2. Virtue-Centered Epistemologies

Virtue epistemology is understood to be a family of views according to which the objects of favorable epistemic evaluation are either any stable dispositions that reliably produce true beliefs, such as mental faculties or mental processes, according to virtue reliabilists, or they are specifically character traits which help us attain epistemic goods and for which we are responsible due to having some control over acquiring or changing these traits, according to virtue responsibilists (Battaly Reference Battaly and Mi2015). The two categories of virtue epistemology are not mutually exclusive, with distinct theorists drawing stronger or weaker lines between them, and some theorists proposing additional categories (Sosa Reference Sosa1980, Reference Sosa1991; Zagzebski Reference Zagzebski1996; Greco, Reference Greco2000; Battaly Reference Battaly and Mi2015; Turri, Alfano, and Greco Reference Turri, Alfano, Greco and Zalta2021).

I suggest that Sor Juana’s Reply to Sor Philotea expresses a responsibilist virtue epistemology. Sor Juana believes epistemic agents have duties to cultivate certain intellectual virtues, and she endorses character traits like studiousness, diligence, humility, and wisdom, while she decries other character traits as vicious. There is a precedent for speaking of Sor Juana in virtue-epistemic language: José Medina has suggested that Sor Juana has the epistemic virtue of courage, and that she speaks of epistemic arrogance as a vice (Reference Medina2013: 230–234).

What epistemic goods is Sor Juana searching for? In her epic epistemological poem, Primero Sueño (First Dream, in OC, Vol. I), the protagonist desires to have an intellectual grasp of the whole world. This may involve or presuppose knowledge of God as its first principle, depending on how one interprets the poem. Another goal for Sor Juana is achieving the good of virtue itself, especially wisdom, which allows one to see through merely apparent goods and therefore better cultivate all the other virtues. As I will argue, the Reply to Sor Philotea (in OC, Vol. IV) reveals that for Sor Juana some of the intellectual virtues that move an inquirer toward these epistemic goals are (i) humility, (ii) studiousness, and (iii) diligence. In later sections I will explain how Sor Juana defines these virtues and how she reworks their meaning for her own system. Wisdom is a cornerstone virtue for Sor Juana, particularly in relation to her feminist theology, but its complete analysis will require a lengthier future treatment. For now we can say that wisdom is a key organizing principle and also an end for her epistemological system: cultivating wisdom is in a sense synonymous with cultivating the intellectual virtues, but not synonymous with accumulating knowledge. One can be foolish, rather than wise, and accumulate knowledge. Foolishness is actually “perfected” in foolish individuals who also accumulate “sciences and languages” (Reply, l. 945–948).

Virtue responsibilism is not an unusual view, retrospectively, in medieval and Renaissance philosophy. Thomas Hibbs (Reference Hibbs1999) lays out a compelling argument for understanding Aquinas, an important source for Sor Juana’s philosophical views and methodology, as a virtue epistemologist and, more specifically, as neither an extreme “externalist” nor an extreme “internalist” about justification. However, while Aquinas and Sor Juana share some epistemological commitments, I will show that Sor Juana’s epistemological system differs from that of “Scholastic” philosophers like Aquinas.

Sor Juana’s epistemological system is egalitarian: access to moral and intellectual virtues which promote knowledge acquisition is not restricted by fixed traits like gender or genius. This may not seem innovative to a contemporary audience, but it actually revised certain thinking by Augustine and the Catholic Church, as we will see. Furthermore, rather than restricting her claims to specific areas of study, Sor Juana’s system requires both domain general knowledge and domain specific knowledge for epistemic advancement. This allows Sor Juana to include women’s specializations, like cooking, among the legitimate domains of epistemic advancement (also see Kirk Reference Kirk2016; Vargas Reference Vargas2022). Finally, rather than requiring learning to be ordered in a particular way in order to enable cultivation of virtues or knowledge, as Aquinas did (Aquinas Reference Aquinas1964), Sor Juana’s pedagogical theory allows intellectual justification to build on itself eclectically. This both helps to decenter universities and other gatekeeping institutions as sole epistemic authorities, and to explain Sor Juana’s actual autodidactic path to achievements, which did not follow the designated Scholastic path.

