Chapter II - Sor Juana and her idea of freedom

In recent years, I have developed an interpretation that specialists in Sor Juana know little about. It relates to the theological influence of a group of Pueblan Jesuits who were contemporary to the nun. Shortly after my article was published, an in-depth study by Dr. Ramón Kuri Camacho was published by the Universidad Autónoma de Veracruz. After translating a number of 17th-century philosophical texts in Puebla, he was able to show that philosophers Francisco Suárez and Luis de Molina once had an influence on Sor Juana, in particular, regarding the issue of freedom. Kuri Camacho has shown that certain Criollo philosophers put these proposals to work —especially that of Suárez— in order to develop a new project for a nation in America. This group of Pueblan Jesuits included Fr. Miguel Sánchez, who spoke of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Lasso de la Vega, Becerra Tanco, Nuñez de Miranda, who was Sor Juana’s confessor, and others. As a group, they extended certain theological theses of Luis de Molina and Francisco Suárez regarding middle science or conditioned science. The theological problem they were working on was the relationship between grace and freedom. In their writings, Suárez and Molina had begun with the question of whether free acts were meritorious in themselves or whether they necessarily required the cooperation of divine grace. They wondered whether virtuous acts are meritorious when the person was in mortal sin, or whether such acts lacked merit because of the sin. These questions augured a greater autonomy for the acting person because of his or her freedom, a possibility that opened the doors to fictionalism and probabilism, together with the theory of possible worlds, which is where the Jesuits parted ways from traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic realism. Suárez’s and Molina’s proposal conceded a greater autonomy to human beings,something decisive for their political project. If good human acts are meritorious despite the fact that the person is in grave sin, this would mean that freedom participates more than grace in the divine project —even putting certain limitations on God. Traditional Catholic theology argued that if the human being sins, none of his or her actions have merit. In contrast, the proposals of Suárez and Luis de Molina threw new light on the understanding of moral autonomy. This movement was called “Jesuit humanism,” and, on the political plane, offered an alternative national project, challenging the theory of the liberal state that Luther’s Reformation had promoted. The theological axiom on which these authors relied was the dual nature of Christ, fully human and fully divine. Because the human being is similar to God, even being called an image of Him, the topic of human freedom had to be studied from two points of view: one of theology and one of political humanism.