Experiencing Time in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Routledge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature) [1 ed.] 1032463716, 9781032463711

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Routledge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature

EXPERIENCING TIME IN THE EARLY MODERN HISPANIC WORLD AFTER APOCALYPSE Ariadna García-Bryce

Experiencing Time in the Early Modern Hispanic World

This book considers the new ways time was experienced in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Hispanic world in the framework of global Catholicism. It underscores the crucial role that the imitation of Christ plays in modeling how representative writers physically and mentally interiorize temporal impermanence as the Messiah’s suffering body becomes a paradigmatic as well as malleable marker of the avatars of earthly history. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which authors adapt Christ-centered conceptions of existence to accommodate both a volatile post-eschatological world and the increased dominance of mechanical clock time. As novel means of communing with Christ emerge, so too do new modes of sensing and understanding time, unleashing unprecedented cultural and literary reinvention. This is demonstrated through close analyses of writings by such influential figures as Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Teresa of Ávila, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Ariadna García-Bryce earned a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale and a PhD in Spanish Literature from Princeton. Her publications, which include Transcending Textuality: Quevedo and Political Authority in the Age of Print (2011) and many articles published in distinguished peerreviewed journals (e.g. Renaissance Studies, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Revista de estudios hispánicos, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Hispanic Review), have focused on a variety of topics within early modern Hispanism: the relationship between drama, religion, and painting; rhet­ oric and poetics; modern appropriations of Baroque aesthetics; gender representation; and the connection between literary culture and incipient bureaucratization.

Routledge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly monographs and edited collections, focusing on literatures from Central America, South America and the Iberian Peninsula. Books in the series are characterized by dynamic interventions and innovative approaches to established subjects and ground-breaking criticism on emerging topics in literary studies. A Posthumous History of José Martí The Apostle and His Afterlife Alfred J. López The Intellectual and Cultural Worlds of Rubén Darío Kathleen T. O’Connor-Bater Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America Edited by Cristián H. Ricci Inventing the Romantic Don Quixote in France Jansenists, Rousseau, and British Quixotism Clark Colahan Beyond sentidiño New Diasporic Reflections on Galician Culture Edited by Daniel Amarelo and Laura Lesta García Experiencing Time in the Early Modern Hispanic World After Apocalypse Ariadna García-Bryce For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Latin-American-and-Iberian-Literature/bookseries/RSLAIL

Experiencing Time in the Early Modern Hispanic World After Apocalypse Ariadna García-Bryce

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Ariadna García-Bryce The right of Ariadna García-Bryce to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Names: García-Bryce, Ariadna, 1968- author. Title: Experiencing time in the early modern Hispanic world : after apocalypse / Ariadna García-Bryce. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge studies in Latin American and Iberian literatures | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023012697 (print) | LCCN 2023012698 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032463711 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032463735 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003381389 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Spanish literature‐‐Catholic authors‐‐Classical period, 1500-1700‐‐History and criticism. | Time in literature. Classification: LCC PQ6066 .G36 2024 (print) | LCC PQ6066 (ebook) | DDC 860.9/921282‐‐dc23/eng/20230602 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023012697 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023012698 ISBN: 978-1-032-46371-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-46373-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-38138-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003381389 Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun

For Diego, Luciana, and Emilia

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Time in Early Modernity “Scattered in Times” 1 Time as Scythe 12 Chronos Resurrected 24 Chapter Overview 28

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Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises Scheduled Devotion 34 Transcending Vanitas 41 Augustine: Time as a Problem 46 Achieving Duration 49 The Presence of Memory 55

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Time Troubles in Teresa of Ávila’s Libro de la vida “We are not Angels” 62 Alumbradismo as Rejection of Time 69 Schooling Memory 73 Lux et Brevitas 75

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Pious Subjects for a Post-millenarian New Spain The Imperfect Conquest of Time 81 Mendieta’s Historia eclesiástica indiana: The End of Kairos 84 Gregorio López: Seizing Stillness 93 Temporalizing the Life of Gregorio López 99

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Contents A New New Jerusalem: Sigüenza y Góngora’s Paraíso Occidental Resignifying Baroque Space 106 Mexico City as a Place of Memory 116 The Christic Bodies of the Patria 120 Redeemed Temporality: The Infinite Self in Sor Juana’s “Primero Sueño” Dreaming Wonder 126 The Permanence of Change 138 Resisting Allegory 142 Awakening 148 Solar Time 152

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Epilogue

157

Works Cited Index

159 174

Acknowledgments

My deepest thanks go to Elisa Sabourian, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, José Antonio Mazzotti, and Elizabeth Duquette for their invaluable editorial and scholarly input. I am equally grateful to Ramón Mujica Pinilla, Mónica López Lerma, Julen Etxabe, and Marsha Collins for years of illuminating conversations, friendship, and professional support from which this project has abundantly benefited. My gratitude also goes to Routledge’s reviewers for their excellent suggestions. I owe thanks as well to the Reed College Dean’s Office for its generous financial support. Finally, deserving of special mention is my husband, Diego Alonso, for his infinite intellectual generosity and inspiring companionship.

Introduction Time in Early Modernity

“Scattered in Times” If we read the ninth chapter of Don Quijote, we may well be amused by the eager narrator’s anachronical take on history as “émula del tiempo, depósito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir” (110) [“the imitator of time, the storehouse of actions and the witness to the past, an example and a lesson to the present and a warning to the future”] (Don Quixote 76). After all, in Cervantes’s epoch, the relationship between past, present, and future was not exactly harmonious. However much some writers continue to harp on the notion that the lessons of the past are of enduring value, it is fair to say that far more reflective of the times than the above characterization of history as a seamless continuum was the sentiment aired over one hundred years before by Fernando de Rojas. In the prologue to La Celestina, Rojas writes: “. . . los tiempos con tiempos contienden y litigan entre sí, uno a uno y todos contra nosotros” (14) [“. . . times with times do contend; one thing against another, and all against us”] (15). Comparable to the sixteenth-century illustrations of Petrarch’s Trionfi, where Time is pictured in human form carrying a deadly scythe, here it is invested with an erratic ferocity reminiscent of pagan Fortuna.1 Even in didactic literature, such as Diego de Saavedra Fajardo’s iconic 1640 compendium of lessons on Christian rulership, Empresas políticas, we read that history takes the form of unpredictable accident: “Y, en alterándose algo los accidentes, se alteran los sucesos, en los cuales más suele obrar el caso que la prudencia. Y así no son menos los príncipes que se han perdido por seguir los ejemplos pasados que por no seguillos” (421) [“. . . and by the Variation of some Accidents, the Successes too are varied, in which Chance has sometimes more Efficacity than Prudence. Others Examples in my Opinion deceive Princes no less than to follow none at all”] (Saavedra Fajardo, The royal politician 210–11). Such imagining of time as a perverse force that flouts even the most prudent course of action is a veritable sign of epochal malaise.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003381389-1

2 Introduction The prevalence of this outlook is clear from the multiplication of texts and visual works deploying draconian representations of the vanitas topos. We might sensibly treat these as tokens of a widespread “Chronophobia” which Marvin Trachtenberg defines as a “psychological or discursive presence” of “anxieties regarding the temporal marking and measure of one’s earthly time” (52).2 While the Medieval psyche was no stranger to the infelicities of ephemeral existence, hostility specifically aimed at time was an emergent early modern phenomenon (West-Pavlov 34). Related to this, while memento mori images were also popular in the Middle Ages, they tended at that point to be primarily allegorical figurations. But in the course of the Renaissance and the Baroque, they increasingly include realistic portrayals of physical death which dramatize the violence unfurled by time’s passage (Cohen, Transformations of Time 150, 163). This anxiety extends to the meta-artistic terrain, such that art grows self-conscious of its vulnerability to temporal dislocation: “What was distinctive about the European Renaissance, so called, was its apprehensiveness about the temporal instability of the artwork, and its recreation of the artwork as an occasion for reflection on that instability” (Nagel 13). We therefore have good cause to question the common contention that radical transformations in temporal experience do not occur until the 1800s, with mass industrialization.3 While the homogenization and acceleration of time at this stage in history surely initiated an acute sense of fragmentation subsequently reflected in modernist, avant-garde, and post-modernist aesthetics, expressions of extreme temporal dislocation are not unique to late modernity.4 The texts I analyze in this book bear witness to the often tumultuous as well as diverse temporal regimes already present in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iberian world and in that respect help us more precisely articulate in what sense we can claim it as a starting point for modernity. By broaching this topic, I join a longstanding conversation about the redefinition of time in early modernity. But I do so from a new perspective, as I regard evolving forms of Catholic religiosity as playing a key role in shaping that redefinition. I thus diverge from past scholarship on the rise of early modern time-consciousness that has attributed it to the secularizing effects of pragmatic clock time. Playing a key role in launching that idea decades ago was Jacques Le Goff’s “Au Moyen Âge: Temps de l’Église et temps du marchand” [“Church Time and Merchant Time in the Middle Ages”] which holds that from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance, along with the development of the mechanical clock, there is a palpable shift toward practical conceptions of time.5 This would presumably mean a move away from natural seasonal rhythms as well as from a commemorative event-centered temporality attached to the church

Introduction

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calendar, and toward a utilitarian calculation of time according to abstract units. Le Goff would contend that as of the thirteenth century, church time, itself structured around the promise of Parousia (the Second Coming), becomes increasingly dissociated from practically oriented work time which is consequently emptied of transcendental meaning. Influenced by this outlook, art and literature scholars have been interested in the cultural effects of the rise of denaturalized and desacralized time. In his now classic work, tellingly titled The Renaissance Discovery of Time, Ricardo J. Quinones holds that “. . . for the new men of the Renaissance time was not plentiful but rare and precious. Since it was constantly slipping away, man must utilize available means of controlling it . . .” (7). Via various analyses of canonical European works (e.g. Dante’s Divine Comedy, Petrarch’s Triumphs and love poems, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear) which represent time as a hostile force, Quinones highlights the anxieties produced by the awareness of time’s radical finiteness. He notes that the literature of the period is ridden with tropes representing destabilizing change. More recently, in a rich study focusing on Italian Renaissance art, Simona Cohen analyzes the fusion of clock imagery with fierce pagan representations of time (such as the devouring Kronos), thus further bolstering the connection between the rise of mechanical time-keeping and the disruption of theocentric Christian temporality (Transformations of Time).6 Classic studies on changing perceptions of time, such as those cited above, have mostly been centered on Northern Europe and Italy and have excluded the early modern Hispanic world. Such an omission contributes to long-entrenched outsider presumptions about that world as peripheral to modernity. Of course, this view has been amply corrected by Hispanist scholarship.7 From those studies that have examined the alteration of early modern Spain’s political structures concurrent with its transition from a regionally contained realm to a global imperial power, to those dealing with the pervasive uncertainties provoked by its involvements in European religious schisms and geopolitical wars, to those analyzing the momentous historical shifts and developing forms of cultural hybridity in the framework of American colonization, scholars in the field have grown accustomed to thinking about the Spanish so-called “universal monarchy” as saddled with an unprecedented degree of transformation. It is generally recognized that however much Medieval religious convictions continue to percolate, they are stretched or defied in novel ways, in response to a new global reality. In the words of Henry Kamen, “The attitudes of the new expansion were so unprecedented that it is difficult to see it simply as an extension of the old Reconquest. Already, it was a new age” (xv). How, then, does this “new age” reimagine time? The question has yet to be properly answered. Despite the abundant light that Hispanists have

4 Introduction shed on what makes Hispanic early modernity modern, the issue of lived time, per se, has been insufficiently unexplored. Considering it, I would argue, is crucial to grappling with how the inhabitants of that world sense and conceptualize its mutability. Rather than, like the previously mentioned canonical histories of European time, tethering modern subjectivities to a transition from religious to secularized temporal parameters, I relate them to a protracted as well as fluid renegotiation of the boundaries between divine and human time and I examine how they are expressed in devotional and contemplative literature and religious history. This approach has two advantages. First, it avoids treating the emergence of a modern zeitgeist as a homogeneous, linear, and universal process. Second, by centering religious life, it engages with the framework most directly preoccupied with structuring lived time. After all, the ontological and epistemological foundations of the early modern confessional self in many ways derive from Saint Augustine’s often-cited question, “What is time?,” one which he declared it impossible to answer (Confessions 230). Defined by this conundrum, the Catholic worshiper had long been called upon to contend with the discontinuities between time as oscillating human experience and time as divinely ordered principle.8 So the notion that time is multiplicity, rather than unity, is an essential component of Christian phenomenology. In effect, we can say that Saavedra Fajardo’s political lesson about the unruliness of human history was in some sense anticipated—in the form of a pious lament—by Augustine’s reflection that “I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand” (Confessions 244). In that respect, it would be too simplistic to deem the early modern vilification of time and its identification with pagan Fortuna a secular turn. While there are certainly ways in which such time-related anxieties would appear to signal the rupture of a Christian temporal order, ultimately, splintered time is a Christian idea which gains particular currency in early modernity. That is, the theological dichotomy between wayward historical time and a God who is outside of time strongly contributes to a widespread sensation of unbridled change. With that in mind, I devote this book to examining how an epochal sense of temporal dispersion is variously intensified or contained in a corpus of primarily religious writings from Spain and colonial Mexico. The texts to be considered are Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (1541), Saint Teresa of Ávila’s Libro de la vida (1588), Jerónimo de Mendieta’s Historia eclesiástica indiana (1595), Gregorio López’s Comentario al Libro del Apocalipsis (1586), Francisco Losa’s La vida que hizo el siervo de Dios Gregorio López (1613), Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s Paraíso Occidental (1684), and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s “Primero sueño” (1685). Together, these works allow for a robust reflection on mutating conceptions of temporality and their relationship to

Introduction

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modern subject-formation. Patent in them is a fertile awareness of the experiential dimensions of time-consciousness. Fundamental to the evolution of varied experiences of time is the burgeoning of forms of spirituality predicated on a personal relationship with Christ. As evidenced in the popularity of vernacular prayer manuals inspired in Thomas à Kempis’ Imitatio Christi and Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi, there is a concerted attempt by the devout to incorporate the Messiah in their innermost thoughts. Particularly prevalent in early sixteenth-century Spain, under the influence of figures like García Jiménez de Cisneros and Francisco de Osuna who promote individual religious meditation, this trend grows controversial in the post-Tridentine period when the church seeks to maximize clerical control over inner spiritual life. However, despite increasing ecclesiastical intolerance of unmediated rapport with Christ, the yearning for strong subjective connection with his life experience remains undiminished. And that yearning, ultimately, makes the worshiper particularly susceptible to a feeling of impermanence. In attempting to make the Messiah present in their own minds, the faithful must very consciously place themselves in a Christian temporal regime, defined as the time between the birth of Christ and the Eschaton, the end of time. Fusing with Christ’s salvific presence means at once commemorating his life and preparing for a timeless afterlife. In practice, this was no easy matter. For, as had long been made clear by Augustine, the human mind was by nature unsteady, prone to distension in time. The fact that intimate communion with Christ was so bound up with awareness of a fluctuating self distant from godly eternity made Christian time inherently unstable. Diversely appropriated in the texts studied here is Augustine’s foundational view of the temporal condition of the self as a “vast problem” (Confessions 57). While for Aristotle, as made clear in his De Memoria et Reminiscentia (27–29), temporal awareness—the ability to distinguish past, present, and future—was a mark of superior cognitive ability, for Augustine, it meant vulnerability to confusion. Bemoaning this in his Confessions, he opposes a fragile time-bounded mortal mind to the omniscience of God who is altogether beyond time. This dichotomy marks the early modern Hispanic world in profound as well as diverse ways: some hold fast to it while others refashion it to the point that they ultimately subvert it. The latter inclination is particularly notable in colonial Mexico where European linear conceptions of time are reshuffled under criollo cultural agendas which engage with pre-Christian cyclical temporalities. While cognizant of the ways in which conceptions of time are affected by concrete material change—e.g. the mechanical clock, the development of a Transatlantic empire, budding mercantilism, and rapid urban

6 Introduction growth—I do not view such change as generating a monolithic or onedirectional cultural transformation. In this sense, I am in dialogue with a varied body of scholarship from the last two decades that, distancing itself from Le Goff’s and E. P. Thompson’s legacies, has underscored the fluidity of modern temporal regimes, allowing for a necessary revision of linear histories of time. In the words of Christian Kiening and Martina Stercken: “From a historical perspective, time is per se not a unity but a multitude, a plurale tantum, related to different cultures, groups and individuals, different phases and moments” (2). Countering approaches that regard the increased social protagonism of clock time as producing a homogeneously “timed” culture, scholars now tend to keep a healthy distance from narratives about the triumph of Western industrialized time (see Burke, “Reflections”).9 Such approaches, it is felt, are ideologically problematic because they prompt simplistic oppositions between so-called primitive and modern societies by imbuing mechanical time-keeping with inordinate distinction as a conveyer of technical and conceptual innovation. This can result in an unfortunate dismissal of the theoretical and practical value of the senses of time cultivated in pre-industrial societies (Glennie and Thrift 292). Aside from correcting such misapprehensions, contemporary time studies also tend to privilege the experiential component of time. Unseated from its function as a universalizing or homogenizing measure, time is now no longer seen as a discrete category that frames existence but rather as something that animates it, and is thus best accessed through intersectional analyses sensitive to its myriad possible manifestations and valences. As Glennie and Thrift note, this understanding is borne out in disciplines, from philosophy, to gender studies, to anthropology. In these as in other related fields, time takes shape through the prism of differential cultural, social, geographical, and epistemological positions. Reflecting on such variations in the terrain of history and social sciences, Tyrus Miller calls for a new level of cognizance that time is “a dimension of historical meaning that can not simply be taken for granted. Time must be reflexively considered in the construction of social and historical interpretations” (7). We might, furthermore, relate such a turn in time studies to the influential contributions of Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and Paul Ricoeur, all of whom provide compelling ways of thinking about time as subjectively perceived experience. If we are today particularly well positioned to take advantage of this legacy, it may well be because of our own sense of temporal unmooring, evident in the coexistence of conceptions of time as different from one another as Glennie and Thrift’s notion of a “desynchronized . . . postmodernity” (278) (swimming in disparate temporal regimes) and Frederick Jameson’s ideas about an expansive “end of temporality.” Such awareness of

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temporal plurality has, in turn, had its impacts on literary and visual art studies, spurring scholars to think about the diverse ways in which time is deployed in the works they analyze. Exemplary in this respect would be Marina Stercken’s study on how the Flemish 1659 Mercator map conveys a sense of temporal simultaneity through certain uses of space (Kiening and Stercken). In another direction, Gill Harris analyzes Shakespeare’s plays as palimpsests of disparate temporalities, where Stuart Sherman’s study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century diary writing shows how time-consciousness, rather than having an emptying effect, serves as a medium for formatting subjectivity. Along similar lines, I will be interested in how the works encompassed here go about registering assorted temporal states. While I do refer to certain historical shifts as general epochal trends, I avoid characterizing them as totalizing turns and I pay close attention to their manifestation as subjectively perceived phenomena that are processed differently by different writers.10 Drawing our attention to how the divisions within Christianity contributed to a fractured modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie remarks: “The origins of modernity therefore lie not in human self-assertion or in reason but in the great metaphysical and theological struggle that marked the end of the medieval world and that transformed Europe in the three hundred years that separate the medieval and the modern worlds” (12). The writers included here are, each in a unique manner, agents of this transformation, as they creatively exploit the dichotomy between time-anchored human existence and divine timelessness that had long been a hallmark of Christian spirituality, and devise forms of spiritual experience tailored to the challenges of their historical context. Said otherwise, they make use of the principle of accommodatio, to echo the term employed by François Hartog to refer to the church’s understanding of God’s ability to adapt to historical changes and to continue, throughout them, to communicate his eternal truths to humanity (Chronos 85). In his recent study, Chronos, Hartog adopts a panoramic view of conceptions of time, spanning from early Christian paradigms that understand human history in relation to the arc of salvation, to the remnants of those paradigms in the current anthropocene (an era which, according to Hartog, also requires shuttling between disparate temporal schemes: lived time and a planetary long durée beyond the sphere of palpable experience). Within this extensive frame, early modernity, as Hartog sees it, stands out as a moment in which the rise of Chronos, chronological time, encroaches on the pivotal roles of Incarnation and Endtimes. If, as already specified, the Christian historical regime conceives of itself as occupying the time between the Incarnation and Eschaton, the axes that invest it with teleological meaning, in the course of the Renaissance and beyond, the subordination of chronological time to Christic telos faces increasing challenges. The idea is decidedly not