A peculiarity of Sor Juana’s epistemology is that she endorses a kind of pragmatic encroachment (Ganson Reference Ganson2019). I mean this in two ways. First, Sor Juana weighs epistemic value against other kinds of value, such as ethical or spiritual value, and sees the latter as affecting the former. Second, for Sor Juana whether someone counts as having knowledge or understanding depends on their ethical or spiritual duties. This outlook is underpinned by a cosmological outlook as well, largely borrowed from the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), which suggests that the world is purposefully organized by God so as to both inspire virtuous curiosity and scaffold understanding for those who are diligent and studious.

In what follows, we will examine each of what I identify as the Reply to Sor Philotea’s six major epistemological innovations, keeping in mind Sor Juana’s epistemological goals and the constraints of her political reality. The first is making the goals of study aid the goals of contemplation rather than serving at cross-purposes, particularly in the case of women. The second is recasting the virtue of humility as a catalyst for intellectual self-improvement rather than dissuading additional study. The third innovation Sor Juana enacts is to endorse curiosity as a companion virtue to studiousness, rather than accept its characterization by Augustine and Aquinas as a vice. The fourth innovation is to reject the Catholic orthodoxy that men and women should be differently restricted epistemically due to having different duties or strengths in virtue: women and men are equally capable of both virtue and vice; men’s vices are no less dangerous than women’s; and, because salvation depends on possessing epistemic goods, to care about women’s virtue is to open up rather than restrict access to education. Fifth, although virtue responsibilism has been described as “broadly aligned with internalist sympathies in epistemology” (Turri, Alfano, and Greco, Reference Turri, Alfano, Greco and Zalta2021: §3), Sor Juana emphasizes externally or third-personally discernible features of intellectual virtue, rather than features that are evaluable primarily from a first-person point of view. I argue that this approach results from Sor Juana’s attempt to resist and counter public skepticism that women possessed rational capacities. Such skepticism renders alternative approaches to justification untenable for Sor Juana’s self-defense. Sixth, Sor Juana does challenge Scholastic orthodoxy and should be considered a revisionary thinker, although not along the same lines as “Modernist” thinkers. Her challenge is subtle enough that it is easy to miss. Sor Juana’s construction is an epistemological system that was familiar enough to her contemporaries to pass as a “received view,” but it actually subverts a number of epistemological conventions of Sor Juana’s time, repurposing them toward divergent ends.

3. First Innovation: The Goals of Study Equal the Goals of Contemplation

The Bishop, writing as “Sister Philotea,” effectively gives Sor Juana her epistemic marching orders: salvation is the proper end of all human activity, and therefore, citing Justus Lipsius’s opinion, “Any science which is not a science of Christ is foolishness and only vanity […] Human letters are slaves to and often help divine letters; but they should be reproached when they steal Divine Wisdom’s ownership of human understanding” (Sor Juana, OC Vol. IV, Appendix 2, par. 10–11). The ordering is blunt. Private study of “profane” matters does not directly serve divine ends such as attaining salvation, and therefore should be curtailed. By contrast, “divine letters,” or the study of scripture and contemplation of Christ, do serve divine ends.

Sor Juana agrees that salvation is her own goal: “I entered religious life because […] it was the least imbalanced and most decent option I could choose in terms of the assurance I wanted for my salvation. All the little impertinences of my character […] gave way to this primary (and in the end most important) consideration” (SJ, Reply to Sor Philotea, l. 269–280). Furthermore, she adds, gaining knowledge and helping others learn will actually help to achieve this goal: “Oh, how much harm could be avoided in our republic if elderly women were educated like Laeta, and if they knew how to teach, as Saint Paul and my Father Saint Jerome command!” (ibid., l. 1012–1014).

However, it often seems as if the Reply reveals that attaining knowledge for its own sake is an equal or even greater motivator for Sor Juana. Sor Juana’s Reply details the many and sometimes extreme methods she employed to achieve her studious goals, for example, “I did in fact cut [my hair] as a penalty for my incompetence. To me it seemed unreasonable that a head dressed in so much hair was so bare of knowledge, a much more covetable adornment” (ibid., l. 268–269). Sor Juana is nonetheless always careful to return to the subject of scripture and salvation. She concurs with “Philotea” in describing theology as the “Queen of the Sciences” and as the ultimate target of her studies (Reply: l. 277–280). She writes, “The end to which I aspired was to study Theology, as it seemed to me, being Catholic, that it is shriveled ineptitude not to know everything that can be apprehended in this lifetime, through natural means, about the divine mysteries” (Reply: l. 296–305). For now, we can surmise that for Sor Juana studying theology is a key means to the end of achieving salvation.

