Conquest & Colonialism, Paz
Catholicism | Her ideas | Her conception of the world
"the rationalism of Sor Juana should not be exaggerated, because they never had a clear awareness of the problem that was beginning to divide their spirits .
p. 110
"No one embodied the duality of that world like Sor Juana, even though the surface of her work, like that of her life, does not reveal any fissures."
p . 111.
Octavio Paz , The Labyrinth of Solitude
Sor Juana "She wanted to penetrate reality, not to transmute it into a delightful surface."
"a poetry of pure intellectual emotion."
p . 112.
"Sor Juana left us a revealing prose text, at once a declaration of faith in the intelligence and the a renunciation of its exercise."
"It is a defense of the intellectual and of women, but it is also the history of a calling. If we can place confidence in her confessions, there was hardly a science that she did not study. Her curiosity was not that of a man of science but rather a cultivated man who aspires to integrate all the particulars of knowledge in one coherent visions."
"She sensed and occult link among all truths."
"The arts and sciences, however contrary they may (appear to) be, not only do not hinder a general comprehension of Nature, but actually assist it, 'shedding light and opening avenues from one to the other, through variations and occult ties . . . in such manner that they seem to correspond and to be united in a wonderful coalescence and concert . . . ."
Even as a Catholic Nun, "She was an intellectual, a consciousness."
p . 113.
"Although she often repeated that everything comes from God , she always sought a rational explanation."
pp . 113-114.
"Everything caused her to conceive of the world as more as a problem or enigma than as a place of salvation or perdition."
p . 115.
"After the uprisings of 1692, intellectual life was quickly muffled."
"Her epoch did not provide her with the intellectual nourishment her appetite required, and she herself could not create a world of ideas in which to live alone."
p. 115.
"Sor Juana was a solitary figure. Indecisive and smiling, she lived an ambiguous life; she was conscious of the duality of her condition and the impossibility of her task."
"a woman who was superior both to her society and her culture?"
p. 116.
An enforced unity among a diversity of peoples
Catholicism's dualistic influences & superficial hold
redemption and sanctity of human individual
Medieval scholasticism opened into the Spanish Renaissance
Labor
Laws of the Indies
both a stifling and a liberating faith.
A hierarchy closed to celebrant, repressed but a mystical body unified & open to lost souls
What was her society like?
One might find a place in the cosmos but not in the political and economic realties of the colony called The Viceroyalty of New Spain.
Ejidos but set against haciendas and the encomienda
Slavery
"The filial relationship of our people with the divine."
"religious fresh air"
p. 108.
Date: 19 March 2008 & November 2014.
