A Woman of Genius: The Rebel Nun

Explore the life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 17th-century nun, poet, and scholar who challenged the conventions of her time. This video unveils the story of "A Woman of Genius: The Rebel Nun," showcasing her remarkable journey as a pioneering feminist and intellectual powerhouse.

We discuss the fascinating world of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a figure who transcended the barriers of her era to become a symbol of resistance and enlightenment. 

Born in New Spain, now modern-day Mexico, Sor Juana's insatiable thirst for knowledge led her to pursue an education that was uncommon for women of her time. Choosing the life of a nun to freely explore her intellectual and literary talents, Sor Juana penned works that questioned the societal norms and gender roles of the 17th century. 

This episode in our "Beyond the Book" series, explores her intellectual autobiography, offering insights into her life, her battles against the constraints placed upon her because of her gender, and her enduring legacy as a trailblazer for women's rights and academic freedom. Join us as we delve into the story of a woman who was not only a genius of her time but also a rebel in her own right.

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Transcript

0:35

I can confidently say if Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz had been born a man, many of us would already know her as a common historical figure. If you're a feminist or appreciate the history of feminism and their fight for equality, you definitely have to read this book. I mentioned to say that if you read her autobiography, she's probably one of the original feminists. And this was at a time when it was almost impossible to be that. So how did her work survive and garner enough attention to get preserved all the way through modern times here? essentially it boils down to the fact that she was so exceptional that the leadership of the Catholic Church in her male peers, or at least her non peers, as they thought of themselves compared to her, were almost forced to respect her or at least kind of respect her because she was so exceptional. And so this book is A Woman of Genius, The intellectual autobiography of Sadhana. And as de La Cruz, it's translated, introduced by a woman named Margaret Sayers Paden. And she did a really good job of putting this book together and making it kind of translatable and relatable to modern times. And I've made an effort when I've been building my religious philosophy, spiritual self-help library, to purchase books by Latin American and woman authors and philosophers. I didn't really know what to expect from this work. I was really just starting out, you know, knowing that she was an influential woman at a very early time in history, that she was born in mid 1600s. Mexico. And that's pretty much it. We should read important philosophy of historical women. In my travels through philosophy, religion, spirituality, I'm trying to jump around to different parts of the world, to these various religions, spiritual constructs, and get this solid cross-section of philosophy. And I'm trying to get perspectives from as wide a cross-section of people as possible, not just from different faiths or belief systems, but from various races and backgrounds, because perspective really matters if you want to change your way of looking at things. And I do want to change the way that I look at things because I feel like we've always gone through life and we're always looking at things from a perspective and then maybe we learn something and we look at it from a different perspective and then we keep learning and keep changing how we see things from different perspectives. So it's important to be well read and to seek out women authors and scholars and theologians. And I think it'd be undeniable that a bunch of white dudes have a pretty unique grip on the perspective of what's being taught in the Western world, especially in history, philosophy and religion. And I'm apolitical now. I don't really get into politics, and I'm not some kind of social justice where you're talking to here right now or anything like that. I'm just kind of offering that as this grounded fact. At the same time, I don't have any issue reading all this rich thought that exists that's offered by the traditional patriarchy. And I won't feel bad about appreciating the men that wrote it. I think it's you know, it's a good thing. But we can't discount the slanted view that each of us hold in modern times due to the influence of that establishment. And I think if we deny that, it only further empowers the idea that this historic imbalance exists. Let's just admit it and understand it and we can kind of move on together. But I'm going to stop there. I'm not here to kind of devolve into that debate, but I felt like it was really important just to kind of put it out there while I was talking to you guys. Before we move on. Please subscribe by hitting the watermark in the lower right hand corner and share this with any friends or family who you think might benefit from it. I think we should take a step back for a second and really reflect on how impressive this woman was. She was exceptional and bright in such a way that mankind was forced to acknowledge her and she was like this supernova and ultimately her work is very much about Christianity and Catholicism, and she would eventually become a Catholic nun. And as I read through this, I had to say, how can we not believe in some kind of divine or universal power when we look at someone that is as pious and who is blessed with such genius as Sor Juana was, she was born illegitimately but to a family of significant means. And they were wealthy enough that she was exposed to education through a lot of books. And this was emphasized over and over again in her autobiography. How many books that she was surrounded by and how much she read. She read