However, Sor Juana makes two subversive moves regarding the proper end of human activity according to Catholic doctrine. These allow her to reassert the importance and therefore the permissibility of studies of the profane, including for women.

The first subversion is to recruit skeptical attitudes toward knowledge of the divine to draw out an inference the Bishop denies. Sor Juana asks two skeptical questions in her Reply. First, she asks, is it even possible for mortal beings to know about God? According to proponents of the via negativa or apophatic theology, due to God’s absolute transcendence and unknowability, God can best be approached according to what cannot be said or what we believe to be false about God. Aquinas quotes Pseudo-Dionysius, affirming, “He is universally to all incomprehensible” (Aquinas Reference Aquinas2017: ST I.Q12.A1). Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), one of the best-known Renaissance-era apophatic theologians, asserts that, “the foundation for learned ignorance is the fact that absolute truth is beyond our grasp,” (Of Learned Ignorance, Ch. 2), and offers a partial understanding of God through indirect means, or denials, as a substitute. Aquinas and Augustine make similar qualifications in their own writings. Indeed, the complement of apophatic theology, cataphatic or affirmative theology, is not its opposite. Instead, cataphatic affirmations about God tend to try to delimit what is in effect unlimited: while knowable in principle, divinity is out of proportion with the intellect attempting to comprehend it (Aquinas, ST I.Q12.A1).

Second, Sor Juana asks what it takes to become an authority on what the sacred texts say. Sor Juana wryly notes that while “heresies against art are not punished by the Holy Office, but are punished with laughter by the discreet and with censure by critics,” (Reply, l. 159–160), heresies against theology, which involve making false statements about the meaning of scripture, are genuinely dangerous. Many err, Sor Juana notes, simply because they think they know more than they do (Reply, l. 930–938), that is, they lack the virtues required to avoid such error. Even trying to attain divine knowledge is fraught with difficulty.

With this skepticism about divine knowledge in hand, Sor Juana decouples the automatic link made by the Bishop between studying scripture and achieving salvation. Since God cannot be comprehended by a human intellect, studying scripture or theology will at best approximate knowledge of Him. Moreover, interpretive errors can be morally and spiritually catastrophic. The upshot is that although salvation remains as the proper final end of human activity for the purposes of Sor Juana’s argument, the subordinate and more proximal epistemic end is not theological. She will introduce a different epistemic end that complements our human limitations and Catholic moral concerns.

Sor Juana’s second subversion regarding the proper end of human activity comes in three parts. First, she asserts that knowledge of Theology, the “Queen of the Sciences,” encompasses or requires knowledge of every other discipline. Call this the Theological Scope thesis. Second, she denies that learning about nature as a means of learning about God is not open to women. Third, she denies that nature is not a means to learn about and gain “general revelation” about God.

The reasoning behind the Theological Scope thesis goes as follows: since God is the cause of everything that exists, God is the first principle; knowledge of God then deductively enables knowledge of everything. However, as Sor Juana asserts, mortals cannot hope to grasp theological truths in the first place without first possessing knowledge of many other disciplines. “It was clear to me that I should climb the steps of the sciences and humanities, for how was someone meant to understand the character of the Queen of the Sciences when they did not yet know that of the ancillaries?” (Reply, l. 313–316). She reiterates this point after providing many specific examples, “It is not only these noble sciences; there is no mechanical art that goes unmentioned in the Scriptures. Otherwise, how could one understand the Book that comprises all books, and the Science that encompasses all the sciences, for whose intellection all serve it?” (Reply, l. 371–374). This suggests that general scientific and humanistic knowledge is a prerequisite to the study of scripture, and therefore, to the ultimate and perhaps unattainable goal of grasping the First Principle, God.