8 Introduction that a Christocentric conception of time is any less dominant than it was in the Middle Ages, but that the continued placement of chronological time within a sacred order involved many new forms of creativity. Not surprisingly, this generated conflict, as exemplified by Blaise Pascal’s denunciation of the Jesuits for their excessively liberal adaptations of God’s eternal word: “First and foremost, they had perverted divine accommodatio via human (all too human) compromise” (Hartog, Chronos 124). Such tensions would, moreover, become particularly charged in colonial America, a context rife with controversy about how to tailor doctrinal teaching to the demands of Indigenous proselytization. As we can infer from scholarship about the complex processes of New World cultural and religious mestizaje, these contribute significantly to intensifying the temporal pluralism endemic in Christianity (Lafaye, Brading, The First America, Gruzinski, Rubial, “El Apocalipsis en Nueva España”). In the words of Matthew O’Hara, who has shed important light on how this plays out in colonial Mexico, “. . . the discussion of religion and conversion was also a debate over time” (“Time and Christianity,” 24), one which highlights the necessarily protean nature of Christian temporality.11 In conversation with the diverse scholarly corpuses mentioned so far, I aim to think about the multiplicity of temporal regimes burgeoning across the early modern Hispanic world as dynamic reworkings of the core tension between the human and the godly that animates Christian philosophies of history. From this standpoint, the deep awareness of epochal change habitually identified with early modernity, far from indicating a move away from Christian temporality, is magnified by the flourishing of religious practices rooted in cravings for a personalized connection with Christ, a figure who, significantly, conflates personal transformation with historical crisis (the fall of empires, social catastrophe, natural cataclysm). The imitation of Christ thus plays a crucial role in modeling how individuals mentally, physically, and psychologically interiorize temporal transience and respond to it. The variety of ways in which worshipers do so offers new venues for self-definition and subject-formation. For instance, in modeling his communion with Christ as a means to overcome the dichotomy between earthly temporality and divine eternity, Saint Ignatius constructs a pragmatic subject at peace with clock time and understood to embody a virile agency. Contrastingly, Saint Teresa of Ávila’s radical devaluing of chronological time shapes a feminineidentified Christian self marked by a sense of temporal fragmenting. An equally disenchanted view of earthly time also conditions the New World religious subjects imagined by Mendieta and Losa in connection with the demise of evangelic utopianism in colonial Mexico. About a century later, forms of imitatio Christi of a rather different ilk emerge along with criollo

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discourses which link the New World to Edenic rebirth, thereby countering the aforementioned debasement of mortal temporality. We see this in Sigüenza’s exemplars of female spiritual martyrdom: emblematizing the vitality of an autochthonous patria they constitute innovative protopatriotic forms of subjecthood. As for Sor Juana, she channels this paradisiacal temporality toward the creation of a protean intellectual subject that subverts the aporetic treatment of time which, in Saint Teresa, is a key component of female humility. While the works I examine are, for the most part, canonical texts that have been widely studied, scarce attention has been directed at the way they formulate time. It is important to fill this lacuna, both because they deserve a prominent role in the multi-disciplinary and evolving discussion about fluid temporalities and because doing so contributes to further refining current understandings of how Tridentine religiosity triggers protean forms of identity. While often identity is related to place, time is as crucial a factor in cultural and psychological self-definition. Not long ago, Anna More remarked: “By understanding identity in spatial terms, whether geopolitical, social, or aesthetic, contemporary criticism has underemphasized the importance of time and historicity in the Spanish American Baroque” (62). As for the Peninsular Baroque, there historicity is commonly considered in relation to the emergence of early modern subjects; yet its sense of historicity is often understood as involving epistemic ruptures that generate disenchantment or demythification (Foucault; Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity). By focusing on how historicity manifests as manifold reconfigurations of the relationship between worldly and divine temporality, I take into account how change is formulated without applying overly schematic linear breaks. This allows for the ontological and epistemological plasticity of early modern subjects to come clearly into focus. Palpable in the writings of the authors that I examine are distinct ways of understanding the relationship between chronological and sacred time, from Loyola’s ingenious fusion of clock time with the eternalizing present of the Incarnation, to Teresa’s despondence about the possibility for such amalgamation, to Sor Juana’s daring abandonment of the dichotomy between sacred and profane temporalities. Whereas all the works included are part of the same Tridentine tradition and might even be regarded as making up a genealogy of sorts, considering the Jesuit impact on Teresa’s spirituality and the substantial influence of both Ignatius and Teresa on the church in New Spain, their ways of seizing the auspicious time of the Incarnation differ markedly. While Ignatius connects with the embodied Christ through curated acts of visual memory, in Teresa’s writing, the possibility of such making present of Christ is complicated by the notion that life is confined to a lapsed temporality. Mourning the waning of

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apocalyptic zeal that emerged in early stages of the American colonization, Mendieta and Losa are, not unlike Teresa, despondent about the possibility of aligning mortal life with godly design. Contrastingly, Sigüenza and Sor Juana, each in a different way, redeem earthly time, investing it with new life. Like many other readers of Hartog’s Régimes d’historicité [Regimes of Historicity], I employ the terms “temporality” and “temporal regime” to highlight the subjective apprehension of time that varies according to cultural and geopolitical circumstance and makes itself felt through diverse phenomenological experiences. Not to be exclusively related to the philosophical discipline founded by Edmund Husserl, “phenomenological” here is used more generally to refer to the sensed experience of time, something which was already a concern centuries before Husserl. Meditating on the problems raised by positing temporality as subjective perception, David Couzens Hoy says: If temporality is the time of our lives, as opposed to the time of the universe, then a plausible answer is that temporality comes from us, unlike time, which must come from the universe. Philosophy is not so easily satisfied, however, by such a quick answer to the question. Philosophical conscience forces a further question: what is meant by “comes from us”? This question in turn divides into two others: (1) who is this “we”? and (2) what does “comes from” mean? (3) While Hoy concentrates on how these questions were pivotal to philosophy from Kant through Heidegger, in early modernity, there was already considerable anxiety about the discontinuity between interior temporal experience and absolute cosmic time. One might in fact say that in early modernity, the situation is yet more fraught as the individual is inwardly divided, cognizant of mortal experience of time as remote from the godly on which it utterly depends for its meaning. As universal time, of which God was the architect, was, in its integrity, inaccessible to human beings, their internal experiences of temporality would, at best, be a rough approximation and, at worse, a delirious confusion. We see signs of this in the different modes of engaging in the commemoration of Christ’s sacrifice. The subjects that take stock of who they are as part of their processes of bonding with the Messiah, often define themselves as, in varying degrees, unable to penetrate the absolute ordering of time to which only God is privy. Beyond the genre differences among the works I analyze, all of them are, in one way or another, descendants of the imitatio Christi tradition and revolve around the construction of spiritual subjects whose inner lives are embedded in iconocentric and spectacle-centered culture. Their

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heightened sensorial consciousness can be taken as a prime manifestation of how they process time. Through rehearsing versions of Christ’s suffering, they intentionally situate themselves in relation to the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of time. Instead of thinking about this as an uncomplicated application of dogma to inner life and history, I take into account the sense in which the imitatio Christi tradition, tied as it is to the practice of ongoing self-interrogation, invites a considerable level of affective and intellectual license, such that there is a wide spectrum of ways of interiorizing a Christocentric temporal regime: from those privileging eschatological rupture to those seeking to locate it squarely in the kingdom of this world. Now, some might argue that the works here encompassed represent conceptual and experiential stability insofar as they exhibit didactic understandings of memory. Each is, in its own manner, invested in the practice of deliberate remembrance of a personal, historical, or Biblical past as the basis for an enlightened present and a redeemed future. In that sense, echoing the root premise of the illustrated ars memoriae that proliferated at the time, they recognize memory as the bedrock of knowledge, thus appearing to perpetuate an Aristotelian vindication of a logocentric temporal awareness which presumes the ability to grasp “the time of the universe” (Hoy 3).12 However, as works that portray radical spiritual states—extreme repentance, mystical raptures, bodily torment, celestial visions—they have a densely affective dimension that complicates the didactic role of memory. That is, they are keenly aware of the risks of what Ricoeur has referred to as the “dysfonctions” [“disfunctions”] of memory, sprung from the inability to disentangle remembrance from imagination (La mémoire, chapter 1).13 Products of a church that incentivized the deliberate sensorial recollection of Christ’s suffering while simultaneously criminalizing delusion and reserving for itself the ability to distinguish true from false visions, they were primed to be profoundly wary of their own cognition. Further complicating these spiritual lives is an epochal tension between the growing proclivity to fathom earthly time as moving forward indefinitely without a palpable telos and a continued need to view it as laden with definitive signs of its advance toward universal redemption. As Reinhart Koselleck has shown, while in some senses, conceptions of time are incrementally transformed as we move from premodernity to early modernity to late modernity, periodizations must be supple so as to avoid excessively strict boundaries between epochs. Relatedly, without ignoring how conceptions of time are impacted by progressive material historical change, I pay particular attention to how these alterations are processed within Christocentric cultural frameworks. In doing so, I am mindful that abrupt temporal turns have been endemic in the Christian imagination

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from its beginnings. Again, coming back to Hartog, “Christianity’s specific contribution was the decisive event of the Incarnation—the birth, death, and resurrection of the Son of God made man—which broke time in two” (Regimes of Historicity 60). As is patent in the Book of Revelation, Christocentric history is formatted as a succession of radical ruptures and drastic turns: from the evil Babylonic reign, to the millennium when the Beast is imprisoned and martyrs reign with Christ, to the following era when the liberation of the Beast initiates a new period of darkness and turbulence, to Judgment Day, the ultimate temporal cataclysm when time-bound existence will end. How the individual was to grapple with his or her place in this convulsive grand narrative and make sense of temporal existence was a central part of confessional practice. Indeed, the search for an adequate articulation of past, present, and future was vital to the development of the “self” which James Olney has credited Augustine’s Confessions with inventing. The writers studied here continue to grapple with the intellectual and existential problems pondered by the bishop of Hippo. As cognizant as Augustine of the difficulties of finding a satisfactory way of relating human temporality and divine eternity, they were as tenacious as he was about attempting to arrive at meaningful ways of intertwining these distant spheres. By highlighting the differences between temporal regimes at which they arrived, I present a variegated view of Iberian early modernity. As I will make clear, the cyclical temporalities emerging in New Spain are as much a foundational facet of modernity as European linear chronologies. Time as Scythe According to Koselleck, in the course of the sixteenth century, we can observe a “temporalization [Verzeitlichung] of history, at the end of which there is the peculiar form of acceleration which characterizes modernity” (11). This would lead some to say that it is only after the French Revolution that the notion that past and present are materially different from one another gains traction and triggers the sense of untrammeled change at the core of modern temporal acceleration.14 Surely, in late modernity, with the advent of expansive industrialization, the experience of time was homogenized and quickened to an unprecedented degree. However, as Koselleck himself allows, already in early modernity the process of “temporalization” is in some sense underway. If, when viewed from the vantagepoint of later modernity, ancient regime Europe would seem comparatively secure in its belief in a substantive continuity between past and present, its own voices tell rather a different story. From the ubiquity of bodily death in the aesthetic and religious imagination, to the

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restless quest for spiritual renewal, there is a dynamic burgeoning of new ways to exploit the age-old Christian notion of history-as-crisis. This is seemingly ignored, though, by those who impose rigid separations between early and late modern conceptions of time and regard the continued tendency in Tridentine culture to identify human history with divine teleology as a sign of its entrenchment in anachronism. Friedrich Schlegel is among those who famously categorized the sixteenth century as an epoch that circumscribes itself within a providential time pattern. Reflecting on this, Koselleck cites the philosopher’s description of Albrecht Altdorfer’s painting of Alexander the Great’s victory at the 333 Battle of Issus. Making “conscious use of anachronism,” Altdorfer, according to Schlegel, represents the battle as part of a teleological grand narrative in which the antique pagan victory anticipates the future triumph of Christendom (Koselleck 9). He does so by symbolically relating the Macedonian conquest to Maximilian’s defeat of the Ottoman army in the siege of Vienna. The Persian battalions are made to resemble the Turks and Alexander is likened to the future Hapsburg emperor. It is, as Koselleck points out, this blending of disparate historical and cultural horizons into an all-encompassing salvific narrative that Schlegel would regard as premodern. He would accordingly categorize the painting as “‘the greatest feat of the age of chivalry,’” and use it to illustrate the difference between the quality of time in Altdorfer’s epoch and that of his own era: “Formulated schematically, there was for Schlegel, in the three hundred years separating him from Altdorfer, more time (or perhaps a different mode of time) than appeared to have passed for Altdorfer in the eighteen hundred years or so that lay between the Battle of Issus and his painting” (Koselleck 10). To refer to Altdorfer’s era as an “age of chivalry” comfortably situated within an archetypical time scheme that invests current events with stabilizing closure is to ignore the significant ways in which the continued subsumption of history within such Biblical patterns coexists with the “temporalization” mentioned by Koselleck. After posing the question “What new quality had historical time gained that occupies this period from about 1500 to 1800?” (10), Koselleck avoids answering it simplistically. Rather than seeking to define early modernity retrospectively from the vantage point of a future fast-paced secular temporality toward which it advances teleologically, he attends to how temporal instability is registered in the period’s own terms, which include Machiavellian ideas about unhinged Fortuna, eschatological discourses, and appropriations of Saint Augustine’s thought on the challenges of harmonizing history and theology. Such examples bolster the idea that the troubling of time takes on many and varied forms. Another epochal formulation of such troubling is reflected in lamentations about the unnaturalness of court life. A telling example appears in

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Antonio de Guevara’s 1539 Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea where the bishop and royal chronicler expresses the commonplace opposition between country and city life in temporal terms: Es previlegio de aldea que los días se gocen más y duren más, lo cual no es así en los superbos pueblos, a do se pasan muchos años sin sentirlos y muchos días sin gozarlos. Como en el campo se pase el tiempo con más pasatiempo que no en el pueblo, paresce por verdad que hay más en un día de aldea que no hay en un mes de corte. ¡Oh, cuán apacible es la morada del aldea, a do el sol es más prolijo, la mañana más temprana, la tarde más perezosa, la noche más quieta, la tierra menos húmeda, el agua más limpia, el aire más libre, los lodos más enjutos y los campos más alegres! El día de la ciudad siéntese y no se goza y el día del aldea gózase y no se siente, porque allí el día es más claro, es más desembarazado, es más largo, es más alegre, es más limpio, es más ocupado, es más gozado, y finalmente digo que es mejor empleado y menos importuno. (171) [Another commoditie of the village is, that the dayes there seeme to be more long, and they are better imployed, than they are eyther in the court or in the great townes, forasmuch as the yeares passe away there ought one be ware, and the dayes without any enoying of them. And howbeit that the sportes and pleasures be more in the village then in the townes, yet so it is that one day shall seeme lenger there then shall a moneth in the court: and the reason is, for that the village is happy and fortunate, forasmuch as there the Sunne seemes to make a more longer day, the morning is ready to show, and the night slow to come. Scarcely one can perceiue the dayes slyde away in the court: In the village if it be perceiued, it is bestowed with honest busines, which cannot bee done in the court.] (A Looking Glasse for the Court 27) As vividly illustrated here by Guevara, city dwellers are deprived of the natural rhythms of the day, trapped as they are in a never-ending succession of vapid obligations. In contrast with the temporal harmony of the countryside, which makes possible the enjoyment of physical sensation, in the urban centers, fast-paced time denudes life of its textures. Contributing to such perceptions of “temporalization” are the highly regulated daily activities of court life and the bureaucratization of government, both of which would substantively impact the experience of time.15 Submitted to the pressures of a growing state apparatus, the days of courtiers, bureaucrats, and the king himself become filled with prosaic duties. Reflecting on this in a letter to his daughters, Philip II intimates that his office work keeps him from attending prayers: “Bien temprano se acabaron los maitines de los Reyes. También acá los dijeron temprano, mas yo no los oí por tener mucho que hacer” (65) [The royal matins

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finished very early. Also here they said them early, though I did not hear them as I had much to do”].16 Unable to center his life around sacred time, the ruler becomes consumed by mortal time, whittled away in untranscendental occupations. Symptomatic of Guevara’s bleak view of the tyrannies of the clock at the centers of power, the king’s letters to his daughters are, in fact, filled with references to the shortage of time: “Siempre deseo responderos y nunca puedo y menos ahora que son las once y aún no he cenado” (34) [“I always wish to answer you and I never can and even less so now that it is eleven o’clock and I have not yet had supper”]; “Lo hacéis tan bien en el cuidado que tenéis de escribirme que no puedo dejar de pagároslo en lo mismo y así lo he querido hacer ahora, aunque no me sobra mucho tiempo” (36) [“So good is the care you take in writing me that I must return the favor and I have wanted to do so now although I do not have much time to spare”]; “No puedo responderos ahora, que tengo mucho que hacer y es tarde . . .” (89) [“I cannot answer you now, for I have much to do and it is late . . .”]. This glimpse of royal quotidian life overpowered by the dominance of secular clock-time over meaningful event-centered time will surely resonate with us today. These perspectives, though, should not lead us to downplay the continued importance of a religious hermeneutic as the main conceptual reference for making sense of history. The king’s bureaucratic life, in effect, coexists with a sacralization of his ceremonial persona. The symbolic identification of Philip II’s reign with divinity was crucial to his role. Exemplary in this respect is his formidable building project, the Escorial, whose church is modeled after Solomon’s temple, or El Greco’s Dream of Philip II where we see the monarch, along with other Catholic dignitaries, kneeling directly below the heavenly hosts that flank the luminous sign of the cross suspended in the sky, as the tormented bodies lining the gaping mouth of Hell also prostrate themselves in worship (Figure I.1). An allegory of the 1571 victory of the Holy League over the Ottoman Empire at Lepanto, the painting enfolds Spanish monarchy within a cosmic and eternal order. More than one scholar has interpreted the work as inspired in a passage from Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (2.9–11)17

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Figure I.1 El Greco, Dream of Philip II, 1579. Source: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Contra Le Goff’s opposition between clock time and sacred time, I would emphasize that, as much as they are, in some contexts, understood as rivals, in many senses, they intersect with one another. As we learn from Anthony Grafton, the early modern development of a science of precise

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chronology was part of an effort to authoritatively interconnect secular and religious history (Joseph Scaliger 9–10). One might, further, relate this trend to the fact that clock time was a crucial component of religious existence insofar as the life of the Christian was supposed to be temporally disciplined. Furthermore, the early modern awareness of ephemeral clock time was often marshalled toward salvific ends. In his 1606 treatise, Redempcion del tiempo cautivo [Redemption of Captive Time], Father Andrés de Soto cautions “. . . el presente es breuissimo, el poruenir es dudoso; el passado esse es cierto” (46) [“. . . the present is brief, the future is uncertain; the past, it is certain”].18 This reflection becomes the foundation of a redemptive temporal order: Pues si el presente dexamos passar, ponemonos à peligro de quedarnos para siempre sin el, y en perpetua condenacion, quanto mas (abre los ojos y està conmigo peccador) que en todos los tiempos desta vida, desde que el hombre tiene vso de razon, es razon que dè fruto, y le tenga aparejado para quando se le venga su dueño y señor a pedir; pues no ay momento ni hora en que no pueda venir y llamarnos al juyzio particular, adonde se da la paga à los obreros de la viña conforme à su trabajo y labor. (46) [For if we let the present slip by, we are in danger of remaining forever without it and perpetually condemned, all the more so (open your eyes and heed me, sinner) that in all the moments of this life, from the moment man gains reason, he must use it and prepare for the moment when his master and lord comes for him; for there is neither moment nor hour in which he cannot come to call us to personal judgment, where the vine workers are paid according to their work and labor.] Here, rather than a ruthless scythe, time is precious commodity which, properly administered, can ensure access to a blessed eternity. From this angle, the prominence of clocks in early modern moral literature and painting can be taken as reconciling so-called “merchant time” (Le Goff) with traditional eschatological time. Juan de Rojas y Ausa’s 1683 La Torre de David con el Relox de la muerte [The Tower of David with the Timepiece of Death] provides a particularly clear example of this. Where the equipping of prominent town buildings with clocks has often been thought to mark a transition to commodified time, Rojas uses this development as a central conceit of Christian prudence. He says that as “El lugar mas propio de los Reloxes son las Torres eminentes . . .” [“The most fitting place for clocks are prominent towers. . .”] he will erect his own clock tower, meaning, his own call to wisdom, “para que le vean, atiendan, y gozen todos” (3) [“so that all can see, attend to, and enjoy it”].19 Expatiating further on the relationship between his book and time-keeping, he specifies that it makes sense to place

