Volume 35, Number 15 · October 13, 1988
The Genius of San Jerónimo
By Michael Wood
A Sor Juana Anthology
translated by Alan S. Trueblood, foreword by Octavio Paz
Harvard University Press, 248 pp., $29.50
Sor Juana: or, The Traps of Faith
by Octavio Paz, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
Harvard University Press, 547 pp., $29.95
In 1690, in the viceroyalty of New Spain, a place known earlier and later as Mexico, anyone who was interested could read an elegant disquisition on Christ's courtesy, his finezas, his delicate kindnesses toward humanity. The author was a formidably clever nun called Sor Juana lnés de la Cruz, undoubtedly one of the great poets of the Spanish language—possibly of any language. She made many modest disclaimers about her theology, but plainly had a tremendous relish for disputation. Was Christ's greatest kindness his dying for us or his consenting to absent himself from us for a while? His leaving us his sacrament or his immaterial presence in the sacrament? His washing his disciples' feet or the motive that led him to wash them? In each case Sor Juana offered refined arguments and examples for the apparently less refined option: dying, the sacrament, washing the feet. She thereby defended the Church fathers against an ingenious Portuguese Jesuit (deviser of the refined options) and managed to look pretty orthodox herself.
Review, 5972 words
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