I describe Sor Juana’s presumed goal this way so as to contrast it with the goal of mystical “communion” with the divine. We can characterize Sor Juana’s goal as an approach through “General Revelation,” a method of knowing God available to all insofar as His creation is perceivable by all, at least according to early theologians like Saint Paul (Romans 1:20). Sister Philotea’s reproach of Sor Juana suggests she should instead try to be more like Teresa of Avila in her “both meter and … choice of subjects” (Letter from Sor Philotea, par. 4). Saint Teresa wrote Interior Castle, a meditation on one’s individual soul as a path to divine knowledge, which engages in mystical rather than abstract theology (Teresa, of Avila, Saint 2007). Teresa’s exercise does not seem to require the worldly studies Sor Juana endorses; it is an example of “Special Revelation,” which relies on individual visions and supra-natural communion with God. Indeed, almost all female Saints had earned their status by means of a mystical approach, while many male Saints, such as Aquinas himself, had been afforded other, more intellectual routes toward salvation and canonization.Footnote ⁴ However, since Sor Juana had also been exhorted by “Sister Philotea” (the Bishop) to read the Bible and seek spiritual understanding through theological study, she seizes and builds on this recommendation to propose her own method of seeking knowledge of the divine, through the path of studying profane subjects. Sor Juana insists that for her an intellectual path is suitable for achieving salvation, denying that this requires her to avoid the study of nature.

In Sor Juana’s view all of the liberal arts and natural sciences are prerequisites for proper understanding of Scripture. Aquinas, too, places the divine sciences last in his pedagogical sequence (Commentary on the Nichomachean Ethics, Book VI, Lecture 7, no. 1211). However, although Sor Juana lacked the luxury of structured instruction, she is intent to show this has not been a barrier to progress. She portrays the arts and sciences as “helping” each other (Reply, l. 411–412), describing these subjects as “steps” leading to a “summit” (ibid., l. 311). For her few other paths permit an understanding of theology. Show me, she seems to challenge her critics, a Biblical passage that can be understood without such study. So if the Bishop is asking her to study scripture, then she must be allowed to not only dabble in but devote herself to these arts. In this way the apparently conflicting goals of contemplation and academic study are actually intertwined. Sor Juana explicitly asserts that the women Saints lauded by the Church were broadly educated for just this reason (Reply, l. 993–1031).

4. Second Innovation: Humility actually motivates learning

Sor Juana opens her Reply by claiming that she is not worthy of studying scripture because there is a significant moral danger should she be wrong about divine matters. However, there is no such danger in being wrong about “profane” matters. She subversively suggests that the virtue of humility that Philotea values therefore recommends the less audacious course of study, which is in fact studying the “profane” arts:

Sor Juana never explicitly redefines the concept of humility, but in the above we can see her give examples of humility, such as fear and reverence for sacred texts and knowing her own ignorance, and what she takes to be examples of its contrary, arrogance or pride, such as unworthiness and studying with the goal of teaching. Suppose humility is a combination of proper self-understanding and reverence for the right things. If one knows one is prone to error, and making errors about divine matters is morally and spiritually fraught, humility would recommend, contrary to Philotea’s advice, that one avoid forming opinions about divine subjects, at least at the outset.

Sor Juana’s view of humility places it as both a moral and an intellectual virtue. On her neo-Socratic account one demonstrates humility, not by ceasing to desire to know or ceasing to pursue knowledge, but by strongly desiring to know and knowing one is not yet a knower (Clavel-Vázquez and Gallegos-Ordorica, Reference Clavel-Vázquez, Gallegos-Ordorica, Detlefsen and Shapiro2023). Humility thus encourages a certain sort of epistemic project, the project of admitting a remediable ignorance, instead of functioning as an impediment to learning. Sor Juana writes that knowledge of her own ignorance motivates her to avoid sacred subjects, the very thing she is being admonished for: “What understanding do I possess, what learning, what material means, what information do I even have for this task, except four superficial under-graduate pedantries?” (Reply: l. 174–176). Nicholas of Cusa may be on Sor Juana’s mind. He writes, “Nothing could be more beneficial for even the most zealous searcher for knowledge than his being in fact most learned in that very ignorance which is peculiarly his own; and the better a man will have known his own ignorance, the greater his learning will be” (Heron, 1954/2007: 8–9). Thus Sor Juana’s humility both informs her choice of subject, the profane rather than the spiritual, and her motivation, to lessen the ignorance which virtuous humility requires her to acknowledge. She flips Philotea’s accusation on its head.

Ignorance here crucially features as a vice, rather than the sort of womanly virtue upheld in Sor Juana’s time. It is “shriveled ineptitude” for a Catholic to not know what can be reached in this lifetime, according to Sor Juana (Reply, l. 267–269).Footnote ⁶ Sor Juana knows what she does not know. However, this is not a reason to cease inquiry, but instead its catalyst. Sor Juana is likely playing here on the dual meaning of “Catholic,” referring to both the Catholic religion and the meaning of the original Greek word, katholou, “universal,” “all-encompassing,” or “on the whole.”