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it near a candlestick, especially given the fashion of using special candles as timepieces: “Aun considerado como Relox este librito . . . no le sera el candelero sitio impropio para que corra mas publico, pues ya el arte ha introducido en muchas partes Reloxes como luzes (algunos ay en esta Corte que ellos mismos las encienden a las horas que sus dueños determinan)” (3) [“For considering this little book a clock . . . the candelabrum will be an appropriate place for it so that it can receive more attention, for ingenuity has already introduced clocks in many places, as lights (some there are in this court that they themselves light at the times their masters determine)”]. Like de Soto, Rojas presumes that cognizance that mortal life is finite prepares one well for being saved in the life to come. The existence of this mindset, though, hardly alleviates contemporary preoccupations about the dissonance between human and sacred time. So rather than—as Schlegel’s reading of Aldorfer’s Issos victory painting suggests—regarding continued typological approaches to history as naive perpetuations of a theocentric temporality, it makes more sense to see them as conscious attempts to cling to theocentric temporal regimes in a landscape in which there is growing uncertainty about how to link mortal and eternal time. The fact that Philip II’s personal frustrations about his life’s being governed by clock time are a sign of something bigger than royal fatigue is amply proven by the universalizing as well as emphatic meditations on the meaninglessness of human time present in salient literary and visual works. Once again, though, such historical pessimism does not signify a break with Christian temporality, for the cheapening of earthly time is embedded in the fabric of Christianity. La Celestina provides a vivid example of how that idea can be deployed in ways that create a chasm between history and eschatological telos. While displaying a level of historical disenchantment that foreshadows a late modern God-deserted world, it does so through theological tropes. The most extreme skepticism is present in Sempronio’s summation of human history: El mal y el bien, la prosperidad y adversidad, la gloria y pena, todo pierde con el tiempo la fuerza de su acelerado principio. Pues los casos de admiración y venidos con gran deseo, tan presto como pasados, olvidados. Cada día vemos novedades y las oímos, y las pasamos y dejamos atrás. Diminúyelas el tiempo, hácelas contingibles. ¿Qué tanto te maravillarías si dijesen la tierra tembló o otra semejante cosa que no olvidases luego? Así como: helado está el río, el ciego ve ya, muerto es tu padre, un rayo cayó, ganada es Granada, el rey entra hoy, el turco es vencido, eclipse hay mañana, la puente es llevada, aquél es ya obispo,

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a Pedro robaron, Inés se ahorcó . . . ¿Qué me dirás, sino que a tres días pasados o a la segunda vista, no hay quien de ello se maraville? Todo es así, todo pasa de esta manera, todo se olvida, todo queda atrás. (Rojas 94) [Ill and good, prosperity and adversity, glory and grief, all these with time lose the force and strength of their rash and hasty beginning; whereas matters of admiration and things earnestly desired, once obtained, have no sooner been come than forgotten, no sooner purchased but relinquished. Every day we see new and strange accidents, we hear as many and we pass them over; leave those, and hearken after others; them also doth time lessen and make contingible as things of common course. And I pray, what wonder would you think it, if some should come and tell you, “There was such an earthquake in such a place,” or some such other things; tell me, would you not straight forget it? As also, if one should say unto you, “Such a river is frozen; such a blind man hath recovered his sight; thy father is dead; such a thunderbolt fell in such a place; Granada is taken; the King enters it this day; the Turk hath received an overthrow; tomorrow you shall have a great eclipse; such a bridge is carried away with the flood; such a one is now made a nobleman . . . Peter is robbed; Ines hath hanged herself.” Now in such cases, what wilt though say, save only this? That some three days past or upon a second view thereof, there will be no wonder made of it. All things are thus; they all pass after this manner; all is forgotten and thrown behind us, as if they had never been”.] (Rojas 95) Striking in this passage is the radical uniformity established among all memories, momentous and paltry alike. Events, such as the Reconquista of Granada and war with the Ottomans, customarily invested with messianic purpose, are reduced to mere fait divers. Stripped of their epic aura, they are equated with common deaths, petty crimes, and other sundry occurrences, all rapidly consigned to oblivion. So extreme is this devaluation of history that glorious Christian military triumphs are put on a par with a suicide (an utter violation of Christian doctrine). We are before a jarring conflation of eschatological and mundane frameworks, one that shakes up ordering temporal hierarchies. Contrarily, that is, to discourses that contain the sense of disintegration arising from human existence by opposing the inconsequence of mortal life to the all-importance of divine eternity which guarantees ultimate redemption, in Rojas’s telling it is the erratically changing tide of mundane time, unharnessed from a godly scheme, that prevails as the main pattern for history. Apocalyptic language is, in other words, stretched to its ontological limit, such that it empties history of all meaningful content.

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Even phenomena traditionally endowed with apocalyptic status are rendered prosaic. I am thinking here concretely of Rojas’s inclusion of “la tierra tembló,” “eclipse hay mañana,” and “el ciego ve ya,” among the flood of trivialized occurrences enumerated by the mordant Sempronio. The Biblical connotations here are hardly coincidental. Earthquakes and eclipses are, ridden with End-of-Days symbolism, connected to the death and resurrection of Christ as well as to the Second Coming. In the Gospel of Matthew, as Jesus agonizes on the cross, “. . . darkness came over the whole land . . .” (27.45), a presage of his impending death; and when he expires, “. . . the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split” (27.51). In the Book of Revelation, such convulsions are, likewise, harbingers of salvation: “When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and there came a great earthquake; the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood” (6.12). References to the blind seeing similarly point to End Times resurrection symbolism, a trope manifest in the Gospel of Luke: “’Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them’” (7.22). Divergently, in La Celestina, the darkening of the sky, the trembling of the earth, and miraculous cures devolve into reminders of the passage of time in the absence of theophany. Dour assessments of human temporality are even visible in the realm of religious painting, as shown by the twin works by Juan de Valdés Leal housed in Seville’s Hospital de la Caridad church. His Finis Gloriae Mundi and In Ictu Oculi (Figures I.2 and I.3) take the memento mori genre to an extreme. Dominating the In Ictu Oculi painting is a skeleton carrying a coffin under its arm and clutching a large scythe that projects into the foreground of the painting, an ominous sign of its boundless power. Nothing escapes its ravages, as indicated by the globe lying trampled beneath the skeleton’s foot. Subject to its might, all things, great and small, lose relevance. The reverse of the classical memory palace in which collected images are immortalized, Valdés Leal’s work highlights the perishable nature of remembrance. Reduced to the state of discarded objects are the symbols of power and knowledge haphazardly piled up below the scythe: a bishop’s miter, a kingly crown, various books, a tome with illustrations of triumphal arches. Similarly insistent on the inconsequence of human life is the companion Finis Gloriae Mundi canvas in which the floor is lined with cadavers; the visage of the older man, still dressed in bishop’s clothing, is in the process of decomposition, part face, part skull, well on its way to becoming like the skeleton that lies ominously at the back of the vault. Moreover, the fact that, rather than including a single corpse, the work displays three bodies in

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Figure I.2 Juan de Valdés Leal, Finis Gloriae Mundi (1670–1672). Source: The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

different states of disintegration evokes a brutal temporality, reminiscent of a famous poem by Francisco de Quevedo that characterizes the present as “presentes sucesiones de difuntos” (4). The very existence of the present is jeopardized in the face of impending corporeal death, the telos of all existence. We approach the terrain of Walter Benjamin’s renowned description of Baroque drama: “And the characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, that they can enter into the homeland of allegory. It is not for the sake of immortality that they meet their end, but for the sake of the corpse” (The Origin 217–18). On this view, rather than signaling an impatience for the afterlife, Baroque death connotes a fixation on human unworthiness of divine redemption.

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Figure I.3 Juan de Valdés Leal, In Ictu Oculi (1670–1672). Source: The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

Returning to Valdés Leal’s paintings, in In Ictu Oculi, life is governed by the scythe-wielding skeleton and in Finis Gloriae Mundi, Jesus’s hand, emerging from the heavens and holding the scales that signal the cost of salvation, scarcely mitigates the overarching skepticism of the work. At first glance, the scales would seem to function as a quintessentially didactic icon, reminding us as they do that the luxury goods in the “ni más” [“neither more”] basket are paltry in comparison to the religious symbols in the one labelled “ni menos” [“nor less”], these being the true conduit to redemption. However, this gesturing toward providential time is undercut by the somber suggestion ciphered in the ensemble of the painting that divine logos is utterly remote from

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mortal existence. A close look at the hand that carries the scale reveals that it belongs to an ontologically separate sphere. Delicate and luminous, it hovers airily on the upper edge of the composition, a momentary presence and one substantively other from the heavy and macabre scene on the floor, itself the more tangible measure of human fate. In their circumscription of life within finite time estranged from a redemptive telos, Valdés Leal’s paintings, like Sempronio’s monologue, suggest a deep fissure between sensed human time and providential order. Providential order is, after all, designed to absorb particular events into the auspicious arc of salvation: In this way the individual earthly event is not regarded as a definitive self-sufficient reality, nor as a link in a chain of development in which single events or combinations of events perpetually give rise to new events, but viewed primarily in immediate vertical connection with a divine order which encompasses it, which on some future day will itself be concrete reality; so that the earthly event is a prophecy or figura of a part of a wholly divine reality that will be enacted in the future. But this reality is not only future; it is always present in the eye of God and in the other world, which is to say that in transcendence the revealed and true reality is present at all times, or timelessly. (Auerbach 72) In this scheme, even the most unsettling events are explained as anticipated turns of a pre-established divine plot. While this approach to time can stem the sense of disorientation registered by Augustine by containing it within a unifying framework viewed as advancing toward salvation, Valdés Leal’s tenebrous spiritual scape and Sempronio’s dejected reflection on current events are forbiddingly backwardlooking. Unknown as it is what the future will bring, the only intelligible certainty is that what is will perish just as all that has been perished. Such pessimism is bolstered by the church’s imposition of a staunchly anti-prophetic stance which adhered to Augustine’s strict division between the mortal and the godly realms.20 However, where in Spain signs of estrangement between earthly time and divine presence abound, in New Spain novel ways of attaining the celestial on earth emerge. Human temporal existence is not, then, irrevocably tethered to the image of the skull. In colonial Mexico, as will become evident in the second half of this book, the Christian cult of death spawns new temporal regimes that variously overcome the dichotomy between a temporally finite earthly realm and an eternal godly sphere.

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Chronos Resurrected Among the causes behind the progressive “temporalization” of history on which he ponders, Koselleck includes the early moderns’ realization that the end of the world did not come with the division of Christendom ratified in the Augsburg Treaty (1555) which gave rulers the right to choose the religion of their state (Lutheranism or Catholicism). This purportedly further drives in the perception of an indefinite deferral of End Times. Such acceptance of an open-ended future was compounded by the church’s own anti-millenarian stance. Millenarianism of any form, however, had become generally suspect in Catholic circles by the end of the sixteenth century. Catholic thinking about the last times had taken on an increasingly reactive stance as the century progressed, with more and more energy being put into the effort of disproving the central tenet of Protestant eschatology, the identification of the papacy with the Antichrist. The Jesuit order, shock-troops of the Catholic Counter Reformation, played the central role in this effort. The great Jesuit controversialist, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, published his Disputationes contra Haereticos between 1586 and 1593. In this massive work Bellarmine rebutted the Protestant view of the papal Antichrist, making use of the sober Commentarius in Apocalypsin that had been written by his fellow Jesuit, Francisco de Ribeira (d. 1591). De Ribeira was the pioneer of a futurist reading of John’s book, one that saw the first three chapters as an account of the early church, and the rest of the text as describing the events of the last days. With considerable erudition he argued that the Apocalypse had nothing to do with the course of church history or the papacy. When de Ribeira turned his attention to Apocalypse 20 (which he characterized as “very obscure”), he adhered to a strict Augustinian reading, rejecting any form of millenarianism as a “stumbling block” (lapis offensionis). (McGinn, “Forms of Catholic Millenarianism,” 10) The temporal parameters of this world are thus held to be utterly distinct from godly temporality. As specified in Augustine’s The City of God, it is not possible to anticipate when the Last Judgment will occur: “Just how many days this judgment will take we do not know, since even the most casual reader of Scripture knows that the word ‘day’ is often used for ‘time’” (250). The firm dichotomy between human and divine time is, as suggested already, at the very center of Augustine’s phenomenology. While the introspective self is, in a sense, a product of divine revelation, it paradoxically also defines itself by stressing its alienation from godly truth. That is to say, incurring in aporia, as Ricoeur has noted, it

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characterizes itself as a divine creation while sustaining the ontological otherness of the divine (Time and Narrative 7). Hence, it is both the product and the antithesis of something it cannot apprehend: “Yet I was certain that you are infinite without being infinitely diffused through finite space. I was sure that you truly are, and are always the same; that you never become other or different in any part or by any movement of position . . .” (Augustine, Confessions 130). Spatially and temporally foreign, God is altogether beyond the human categories of thought and experience: his infinity does not mean that he occupies more time or space, but that he occupies a time and space of an altogether different, unfathomable, order. Given that human beings exist in mortal time, they cannot grasp how precisely the divine plot will unfold: “For, to be sure, this secret division is absolutely unknowable in this world of time, inasmuch as we have no certainty whether the man who is now upright is going to fall, and the one who is now lying flat is going to rise to righteousness” (Augustine, City of God 268). This contrasts starkly with Saint Paul’s messianic temporality in which the faithful are closer to eternal being. The apostle would understand living in Christ as a tumultuous rupture with chronological time that involves entering into a dimension in which the usual meaning of things is inverted: I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away. (1 Corinthians 7.29–31) The objective here is to sense worldly time in the process of collapsing in preparation for the impending end of history. Removed from the immediacy of the “time that remains” envisioned by Paul and analyzed by Giorgio Agamben as concretizing divine presence in the now (55), the early modern saint can be said to live in a posteschatological era. And one might add that the intense forms of imitatio Christi practiced in Spain and America can be understood as ways of responding to such temporal indeterminacy. As Nandra Perry has said regarding bodily imitatio Christi practices: “In both religious and literary discourses . . . the body . . . figures as both the sign and the site of all that human signifying can accomplish. It is at once the dream of organic relation between words and things, insides and outsides, bodies and souls,

26

Introduction

and heaven and earth and the nightmare of endless idolatrous surface” (15). That is, performing Christ’s suffering reaffirms the temporal splintering of human history, for the sensation of the sacred afforded by it is animated by the pathos of a doomed distance from divine oneness. Significant in this respect is the increased protagonism assigned to the crucifixion within the liturgy of the hours. While the yearly calendar had long centered around the pivotal moments of Jesus’s life: his birth, his crucifixion, and his resurrection, a pattern also replicated in daily liturgy, in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Spanish church makes a concerted effort to center the liturgy of the hours around the Passion of Christ. Traditionally, the seven liturgical hours were related to a variety of measures: the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the seven days of the week, the seven ages of man, the seven pleas of the Lord’s prayer, the seven penitential psalms. Where these continued to be invoked, as Juan Pablo Rubio Sadia, explains, synodal councils launch an initiative to place the Passion at the forefront of the holy office. The graphic linking of temporal rhythms to Christ’s wounds is plain in a 1478 edict addressed to the church in Jaén: “Ordenaçion santa fue establesçida por la santa madre Iglesia que los clerigos de orden sacra o aquellos que ovieren benefiçios, fuesen obligados a rezar las Oras canonicas cada dia. Las quales Oras de noche e dia, conviene a saber Maytines e Prima e Terçia e Sexta e Nona e Bisperas e Cunpletas, fueron canonizadas en la Pasion de nuestro Señor Jesuchristo, e, asimismo, segund da dello testimonio la santa Escritura que fabla del cuchillo del dolor que traspaso las entrañas de nuestra Señora en cada una de las dichas oras. . . .” (qtd. in Rubio Sadia 295) [“A saintly ordinance was established by the holy mother church that lettered men from holy orders or those with benefits, be obliged to keep the canonical hours each day. Which hours of the night and day, namely, Matins and First and Terce and Sext and Nones and Vespers and Complines, were canonized in the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, and, similarly, according to the testimony given in the holy scripture which talks about the knife of pain that penetrated the entrails of our Lady at each of these times. . . .”]21 Thus, the mental and corporeal imitation of Christ that would take on such prominence in Hispanic early modernity can be seen as a dramatic way of processing time. By becoming one with Christ, the faithful interiorize the pain of human history, taking stock of its fallenness. How different authors do so tells us much about the ways in which they process Augustine’s dichotomy between the profane and the sacred.

Introduction

27

As I foreground the interrelatedness of imitatio Christi and Augustine’s conception of temporal existence, it is also well to remember that Heidegger’s readings of Augustine’s Confessions played a formative role in his understanding of “being in time.”22 One could, furthermore, make the general claim that Augustine and, by extension, his early modern Spanish heirs, anticipate Heidegger’s idea that temporal awareness is the foundation of human existence.23 Hence, the continuities between the timerelated anxieties that structure the inner lives and historical imaginaries of the authors analyzed here and late modern temporal sensibilities which, having moved away from a Cartesian transcendental subject, contend with the complexities of recognizing the knowing self as utterly enmeshed with lived time. As reflected in the phenomenological turn in philosophy propelled by Husserl and perpetuated by figures as mutually distinct as Heidegger, Bergson, and Ricoeur, human beings have no genuine access to an extra-subjective universal time; from within the realm of everevolving lived experience, there is no bridge between inwardly perceived temporality and a presumed time of the world. Of course, differently from antique and early modern conceptions of the time of the world as something created by God, late modern phenomenology presumes it indissociable from human perception. That being said, it is useful to be cognizant of how the notions about time as a subjective category that we have derived from modern phenomenology can be related to Renaissance and Baroque attitudes to time. However much early modern contention with temporal instability tends to be ridden with religious guilt and is in that sense distinct from post-Heideggerian stances, in both cases the subject must grapple with exile from an ideal allencompassing temporal order. Universal collective time becomes an impossible abstraction and is thus of little use for containing the vagaries of lived time. In order to plumb what this means in the works examined here, I will above all use Augustine’s reflections on the experience of time as a theoretical framework, as his articulations of the complex interactions between time and memory were, as noted already, seminal to antiguo régimen religious writers’ affective and intellectual sensibilities. While seeking to ground the phenomenological content of their writings in the Christocentric cultural fabric specific to them, so as to attend to their particular spiritual objectives, I am also interested in their contributions to a larger genealogy of the self that transcends the strictly cultic dimensions of godly worship. It is for that reason that I end with a chapter devoted to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s “Primero sueño” where we witness the emergence of a subject that, while conditioned by imitatio Christi ideals, transforms them so as to overcome the ontological boundaries they impose.