all the time. She was always reading. And she did this without her mother's knowledge. And she even sought out a tutor in her family's home when she was three years old so that she could learn to read and teach herself. And she wanted her mother to let her dress as a boy. And attend these advanced schools in Mexico City. But her mother wouldn't allow it, She was eventually allowed to go live with her aunt uncle in Mexico City. And there she was able to learn Latin and study in private in their home. She still wasn't allowed to go to school. In the great theme of her life was this unquenchable thirst for knowledge, insight and wisdom. She wasn't just interested in a single discipline or this niche subject, but really interested in everything. If she'd have been a man, she would have been recognized as a philosopher and she would have probably been called a polymath, which is kind of a renaissance man or someone who studies all these different fields. And one of her great themes is that she was essentially her own teacher for almost her entire life. And I think that's one of the really beautiful things about her story, is she didn't really ever have anybody that was there to teach her. She just self-taught her. All of this, which I think really makes her journey even more interesting. The royal court and intellectual community in Mexico City were completely enamored and astounded by her intelligence and her depth of knowledge. She was also really beautiful. And that created this fierce combination that made her almost undeniable to the wealthy elite in Mexico the time. And she would develop one of the greatest personal libraries in all of the Americas, which at the time the Europeans called the New World. at one point, the Spanish Kings representative in Mexico, Viceroy Marquez de Mancera, sent a group of 40 learned men who were theologians, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, poets, humanists and a bunch of other guys to examine Sor Juana. And she was 16 years old at the time. And the quote from Mancera vividly and kind of concretely demonstrates the nature of her genius. He said And so these 40 guys went in to examine her, test her, throw everything they had at her, which must have been a lot. And she was able to answer all of it at 16 years old. I'm not sure we can accurately kind of comprehend what it is for a 16 year old self-educated girl in the 1600s to go fend off 40 men that were just like pummeling questions at her. It that had to have been quite an amazing sight. The men of the church were were jealous of her royal attention and of her natural abilities. She took all these efforts to color inside the lines and do what she was supposed to do. And it still wasn't good enough for the men of the cloth. And jealousy crept up all around her as she tried to navigate her way through the Catholic Church. And although she grew up as a favorite of the Royal Court and was an advisor and a scholar to the the Royals, she actually left that life and chose to live in devotion as a nun. And the exact reason for that isn't clear as well as to why she didn't marry or continue to lead a life in the court. Part of the reason that we don't know exactly why is because not all of her work survives. Not all of the things that she wrote or that were written about her survived. In fact, the only reason we know as much about her as we do is, again, because of the greatness that she exhibited. And so we know a whole lot more about her if she had been a man. Essentially, we'd lost all of this wealth of knowledge and insight concerning her simply because of her gender. And if she'd have been born a man, it seems like her or him, as it would have been, would be known in history books today. It would be as natural as Thomas Aquinas. And it leads me to think, How much progress have we lost in human history on this issue alone? Where where could we have been, operating if we hadn't hamstrung ourselves to that 50% capacity as a species for so long? This woman wrote poetry, plays music, she played instruments she created prayer routines, she wrote verse. She was a philosopher, a theologian and a scholar in every sense of the word. And everything for her came to a head when she wrote a critique of a piece of work that had been produced 40 years prior to her by a Catholic Jesuit priest. And the work that she wrote this critique that she wrote was, well, well done. It was obviously, you know, she was super smart and it was regarded by the church as accurate, and yet she was severely admonished for daring to author this critique as a woman of a man. And even her personal priest withdrew his services from her. There's also some debate that she may have withdrawn them herself because he had been going around town talking behind her back. So there's not an exact reason that he withdrew the services. But the suspicion is that he would no longer work with her. And there's evidence of the harm that was done to Sor Juana after this incident. And it was made clear by the fact that after this, she sold away her entire library and gave the proceeds to the poor and with her thirst for understanding, knowledge and wisdom. I think this act speaks volumes to the impact this event had on her. It kind of makes me sad to really think about it. It's almost like they had extinguished her light and she did it right and she lived right, but it still wasn't enough. And she tells her story in this autobiography, and she seems perplexed by the fact that she could do all these things right. And it still wasn't enough. She she became a nun so that she could study in solitude and be mean and keep to herself. And she followed all the rules. She was she was pious. Her songs and prayers had been used by important Catholic churches all around Mexico City for years. She was everything that she was supposed to be, and she was also a devout Christian, and that wasn't good enough. I think this is really what moved her to begin to document her