5. Third Innovation: Endorsing Curiosity as a Companion Virtue to Studiousness

I mentioned earlier that for Sor Juana the primary intellectual virtues that move an inquirer toward knowledge are (i) humility, (ii) studiousness, and (iii) diligence. We have now briefly traced the way in which humility functions as an intellectual virtue for Sor Juana, and one that encourages study of many subjects, rather than as a moral virtue that dissuades study.Footnote ⁷ It is now time to discuss studiousness. However, I left out a crucial detail.

Sor Juana’s fervor for study is not an ordinary studiousness. Her fervor is passionate, and she is aware there’s an element of danger in it:

Where does this sense of danger come from? Consider this warning from Augustine:

Augustine, and Aquinas soon after him, regarded inquisitiveness, or curiositas, as a vice. Being curious about the material world is for Augustine an example of this sort of vice. Its natural remedy is meant to be a kind of temperance. Aquinas identifies this special form or “secondary virtue” of temperance with studiositas or studiousness (Aquinas, ST II–II.167). Studiousness moderates the natural human desire to know and helps in part to remove obstacles, including the obstacle that is the arduousness of learning itself (ibid., II–II.166.2). The Bishop directly references these concerns, writing, “[Human letters] become commendable when the motive of curiosity, which is a vice, is replaced by studiousness, which is a virtue.” (SJ, OC Vol. IV, Appendix 2: par. 11). According to Aquinas, vicious curiosity can have both sensible and intellectual objects, so its viciousness is not determined solely by its objects; although knowledge of truths is essentially good, it can be accidentally bad, either when it results in pride, or when the knowledge is used for bad ends (ibid., II–II.167.1).

Sor Juana does not dwell on this concern, instead insisting, in a passage we have already seen, that her true goal was to study theology (SJ, Reply: l. 297–300). But I wish to argue that there is evidence in the text that she simply does not agree with Augustine and Aquinas. Consider this passage:

All of God’s creation, she notes, and all of God’s creatures, are stamped with the mark of God as their maker. If this is true, why shouldn’t one be curious about them? Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), one of the founders of the influential Jesuit order, also exhorts believers to “find God in all things” (Ganss Reference Ganss1992). Sor Juana’s Reply to Sor Philotea actually details many examples of her unceasing and outsized curiosity: she is curious about the origin of different temperaments and personalities, about the nature of parallel lines receding to a point when in perspective, about the spiral movement of a top, about the different chemical properties of egg whites and egg yolks. So, if curiosity is a vice, Sor Juana does seem guilty of it.

But here is Sor Juana’s response to this implicit charge. On the one hand, it seems to her that this sort of inquisitiveness is celebrated in the male gender. So perhaps the trait should be celebrated in Sor Juana’s case as well. However, she has been making the point throughout the passage that her curiosity is insatiable, and not really in her control; therefore, she is not to blame for it, if it is in fact a vice, and likewise she is not praiseworthy for it if it is a virtue. “If these [instances of curiosity] were considered merits, Lady (and I see them celebrated as such among men), they would not have been considered as such in me since I act out of necessity. If they are considered blameworthy then for the same reason I believe I have not been to blame” (Reply, l. 835–839). In sum, either curiosity is not a vice after all, or it is an innate trait that cannot be regarded as morally evaluable in the first place!

So how then does curiosity relate itself to studiousness? In Augustine and Aquinas, these are cast as opposites, with studiousness providing the remedy to curiosity. In Sor Juana, curiosity becomes an epistemic catalyst, perhaps like the general love for knowledge inherent in human nature according to Aristotle (Aristotle Reference Aristotle and Barnes1984: Metaphysics I.1). It is complementary to studiousness, with curiosity’s primary role being to invite inquiry toward some question, and studiousness’ role being to direct and discipline inquiry and remove obstacles for learning when the toil of study reduces the effect of curiosity.