28

Introduction

As I show, the Sorjuanine subject belongs to a distinctly American temporal regime. Its own genesis can be related to the recycling of millenarian currents in early colonial Mexico. From Columbus’s description of the Arawak in an uncorrupted state of nature, to Bartolomé de las Casas’ portrayals of Caribbean peoples as primitive Christians, to Franciscans’ view of New Spain as a natural haven of evangelic zeal, there was a widespread tendency to think of America as embodying the rebirth of the early church which was to trigger the Second Coming. Although the antimillenarian agenda of the church would impact spiritual life in New Spain, it coexisted with the continued circulation of eschatological myths which drew their inspiration from the Medieval Joachim de Fiore’s apocalyptic interpretation of history.24 An eschatological temporality is thus embedded in the cultural foundations of criollo Mexico, as emblematized in the Virgin of Guadalupe, the lady of the Apocalypse. Different, though, from Pauline eschatology that emphasizes the imminent end of time, here the apocalyptic imaginary is remodeled into temporal regimes centering upon continual rebirth and transformation. Death-centered versions of the imitatio Christi tradition are accordingly metamorphosed to fit with visions of America as a nascent paradise. The draconian opposition between earthly and divine time is thereby mitigated. Indeed, the gradual displacement of the cult of Saint Teresa of Avila by that of the Virgin Guadalupe stands as symptomatic of Christian subjects whose modernity is defined in a way very different from that of their Spanish counterparts.25 Along with the development of a hybrid criollo religiosity that intertwines Christian, Greco-Roman, and Indigenous imaginaries, there emerge circular temporal regimes that mitigate the finiteness of mortal experience articulated by Augustine.26 Chapter Overview Threading the successive chapters of this book is the question of how different authors process the opposition between time-bound mortal life and divine eternity theorized by Augustine and reinforced by the Catholic church. The multiple ways in which they update imitatio Christi ideals to fashion meaningful temporal experiences show that they vary widely in their approaches to theorizing and sensing time. The plural forms of subjecthood emerging in the process exemplify distinct attitudes toward the concept of finite earthly time. Clearly, the kinds of experiences of time taking shape in the assorted works that I examine are partly conditioned by the genre in which they are written. The genres at issue here—devotional manual, spiritual autobiography, historical chronicle, Biblical commentary, and poem—have very different conventions and goals. Putting these texts in conversation

Introduction

29

illuminates their role as means of conveying temporality. This, in turn, involves treating their rhetorical strategies as expressions of lived existence. Said otherwise, it is via their writing that authors arrive at a way of making sense of the complex relationship between time as a universal—also, in this case, theological—concept and its subjective manifestations. I do not thus see them as having an a priori settled definition of this relationship which is then transmitted in writing. On the contrary, more than simply an instrumental act, the putting of events into words itself creates a sensed unfolding of temporality. From this perspective, their readers would not be conceived as passively absorbing fixed lessons about time, but rather as participating in a fluid hermeneutical experience. In that respect, I echo Ricoeur’s idea that literature mediates between intuitive feeling and understanding, or said otherwise, between the ontological and the epistemological (Time and Narrative 30). Regarding Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and Saint Teresa of Avila’s autobiographical Libro de la vida, examined respectively in chapters 1 and 2, I argue that the former arrives at a potent way of adapting the experience of the sacred to the demands of chronological time, while Teresa magnifies the tension between these opposing realms. Both authors combine iconocentric artificial memory traditions with subjectivist approaches to memory as fluid inward impression. While those who have stressed Ignatius’s towering role as a founding figure of modernity have largely attributed it to his intimate and individualized religiosity, I concentrate on his reframing of religious experience within linear clock time. What makes him an innovator, in my view, is his creative dismantling of the tension between time-bound human existence and divine timelessness. As will be shown, through a regime of systematically timed beatific states, Ignatius achieves an incremental as well as controlled fusion with the body of Christ which constitutes a significant departure from death-centered forms of imitatio Christi. While these use Jesus as a model for preparing to exit temporal existence, Ignatius coopts him as a model for ongoing self-improvement within chronological time. He thereby revamps Augustinian temporal phenomenology, founding an agentive subject who is endowed with a virile command of his spiritual journey. Contrastingly, Teresa’s Vida—in part because it is a confessional work—highlights the difficulties of attaining union with the divine. As creative in her appropriation of Augustine’s phenomenology as Ignatius, albeit taking it in a different direction, Teresa uses it to shape a paradigmatically feminine form of imitatio Christi. This fractured self, articulated as an ontological crisis of sorts, anticipates the disillusioned posteschatological subject of the Spanish Baroque. In opposition to those who have emphasized that female mysticism is unselfconsciously emotive, I highlight the ways in which Teresa’s sensitivity to the problem of time

30

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reveals a high degree of conceptual nuance. Also, differently from those who understand the conflictedness registered in Teresa’s writing as calculated rhetorical posturing designed to signal the dutiful self-doubt expected of a female confessant, I approach her work as productive rather than reactive. By delving into how the ebbs and flows of her text give its readers access to a felt experience of time, I show its significance as a model of temporal anxiety that participates in the centuries-long trajectory linking the religious subject founded by Augustine to the Heideggerian post-metaphysical self. In this sense, I show her to be as important as Ignatius as a founding figure of modernity, something so far neglected. Chapter 3 has as its backdrop the complex transition from apocalyptic time schemes to post-millenarian temporalities in New Spain. At issue specifically is the aftermath of the Franciscan utopianism prevailing in the early phases of colonization when the New World is identified with a revival of the primitive church and an imminent Second Coming. I begin with a discussion of Jerónimo de Mendieta’s Historia eclesiástica indiana, a chronicle that looks back at the first conversions of the Indigenous population with considerable nostalgia. In contrast with those who have stressed the text’s prophetic dimensions, I concentrate on its departure from apocalypticism and its preoccupation with accommodating Christian piety to a new epoch in which the initial promise of America as Paradise regained has lost credibility. Remembering the performances of spectacular religious zeal displayed by the first Indigenous converts to Catholicism, Mendieta portrays them as anachronisms, out of place in a world where the coming of the New Jerusalem has been reduced to a remote memory. In that sense, he assimilates Christian life to worldly historical time. Very different from this shaping of temporal experience is the one articulated in Gregorio López’s little-studied treatise on the Book of Revelation. In stark contrast with Mendieta, López, one of Mexico’s first hermits, models his religious practice according to an apocalyptic reading of history. Understanding his own era as being at the threshold of the end of time, he uses Christ’s life as inspiration to develop a contemplative practice centered on the sensation of timelessness. I end the chapter by contrasting his own ecstatic approach to time with that present in the biography written about him by Francisco Losa. Effacing the apocalyptic dimensions of López’s religious fervor, Losa depicts his inner life as dogma- and ritual-centered. He thus reimagines his legendary piety, coopting it as a model for a devotional life utterly grounded in time-bound mortal history. Departing from Mendieta’s and Losa’s somber confinement of Christcentered life to mortal time, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s Paraíso Occidental, the focus of chapter 4, reframes imitatio Christi as part of a

Introduction

31

myth of Mexican spiritual rebirth. In this chronicle on the lives of some of Mexico’s first nuns, he models American temporality in a way that departs significantly from Peninsular post-millenarian schemes. Without returning to eschatological visions of history, Sigüenza celebrates human chronology as endowed with its own transcendence. Contributing to the foundation of a criollo patriotism, he enshrines extravagant forms of female beatitude as embodiments of a nascent patria. Identified with the Edenic landscapes of seminal grandeza mexicana poems, and Guadalupan floral symbolism, his heroic nuns represent a cyclical sense of time that undoes rigid divides between Aztec past and Christian present. Also a participant in criollo patriotism, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz makes use of it to fashion her own version of American temporality. Devoting my concluding chapter to her silva, “Primero sueño,” I reflect on how it borrows from grandeza mexicana aesthetics of wonder and abundance to redefine introspective thought in ways that alter messianic time schemes. Contesting platonic beliefs in ascent to a metaphysical sphere of eternal forms, Sor Juana pictures the act of cognition as open-ended natural and cosmic exploration. Overturning the mystical aspiration to exit human time and space, she expresses intellectual contemplation as a perpetual unravelling of thoughts and motile visual impressions. Inflected by Ovidian and Lucretian figurations of a universe in constant change, her dynamic dreamscape marks a turn away from eschatological and Baroque temporalities that reduce sentient perception to phantasmatic vanity. She thus forfeits Teresa’s tormented model of subjecthood and fashions a new kind of phenomenological experience in which bodily and sentient fulfillment, no longer deferred until End Times, can be materialized in the human present and relished by a female subject. Overcoming constraining dichotomies between the human and the divine and accessing a relatively tranquil form of introspection, she pacifies the crisis-centered world view implicated in post-Tridentine historical pessimism. In a certain respect, the arc of this book, which takes us geographically from the so-called old world to the so-called new one, illustrates a movement from lived experiences premised upon linear time to fluid time schemes that eschew definitive beginnings and endings. While, like Ignatius, Sigüenza and Sor Juana embrace mortal time, they defy the notion of progressive succession, envisioning memory as something shifting as well as untethered from a fixed future telos. That said, I reiterate that the changing temporal sensibilities studied here are in no way intended to trace a definitive or comprehensive history of time. Standing by my idea that time is a supremely malleable category, I would avoid such a proposition, preferring instead to understand the temporal experiences registered in the pages of this book as only one among countless trajectories that shape modernity.

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Introduction

Notes 1 On the emergence of a destructive conception of time in the Renaissance as reflected in portrayals of time as a scythe, a devouring creature, a corpse, and a skeleton, see Trachtenberg 53, Gahtan 76, and West-Pavlov 35. In her study of the increasingly aggressive representations of time visible in evolving illustrations of Petrarch’s Triumphs in the course of the sixteenth century, Simona Cohen comments: “In the 1540s the impotent elder of the Quattrocento was transformed into a muscular nude and his crutches were replaced by weapons. He had changed from a passive figure into an active one. Soon after, Time was conceived in such diabolical terms that his lower limbs were transformed into goat legs or sprouted claws” (“The Early Renaissance Personification of Time,” 326). See, in addition, Cohen, Transformations of Time. Also pertinent here is François Hartog’s remark to the effect that “Thus from Petrarch to Montaigne the ruins of Rome took on increasing significance. However, although their grandeur endured, they were increasingly ruins” (Regimes of Historicity 168). 2 Quinones points out the growing anger about mutability that accompanies the emergence of pragmatic clock time (16). 3 On the sense of historicity developing in early modernity see Burke, The Renaissance Sense. 4 Regarding late modern temporal homogenization and acceleration, it has been linked to a sensation of radical emptying resulting from the highly mechanized world that began to take material shape in the nineteenth century. About the presumed climax of this sentiment in ultra-technologized late capitalism, Jameson says: “Rather than a period style, therefore, it seems more desirable to stage the ‘end of temporality’ as a situation faced by postmodernity in general and to which its artists and subjects are obliged to respond in a variety of ways. This situation has been characterized as a dramatic and alarming shrinkage of existential time and the reduction to a present that hardly qualifies as such any longer, given the virtual effacement of that past and future that can alone define a present in the first place” (708). 5 Although more focused on later modernity, E. P. Thompson’s “Time, Work, Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” has also been influential in establishing causal connections between social and cultural changes perceptible in early modernity and the development of the mechanical clock. 6 Also suggesting a linear development in temporal sensibilities is Miha Pintharic’s study of French literature from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, which registers the evolution of the increasing tendency to portray time as having a fragmenting effect on the self. Relatedly, see Hiscock on the evolution of new conceptions of memory in early modern England. 7 In fact, we would be hard-pressed to find current scholarship that does not in some way think of this as a world defined by change. On salient geopolitical shifts, see Kamen and Lynch; on changes in political practices and institutions, see Fernández de Santamaría; on the emergence of new subjects and modern state formation, see Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity; on changes of an epistemological order, see Robbins; on a growing consciousness of fast-paced urban life see García Santo-Tomás; on the ongoing processes of cultural reinvention in New Spain, see Lafaye, Gruzinski, and Brading, The First America. 8 “If modernity is the age in which we define our own being in terms of time, and time in terms of our own being as historicity, we can only come to terms with ourselves by coming to terms with our temporality. Temporality, however,

Introduction

9 10

11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

33

becomes meaningful for us against the background of eternity. To understand the question that modernity thus poses for us, we must consequently consider the question of the theological origins of modernity” (Allen Gillespie 18). I borrow the adjective “timed” from Glennie and Thrift (292). For studies on conceptions of time and modernity that resist Le Goff’s and E. P. Thompson’s linear narratives, see Glennie and Thrift, Burke, “Reflections,” Harris, and Latour. On the plurality of types of lived time in different epochs, see Sherman, Kiening and Stercken, May and Thrift, Miller, and Dinshaw. For a wide-ranging view of the development of protean time schemes in Mexico from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, see O’Hara, The History of the Future. On the proliferation of treatises on the power of memory and their significant cultural footprint in the early modern world, see Egido, Báez,Domínguez, and Beecher. Translation mine. To avoid the appearance of contradiction, I should specify in what sense the linear time under discussion here is different from Augustine’s linear time. In this case, it has to do with an awareness of pronounced and ongoing technological change that alienates “modern” individuals from the past, historical, and personal. Meanwhile, Augustine does not view psychological and historical transformation in materialistic terms. If in so-called “advanced” societies, clock time is conceived as a scientific reality around which quotidian existence is ordered, the ingredients for this are already in place in early modernity. This is reflected both in important developments in scientific time measurement and in the implementation of neatly scheduled court life (see Elias, Du Temps and The Court Society). All English translations of excerpts from Philip II’s letters are mine. All Bible quotations are from The New Oxford Annotated Bible. All English translations of excerpts from de Soto’s text are mine. All English translations of excerpts from Rojas y Ausa’s text are mine. The church’s anti-millenarian stance by no means eliminates the practice of prophecy in Spain. Popular visionaries continue to crop up and to gain followers among the common people. Not limited to the popular classes, appetite for prophesies was also palpable at the court. See Cueto Ruiz, Quimeras y sueños and “La tradición profética,”Milhou, “La chauve-souris, Le nouveau David et le roi caché,” Redondo, and Reeves. At the same time, there is constant pushback from church authorities against this phenomenon and the Inquisition is particularly intolerant of visionaries with political agendas. Regarding this, see Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams and “Politics, Prophecy, and the Inquisition.” Translation mine. On the connection between Augustine and Heidegger, see Coyne. Heidegger’s precise words are: “Temporality reveals itself as the meaning of authentic care” (374). On the difference between Joachim de Fiore’s and Augustine’s understanding of human history in relation to the Apocalypse, see Bynum and Freedman 152–53, 159–63. As Asunción Lavrin points out, “la veneración a Santa Teresa no pudo competir con la veneración novohispana hacia la virgen María, en sus encarnaciones marianas como la de Guadalupe . . .” (523). On Indigenous appropriations of Christian temporal paradigms in New Spain, see O’Hara, “Time and Christianity,” 31.

1

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises

Scheduled Devotion Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises are packed with scheduling instructions. Together with their specifications regarding the overall number of days requisite for different levels of training, they include stipulations about how long particular exercises should take, adjusting timetables according to the aptitude of the exercitant. For instance, for the least schooled—“para personas más rudas o sin letras” (18) [“those who are illiterate or poorly educated”] (42), Ignatius recommends abridged half-hour examinations of conscience, to be accompanied by confession every eight or fifteen days, depending on the spiritual stamina of the pupil.1 He also offers extensive guidelines on how days should be planned so that worshipers have a clear sense of pacing: “El primer ejercicio se hará a la media noche; el segundo, luego en levantándose a la mañana; el tercero, antes o después de la misa, finalmente que sea antes de comer; el cuarto, a la hora de vísperas . . .” (72) [“The first Exercise will be made at midnight; the second, immediately on rising in the morning: the third, before or after Mass but before dinner; the fourth, at the hour of Vespers”] (60). Practicants thus learn to track their own progress. As part of their daily examinations of conscience, they are required to tally the number of times they have a sinful thought and compare their totals from day to day and from week to week, ideally seeing them decline. By teaching individuals to manage their time and chart their personal growth, Ignatius inaugurates a new temporal regime in which the devotee of Christ is master rather than victim of time. Born thus is a subject capable of combining immersive sensorial experience with cognitive empowerment. In a certain sense, then, Ignatius’ pedagogy anticipates Paul Ricoeur’s supple understanding of memory. Countering the positivist view that memory is too impressionistic to serve as an adequate vehicle for historical investigation, Ricoeur regards it as a productive tool for accessing the past. Juxtaposing Augustine’s claim that time is an obstacle that renders the mind

DOI: 10.4324/9781003381389-2

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises 35 unreliable with Aristotle’s inattention to the possibility that time can cloud remembrance, he avoids both extremes, viewing the subjectivity and imagination that are activated as part of the exercise of memory as being compatible with lucid perception (La mémoire, chapter 1). Notwithstanding the formidable differences in context and intellectual objectives that separate the saint from the modern philosopher, bearing in mind Ricoeur’s theory can help us think about how Ignatius treats fluid phenomenological sensation and deliberate reasoning as mutually beneficial. If we can commend Saint Augustine for coming up with the idea that time is a conceptual problem that hinders union with the divine, we can credit Ignatius with providing an efficacious solution for it. The antithesis of the lugubrious memento mori that insists on the cadaveric condition of sensate life, time, under his tutelage, becomes an instrument of personal salvation. This proactive approach to time is a crucial facet of the modernity which many have attributed to the Basque saint. While scholars have already shed abundant light on what makes the Exercises foundational to modernity, the way in which the conception of time contained in them contributes to their innovativeness has yet to be more fully exposed. Reflecting on how the sensorial dimensions of Ignatius’s spiritual practice constitute a particular way of situating the self in time is crucial, for it illuminates the sense in which the cult of visual splendor that would later become synonymous with Jesuit culture has its roots in a concern with how to actualize Christic temporality in day-to-day life. From Roland Barthes who famously hails him—alongside the libertine Sade and the utopian Fourier—as inventing a new mode of communication, to Italo Calvino who applauds his prodigious imagination, to scholars such as Christopher Van Ginhoven Rey who regard him as a spiritual pragmatist, Ignatius has for decades and among a wide spectrum of readers, enjoyed the reputation of being a modern. Often, those who tie his status as an innovator to his fertile imagination have a particular interest in the Exercises’ emphasis on visual perception, with some going so far as to regard the forms of visualization they prescribe as being endowed with the dynamicity of cinematic images.2 Meanwhile, those who underline his pragmatism draw attention to his promotion of personal agency.3 The idea here is that, departing from the categorical rejection of fleshly existence advocated by mystics and monks, Ignatius does not exact a radical contempt for earthly life. Not cornered into a constrictive dichotomy between heaven and the kingdom of this world, practicants have leeway to determine the intensity of their religious devotions. Some scholars have connected this feature of the Exercises to the later preeminence of Jesuits in political life in an age of urbane realpolitik which would come to terms with the fact that Christian principle had to be tempered by strategic calculation.4 Others would link it to the emergence of a

36

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises

psychologically and socially sophisticated individual central to modern Western literature and philosophy. For example, Frédéric Conrod sees in the Exercises the genesis of a free-thinking self-conscious subject seminal to an intellectual and literary legacy extending from Cervantes and Gracián on to Hume and even the anti-Jesuit Voltaire. Whether or not we agree with such sweeping claims about Ignatius’s impact on subsequent Western thought and culture, the contention that he promotes intellectual and emotional initiative is well substantiated by the Exercises which do, in effect.. which do, in effect, envision a subject driven by affective experience while also being accoutered with self-awareness and self-determination. A subject then, that belies the common view of Tridentine Catholicism as exploiting the senses to the detriment of psychological and conceptual lucidity. Unlike previous religious exercises which were directed only at the practicant who would perform them alone, Ignatius’s call for a collaborative format involving both an exercitant and a director who is, himself, required to abstain from undue interference in the pupil’s process. Indeed, the goal is for exercitants to succeed in establishing their own rapport with Christ and God through dynamic mental and affective engagement: . . . la persona que da a otro modo y orden para meditar o contemplar debe narrar fielmente la historia de la tal contemplación o meditación, discurriendo solamente por los puntos, con breve o sumaria declaración; porque la persona que contempla, tomando el fundamento verdadero de la historia, discurriendo y raciocinando por sí mismo, y hallando alguna cosa que haga un poco más declarar o sentir la historia, quier por la raciocinación propia, quier sea en cuanto el entendimiento es ilucidado por la virtud divina, es de más gusto y fruto espiritual que si el que da los ejercicios hubiese mucho declarado y ampliado el sentido de la historia. Porque no el mucho saber harta y satisface al ánima, mas el sentir y gustar de las cosas internamente. (2) [The one who is giving instruction in the method and procedure of meditation or contemplation should be explicit in stating the subject matter for the contemplation or meditation. He should limit his discourse to a brief, summary statement of its principal points; for then the one who is making the contemplation, by reviewing the true essentials of the subject, and by personal reflection and reasoning may find something that will make it a little more meaningful for him or touch him more deeply. This may happen as a result of his own reasoning or through the enlightenment of his understanding by Divine grace. This is a greater spiritual satisfaction and produces more fruit than if the one who is giving the Exercises were to discourse at great length and amplify the meaning of the subject matter, for it is not an

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises 37 abundance of knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul but rather an interior understanding and savoring of things.] (37–38) Amply significant is Ignatius’s request that the director be brief in his exposition of the points to be considered in a given contemplation, for it underscores how much he promotes students’ ability to think for themselves: once the exercitant has understood the director’s summary of the crux of a given meditation, he should be able to formulate it “por sí mismo” (literally, “for himself”). Also worth foregrounding is the remark that what is most pleasurable to the soul is to feel and enjoy things inwardly. This emphasis on interior pleasure sets a tone that departs from martyrological discourses.5 Of note here is not only the fact that pleasure is deemed a core component of spiritual life, but that it is not divorced from cognitive faculties, as shown by the fact that it operates together with “raciocinación” to achieve spiritual fulfillment. In that sense, the concluding statement to the effect that “no el mucho saber” [“abundance of knowledge”] but rather “el sentir y gustar” [“the interior understanding and savoring of things”] are most desirable, should not be narrowly understood as opposing knowledge to feeling. Instead, the assertion has to be contextualized in relation to the sentence immediately preceding it which cautions the director against saying too much as this could discourage exercitants from tapping into their own mental and sensory energies. We may further note that the relationship between trainee and director is substantively different from that between audience and orator. Ignatius’s comment that much more is to be gained from the director’s verbal restraint is an implicit affront to the artes sermonicales which had a columnar role in the Catholic church. When the saint opposes the director’s amplifying the episode under discussion, he might be seen as taking aim at amplificatio, a stock principle much touted in Christian oratory manuals that considered it a central means through which preachers could captivate audiences.6 By shifting spiritual inspiration from church authority- to worshiper-driven, Ignatius lays the groundwork for an agentive and inventive individual. The crafting of a new relationship with time is a vital facet of this endeavor. In order to put the pioneering aspects of Ignatius’s temporal framework in proper perspective, though, we need to take into account his debt to extant religious conventions. Just as his call for mental picturing, however ground-breaking in its particular manifestations, is part of a longstanding custom of using visual memory in confession and his prioritization of inner life is identifiable with an age-old cult of beatific solitude, his structured time schemes also have their roots in established church praxes. The scheduling of prayer is not unique to Ignatius. Church liturgy had long organized the life of the faithful around regularly kept canonical hours, a