struggles to exist as someone who was in love with the divinity, but also wanted to share the beauty of that knowledge with others. Her knowledge of the divine and I think it must have been infinitely frustrating for her that she was told to leave worldly knowledge alone because that was for men, and she should only concern herself with Jesus. But she understood that one can't really contextualize Jesus or the divine with that context. You can't do that contextualization if you don't have the context to do it. And that's what you and I are doing right now in this episode. There's a you know, I'm having a discussion with you guys about how we're contextualizing historical knowledge to increase our own wisdom and understanding of the spiritual of the divine. So for her, she knew that the more she understood the world and the knowledge of all of it, the more clarity she would have in what the Divine was and how to communicate that with other people. And that's when important people that are studying theology and philosophy, do they help us relate better to a subject, understand it better? She said. And that's so beautifully true. So one who knew that knowing and understanding history was critical to understanding religion and faith, spirituality. She was well versed in mystic thought. She referred back to Thomas Aquinas and his mysticism as an example. She writes in depth about the need for knowledge so that we can have a greater hold on the beyond. It's well thought and excellently reasoned. Plus, she's able to convey her reasoning concisely. It wasn't just that she was a genius. It was that she was able to convey her knowledge in an easy, very understandable manner. and she wasn't the first woman this has happened to. And she brought the receipts. And one section of this autobiography she launches into this litany of examples from history that point to significant and notable women that changed the world around them who had been shunned or killed or marginalized. It's a super comprehensive list, and it's a stern rebuttal to the oppression that she clearly experienced throughout her entire life. You can feel the passion coming off the pages as she recites these examples from history. And I'm not going to list them all out here. But I mean, she goes throughout history includes people like Hypatia of Alexandria, who was killed by the Christians, and she talks about and alludes to the needless throwing away of genius. And she points out the contrast that the oppression of great women thinkers experience within the patriarchy and further points out that the patriarchy went on to arm these dull men with unfettered access to great knowledge in the hopes that they would produce wisdom. So here we have these great women who are geniuses, and yet these men who aren't, you know, there are great genius men, but also these dull men who weren't prepared to go out and have wisdom and share knowledge were given access to this information, and they couldn't do anything with it. That must be extremely frustrating. These unqualified men were brought forward in a waste of knowledge and education as opposed to these gifted women who would have been able to actually make use of that of that study Sor Juana who would expertly weave an argument against the oppression of women in the church that goes all the way back to Paul and even the misunderstanding or misappropriation of what Paul was saying or what Paul was driving at. And to me, this really speaks not just to the church's oppression of women, but also to the censoring of mysticism at certain points in their history. Because we know the Catholic Church saw the mystics as an existential threat to their power, that the mystics taught that the divine light within and that people could sense and be with God within themselves directly all the time. And the Catholic Church saw this as a threat to the power of the church, because then the people wouldn't respond to what they were being told to do. And so the dogma of the church exists as all of these man made or human touch points along Christianity's path. And this is what gets in the way of the base teachings and belief of that faith. Sor Juana said So what if they'd just taught us? What if we had had a voice? She asked why women like men don't have a rational soul, how they are not meant to enjoy the enlightenment of letters is a woman's soul, not as receptive to God's grace. And this really mattered to her because she legitimately appeared to understand God. And she saw the divine. She didn't just see it. She knew it. She knew it on this base level because she was a mystic in her own right. And she would learn it. And she saw that the sum total of all this knowledge that she was surrounded by and that she had absorbed pointed to something beyond beyond her, beyond this world, beyond the, you know, that universal thing to grace and salvation. And that, for me, speaks to my own soul. She saw God and knew the divine and the joy of it, only to be confined to this relative prison of her own world. There is a sense of loneliness in her knowledge and wisdom, and she has only herself with which to share it compared to men. And she had no way of knowing that someday she would be more well known. She's not very well known. I mean, there's not many people who would know who this woman is. But back then, she felt that no one would know her. And this was a reality created around her by the ignorance of men. What are your thoughts on this amazing woman? What do you think about her autobiography? Have you read it? Or are you familiar with her? Are you excited to read about her more? Let me know in the comments and I'll absolutely respond. It's nice to have a discussion. And really, the reason that we run this channel for a peaceful and open minded community where people can share their journeys and be themselves. We have conversations just like this. Please visit Keesha dawg. And until next time, I wish you peace on your journey. do?