6. Fourth Innovation: Egalitarian Epistemic and Moral Agency

We have seen hints of it already, and the subject has been treated by other commentators on Sor Juana (Kirk, Reference Kirk2016; Vargas Reference Vargas2022), but we cannot go without mentioning the importance of Sor Juana’s incisive critique of the gendered double standard in Catholic pedagogy. One Biblical passage in particular was used to repress women intellectuals like her: “Women should be silent in the Churches, for they are not permitted to speak,” etc. (1 Corinthians 14:34–35). Her primary counterargument in the Reply cites her contemporary Juan Díaz de Arce, who argues that while women cannot preach from the pulpit, women are allowed private study, writing, and teaching. Sor Juana then adds this:

That is, in Sor Juana’s view, the prohibition about preaching and interpreting Scripture applies to any person with a vicious character, not only to women. Sor Juana continues, “There are many who study only to remain ignorant, especially those who have arrogant, restless, and conceited spirits […] These men are more hurt by knowledge than they would have been by ignorance” (ibid., 933–939). If it was being a certain gender that impeded one from acquiring intellectual virtue, there would be no saintly women recognized by the Church who had done their own writing on spiritual subjects, like Saint Teresa, who was cited by Philotea. Sor Juana also lists men who have notably done great harm by claiming to know when they did not, including Pelagius, Arius, and Luther. She concludes the section by saying, “So the “be silent” is meant not only for women, but for all those who might not be very competent” (ibid., 969–970).

Sor Juana subsequently makes an independent case for the importance of educating women. In brief, if women are not permitted to study in public universities because of the danger of being near men, who threaten their chastity and honesty, then they should be educated by other women. This then necessitates that women be permitted private study. She cites her order’s founder Saint Jerome’s recommendations on how to educate young women, and also leans heavily on the words of Saint Paul, who says women should be “teaching what is good” (Titus 2:3). Immediately after that, Sor Juana lists a litany of examples of scriptural passages that are almost impossible to understand without a complete education in topics like history, mathematics, Latin grammar, and even classical literature.

After defending the general permissibility of women privately studying, teaching, and writing, she returns to her own individual case. Recall that the subject of her Reply to Sor Philotea is the polemic that arose from her theologically opinionated Athenagoric Letter, a critique of a sermon by Antonio Vieira. Sor Juana is pointed in asking, “Was it insolence for me to hold an opinion contrary to Vieira’s, but not so for him in his Priesthood to hold one contrary to those three Holy Fathers of the Church? Is my bare understanding not as free as his, though it comes from the same stock?” (SJ, Reply: 1169–1173). She then asserts that she has done nothing wrong, or at least, her action falls under the freedom of judgment granted to everyone by God, “just as I was free to disagree with Vieira, anyone is free to disagree with my judgment” (ibid., 1189–1190). Here Sor Juana markedly disagrees with her former spiritual director, Antonio Núñez, who maintained that nuns should renounce their own will and freedom (More Reference More, Coles, Bauer, Nunes and Peterson2015). A woman’s judgment is just as free and independent as a man’s.

This last thought is perhaps the most transgressive. Women and especially religious women in the Catholic Church are required, above almost every other edict, to be obedient. One wonders then whether Sor Juana is glossing over the implication that women should subsume their opinion, and not just their behavior, to that of other authorities, and in particular men. If she had to be explicit, Sor Juana could have leaned on arguments she was likely familiar with from eminent figures in the School of Salamanca (see Aspe 2018). Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) in particular emphasized the key importance of individual freedom of will as a gift from God, specifically in deciding whether or not to believe the tenets of the faith. Individuals had to be given reasons to change their views before accruing any moral blameworthiness. One upshot of this view, which Ambrosio Velasco calls a kind of Catholic “republicanism” that rivals its Protestant counterpart (Velasco 2022), is that individual freedom of judgment is thereby sacrosanct. While one could be held morally liable for the consequences of having the wrong beliefs, according to the school of Salamanca, the beliefs themselves might not be subject to moral evaluation, or at least not subject in the same way.

Sor Juana’s egalitarianism is therefore transgressive but not unprecedented. She is quite explicit about questioning the gendered epistemic and moral double standard. She is less explicit about the theological foundation for her right to disagree with authorities. The proof that she strongly believes she is entitled to theological opinion—and that she does not shy away from the threat having such an opinion poses to her as a woman—is that, throughout her Reply to Sor Philotea, she cites, analyzes, and interprets both scripture and various theological authorities. Despite her protests to the contrary, Sor Juana does not cleave to received or orthodox interpretations of these sources. One must conclude that Sor Juana believes she possesses the virtues required to approach such activities.