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practice anchored in the premise that a pious existence must reflect God’s neat ordering of time. The notion harkens back to the God of Genesis shaping formless time into distinct units. His separation of darkness from light which allows for the creation of differentiated days and nights is, from the start, presented as the realization of moral right: “And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1.18). In the Gospels temporal regimentation grows in importance yet further, as shown by the tethering of climactic moments of Christ’s life to a divinely-established timetable. Toward the beginning of the Gospel of John, for example, when Mary tells Jesus that the Cana wedding guests have been left without wine, he quips “‘Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come’” (2.4). Later, at the last supper, when he knows his time is approaching, we are reminded that “. . . Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father” (John 13.1). And as his crucifixion grows near he again ratifies divine chronology: “‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son, so that the Son may glorify you . . .’” (John 17.1). Picking up on the scriptures’ representation of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection as comprising a divinely ordered temporal sequence, theologians, going back to antiquity, tethered Catholic ritual to it. In the words of the early church leader, Clement of Rome: “We should do in order . . . everything that the Master commanded us to do at set times. . . . He has ordered oblations . . . and services . . . to be accomplished, and not by chance and in disorderly fashion but at the set times and hours . . .” (qtd. in Taft 14). In Ignatius’s epoch, this emphasis on temporal ordering would embed itself in bourgeoning mental prayer practices. Harkening back to Thomas à Kempis’s and Ludolph of Saxony’s promotion of an inwardly transformative piety, these contemplative currents, bolstered in a flurry of prayer and spiritual exercise manuals, sought to instigate a deep human connection with Christ. Consecrating regularly scheduled hours to intimate worship is considered a crucial means of solidifying that bond. In García Jiménez de Cisneros’s Exercitatorio de la vida spiritual, on which Ignatius’s Exercises were directly inspired, the faithful are urged to make their devotions as core to the rhythms of quotidian life as activities such as eating: Quanto al tiempo y las horas veemos, hermanos, que mucho más es provechoso al cuerpo y más convenible a su apetito y desseo, acostumbrar sienpre comer a un tiempo. Y por semejable manera, la ánima que dessea bivir en el amor de nuestro Señor, deve tener hora convenible en que se pueda apartar, y tiempo cierto para orar (126) [Regarding time and hours we see, brothers, that it is much more beneficial for the body and more suitable to its appetite and desire, to always eat at the same time. And, in the same manner, the soul that wishes to inhabit the love of our Lord, must have a suitable hour at which to retire and an appointed time at which to pray].7

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises 39 Akin to mealtimes in its regularity, such prayer preserves Christ’s centrality in the temporal ordering of human life. In his Tercer abecedario espiritual, Francisco de Osuna offers us an illustrative explanation of the direct connection between planned worship and fusion with the body of Christ. Los que son devotos de la sagrada pasión del Señor débenla tener continuo en la memoria, porque en esto se parecerá la devoción de ellos, y no en hablar de la tal devoción, porque no hay duda sino que el más devoto de ella la tiene más en la memoria, como cosa más amada; conforme a lo cual dice el bienaventurado San Bernardo: Cualquiera que tiene el sentido de Cristo sabe cuánto aprovecha a la cristiana piedad y cuánto convenga al siervo de Dios y le sea útil, a lo menos alguna hora del día, recolegir más atentamente los beneficios de su pasión y redención para gozar de ello suavemente en su conciencia, y fielmente en su memoria guardarlo, lo cual es en espíritu comer el cuerpo de Cristo y beber su sangre en su memoria, según Él lo mandó. (307) [Christians devoted to the sacred Passion of our Lord should keep it constantly in their mind, for their devotion consists in this, not in speaking about it. Undoubtedly he who is most devout will most frequently recall it as the subject he loves best. The Blessed S. Bernard says: “He who has a devotion to Christ knows how beneficial it is to Christian piety, and how fitting and useful it is to the servant of God that, at least during some portion of the day, he should recollect more attentively the benefits of Christ’s Passion and Redemption, rejoice in them peacefully in his mind and keep them faithfully in memory, which is to eat spiritually the Body of Christ and drink his Blood as he commanded.”] (217)8 The methodical practice of mental and corporeal memory becomes the crux of Christocentric life. Through such means worshipers are called upon to fulfill the spirit of the imitatio Christi maxim entrenched in church doctrine and authoritatively asserted, among others, by Thomas Aquinas: “. . . religious perfection consists chiefly in the imitation of Christ . . .” (Part II, Q. 186, Art. 5, Obj. 5). While in some contexts, imitation would mean an active apostolate—as seemingly implied by Paul’s admonition, “. . . be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us . . .” (Ephesians 5.1-2)—in the conception of the medieval imitatio Christi writers who so influenced Ignatius and his contemporaries, the objective is a deeply felt identification with the persona of Christ. In other words, for them emulating Christ involves inwardly participating in the

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eucharistic act of memory which he demands of his disciples: “. . . the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, . . . he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me’” (1 Corinthians 11.23–24). Closeness to Christ is not something that occurs effortlessly or spontaneously; rather, it must be laboriously gained through constant training. In the words of Cisneros, “Estas cosas susodichas no las pongo aquí para que las leas sola una vez, mas muchas, y casi para que sienpre estén en tu memoria, para que en tu coraçón las tengas cada día porque no se enfríe, y porque si se enfriare, se inflame por la recordaçión destas consideraciones” (118) [“I do not include the aforementioned things here so that you read them only once, but many times, and so that they are always in your memory, so that you have them in your heart each day so it does not grow cold, and so that if it does grow cold, it become inflamed by the memory of these considerations”]. A student of Cisneros’s Exercitatio and a reader of à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi, of Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi, and of Erasmus’s Enchiridion, Ignatius is representative of Catholicism’s move toward an internalized Christocentrism and it is in that context that we can best make sense of his approach to time.9 In tune with the notion promoted in sixteenth-century prayer manuals that human beings can perfect themselves through mental and spiritual concentration, he aspires to help exercitants enhance their command of their faculties so they may effectively reach religious fulfillment. Among the traits that make Ignatius’s Exercises distinctive is the extent to which they train worshipers for the realization of a life in Christ that is not plagued by anxiety about the ephemerality of human existence. Diverging from the tendency to pair devotion to Christ with a fixation on the brevity of life, Ignatius’s spiritual program arms the worshiper with the tools for a conciliating rapport with linear time that makes it viable to enjoy the fruits of personal progress in the human present (see Giuliani). If he succeeds more than others in finding an effective formula for doing so it is because he equips worshipers with the skills to be active curators of their own spiritual lives. Refashioning imitatio Christi as pragmatic steps which maximize affective dynamicity, Ignatius initiates practicants into crafting an interactive mental and physical experience which deflects temporal pessimism by embracing subjective time and memory. Furnished with the tools to mold their own sense of time, pupils are not beholden to a totalizing Godappointed time, as is the case in the previously quoted passages from the Gospel of John where Christ orchestrates his actions in accordance with a divinely-imposed schedule. Scholars have noted that the agentiveness embedded in Ignatian worship constitutes a masculine subjecthood (see Rhodes, Strasser, and Routt). Modeling piety as active self-improvement akin to athletic training

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises 41 involves the cultivation of a set of skills comparable to those required in conventional expressions of manly excellence, from military prowess, to potent oratory, to inspirational leadership: “he did not call it spiritual exercise for nothing,” Elizabeth Rhodes points out (35). The Ignatian subject, in other words, comes closer than the selves modeled in previous contemplative programs to the Roman Republican concept of active virtus—a word that, not coincidentally, has vir, man, at its root. This is further reinforced with the subsequent institutionalization of the Jesuit order which would exclude women from its ranks. Its brand as purveyor of “soldiers of God” (Rhodes 38) uniquely poised to become agents of a global empire is enshrined in the Constitutiones which ratify their obligation to go anywhere in the world (“a cualesquier provincias”) (412) [“to whichever province”] where they may be summoned by the Pope to carry out their transformative work.10 Such commitment would be considered antithetical to the erasure from political, social, and civic action expected from exemplary Christian women. However, as the focus of this analysis is not the outward expressions of identity forged by Jesuit institutional culture but rather the inward experience of time generated by the Exercises, the masculine/feminine binary would not apply in absolute terms. Among other considerations, during the early stages of Ignatius’s composition of the Exercises, it was mostly to women that he gave them (Rhodes 39). So as much as they would later be coded as a cornerstone of the order’s patrilineal religious genealogy, transmitted from spiritual fathers to sons (Strasser 69), that packaging only partially reflects the experiential possibilities they offer. As we will see in connection with Saint Teresa’s spiritual enterprise which is in dialogue with Ignatius’s, the genealogy is not strictly patrilineal given the wide array of affective experiences and epistemological positions into which it burgeons through its varied reception. Transcending Vanitas The vanitas topos is a central component of personalized imitatio Christi. Hand in hand with the push to personally identify with Christ and to emulate his humility and self-sacrifice, went ubiquitous reminders on the shortness of life. Habituation into a Christ-centered existence is thus often intertwined with acclimatization to a constant remembrance of death. In that respect, the cultivation of a living memory of the Messiah is part of an ongoing effort to school humanity to dwell on its own mortality. Hence it is that in his Tratado de la vanidad, written in the mid 1500s, Diego de Estella urges his fellow worshipers “. . . tengamos delante de nuestros ojos en perpetua memoria la Cruz y Pasión de Christo” (262) [“. . . let us have before our eyes in perpetual memory the cross and Passion of Christ”],

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so as to intensify awareness of their imminent demise. In fairly draconian terms, he exhorts them to remain constantly focused on death, “polvorizando tu memoria con la ceniza en que has de ser convertido” (499) [“lacing your memory with the ashes you will become”].11 In his Imitatio Christi, à Kempis would make clear the moral instrumentality of this perpetual memory of death: “Blessed is the man who keeps the hour of his death always in mind, and daily prepares himself to die” (58). Already in such convictions we can discern echoes of the memento mori poetics which would become dominant in Spanish Baroque aesthetics: “Foolish man, how can you promise yourself a long life when you are not certain of a single day? How many have deceived themselves in this way, and been snatched unexpectedly from life! . . . Death is the end of all men; and the life of man passes away suddenly as a shadow” (59). Striking a similar note, Cisneros’s Exercitatorio warns: Cómo quando a aquella hora vinieres y de aquí passares, y el tiempo passado comparares a la eternidad, a la qual passarás, quán breve te parescerá. Toda tu vida te parescerá un breve sueño, y todo el tiempo y toda tu vida será a ti assí como si por un poco de spacio, conviene a saber, camino de media legua hoviesses andado. Quánto dolor será a ti, quando vieres que por una tan pequeña delectación perdiste aquellos eternos gozos. (162) [As though when you arrive at that hour and move on from here, and compare past time with eternity, to which you will pass, how brief it will show itself to have been. All your life will appear to be a fleeting dream, and all time and all your life will seem to you but a short walk of half a league. How much pain you will feel when you see that for so small a pleasure you lost that eternal bliss.] Such understandings of life as shadow or dream would become de rigueur in confessional and contemplative discourses. We might explain this grounding of Christian zeal in an inwardly focused sense of futility as marking a shift away from eschatological formulations of the sort articulated by Paul when he calls on the faithful to live as though the present were vanishing (1 Corinthians 7:31). Where in Paul’s vision, this involves a buoyant expectancy of the fullness of time, the late medieval and early modern iterations of the topos expressed in the above passages thrust the individual into a world whose temporal boundaries are indefinite. In line with an Augustinian deferral of Endtimes, they do without the promise of cosmic closure. The sought-for ending, whose constant anticipation presumably gives life meaning, is a human event—individual death—as opposed to a grand cataclysmic conclusion.

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises 43 In Ignatius’s Exercises, awareness of death also has a role in spiritual awakening. As part of the purgative stage of the exercises—the initial steps largely aimed at the purging of sins—the practicant is counseled to avoid ruminating on joyful subjects, such as the resurrection, and to maintain focus on mortality: “manterner delante de mí quererme doler y sentir pena, trayendo más en memoria la muerte” (78) [“to keep in mind that I want to feel sorrow and pain, remembering death”] (61). However, such recommendations are paired with an emphasis on active fashioning of propitious mood and sentiment. Death and the afterlife are points of reference; however, they do not eclipse the value of the present. Great store is set on what is achievable in life by the spiritually industrious. What is more, the ability to seize the moment is guaranteed to reap eternal rewards: “mirando y considerando cómo me hallaré el día del juicio, pensar cómo entonces querría haber deliberado acerca la cosa presente; y la regla que entonces querría haber tenido, tomarla agora, porque entonces me halle con entero placer y gozo” (187) [“to examine and consider how I shall be on the day of judgment, to think how I shall then wish to have made my decision in the present matter. The rule which I should then wish to have followed, I will now follow, that I may on that day be filled with joy and delight”] (86). The accent here falls, not on the lapsed nature of mortal life, but rather on what can be done by executing proper action in the now, “agora.” Also worth mentioning is the fact that, in contrast with catastrophist Last Judgment visions, pleasure and enjoyment are foregrounded. Ignatius thus eschews the time-related anxieties endemic in Augustinean introspection as well as in devotio moderna practices which belittle sentient life. Rather than perpetuating an opposition between worldly transience and divine eternity, he teaches his pupils to make effective a sensorially potent rapport with eternity in real time. As illustrated by his above-cited call for applying “la regla” [“the rule”] “agora” [“now”], Chronos can be seized and rendered auspicious. Ignatius’ intent to take control of the present denotes a level of temporal agency relatable to that cultivated in the realm of realpolitik. Although his objectives are worlds away from those of Machiavelli, he does, in his own way, subscribe to the principle of opportune action. Where the Florentine author is concerned, this principle is operative in his admonition to the prince to avoid disaster by being energetic about combatting problems in the present.12 Comparing political adversity to sickness, he drives in the point by signaling the effectiveness of cures that are immediately applied. The fact that Ignatius also calls for inhabiting the present in a spirited manner shows that he too imbues human temporality with purpose, thus capturing what Hartog refers to as Kairos, a Greek concept for time of an order different from Chronos. Where Chronos, he reminds us, would mean time as a regular constant measure, Kairos

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denotes a pivotal moment, a live instant when something important can be made to come to fruition. Represented in ancient Greek art as a swift runner with winged feet and a bald head, Kairos embodies “agility, liveliness, the opening for seizing him by the hair (which must not be missed)” (Chronos 6). Where we might be more prone to think of this idea as primordially surviving in early modern figurations of Occasion as pagan deity, the idea of an auspicious time that impacts the course of Chronos, is also embedded in Christian imagination. This is evident in the Gospels where the two terms, Kairos and Chronos, coexist, conveying a textured view of time whereby it is shaped by its content and not simply by its passage (see Barr). Indicative of a physical manifestation of the divine within the worldly, the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ connote the perfect synchronization between time as measure and time as event. Uncertainties about how chronology relates to divine providence are countered at such junctures as timing is shown to be clearly ordered by a godly hand, as illustrated in the Gospel of John when Jesus defers to a divinely imposed “hour” (2.4; 13.1) as determining the moment of his crucifixion. What is distinct about Ignatius’s Exercises is that they provide a channel for actualizing Christic Kairos in sensate quotidian existence where human beings determine the pacing of their own actions. The religious practice operative in the Spiritual Exercises thus constitutes a radical rereading of the Bishop of Hippo’s conception of memory that had been foundational to the confessional subject. While that subject is resigned to a temporally unstable distentio animi which in Ricoeur’s words “fait du temps humain la réplique déficiente de l’éternité divine, cet éternel present” (La mémoire chapter 2) [“understands human time as the deficient copy of divine eternity, that eternal present”], the Ignatian self relies on the powers of spiritual habituation to produce a munificent present, one not viewed as a vitiated version of divine timelessness.13 Where Augustine’s experience of the present is marred by an awareness of its fleetingness, Ignatius, embracing the condition of life as a work-in-progress, vindicates an ongoing sense of human perfectibility. Subscribing to the notion that the memory is “the stomach of the mind” (191)—a privileged locus of knowledge—the protagonist of the Confessions continually revisits the past in an attempt to stem a preponderant sense of epistemological disorientation produced by the discontinuities between past, present, and future which make human life so very alienated from God in whom “there is no change nor shadow caused by turning” (68). But the memory is also troubled by awareness of earthly variableness, the recognition that all is short-lived and therefore constantly becoming past. By contrast, Ignatian memory takes the form of active cognitive conditioning. Unclouded by temporal anxiety, remembrance is instrumentalized to trigger the set of thoughts and moods fitting to whatever stage of the

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises 45 spiritual trajectory the exercitant is in at that given moment. More Aristotelian than Platonic, the vita contemplativa becomes vita activa. Rather than regarding this shift as representing a diminished version of Augustine’s highly intellectual scheme, I would note that by emphasizing the subject’s ability to refashion itself and explicitly integrating corporeal performance and sensorial imagination into this process, Ignatius introduces a considerable degree of psychological and emotional initiative that opens up unprecedented hermeneutical possibilities and looks forward to Ricoeur’s comprehension of lived experience as endowed with epistemological value. In Gonçalvez da Camara’s 1553 biography of Ignatius—the earliest of the saint’s biographies—we find a famous anecdote about Ignatius’s conversion which vividly exemplifies this. The account tells of the spiritual revelation inspired in Ignatius by Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi and the collections of saints’ lives which he read while convalescing from a leg wound. Liberating him from his prior avocation to mundane military glory, they kindle in him a deep desire to devote his life to God. Porque, leyendo la vida de nuestro Señor y de los santos, se paraba a pensar, razonando consigo: ¿qué sería, si yo hiciese esto que hizo San Francisco, y esto que hizo Santo Domingo? y así discurría por muchas cosas que hallaba buenas, proponiéndose siempre a sí mismo cosas dificultosas y graves, las cuales cuando proponía, le parecía hallar en sí facilidad de ponerlas en obra. Mas todo su discurso era decir consigo: Santo Domingo hizo esto; pues yo lo tengo de hacer. San Francisco hizo esto; pues yo lo tengo de hacer. (Autobiografía de San Ignacio de Loyola 6) [In reading the Life of our Lord and the Lives of the Saints, he paused to think and reason with himself. “Suppose that I should do what St. Francis did, what St. Dominic did?” He thus let his thoughts run over many things that seemed good to him, always putting before himself things that were difficult and important which seemed to him easy to accomplish when he proposed them. But all his thought was to tell himself, “St. Dominic did this, therefore, I must do it. St. Francis did this; therefore, I must do it.”] (St. Ignatius’s own Story 9–10) Representative of a mass of non-scholarly readers made possible by the burgeoning print industry, Ignatius responds emotively to the texts he peruses.14 Perhaps reminding us of Don Quixote—some critics, in fact, regard Ignatius as his precursor—he feels compelled to imitate his heroes, to make their lives literally present in his.15 This means a turn away from reading as authorized interpretation, characteristic of patristic and scholastic exegesis, to reading as self-driven subjective interaction.16 To avoid misunderstandings though, especially in light of my just-mentioned

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reference to Don Quixote, I hasten to say that I am not implying a primal or unselfconscious readerly process. Contrarily, as shown in this chapter, the openness to subjective emotion is part of a process of self-reflection. From it emerges an experientially rich religiosity that can compete with the intensely personal dimensions of Pauline zeal, while being ideally suited to a post eschatological landscape.17 While adapting to a context in which Augustine’s insistence on separating history from prophesy has gained particular currency, Ignatius arrives at ways to deflect the temporal aporias present in Augustine’s mnemonic model. Augustine’s expansive palace of memory, the space where private religious meditation originates, while pictured as a means to access divine presence, is fraught with tensions between pagan past and Christian present. Where emphasizing the need to shed his pagan past in order to access an eternal Christian present, Augustine cannot permanently escape his heathen origins. He does, through the practice of enlightened recollection, succeed in attaining a sublime union with divinity; however such a state is merely temporary. If for classical rhetoricians memory guarantees timelessness, for Augustine it is bounded by time, intimately connected as it is to restless inner life. Operating within the parameters of linear time, Ignatius devises a performative memory that overcomes the rift between human temporality and divine timelessness. A brief overview of Augustine’s own mnemonic practice and the hermeneutics that went with it can help shed further light on the innovative aspects of Ignatius’s phenomenology. Augustine: Time as a Problem The idea of Christian life as conditioned by the drastic historical turns associated with Jesus’s birth, death, and resurrection is palpable in Augustine’s confessional subject. In the pages of his Confessions, the pious self seeks to cut its ties with a profane past. And yet, ultimately, renewal is undercut by an insistence on subjection to mortal time.18 To gain insight about how Augustine constructs himself as a transformed subject, we can turn our attention to the fact that the inward shift making possible his birth as a Christian takes shape as a break with his cultural milieu, one initially propelled by his being rendered incapable of public speaking (Confessions 157). Forced, by this harrowing episode, to retreat from his prestigious career as an orator, he is initiated into contemplative silence. In this episode Augustine makes his own body and mind the site of a formidable rift between Roman custom and Christian faith. The product of Roman education which was largely aimed at the mastery of rhetorical performance, Augustine had excelled at awing audiences with his eloquence. If he was at first utterly identified with the Ciceronian legacy whereby great speech is deemed the height of human

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises 47 achievement—a guarantor of eternal fame—after his conversion, those values are regarded as obstructing access to an eternal God. Creating a binary opposition between clever speeches, incarnations of a lapsed world, and unscripted silence, the sign of genuine communion with divinity, Augustine separates his present from his former self which he castigates for its addiction to the “empty glory” of pleasing crowds: “Publicly I was a teacher of the arts which they call liberal; privately I professed a false religion--in the former role arrogant, in the latter superstitious, in everything vain” (Confessions 52).19 Where rhetorical performance traffics in the realm of lowly impulses, religious contemplation aspires to a radical metaphysical shift. This is patent in Augustine’s famous account of the mystical ascent he experiences in the company of his mother: The conversation led us towards the conclusion that the pleasure of the bodily senses, however delightful in the radiant light of this physical world, is seen by comparison with the life of eternity to be not even worth considering. Our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection towards eternal being itself. Step by step we climbed beyond all corporeal objects. . . . We ascended further by internal reflection and dialogue and wonder at your works, and we entered into our own minds. We moved up beyond them so as to attain to the region of inexhaustible abundance. . . . Furthermore, in this wisdom there is no past and future, but only being, since it is eternal. (171) The “entry into our own minds” marks the passage to eternity. Heavily influenced by Plotinus’s celebration of true beauty as an incorporeal essence that can only be attained through radically purging oneself of all physical “alloys,” Augustine situates the climb toward divinity in the immaterial space of mental reflection.20 In this Neoplatonic scheme, the self transcends embodied existence: contact with the sacred is likened to an act of pure noetic intellection which necessitates no longer being in the world. “Corporeal objects” and the cosmos itself are left behind. It is only by inhabiting this space beyond material space that eternity can be sensed. Eternity is thus radically opposed to embodied sequential time. If time is defined by change, here we get a glimpse of the unimaginable: an unending present. Mirroring Plotinus’s primal One from which all created things emanate, this state of being transcends the fragmenting confusion of the temporal condition. If in his past life as a rhetor, Augustine was imprisoned in a “state of disintegration” and “multiplicity” (Confessions 24), in his current condition he succeeds in reaching “my inner man, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize” (Confessions 183).

