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González, Michelle A. Sor Juana: Beauty and Justice in the Americas.

González, Michelle A. Sor Juana: Beauty and Justice in the Americas. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003. Pages, vii + 218, Paper, $20.00. ISBN: 1570754942

Reviewed by: Pamela Kirk Rappaport

It is a tribute to the genius of poet, playwright, and theologian Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Mexican Hieronimite nun (1648-1695), that a host of contemporary theological directions can be brought to bear in a study of her works. It is a tribute to Michelle González that she has had the courage to weave a tapestry in which both Sor Juana and contemporary theological concerns stand out in relief. Her retrieval of Sor Juana from the perspective of a theology of beauty or theological aesthetics is rooted in the emerging von Balthasar studies and their influence on contemporary U.S. Latino/a theologians, such as Roberto Goizueta. As the title Beauty and Justice in the Americas suggests, the interest in a theological aesthetics is paired with the concerns of liberation theologies (Latin American, U.S. Latino/a, and feminist/womanist).

Although González devotes considerable space to setting the frame of her investigation within the parameters just sketched (in chapters one and six), as might be expected the main focus of the book is Sor Juana herself. González’s task is more difficult than von Balthasar’s retrieval of figures such as Augustine, Bonaventure, Pascal, and others because she is introducing a less known figure into the process of retrieval. As a result, a considerable portion of the work necessarily involves introductory material to acquaint the reader with basic information about Sor Juana’s life, as well as her social intellectual setting in seventeenth-century Mexico (chapter two). At the “heart” of the book as González describes it are the three chapters which show the relationship between Sor Juana’s writings and the three transcendentals: beauty, goodness, and truth. González culls and analyzes significant examples to illustrate these connections. In each case she must select from an immense range of material as well as systematize a body of work that is of an “unsystematic nature” (58).

In chapter three which considers Beauty, González points out that Sor Juana, as a poet and dramatist, in short, a maker of beautiful things herself, has a special existential relationship to beauty. Beginning by looking at those poems of Sor Juana which explicitly consider beauty as an ordered proportional relationship harmoniously uniting parts and the whole, in nature as well as in art, she moves on to explore Sor Juana’s poems in honor of Mary as they reflect Mary’s beauty, itself a reflection of divine beauty. The centerpiece of this chapter is the analysis of Sor Juana’s allegorical drama El Divino Narciso. Unlike Mary, Narciso does not reflect divine beauty, but is divine beauty. The play stresses beauty as “the primary attribute of God” (75).

Chapter four on the Good links Sor Juana’s thought to feminist and liberationist concerns. Since her appreciation of the social construction of gender has been given much critical attention by literary scholars, González briefly outlines the dimensions of this discussion, concluding that, though Sor Juana cannot be properly called a feminist, she can “with hesitancy” be termed a protofeminist (94). She appreciated the tradition of women writers and intellectuals, and was conscious of the complex interplay of silence and authority in women’s writing. She advocated for women’s right to higher education, and developed a theological anthropology which, especially in El Divino Narciso sees women as fully imaging the divine. González is also reluctant to categorize Sor Juana as a seventeenth-century liberation theologian, because she feels it would diminish the uniqueness of her contribution, which like that of Bartolomé de las Casas stands out best in the context of its own time. Sor Juana’s awareness of the role of race and ethnicity is explored primarily through an analysis of a short allegorical play about the evangelization/conquest of the New World.

Examination of Sor Juana’s relationship to Truth as the third transcendental is organized around specific topics: daily life; the universal nature of truth; knowledge as contextual; the role of theology; the use of myth, metaphor, and allegory; lo Americano and epistemology. Major works considered are Sor Juana’s lengthy philosophical poem, Primero Sueño, and her intellectual autobiography and defense of women’s learning, Repuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz.

Chapter Six returns to connect Sor Juana’s thought to contemporary theological directions, this time enriched by the preceding analysis. González concludes by referring to a range of authors interested in a retrieval of a theology which embraces beauty and justice. Included are: Latino/a theologians (García-Rivera, Goizueta, Delgado, Isasi-Diaz); feminist theologians (E. Johnson, E. Schüssler Fiorenza) and philosophers (Kristeva, Chopp, Scarry, Miles); Black theology, (D. Hopkins, Hayes, Walker); European (von Balthasar) and Euro-American theologians (Farley, DeGruchy). In a final chapter Sor Juana’s contributions to theology are summed up under the title “Latin American Church Mother,” but González emphasizes that she is more than that. She is an “intellectual foremother to Christian theologians” (197).

Sor Juana: Beauty and Justice in the Americas is a good introduction to Sor Juana for theologians who might be skeptical about the relevance of a seventeenth-century Mexican nun to twentieth-century theology. González has indeed established this relevance. I think she could have done it without devoting quite so much attention to the contemporary theological horizon, and more to the analysis of Sor Juana’s theology. Careful editing would have helped correct some minor historical errors, such as the erroneous designation of Carlos Sigúenza y Gongora as a Jesuit (p.42) and the statement that Puebla bishop Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz was “her” (Sor Juana’s) bishop (p.48), when actually it was Archbishop Aguiar y Seiujas of Mexico City. This being said, I welcome Michelle González as a new voice in the emerging conversation about Sor Juana’s religious works.