7. Fifth Innovation: Epistemic Justification from an Accessible World

An important aspect of Sor Juana’s epistemological system that, I think, has gone unnoticed previously is her emphasizing that the factors that enable and justify her study are perceivable by all rather than accessible only from a privileged first-person perspective. For example, consider our previously noted assertions about gendered area expertise. Sor Juana wryly notes, “Lady, what can we women know except the philosophies of the kitchen? […] I often say, noting these little facts: If Aristotle had cooked, he would have written much more” (SJ, Reply, l. 810–813). In my view, in addition to its feminist rebuke of male intellectual arrogance, this is an endorsement of the idea that propositions that are knowable or understandable are accessible in an egalitarian way: any agent who contemplates the machine of the universe that is God’s “book” has the means by which to question, study, and learn. If there is gendered area expertise, it is because of exposure to the objects and activities that shape such expertise. Thus, not only could Aristotle have “written much more” than he did if he had such expertise, but also, women do not need to read Aristotle or have received university instruction in order to qualify as knowledgeable. With this, we can see how Sor Juana is selecting observable habits and skills, rather than unobservable rational processes, to underlie justification in her epistemic system. On the picture Sor Juana has drawn, a knower studies, practices, cross-checks, reads, observes, listens, and clarifies; a knower refines their mind holistically.

Here I tie this notion of “justification,” a term Sor Juana does not use, to the virtue of diligence or thoroughness: Sor Juana specifically worries about the fact that she has had an unstructured and auto-didactic education. Under unfavorable circumstances this might undercut her claim to epistemic justification. However, she reassures herself and us that, “I can guarantee in my own case that whatever I have not understood in one author in one discipline, I tend to understand in another from a different discipline that seems quite distant. […] And so it is not an excuse, nor do I offer it as one, that I studied a variety of subjects, since these help each other before doing otherwise” (ibid., l. 422–438). She is even careful to differentiate the help subjects give each other when it comes to propositional knowledge, what we might in contemporary terms call “knowledge-that,” and the fact that the opposite happens with practical knowledge and habits, or what we call “knowledge-how.” While on the one hand, “Since much corporeal activity is called for in order to acquire a habit, none who divides themselves across varying exercises can ever perfect it” (ibid., 409–410), on the other hand, Sor Juana says, “in formal and speculative matters the opposite happens” (ibid., 411). So, for Sor Juana a diligent epistemic agent will ultimately profit from continued inquiry, even if they do not benefit from pedagogical systematicity. That is, her failing to follow a prescribed order does not undercut her epistemic justification because her diligence or dedication to learning affords her alternative epistemic support.

Sor Juana emphasizes that she is capable of inquiring into and learning about the world because it is accessible in this way to everyone as part of its design. The subjects of study—features of the world themselves—are structured in relations of mutual support. In her words:

There are no gendered restrictions on accessing justification here.

However, and importantly for my core point, there is no attempt in the Reply to Sor Philotea to argue directly for women’s possession of rational capacities as a means for establishing their right to learn, write, or teach. On my view, Sor Juana avoids addressing the question of whether women have introspective access to the sources of their justification because of the oppressive constraints of intellectual sexism. For a woman to construct an argument that women have rational capacities or access to their reasons for belief, she would already concede to a sexist doubt in her own rationality.Footnote ⁸ Also, an argument from a source of justification that was only first-personally accessible to her would be persuasively sterile.

Sor Juana instead adopts a strategy that emphasizes attestable character traits, historical facts, and discernible features of the world, which are more resistant to uncharitable skepticism about women’s epistemic justification. First, she details widely acknowledged intellectual achievements from famous women pagans and Christians (Merrim Reference Merrim1991). Then, in her own case, Sor Juana demonstrates her rationality through observable, third-personally attestable actions and supports its possibility from historical evidence rather than by making declarations about her internal states or her specific cognitive processes that would then have to be defended on speculative grounds. Sor Juana otherwise presupposes that women are rational. Why would she not? Women have rational souls because they are human beings (something she reminds her unjust addressee in her Spiritual Self-Defense, or Letter to Her Confessor (Tapia Méndez Reference Tapia Méndez1986)). Again, Sor Juana is not interested in proving that women are rational.

If anything, Sor Juana thinks of human rationality as a natural birthright when she says, “God favored me with the greatest love of truth – that ever since the first light of reason shone on me, my inclination toward learning has been so vehement and powerful that [no one has been able to stop it]” (ibid., 187–191). The closest she comes to allowing that there are gradations in the intellect or understanding itself among different beings is when she claims that, “An angel is greater than a human for no other reason than that an angel understands more; a human has no advantage over the brute other than understanding” (ibid., 618–619). Angels are superior only in the quantity of understanding, not in type.