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But ultimately, the transcending of time is short-lived. As time is, in the words of Plato, “a movable image of Eternity” (Timaeus 77), temporal existence is phenomenologically distinct from the divine. Often caught in the realm of moving images, inner being cannot indefinitely suspend itself in timelessness. Said otherwise, it cannot utterly escape its past or its cultural origins. After all, that self is, in many senses, a creature of human memory. The self is born in the memory and the Confessions, logically also a product of that memory, must likewise dwell on its failure to access a seamless contiguity with the divine. A testament to this is the fact that Augustine’s mystical episode does not mark the conclusion of his autobiography; although a climactic moment of his trajectory, it is followed by ongoing preoccupations about the constraints of time. After the visionary scene, Augustine devotes a chapter to defining memory and then another one to further puzzling over the meaning of time. It is true that memory on one level appears to transcend time and space: “It is a vast and infinite profundity” (187). Its contents are inexhaustible storehouses where all experiences, sights, and lessons are collected; so copious are they that they cannot be enumerated. Aside from a collecting vessel, memory is also an ordering system: it is by looking back at its contents that the self becomes intelligible to itself (see Olney, 5–6). To put it more concretely, it is through ordering his memories and understanding his past that Augustine can tackle the “vast problem” he “had become” to himself and communicate with God (Confessions 57). As Olney puts it, memory “affords a bridge between time and eternity” (17). It helps the individual conceptualize time-bounded existence. A creature of Augustine’s memory, the Confessions orders different moments of his life, rereading the pagan past teleologically, as a precursor of the Christian future. However, while memory is on one level endowed with divine light and allows the individual to understand temporality, it cannot utterly liberate the self from the successiveness of time. Preoccupied with the irreconcilable difference between divine being which is beyond time and human existence within time, Augustine laments that his narrative, locked as it is into a conception of time as successive, is substantively removed from direct experience of the divine: “Your vision of occurrences in time is not temporally conditioned. Why then do I set before you an ordered account of so many things?” (221). Ultimately God’s word is untranslatable into human language because it is timeless. The ontological barrier between God, the timeless creator, and human beings, his temporal creatures, is a foundational principle of life to which Augustine constantly returns. Of those who dare to inquire what God was doing before he created human kind, Augustine says disapprovingly:

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises 49 They attempt to taste eternity when their heart is still flitting about in the realm where things change and have a past and future; it is still “vain” (Ps. 5: 10). Who can lay hold on the heart and give it fixity, so that for some little moment it may be stable, and for a fraction of time may grasp the splendour of a constant eternity? Then it may compare eternity with temporal successiveness which never has any constancy, and will see there is no comparison possible. (Confessions 228) Even the exceptional “little moment” of contact with eternity is troubled by consciousness of its incommensurability with genuine timelessness. In a mind so concerned that the present is constantly vanishing into the past, becoming but a faint memory of itself, phenomenological experience is inevitably condemned to a fragile spectrality. It is from that precarious position that Ignatius rescues lived time. Achieving Duration Where Augustine laments that, although a product of divine utterance which transcends time, the human world is stuck in the realm of sequential time, Ignatius shapes temporal experience in a way that allows for the undiminished transmission of that utterance. He can thus be said to unlock its supreme enargeia, a quality vividly illustrated in Ludolph of Saxony’s commentary on the opening verse of the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word . . .” (John 1.1). I include a sixteen-century Spanish translation below as its word choice is helpful to the discussion at hand. El hijo estaua en el padre al mesmo padre ygual a con el juntamente eterno: porque no començo a ser en la madre virgen Maria: mas fue sienpre en el principio esto es en el padre: que es principio sin principio; en cuyo entendimiento y persona eterna sienpre estaua el hijo que es principio de principio. . . . Y tambien este concepto o cosa interior que en l’anima esta se llama en propria manera verbo antes que por la boz sea pronunciado. Pues como este nonbre palabra signifique la boz corporal que procede por la boca: . . . signifique el concepto mental que se engendra en el anima que no se aparta della quando es embiado o pronunciado: . . . aqui viene que por esta segunda manera de palabra se toma aqui que el hijo de dios sea dicho palabra: porque procede al padre por eternal nascimiento y por esta manera de nascer no deja de permanescer con el y en el por unidad o essencia como la verdad o lo que del entendimiento nasce que sienpre permanesce con el mismo entendimiento y por esto mas quiso aqui dezir sant Juan: en el principio era la palabra que dezir en el principio era el hijo. (Vita Christi cartuxano 9)

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Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises [“The Son was in the Father, co-eternal with the Father. He did not begin to be in Mary, but in the beginning, that is, in the Father, who is the origin without origin, and the Son is the origin from the origin.” . . . But word more fundamentally signifies the interior concept of the mind. . . . Just so, the word is what is signified by the sound of the voice. The underlying reality is the interior concept in the mind; the sounds are vocal expressions of impressions that are in the soul, and these concepts also are properly speaking called words even before they are pronounced. The term word signifies the vocal sound that comes from the mouth but also the mental idea that is born from the mind, and when this concept emerges in the spoken word, it still remains present in the mind. The Son can be understood in this way: he proceeds from the Father by an eternal birth, but he remains with him and in him by the unity of their divine essence— just as a thought or a concept remains in the mind from which it is born. This is why John prefers Word to Son here.] (The Life of Jesus Christ 26–27)21 fBarthes thus refers to Ignatius’s

If Augustine worries about the subjection of human language to successive time, which threatens it with fragmentation, Ludolph of Saxony affirms the permanence of God’s eternal word in Christ’s living body. Harkening back to the meaning of the original Greek term for “word,” “logos,” that is translated in the Vulgate as “verbum,” hence “verbo” in Spanish, as well as “palabra,” the author reminds us of the more capacious meaning of that term: “logos” encompasses both the uttered word and its preceding meaning. Impervious to distension in time, here the word made flesh in Christ, does not distance itself from the meaning it had “antes que por la boz sea pronunciado,” that is, before the beginning of time. This emphasis on Christ’s eternal body, in turn, comes to define his relationship to his worshipers in somewhat different terms from those visible in Augustine’s Confessions where Jesus is described as, “The true Mediator you showed to humanity. . . . You sent him so that from his example they should learn humility” (219). Here Christ is an exemplary figure whose conduct is to be emulated. But in Ludolph of Saxony’s scheme, he is corporeally and emotionally immanent in the human psyche: “menester es que sea el corazón inflamado del cotidiano pensamiento de su vida” (7) [“. . . when we meditate frequently on his life, our heart is enkindled . . .”] (15). The transcendental Johannine word thus materializes itself in quotidian existence. Ignatius’s Exercises open new ways of perpetuating the immanence of the pre-rhetorical and pre-textual divine word in daily life. As more than one distinguished reader of the Exercises has noted, they are emphatically silent. They provide general instructions about the pacing of the meditations as well as certain specifications about the physical conditions under

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises 51 which they should be carried out (for example, it is stipulated that they should be performed in a quiet place, or a dark room, with an only sparing use of moderate corporeal punishments.) But no script is provided: neither for the person administering the exercises, nor for the exercitant. Roland Barthes refers to Ignatius’s “aphasia” (45) and views the text as a rejection of the sensorial baggage of literary language: . . . thus it is that literature, whose function is a worldly one, is not compatible with spirituality; one is detour, ornament, veil, the other is immediation, nudity: this is why one cannot be both a saint and a writer. Purified of any contact with the seductions and illusions of form, Ignatius’s text . . . is barely language: it is the simple, neuter path which assures the transmission of a mental experience. (39–40) Barthes’s opposition between mental perception and phenomenal experience warrants correction. While the manual is without rhetorical flourish, it invites the worshiper into a full engagement with the senses. More than an abandonment of the spectacular elements of oratory, the silence of the worshiper is best described as an extreme interiorization of their powers. In that respect, I would disagree with Barthes’s dichotomy between saint and fictional author, especially where Ignatius is concerned.22 For while his Exercises can be said to call for the silencing of oratory—by warning the director to be frugal with his words—they give wide imaginative powers to the exercitant. The latter, we might say, becomes an author, not in the sense of a traditional auctoritas that dictates meaning, but rather one who appropriates discursive and imagistic traditions according to personal needs and inclinations. If in the previously cited passage from the Vita Christi much store is set on Jesus’s embodiment of an original pre-temporal divine utterance, Ignatius is less preoccupied with conserving a primary timeless essence. Rather, he envisions the efflorescence of spiritual fulfillment in the ever-shifting terrain of temporal existence. Yearning for the divine does not in that sense necessitate a negation of the ontological integrity of time-bound experience; rather, it serves as a motor for the achievement of phenomenological plenitude within it. Similarly to Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi, the overall arc of the Exercises follows key episodes of the life of Christ in order: his birth, his presentation at the temple, the Sermon on the Mount, his walking on water, his reviving of Lazarus, and, finally, his crucifixion. As also occurs in the Vita Christi, the temporal remoteness of these occurrences is eliminated as sacred events are enfolded in the individual’s lived experience. In order to achieve such a live rapport, the practicant learns to apply the sensory faculties, as is patent in the passage below, relating to imagining the fires of Hell awaiting those who deny Christ:

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Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises El primer punto será ver con la vista de la imaginación los grandes fuegos, y las ánimas como en cuerpos ígneos. El segundo, oír con las orejas llantos, alaridos, voces, blasfemias contra Cristo nuestro Señor y contra todos sus santos. El tercero, oler con el olfato humo, piedra azufre, sentina y cosas pútridas. El cuarto, gustar con el gusto cosas amargas, así como lágrimas, tristeza y el verme de la conciencia. El quinto, tocar con el tacto, es a saber, cómo los fuegos tocan y abrasan las ánimas. (66–70) [First point: To see in imagination the great fires, and the souls enveloped, as it were, in bodies of fire. Second point: To hear the wailing, the screaming, cries, and blasphemies against Christ our Lord and all His saints. Third point: To smell the smoke, the brimstone, the corruption, and rottenness. Fourth point: To taste bitter things, as tears, sadness, and remorse of conscience. Fifth point: With the sense of touch to feel how the flames surround and burn souls.] (59)

The gruesome content of the scene notwithstanding, it provides worshipers with a method that can be deployed in relation to all manner of scenes. Visible here is Ignatius’s encouragement of an active imagination. Also illustrative of this is his departure from one of the objectives of Osuna’s “recogimiento” practice: “Acontece a los ejercitados tener tan sosegada la memoria y acallado el entendimiento, que, estando con Dios gozando de su gracia, no piensan en lo que están ni en otra cosa alguna, sino que están como absortos y embebidos en aquello que sienten en su ánima . . .” (589) [“Sometimes the memory and understanding of the recollected are so silenced that while enjoying the grace of God they forget themselves and everything else, being absorbed and inebriated by what they feel”] (448). The portrayal of the worshiper emerging here may remind us of epochal paintings of enraptured saints at prayer, their gazes turned upward, as though they were absent from the earthly realm. Osuna expresses this process as one in which memory becomes a passive receptacle of divine light, implying that access to eternal present means a veritable withdrawal from temporal successiveness. The preferred way to reach God is either to remove one’s senses from the kingdom of this world, or to die. Unlike Osuna’s kenotic worshiper, the Ignatian subject does not yearn to abandon worldly time. Rather than stripping himself of his earthly attachments, quieting his imagination, and ascending to an alien metaphysical state, he incorporates the divine into his embodied and

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises 53 imaginatively rich existence. For example, it is expected that, after the requisite amount of spiritual training, the pupil will be able to connect with the body of Christ through the prosaic activities of daily life: “Mientras la persona come, considere como que ve a Cristo nuestro Señor comer con sus apóstoles, y cómo bebe, y cómo mira, y cómo habla; y procure de imitarle” (214) [“While one is eating, he may consider that he sees Christ our Lord at table with His Apostles, how He eats and drinks; how He looks and how He speaks, and he will strive to imitate Him”] (97). Far from a corrupted version of divine eternity, the corporeal affects have the potential to actualize the sacred. And in pursuit of such reward it is up to worshipers to finetune meditation schedules according to their needs: Por el contrario, quien quisiere más abreviar en la pasión, tome a la media noche la cena, a la mañana el huerto, a la hora de misa la casa de Anás, a la hora de vísperas la casa de Caifás, en lugar de la hora antes de cena la casa de Pilato. De manera que, no haciendo repeticiones ni el traer de los sentidos, haga cada día cinco ejercicios distintos, y en cada uno ejercicio, distinto misterio de Cristo nuestro Señor; y, después de así acabada toda la pasión, puede hacer otro día toda la pasión junta, en un ejercicio o en diversos, como más le parecerá que aprovecharse podrá. (209) [On the other hand, anyone wishing to spend a shorter time on the Passion, may take at midnight the Last Supper and the Garden; in the morning at the time of Mass, the house of Annas; at Vespers, the house of Caiphas; in place of the Exercise of the time before supper, the house of Pilate. Thus omitting the repetitions and the application of the senses, he may make five distinct Exercises each day, and in each Exercise contemplate a distinct mystery of the Passion of Christ our Lord. After he has thus completed the Passion, he may use another day to contemplate the entire Passion in one Exercise, or in several, in the way that he thinks will profit him most] (96). The opposite of a tyrannical scythe, here time can be molded and manipulated at will by the worshiper. Ignatius stresses this further by explicitly stating that temporal units are flexible: . . . no se entienda que cada semana tenga de necesidad siete o ocho días en sí. Porque como acaece que en la primera semana unos son más tardos para hallar lo que buscan, es a saber, contrición, dolor, lágrimas por sus pecados; asimismo, como unos sean más diligentes que otros, y más agitados o probados de diversos espíritus, requiérese algunas veces acortar la semana, y otras veces alargarla, y así en todas las otras semanas siguientes, buscando las cosas según la materia subyecta. (4)

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Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises [This does not mean that each week must cover seven full days. It may happen that some exercitants are slower than others in finding the contrition, sorrow, and tears for their sins that they are seeking. In like manner some may be more diligent than others, or be more disturbed or tried by different spirits. It may be necessary sometimes to shorten the week and on other occasions to lengthen it. The same is true for the following weeks. The time should be set according to the needs of the subject matter.] (38)

This diverges significantly from Augustine’s spectral characterization of lived time: “. . . for not even one day is entirely present. All the hours of night and day add up to twenty-four. The first of them has the others in the future, the last has them in the past. Any hour between these has past hours before it, future hours after it. One hour is itself constituted of fugitive moments” (Confessions 232). Because there is no absolute coincidence between “objective” time measures and the experience of time, time is declared quintessentially elusive, so much so that the present is rendered virtually ungraspable, for it “. . . flies so quickly from future into past that it is an interval with no duration” (Confessions 232). It thus lacks the apparent stability of space: “the present occupies no space” (Confessions 232). And because this phantasmatic entity is constitutive of human life, it rends it with confusion: “The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts . . .” (Confessions 244). Meanwhile, for Ignatius, human temporality is conceptually and sensorially productive, for individuals can capitalize on its flexibility to properly calibrate the trajectory of their spiritual progress. Unperturbed by concerns about the incompatibility between absolute and embodied time, his scheme makes room for forms of temporal duration that stabilize inner life. Overcoming the sense of fragmentation induced by confining time to fixed units that can only be registered as “fugitive moments,” Ignatius makes way for a more ductile temporality which is in some sense comparable to Henry Bergson’s durée. But the real, concrete, live present—that of which I speak when I speak of my present perception—that present necessarily occupies a duration. Where then is this duration placed? Is it on the hither or on the further side of the mathematical point which I determine ideally when I think of the present instant? Quite evidently, it is both on this side and on that; and what I call “my present” has one foot in my past and another in my future. . . . My present, then, is both sensation and movement; and, since my present forms an undivided whole, then the movement must be linked with the sensation, must prolong it in action. (176–77)

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises 55 Similarly, in Ignatius’s Exercises, temporal movement, no longer viewed as destabilizing, is compatible with phenomenological fulfillment. Not condemned to being polar opposites, present and past can coexist in the mind and Chronos and Kairos are reconciled: Chronos is not, in other words, a mere marker of vapid existence. If the traditional mystic, in Michel de Certeau’s words “échappe à la fragmentation du temps” (240) [“escapes the fragmentation of time”] by an often violent rupture with worldly life, Ignatius renders that escape unnecessary by making spiritual realization attainable in a temporalized sphere.23 As Adrien Demoustier says, he frees mental prayer from a “calendrier étroitement chronologique et mnémotechnique, introduit une progression, utilise le temps pour faciliter l’association de la vie avec la vie de Christ” (31) [“narrowly chronological and mnemonic calendar, introduces progression, uses time for facilitating the association of life with the life of Christ”].24 The liberalization of linear time that this entails, as suggested already, has profound hermeneutical implications which are worth some further considerations. The Presence of Memory For Aristotle, awareness of the passage of time is an essential component of memory: Memory, then, is neither sensation nor conception, but a state of having one of these or an affection resulting from one of these, when some time elapses. As we have stated, there is no memory of the now in the now. For of the present there is sensation, of the future there is expectation, and of the past there is memory. Therefore, all memory happens with time. Thus, only animals that sense time can remember, and they do their remembering using the same faculty, by which they sense. (De Memoria 27) From this standpoint, when we remember, we are conscious of the difference between our recalled image of past events and the original experience of the events themselves. We see how, despite his differences from Aristotle, Augustine likewise puts memory on a temporal continuum. Emphasizing its mobility, he regards it as an ever-changing terrain: memories take on different meanings according to the particular juncture at which they are culled. So, built into the practice of remembrance is a perpetual awareness of change which distinguishes it from unmediated sensation. Hence, Augustine’s specification that: “The present considering the past is the memory” while “the present considering the present is immediate awareness” (Confessions 235). And, given that the embodied

