily on her writings, as was her identity as a Mexican Creole who straddled several cultures and sought out the relationship between several fields of knowledge. She moved easily between the cultures of the Old World and the New, and nothing was alien to her productive curiosity; Sor Juana’s “reading” of the world is contextualized within the wider chain of knowledge, even if the immediate realities of her precarious existence were never far from her intellectual preoccupations. Her writing clearly underscores the tension between freedom and containment that were manifested in the cultural production of the Spanish-American Baroque.2 Sor Juana’s Carta atenagórica (Letter Worthy of Athena) may be read as a 206 PAOLA MARÍN critique of the colonial condition by an intellectual positioned in the periphery by virtue of her gender, religious status, ethnicity, and locus of enunciation. I will argue that she advances her critique by calling into question the foundations of both knowledge and theology. The author’s position as a religious writer may be clarified through a discussion of the circumstances surrounding the publication of her letter. The Bishop of Puebla published Sor Juana’s Carta atenagórica with a prologue written by him under the pseudonym of Sor Filotea. In that prologue he urged Sor Juana to dedicate her talents to sacred matters. The topic of Sor Juana’s letter was a refutation of a sermon on Christ’s demonstrations of love by a famous theologian, the Portuguese Jesuit Father Antonio Vieira. The Bishop, astounded by the solid and carefully crafted arguments that Sor Juana had presented orally on a lively afternoon in 1690 at the convent’s locutory, requested a written copy. By publishing Sor Juana’s text without her knowledge or consent, his intention was to gain her talent and support for the Church’s cause. Nonetheless , in her Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz (Answer to Sor Filotea of the Cross), Sor Juana emphasizes her impulse to write verses being a gift that God had bestowed upon her, a gift so strong that even in dreams she was not free of it. Therefore, she identifies herself primarily as a poet “porque una herejía contra el Arte no la castiga el Santo Oficio” (45) (for a heresy against Art is not punished by the Holy Office), and refuses to become a model of piety. Taking into account that Vieira’s sermon was published forty years before Sor Juana’s commentary, Octavio Paz suggests that her letter had been published by the Bishop of Puebla in order to support his own point of view in a personal debate with another powerful prelate (Aguiar y Seijas). The real issue at stake was Mexico’s archbishopric. A more recent and widely accepted hypothesis is that the real target of Sor Juana’s critique was her confessor, Father Antonio Núñez de Miranda. He had also discussed the topic of Christ’s greatest gift to humankind in his writings and his intellectual arrogance and excessive religious zeal proved painful for Sor Juana (see Marquet, Martínez and Trabulse, among others). The basis for this hypothesis is that in spite of her refutation of Vieira’s ideas, she reasserts her admiration for the Portuguese prelate. Vieira expressed a deep and sincere respect for religious women writers, as is apparent in his panegyric addressed to María de Ataide (see Marquet).3 In spite of identifying herself mainly as a poet, Sor Juana’s religious thought is not irrelevant. On the contrary, the Carta atenagórica is a significant example of how the author always moved along fragile borderlines as colonial woman, poet, and theologian. Besides, the Carta is Sor Juana’s...

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