Sor Juana thus sees knowledge – including knowledge of the divine! – as proceeding, not from internal reasons and induction, but from empirical sources, from knowledge of the material world, a world she sees as built so as to support this knowledge.

8. Sixth Innovation: Sor Juana’s “Skepticism” and Challenging Scholasticism from Within

Much ink has been spilled on the question of whether Sor Juana was a Scholastic, a true Modernist, or something else. Some commentators describe Sor Juana as an eclectic Baroque writer (Beuchot Reference Beuchot1999). These questions often turn on whether Sor Juana read authors like Descartes or Gassendi or embraced skeptical methods (ex: Hill Reference Hill2000; Finley Reference Finley2019). To be brief, Scholasticism in the 16th–17th centuries was simply a different beast from Scholasticism in the medieval period, so such conceptual bifurcations are unhelpful (Mercer Reference Mercer2016). New Spain in particular had stronger ties to Iberian Europe and Catholicism than to French, English, or Dutch intellectuals (see Aspe 2018). However, I will argue that Sor Juana’s virtue epistemology is not a simple adoption of any other system, including late Scholasticism. Even when Sor Juana appears to toe the orthodox line and follow orthodox Scholastic methodology, as in, for example, her Athenagoric Letter (not discussed at length here), she also tends to subvert it for her own purposes (see Ludmer Reference Ludmer1991).

Are Sor Juana’s skeptical sensibilities linked to Scholasticism? These tend to be expressed in her poetry rather than her prose writing. Primero Sueño (First Dream, OC Vol. I) and her Romance #2, “Let us pretend that I am happy,” (ibid.) are potential examples of “skepticism” in Sor Juana’s poetry. By contrast, in the Reply to Sor Philotea, Sor Juana’s critical attitude targets male arrogance, leveling the playing field rather than expressing doubt about the general possibility of attaining knowledge. I do not think this is an accident: self-defenses are not places where one typically centers doubt about one’s own intellectual capacities, except insofar as others’ capacities become subject to similar scrutiny. In First Dream, on the other hand, the protagonist fails more than once to achieve knowledge of the whole cosmos. The poem ends inconclusively, leaving uncertain whether knowledge will or will not be attained, and what method will ultimately be used to attain it Sabat de Rivers (Reference Sabat de Rivers1992, Reference Sabat de Rivers1976). Relatedly, Sor Juana characterizes her own Romance #2 as denouncing “the edema of too much science, which she fears useless even for knowledge and noxious for living.” The poem laments in part her focus on argumentative discourse and being right at the expense of her peace of mind.

In my view, Sor Juana’s poetic skeptical sensibility owes more to the anti-Scholastic radical skeptic Francisco Sanches (1550–1623), who himself influenced Descartes, than to non-Iberian European philosophy (Sanches Reference Sanches, Limbrick and Douglas1988). Sanches’ skepticism was motivated by a worry that the Aristotelian Scholastic system requires that one understand very obtuse metaphysical terms on thin and mysterious intellectual grounds as a basis for understanding simpler empirical generalizations (That Nothing is Known, 1581). If this is the Dream’s source for skepticism, it leaves room for an alternative, non-Scholastic, method of inquiry.

Another reason for Sor Juana’s sometimes skeptical attitude is poetic self-reflection. When Romance #2 decries “too much science,” Sor Juana is bemoaning her over-valuation of winning arguments and her belief that she is right, regretting that she has put intellectual ends before emotional peace and moral virtue. This is not traditional skepticism, in my view, but a worry about how to properly weigh different ends. According to Lisa Shapiro, who does identify skeptical arguments in this poem, Sor Juana responds to this skepticism through affective means, tempering the desires that result in her unhappiness (Reference Shapiro and Schliesser2022).

In short: if Sor Juana is to be called a “Scholastic,” let us at least call her a nonconformist one. Her Reply to Sor Philotea is not a place where we encounter obedient, Catholic epistemological orthodoxy. One striking example: despite agreeing with Saint Jerome that women should not try to study the “fleshly” Song of Songs until they have all but completed their education (Reply, l. 145–149), Sor Juana herself analyzes the Song of Songs in her Reply to Sor Philotea (Reply, l. 1108–1109)! Sor Juana uses Scholastic tools because she has a Scholastic audience, and she uses Scholastic sources because she is a nun, and one fascinated by classical authors and classical philosophy. But, as I have argued throughout this article, she rejects certain core commitments of Scholastic epistemology.