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present is inherently impermanent, it is doomed to a vane existence, one, as shown, deprived of any duration. As made clear in the passage cited several pages ago in which Augustine’s mind rises beyond worldly things, true being can only exist outside of time and space. Alternatively, in Ignatius’s universe, immersive experience, far from being devalued as antithetical to a superior extrasensory state, is regarded as a crucial component of the worshiper’s spiritual and mental edification. As is manifest in his instructions to deliberately marshal the bodily senses to see and hear and touch and taste and smell biblical scenes, the past corporeally and sensorially reemerges, undiminished, in the present which is, therefore, not condemned to a spectral condition. Repeatedly, Ignatius uses the expression “traer en memoria” which literally means “to bring into the memory” to refer to the act of reflecting on specific biblical episodes. Memory is in this respect a present-centered act. That is to say, instead of being occupied with temporal distension and complicating the exercise of the reasoning will, it is geared toward bolstering the sensorial plenitude of the now. This substantially changes the role of reading in spiritual education. Ignatius does assign some value to reading religious texts, saying it is very advantageous to read parts of `a Kempis’s Immitatio Christi as well as the Gospels and saints’ lives (100). However, just as he limits the director’s talking, he also suggests curtailing the amount of required reading so as not to detract from the intensity of worshiper experience. He explicitly calls for avoiding reading that is not of immediate relevance to the exercise being done: “De manera que por entonces no lea ningún misterio que aquel día o en aquella hora no haya de hacer, porque la consideración de un misterio no estorbe a la consideración del otro” (127) [“Thus, for the time being, I should not read any mystery which I am not going to consider on that day or at that hour, so that the consideration of one mystery may not interfere with the consideration of another”] (73). This approach to reading also, of course, departs from the hermeneutics of humanistic commentary which distinguishes between the context in which the texts are originally produced and the context of their subsequent reception. A prime example of this, Erasmus’s exegetical method, treats texts as human and historical artifacts, rather than as transhistorical performances. Conditioned by his work as an editor, commentator, and translator of biblical and patristic writings, he would pay close to grammatical and stylistic questions. Hence, while he embraces the eucharistic permanence of the word of the spirit (see Enchiridion), he brings an understanding of the historicity of linguistic usage to bear on his commentaries (see Ecclesiastes). Close textual reading based on philological expertise was central to his theology. Humanists’ impatience with scholastic use of canonical texts as archives of fixed philosophical

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises 57 truths stemmed from the fact that this approach utterly disregarded the nature of texts as fluid entities whose meaning changes across time. In other words, humanism makes exegesis a temporally bounded affair. Arguing that fathers of the church were readers of texts—Augustine’s Confessions certainly makes this clear—and that current theologians should thus follow in their footsteps, Erasmus has harsh words for scholastics whom he sees as utterly removing texts from the fluid fabric of temporal evolution and turning them into archives of dogmatic sententiae. The conception of reading evoked in Augustine’s Confessions can be understood as a precursor to this position. In the eleventh chapter of the Confessions, which was not included in early modern Spanish translations, due to its potential for undermining the exegetical authority of canonical commentators, Augustine takes God’s call to humanity to “‘Increase and Multiply’” (295) as a paradigmatic principle for textual interpretation. From this standpoint, as the godly word is a “fount of eternal life” (Confessions 291) it can be ceaselessly reborn with new readings: So what difficulty is it for me when these words [of Genesis] can be interpreted in various ways, provided only that the interpretations are true? . . . As long as each interpreter is endeavouring to find in the holy scriptures the meaning of the author who wrote it, what evil is it if an exegesis he gives is one shown to be true by you, light of all sincere souls, even if the author whom he is reading did not have that idea . . . ? (259–260) This rationale can be said to provide ammunition for undermining the church’s limitation of interpretive authority to a select few. Surely, it differs from subsequent scholastic convention of deferring to the first canonical commentators as having primary jurisdiction over the meaning of the Bible, for in Augustine’s theory later readings can be as valid or more valid than earlier readings. Albeit, Augustine understands revisiting past texts as coexisting with rather than abolishing multiple layers of interpretive history. The “present” act of reading is not new in the sense that it eliminates previous exegeses, but rather in that it unravels their inherent signification, tapping into the infinite reserve of meaning that exists already in Holy Writ. As seen in the above citation, Augustine considers it important that readers sincerely attempt to get at the original author’s intent. If the mystical experience described by the bishop of Hippo implies momentarily abandoning mundane time, the readerly experience, as he imagines it here, does not break with historical time. A testament to this is his remark that it is, in fact, the reading of a classical text, the Hortensius, that triggers his initial move toward a more

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intimate rapport with literate culture (Confessions 39). It is while he is perusing this now lost Ciceronian work that it dawns upon him that texts can serve, not only as masters of verbal dexterity, as archives of tropes or turns of phrase instrumental to the art of rhetorical performance, but also as containers of compelling ideas. At this point, Augustine veers from an understanding of texts as means of perpetuating a conventional set of winning verbal formulae to the realization that they can spawn new ways of thinking. So paradoxically, it is in the context of a traditionalist rhetorical education that the break associated with Christian renewal takes place. That it is Cicero, the quintessence of oratorical verve which Augustine is in the process of renouncing, who is the author of the book that starts his foray into inward spiritual renovation drives in the point that, in Augustine’s case, rebirth does not mean a total abjuring of the past. Rather, it is a matter of rechanneling that past toward new horizons. While this process invites constant innovation, it also involves going back in time and revisiting the contents stored in the archives of memory. Hence, while at one level, texts become boundless fountains of meaning, and can be considered in that sense to transcend time, understanding them involves a consciousness of the time lapsed between their creation and their reception. This is reiterated in Erasmus’s Ecclesiastes, which focuses on religious preaching and stresses the need for prudence as well as scholarly knowledge. While recognizing that good preachers should be pure at heart, he underlines the need for them to be equipped with intellectual skill and good memory (66). In other words, he adheres here to classical ideals of oratory as masterful remembrance of a learned canon. Taking a different approach to the notion of godly word as eternal fountain of meaning, Ignatius comes closer to Erasmus’ Enchiridion than to his Ecclesiastes.25 Inspired in Paul’s focus on grace over custom, the Enchiridion identifies godly word with the “meat and drink of the soul” (10) that is accessed through intimate prayer rather than uttered word. Transcending rehearsed learning, this word is an ever-flowing fountain in which those who truly love God can partake (22). Repeatedly, Erasmus establishes an opposition between old and new, between convention and innovation: his ancient models—Plato, Cicero—he says, are not followers of customs. They are veritable mirrors of Pauline command from Romans 12.2: “Be not then conformed to this world in wickedness, but be transformed in the renewing of your mind” (Erasmus, Enchiridion 181). Clearly, there are similarities between the vindication of renewal palpable in such manifestations of Erasmian zeal and Ignatius’ innovative religious practice. However, Ignatius’s brand of Christianity is more emphatically presentist. Where Erasmus privileges spiritual transformation, like Augustine, he remains cognizant of his place within a historical

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises 59 chronology of readers. Ignatius, on the other hand, envisions a model of reading very much centered upon the immediate sensorial experience of the text. Exercitants are instructed to engage with the Gospels by imagining themselves literally in the settings evoked in them so that the temporal horizon of their own lives seamlessly fuses with that of the scene perused. Emblematic of this is one of the preliminary recommendations included in the section on the birth of Jesus which calls for conjuring a detailed mental image of the road between Nazareth and Bethlehem, including fathoming its length, width, and the kinds of terrains through which it runs. Also required is the visualization of the precise appearance, shape, and height of the Nativity cave (112). After visualizing that scene in extensive detail, exercitants can focus on communing with the protagonists: “El primer punto es ver las personas; es a saber, ver a nuestra Señora y a José y a la ancila, y al niño Jesús después de ser nacido, haciéndome yo un pobrecito y esclavito indigno, mirándolos, contemplándolos y sirviéndolos en sus necesidades, como si presente me hallase” (114) [“The first point is to see the persons: our Lady and St. Joseph, the servant girl, and the Child Jesus after his birth. I will become a poor, miserable, and unworthy slave looking upon them, contemplating them, and ministering to their needs, as though I were present there”] (71). Through empowering readers to establish a totalizing immersive rapport with the content of Holy Writ, Ignatius undoes the negative definition of time established by Augustine’s aporia: “In the eternal, nothing is transient, but the whole is present. But no time is wholly present” (Confessions 228–29). According to Ricoeur’s interpretation of Augustine’s thought, “Such meditation leaves no place for a derivation, in any conceivable sense of the word, of eternity from time” (Time and Narrative 23). Contrastingly, Ignatius’s Exercises, one might say, equip readers and worshipers with the means to derive eternity from time, or more so, in time. Notes 1 Even though the first official printed version of the Exercises was the Latin one presented to Pope Paul III in 1648, I include quotations from a Spanish version of the Exercises as it is closer to the original manuscripts which were drafted by Ignatius in Spanish. For a brief overview of the earliest editions, see Iparraguirre. All excerpts from Ignatius’s Exercises in English are from Anthony Mottola’s translation. 2 Calvino, for one, refers to the visual fantasizing incited by the Exercises as “escenas en movimiento” (101) [“scenes in movement”] (translation mine). Relatedly, Martin Lefebvre draws parallels between Ignatian aesthetics and the work of film director Sergei Eisenstein, reflecting that in both cases, images are conceived as personal appropriations of a collective imaginary. 3 Regarding this aspect, see Demoustier 33.

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4 Robert Bireley highlights the ways in which Jesuit religious ideals are well suited to the pragmatic needs of emergent modern statehood: “on pouvait vivre en chrétien dans le siècle, ce qui incluait aussi la sphère politique” (231) [“one could live as a Christian in the century, which also included the political sphere”] (translation mine). 5 This does not mean penance has no role, which would have been unthinkable at the time. The Exercises do thus include self-punishment, but they call for it to be restrained (86) and specify that the purpose of physical penance is selfcontrol; otherwise said, it is thought to help ensure that sensuality is balanced by reason (87). 6 See López Grigera, 79. In his Seis libros de la retórica eclesiástica, Fray Luis de Granada, in keeping with epochal trends, touts the practice of amplification : “Porque haviendose inventado la Amplificacion, para conmover los afectos, nada los conmueve mas, que el pintar una cosa con palabras de manera, que no tanto parezca que se dice, quanto que se hace, y se pone delante de los ojos . . .” (171) [“For amplification having been invented to move the affects, nothing does so more than painting something through words in such a way that it does not so much appear said but rather created and put before the eyes”]. Accordingly, he continues, the orator should not economize his words, but rather describe extensively: “no sumaria, y ligeramente, sino por extenso, con todos sus colores” (171) [“not summarily and lightly, but extensively, with all its colors”] (translations mine). 7 All English translations of excerpts from Cisneros’s text are mine. 8 All excerpts from Osuna’s text in English are from Benedictine of Stanbrook’s translation. 9 That said, Ignatius was strongly committed to communal activity. Part of the reason why he decides to found his own order, rather than joining an established one, is because of his desire to tailor his spiritual mission to social outreach. 10 Translation mine. 11 Translations mine. 12 “Because the Romans did in these instances what all prudent princes ought to do, who have to regard not only present troubles, but also future ones, for which they must prepare with every energy, because, when foreseen, it is easy to remedy them; but if you wait until they approach, the medicine is no longer in time because the malady has become incurable; for it happens in this, as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure. This it happens in affairs of state, for when the evils that arise have been foreseen (which it is only given to a wise man to see), they can be quickly redressed, but when, through not having been foreseen, they have been permitted to grow in a way that everyone can see them, there is no longer a remedy.” (Machiavelli 25) 13 Translation mine. 14 While on one level, the multiplication of printed texts contributes to a rich tradition of biblical commentary, emblematized by such towering intellectual figures as Erasmus, Lefevre d’Étaples, and Francisco Suárez, it also generates quantities of readers who relate to texts on a much more immediate level. Regarding the printed books read by Ignatius see O’Reilly, “Early Printed Books.”

Embracing Clock Time in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises 61 15 Regarding the comparison between Ignatius and Don Quixote, see Mohamed Lozano and Davidson. 16 Although he does include in his Exercises a brief defense of scholastic authorities, he, significantly, places it at the very end in a section that serves as a kind of epilogue. 17 On the deeply personal appeal of Pauline rhetoric, see Badiou 14. 18 In the words of Paul Plass, Augustine “is aware that, since the decisive fact about human beings is their temporal creatureliness (in the biblical sense), reason/faith and such related antinomies as works/grace or freedom/predestination cannot be resolved because they define our personal temporal condition. And that is true of the antinomy time/eternity as well, whose ‘fearful’ coincidence is played out in memory” (359). 19 The false creed at issue is Manicheism. 20 A relevant comparable passage from the Enneads is: “What then are we to think of those who see beauty in itself, in all its purity, unencumbered by flesh and body, so perfect is its purity that it transcends by far such things of earth and heaven? All other beauties are imports, are alloys. They are not primal. They come, all of them, from it. . . . It were well to cast kingdoms aside and the domination of the entire earth and sea and sky if, by this spurning, one might attain this vision” (Plotinus 41). 21 All English‐language excerpts from Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi in this chapter are from Milton T. Walsh’s translation. 22 On the literary and rhetorical foundations of the Ignatian self, see O’Rourke Boyle. 23 Translation mine. 24 (English translations of excerpts from Demoustier’s study are mine). Hence, his distance vis-à-vis monastic life, also noted by Demoustier: “Son innovation est faire possible la perfection, ie union avec Dieu, hors de la vie monastique” (34). [“His innovation is to make possible perfection, ie union with God, outside of monastic life.”] 25 On Ignatius’s affinities with Erasmus’s Enchiridion, see O’Reilly, From Ignatius Loyola to John of the Cross 119.

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Time Troubles in Teresa of Ávila’s Libro de la vida

“We are not Angels” If Saint Ignatius of Loyola situates the experience of divinity in human time, Saint Teresa of Ávila wrestles with their incompatibility. Contrary to what we might surmise from iconic images of her gazing heavenward—Bernini’s hallmark sculpture, along with Rubens’s and Rivera’s famous portraits come most immediately to mind—Teresa was much preoccupied with coming to terms with her earthliness. In her Libro de la vida, she declares that “. . . nosotros no somos ángeles, sino tenemos cuerpo; querernos hacer ángeles estando en la tierra . . . es desatino . . .” (222–23) [“. . . we are not angels and we have bodies. To want to become angels while we are still on earth . . . is ridiculous”] (140).1 And yet she does, throughout the work, display her devotion to mystical contemplation. The tension between this avocation and her sense of being a prisoner of time is, in effect, a defining feature of the pious self that she models in her autobiography. In that sense, I would contend that the text is chiefly concerned with performing a fractured temporal condition. Teresa’s insistence on her worldliness is instrumental in the case for her eventual canonization as it signals deference to church patriarchy. In the decades separating her Libro de la vida (initially composed in 1561–1562) from Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (drawn up in the early 1520s), the church had become exceedingly suspicious of personal religious expression. The nurturing of individualized worship possible in the Spain of Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros fizzles out as doctrinaire Catholicism gains traction. The kinds of reformatory manifestations of the devotio moderna palpable early on in the century—the circulation of Spanish-language prayer manuals, the promotion of mental prayer, the incitement of a deeply intimate spirituality in women and common folk—are largely curtailed. With the writing of vernacular devotional books no longer allowed and the placement of many extant ones on the Index, those given to extatic inspiration were often branded as alumbrados or Lutherans,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003381389-3

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with little care paid to the distinction between these designations. Female mystics were particularly distrusted by ecclesiastical authorities as they were presumed incapable of maintaining a healthy balance between emotions and reason. Their claims to divine illumination were invariably treated as symptoms of delirium or demonic temptation. Teresa herself echoes this fear when she calls for particular vigilance vis-à-vis women who engage in impromptu contemplative ascent: “En especial para mujeres es malo, que podrá el demonio causar alguna ilusión . . .” (Libro de la vida 136) [“It is specially harmful for women to make such attempts, because the devil can foster illusions in them . . .”] (73).2 Although, given the dogmatic milieu in which Teresa found herself, her cautionary words might be read as a strategic show of fealty to orthodox thought, they are, just as importantly, manifestations of the time-related anxieties that are constitutive of her religious life. In effect, her avowed wariness of extemporaneous rapture relates directly to her tenacious quest for a means to properly administer contact with the timeless. What is more, Teresa’s expertise in the temporal conundrums foundational to Christian piety makes her work central to any reflection about time in the early modern Hispanic world, for her spiritual life is steeped in the difficulties of finding a sustainable equilibrium among Chronos, Kairos—the Incarnation—and Krisis—Endtimes—to return to Hartog’s theoretical framework (Chronos). At one level, we can think about this in the terms exposed in my introductory chapter, as an epochal problem. The schism of the church, along with the rifts internal to Catholicism between reformatory and doctrinal forms of religiosity poses considerable challenges for the Christian historical regime. While the Christian order is conceived as auspiciously placed between Incarnation and Apocalypse, how this paradigm translates into lived existence is subject to constant interrogation. If from the standpoint of more radical forms of spirituality living in Christ means treating chronological time as though one were on the brink of being outside of it, for Teresa’s doctrinal contemporaries legitimate piety requires submission to Chronos. Again, this does not mean that Apocalypse loses relevance as an ultimate framer of Chronos. But how to inhabit a world in which the lacuna between Incarnation and Parousia is ever widening is a complicated matter that provokes uncertainty and anxiety, something that is amplified in Teresa’s Vida. With this in mind, I treat the tensions and juxtapositions deployed in the text as reflections of Teresa’s inner life. I thus depart from distinguished scholarship that has focused on the rhetorical intent of her writings. Thanks to the studies of Alison Weber, Gillian Ahlgren, and Barbara Mujica (Teresa de Ávila), we have gained a refined understanding of Teresa as a lucid and politic figure who succeeds in carving out an authoritative place for herself in a context inhospitable to female self-expression. Emerging

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from the pages of these studies is a savvy woman, well-versed in using language to contend with the constraints of a male-dominated church as well as with the volley of onslaughts from those who accuse her of unorthodoxy. With that, the patronizing view of her as naively emotional has been laid to rest (Weber 6–7). In concentrating now on her affective experience, I am not reverting to simplistic portrayals of a “spontaneous” or unwittingly candid Teresa. Rather, now that her social and intellectual selfawareness has been amply established, it is well to engage further with the phenomenological content of her Vida, a text that devotes sustained attention to the fluid condition of inward being.3 Those who have studied her works in the framework of contemporary spiritual currents have already provided important insight on this subject by highlighting how Teresa’s focus on personal experience is part of a conceptually nuanced and dynamic engagement with contemplative traditions (Carrera). Whether we see manifestations of this, as McGinn has, in Teresa’s life-long attempt to combine contemplative life with active religious service (Mysticism, 120–229, “Teresa de Jesús”) or, as has Denise DuPont, in her writing’s intertwining of the quotidian and the extatic, or, like Mujica (“Beyond Image”), in the at once anti-corporeal and icon-centered bent of her devotional practice, what is clear is that we are before an author who displays a marked restlessness.4 In order to properly unpack that restlessness, I would submit, it is crucial to consider the question of time and grapple with how the work articulates the temporally fraught subjectivity of the posteschatological female mystic. As was the case in my analysis of Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, here I take into account how gender identity operates inwardly, at an ontological and phenomenological level. While Ignatius concocts a recipe for eluding Augustinian aporias and achieving enduring phenomenological fulfillment, Teresa reinforces the incommensurability of embodied temporal experience and divine timelessness. In this, she partly adheres to a Neoplatonic strand of Spanish mysticism traceable to such figures as Dionysius the Areopagite.5 Inspired in her readings of Osuna’s Abecedario espiritual and Laredo’s Subida al Monte Sión, themselves influenced by the Areopagite, she often expresses the godly in terms that echo the late antique author’s definition of God as “a supra-existent Being” (Pseudo-Dionysius 50) “out of the reach of every rational process” (Pseudo-Dionysius 49–50). Perpetuated in her allusions to divinity’s ontological otherness is the binaristic thought deployed in the Areopagite’s claims about the untranslatability of divine being: “Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech, it is gathered up by no discourse, by no intuition, by no name” (50). At the same time, her inclination toward that otherworldly sphere exists in perpetual tension with her groundedness in fleshly existence to which she tethers herself with equal obstinacy. We might add that her role as an influential woman in the church equips her

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with abundant insight on the historical condition of the Christian subject as a living contradiction. I am referring here to the definition of the devout worshiper as one who is fixated on experiencing Eschaton while knowing it to be beyond reach. Taking into account that it was the deep-seated temporal restlessness expressed in the Confessions that led the early Heidegger to find in the Augustinian subject a precursor to his definition of human life as pertaining to the unstable realm of historical experience, it is fitting, by extension, to view Teresa as participating in the trajectory that links that subject to the modern post-metaphysical self. With its tenacious insistence on condemning itself to embeddedness in the flux of time and uncertain material things, Christian phenomenology offers a useful model for countering a Cartesian epistemologically self-assured individual removed from the vagaries of subjective perception. In the words of Ryan Coyne who unearths the “remains” of Augustinian thought in Heidegger’s conceptions of felt time, “The point is not that the lived experience of Christian religiosity is identical with time itself, but rather that temporality is produced by this religiosity” (33). That is, the conscience that the individual is ever distanced from the moment of Parousia inters life in the volatile terrain of the temporal. The internal guilt caused by that delay means that, “Christian experience of time resembles an ongoing spiritual form of crucifixion” (Coyne 4). Inflected here, more specifically, by Paul’s pinning of the telos of human life to the Second Coming, Heidegger posits “the cross as the very center of historical becoming” (Coyne 49). It is not just that the cross symbolizes the birth of the Christian subject. More to the point, the crucifixion stands at once as anticipation of Parousia and as a reminder of human life as a radical lack—ever without its ultimate telos. Such incompletion, likewise, structures Teresa’s life story. If at times defining her life as a reenactment of the crucifixion emerges as a potent panacea, a bridge to mystical rapture, at other times it devolves into a shadowy nothingness. In that sense she embraces the anguish—sorgen, if we want to push the link with the Heideggerian subject—that Ignatius dodges. This is not to say that Ignatius’s legacy had no impact on Teresa. In fact, many of her confessors were Jesuit and she did incorporate some aspects of their method into her religious practice.6 Like the Basque saint, she is firmly dedicated to actively improving her memory and one sees a resemblance to his approach in the deliberateness with which she attempts to cultivate her connection to the Messiah: “Procuraba lo más que podía traer a Jesucristo, nuestro bien y Señor, dentro de mí presente, y ésta era mi manera de oración” (69) [“I used to try to think of Jesus Christ, our Good and our Lord, as present within me, and it was in this way that I prayed”] (23). Similar to the agentive personal rapport prescribed in the

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Spiritual Exercises, Teresa embeds Jesus’s life in hers through habitual training, as is reflected in the increasingly intimate relationship with him that unfolds in her autobiography. Appearing to her repeatedly in visions, Christ mobilizes such emotion in her, that during prayer she is overcome by the desire to relive his travails: “. . . mirando a Cristo en la cruz tan pobre y desnudo, no podía poner a paciencia ser rica; suplicábale con lágrimas lo ordenase de manera que yo me viese pobre como Él” (345) [“. . . when I . . . looked at Christ hanging poor and naked upon the Cross, I felt I could not bear to be rich. So I besought Him with tears to bring it about that I might become as poor as He”] (The Life 243). Although facilitated by active mental conditioning akin to that prescribed by Ignatius, the above interaction with Christ also points to a significant difference vis-à-vis the Ignatian self, namely Teresa’s conception of pain as an inherently desirable predicament. The embracing of suffering is, indeed, central to her performance of imitatio Christi. Her constant references to the acute bodily aches brought on by her physical illness and her humble forbearance of them are clear projections of Christic patientia. Mores o, in contrast with Ignatius’s understanding of pain, not as an end in itself, but as something that can be instrumentalized to focus spiritual meditation, Teresa values it as an ongoing and integral component of her life: “Tengo por costumbre, cuando los dolores y mal corporal es muy intolerable, hacer atos como puedo entre mí, suplicando a el Señor, si se sirve de aquello, que me dé Su Majestad paciencia y me esté yo ansí hasta la fin del mundo” (Libro de la vida 186) [“When the pains and the bodily suffering are quite intolerable, my custom is to make interior acts as well as I can, and to beseech the Lord, if it be His Majesty’ s good pleasure, to give me patience—if only I have that I can keep on suffering in this way until the very end of the world”] (204–205). Different from the eschatological expectancy present in some Pauline epistles and in martyr accounts, though, Teresa’s cult of suffering suggests an inwardly rent existence, one caught between impatience for the timeless afterlife and duty to accept indefinite confinement in a temporalized world. It is in this latter sense that her performance of imitatio Christi enacts the pain of “historical becoming” described by Coyne (49). While some might argue that Teresa’s Vida reflects a more conflicted relationship between the profane and the sacred than Ignatius’s Exercises because it is a biographical confession and is, as such, centrally concerned with airing mortal failings, the differences between the texts go beyond genre. In effect, the distinct experiences of time formulated in them yield two substantively different models of selfhood. Where Teresa’s text is concerned, the anguish-provoking aporias which Augustine attaches to human temporality reemerge.7 More than a passive emulator of Augustine, whose Confessions she counts among her preferred readings,

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Teresa inventively appropriates his dichotomies to grapple with her uneasy place within historically bounded time. In that respect, the radical otherness sometimes attributed to female visionaries would not quite apply to her. As part of a reflection on a conflict between disparate conceptions of time in Medieval Christianity, Carolyn Dinshaw recounts an episode in which the mystic Margery Kempe is overcome with convulsive sobbing before an image of Mary holding the dead body of Jesus. Like the other unsympathetic onlookers, a priest who is at the scene is disturbed by her disruptive outburst and attempts to quell it by pointing out that Christ died long ago: “‘Ihesu is ded long sithyn [Jesus is long since dead]’” (qtd. in Dinshaw 107). Kempe would, not surprisingly, take strong exception to this stance. Dinshaw views the misunderstanding between her and her subduer as a matter of clashing temporalities: The conflict with the priest in front of the pietà goes to her core and tests the immediate reality of her being. Her response is ethical and moral, focused in the now and distanced neither by institutional structures nor by the chronological time they seek to control. Her time, her present, her now, is defined by its being invaded or infused by the other: the pietà out there becomes the pity in her (108). Defying linear chronology, Kempe insists on living as an anachronism. As for Teresa, she is not entirely an anachronic other; she does not limit her faith to a totalizing “now.” Rather, she straddles multiple temporalities: a presentist communion with Christ’s body, a metaphysical flight from terrestrial time, and a chronologically situated practice of religious self-improvement. She does not thus exemplify the confinement of the feminine to what Julia Kristeva has referred to as cyclical and monumental temporalities—i.e. time schemes that exclude genuine change: “In return, female subjectivity as it gives itself up to intuition becomes a problem with respect to a certain conception of time: time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival—in other words, the time of history” (Kristeva 17). Conversely, Teresa inserts herself into “the time of history,” but she complicates her place within it by experiencing it as alienation from genuine contact with the sacred. The oscillations at the heart of her Vida between a well-read Teresa steeped in religious writings and an unschooled Teresa, representative of the blessed ignorance archetype, as well as between an intensely corporeal imitatio Christi and disembodied contemplative vision, can be linked to these asynchronous temporalities and the conceptually and existentially unstable condition resulting from them. Rather than, as occurs in Ignatius’s Exercises, envisioning a linear pattern that incrementally trains

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the worshiper to attain increasing contemplative fulfillment, Teresa’s prose transmits an ongoing fluctuation between a temporal and a timeless sphere, as well as between corporeal and incorporeal experience. Her life thus presents as an aberration from the structure of mystical teleology which posits a movement from the via purgativa, where the worshiper takes stock of his/her own sinfulness, to the via illuminativa, the solicitation, that is, of God’s mercy, to the via unitiva, fusion with the divine. Rather, Teresa exemplifies the pendular nature of mortal existence. In that respect, she complicates the notion, central within mystical thought, of using memory as a conduit to divine timelessness.8 If it is true that, at one level, there is a clear linear narrative showing how she progressively educates her spiritual memory, in the course of her journey she constantly lapses back into states of confusion after salient moments of spiritual clarity. We could simply view this as a manifestation of the typical setbacks inherent in the difficult path toward successful spiritual meditation. However, looking beyond that grand-narrative, we can say that her veering back and forth among linear temporality, presentist somatization of the Passion, and platonizing experience of the eternal shows that ontological indeterminacy is what emerges as the animating principle of Christian selfhood. The antithesis, in other words, of the experience conveyed in John of the Cross’s “Noche oscura” [“On a Dark Night”], where the soul enters a state of total stillness in which time comes to a halt—“cesó todo” (4) [“everything ceased”]—and all care is consigned to oblivion.9 While Ignatius fashions time as something that can be opportunely seized, Teresa dwells on her failure to arrive at an auspicious temporal order. Emblematic of this is the passage where she says that often, when at prayer, “. . . tenía más cuenta con desear se acabase la hora que tenía por mí de estar, y escuchar cuando daba el reloj, que no en otras cosas buenas, y hartas veces no sé qué penitencia grave se me pusiera delante que no la acometiera de mijor gana que recogerme a tener oración” (105) [“. . . I was more occupied in wishing my hour of prayer were over, and in listening whenever the clock struck, than in thinking of things that were good. Again and again I would rather have done any severe penance that might have been given me than practise recollection as a preliminary to prayer”] (51). Unable to focus on her devotions, her mind becomes fragmented and devolves into listlessly measuring the passage of prosaic clock time, the hollow opposite of beatific stillness. Contrary to Ignatius’s vindication of phenomenologically rich temporality, here the subjective experience of time is emptied out and reduced to a moral flaw, thus contravening the Christian mandate to make wise use of the limited time allotted on earth. While echoing Augustine’s sense of being dispersed in time, Teresa in many respects exceeds the degree of inward fragmentation palpable in her

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precursor’s autobiography. Where Augustine, for all his anguished dichotomies between the mortal and the divine, is able, in certain instances, to resort to memory as a place of soothing recollection, for Teresa, the memory, even when educated, remains fragile. If it is true that Augustine thinks of memory as fluid and often uncertain, his continued belief in its productivity as a capacious archive which can generate new revelations shows that for him the classical conception of memory as producer of enduring exempla is of continued relevance. Divergently, in Teresa’s autobiography, we glimpse the ultimate overturning of Cicero’s definition of rhetorical memory, “Memory is the firm retention in the mind of the matter, words, and arrangement” (Rhetorica ad Herennium 7). Teresa does make an effort to display her ongoing development of an agentive memory. In this she distinguishes herself from alumbradas, framing her spiritual journey in a temporally regimented order. However, by continually doubting the value of her own perceptions she also evinces her failure to live in keeping with the neat ordering of time celebrated by Clement of Rome as one of the main gifts that God purveyed to humanity (Taft 14). But before further pursuing the sense in which her narrative is marked by temporal disruption, it is worth clarifying the way in which she shows deference to the strictures of linear time and to that end a brief detour into epochal views on alumbrados can prove useful. Alumbradismo as Rejection of Time Among the testimonies that circulated about one of the first alumbradas, the Beata Piedrahita, was one that described her lying on the floor with her arms extended outward in the position of the cross, a dramatic performance of her claim that she and Christ were one (Bataillon 73; Lea 6). Although in 1510, she was denounced as a victim of demonic delusion, Piedrahita enjoyed the protection of the church which absolved her from Inquisitorial punishment. However, her successors would be less lucky, as anti-alumbrado sentiment grew in the course of the sixteenth century along with the church’s hostility to prophetic and extatic conduct. As scholars of alumbradismo have explained, grasping the actual convictions of its representatives is a difficult task given that it is their testimonies before Inquisition panels that have largely served as sources for understanding their belief system (Hamilton 116). Moreover, as we might conclude from a line of scholarship going from Bataillon’s Erasme et L’Espagne to Stefania Pastore’s Un’eresia spagnola, we have good reason to doubt the diagnostic value traditionally assigned to labels such as alumbrado, erasmista, and luterano, in addition to converso. While these tended to be bunched together as “non-Spanish” heterodoxies—thus

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creating a false dichotomy between a genuinely Spanish religious purity and an alien unorthodoxy—it makes more sense to avoid such simplification and acknowledge that Spanish religiosity was, in fact, more pluralistic than was previously recognized. That said, it is beyond the scope of this analysis to contribute in any significant way to alumbradismo studies. Rather, my point is to take into account the orthodox church’s attacks on alumbradismo as the concern with temporal questions reflected in them provides some context useful for comprehending Teresa’s own temporal regime. Emblematic of a prevailing animus against spiritual extemporizing is the 1532 trial against the preeminent alumbrada of the time, María de Cazalla, who was said to be inspired in an Erasmian vindication of the spirit over the letter of divine law. A reader of the Enchiridion, she was denounced for her waywardly emotional zeal unconstrained by church norms (Lea 13). In her defense, she alleged that the forms of dejamiento [state of quiet] that she practiced involved didactic training.10 And yet, this did not mitigate the judgement against Cazalla and her cohort who were punished for presuming themselves privileged recipients of divine inspiration despite their scant learning. Specifically repudiated was their pursuit of an “interiorized relationship with the divine” (Homza 7) that disregarded “external rituals of Catholicism, from meditation on Jesus’ crucifixion to physical gestures in church” (Homza 7). The underlying implication was that the heretics were guilty of attempting to negate their mortal condition, as can be surmised from one of the sections of the 1525 Edict against the alumbrados of Toledo: Que estando en el dexamiento no avian de obrar porque no pusieseen obstaculo a lo que dios quisiesse obrar y que se desocupassen de todas las cosas criadas e que aun pensar en la humanidad de Xristo estorvaba el dexamiento en Dios e que desechassen todos los pensamientos que se les ofreciessen aunque fuesen buenos porque a solo dios debian buscar e que era merito el trabaxo que en desechar los tales pensamientos se tenia y que estando en aquella quietud por no distraerse tenia por tentación acordarse de dios (Márquez Los alumbrados 276). [That being in a state of quiet they should not act, so as not to obstruct what God wants to do and that they should ignore all created things and that even thinking about the humanity of Christ disrupted divine quiet and that they should get rid of all the thoughts that would come to them even if they were good because they should seek only God and that the work done to get rid of these thoughts was beneficial and that being in such a state of quiet it was held to be a temptation to remember God.]

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Particularly telling here is the allegation that the alumbrados presumably regarded the act of remembering God as disrupting their blissful beatific state. In other words, they are seen as categorically removing religious experience from the realm of deliberate remembrance. By spontaneously suspending themselves in an absolute present, they forfeit recourse to the will which is considered a crucial component of Christian piety. It is true that communion with divine presence is also part of recogimiento [recollection], an allowed practice different from dejamiento in that it centers on gathering the senses rather than on taking leave of them.11 But that mental discipline was grounded in the conscious use of memory. Among alumbrados’ most ardent critics, Gracián de la Madre de Dios, in his Diez lamentaciones del miserable estado de los ateístas de nuestro tiempo, would malign them for declaring that they could engage in mental rapture without any need for spoken prayer, collective ritual, or good works. Avra algunos años passados, que en España se levantaron unos hereges que se llamavan Alumbrados y dexados, porque dezian que les alumbrava Dios desde el Cielo, y dava luz en sus particulares espiritus, de lo que avian de hazer: y que no avian de hazer obras, dexandose del todo en las manos de Dios, y por eso los llamavan, Dexados, y tambien por que se dexavan caer, diziendo, que tenian extasis y raptos. Estos (siguiendo quasi la misma heregia de los de arriba) ponian todo su negocio en la oracion mental: diziendo mal de la vocal, y de hazer buenas obras. Dezian, que veian en esta vida la divina Essencia (305). [Some years ago, in Spain there emerged some heretics called alumbrados and dejados, because they said that God illuminated them from heaven and gave light to their individual spirits regarding what they should do, and that they were not obliged to do works, leaving themselves entirely in God’s hands; and for that reason they were called dejados, and also because they allowed themselves to fall, saying that they experienced extases and raptures. These (following the same heresy as those mentioned above) devoted themselves entirely to mental prayer, disparaging spoken prayer and the doing of good works. They said that they saw the divine essence in this life.]12 The notion of unfiltered access to divine essence would have been considered particularly egregious by Gracián de la Madre de Dios, who was, incidentally, a friend of Teresa of Ávila. Going against the spirit of self-conscious introspection promoted in confession, where confessors interpellate and channel the worshiper’s inner thoughts according to the teachings of the historical church, here religious experience privileges unadulterated personal sensation. According to Antonio Márquez,

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the chief threat alumbrados were thought to pose was their “oposición a la Iglesia Católica e Imperial de Roma” [“opposition to the Catholic and imperial church of Rome”] grounded in their “subversión del sistema sacramental, basada en una particular hermenéutica bíblica” (163) [“subversion of the sacramental system based on a particular Biblical hermeneutic”], and their prioritization of a purely individual subjectivism over “‘Todo lo que es eclesiástico, histórico, dogmático, objetivo y de autoridad’” (186) [“Everything that is ecclesiastical, historical, dogmatic, objective, and rooted in authority”]. The equation drawn by Márquez between the historical and the objective might rightly give us pause. At its crux is a discomfort with the alumbrados’ view of Christ’s life as repeating itself in them through a kind of timeless and seamless fusion, rather than through an incremental and conscious convergence of distinct temporal horizons. In that sense, we could say that one of the main rationales behind the bias against alumbradismo was that it was seen as utterly thwarting the Augustinian separation between divine eternity and historical time. Alumbrados, in short, are accused of negating their subjection to Chronos, which is regarded as a mark of blasphemous arrogance. This is patent in the 1575 Inquisition trial of Francisca de los Apóstoles who was accused of alumbradismo and punished with one hundred lashes and exile. At issue was her impassioned insistence that the contents of her visions were untranslatable. When the inquisitors commanded that she provide details on the heavenly hosts she reported to have seen and on the divine words uttered to her, she obdurately abstained from complying: She said that she has no words to be able to say what she has been asked because in the rapture that she felt at that time in her soul, her spirit was absorbed in an incomprehensible light. In that light they showed her soul all of those things, and she cannot say with any words anything about how she then understood them. She does not know the manner in which these things were engraved in her understanding in order to be able to say what she saw (90).13 While Francisca comprehended the suspension of her faculties as a measure of divine favor, her hostile audience read this as hallucination. Overly suspect from its perspective was her holding fast to the sensation of her soul flooded by holy apparitions for which she could not account. Her interrogators would not accept that there were “things . . . engraved in her understanding” that she could not explain and that she was also unable to reconstruct how she came to remember them. From their standpoint, if an image was indeed lodged in the memory, the subject had to be able to give some kind of account of it. By proclaiming herself incapable of doing so Francisca appeared to forget her own temporal condition.

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Although less pathos-ridden than Margery Kempe’s effusive adoration of Christ, Francisca’s religious experiences are similarly divested of legitimacy by a church patriarchy accustomed to believe women prone to cognitive derangement. When, for instance, Melchor Cano censures the dissemination of vernacular religious texts, he is especially worried about its effects on women whom he puts on a par with idiots. He affirms that the translation of the Bible “en vulgar ha hecho mucho daño a las mugeres y a los Ydioctas” (qtd. in Caballero 537) [“into Spanish has done great harm to women and idiots”].14 Through strict gate-keeping, church authorities hoped to curtail such immediate access to Holy Writ that could degenerate into sacrilegious anachronism such as that embodied by figures like Cazalla and Francisca. Schooling Memory In contrast with the performance of timelessness associated with alumbradas, Teresa laboriously maps her spiritual practice to chronological time, situating it within a developing pedagogical trajectory. She makes clear that at the beginning of her long spiritual journey she avoided praying without a prayer book: “. . . jamás osaba comenzar a tener oración sin un libro . . .” (70) [“. . . I never dared begin to pray without a book . . .”] (24). Without one, she says, she ran the risk of becoming dissipated: “. . . era siempre cuando me faltaba libro, que era luego disbaratada el alma, y los pensamientos perdidos . . .” (70) [“For it was not usual with me to suffer from aridity: this only came when I had no book . . .”] (24). In addition, she crafts her intimate relationship with Christ and God in constant consultation with her confessors. Noting her own faulty intellect, she sets about scaffolding her devotional experience by studying religious teachings and making use of holy images. Accentuating her need for such guidance, she proclaims herself “amiga de imágenes” (111) [“so fond of pictures”] (56), stating that she needs them in order to begin to comprehend the spiritual beauty of Christ, as, left to its own resources, her mind was incapable of inwardly retaining it. One might, along these lines, view her Vida as demonstrating her assimilation of an expansive artificial visual and textual memory palace. Similarly to Teresa’s prayer treatise, El Castillo interior [The Interior Castle], where, as Michael Gerli has shown, the soul is progressively edified through the deployment of visualization techniques drawn from the ars memoriae, her autobiography shows a commitment to interiorizing conventional learning as part of spiritual introspection. Just as in the treatise absorbing the architecture of the multi-chambered castle is conceived as helping the worshiper to contain disorganized thoughts and advance toward enlightened union of the soul with God, in the Vida,

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deliberate exposure to visual and verbal lessons is shown to allow Teresa’s initially fragmentary grasp of the Messiah’s presence to solidify so that she is eventually able to preserve his image in her mind’s eye. As she remarks in one of the several references to her increasingly lucid grasp of the holy entity, it becomes “engraved” in her: “. . . queda tan esculpido en la imaginación, que no lo puede quitar de sí—por en breve que haya pasado—por algún tiempo, y es harto consuelo y aun aprovechamiento” (383) [“. . . it remained so indelibly stamped upon my imagination that for some time, quickly as it passed, I could not rid myself of it: it is a wonderful comfort to me and it also does me a great deal of good”] (273–74). As is shown in luxurious metaphorical detail in the intercalated chapters (chapters 11–22) that provide a kind of treatise on prayer, preparing the mind for reception of God is akin to tilling a field. Hard work is needed—much irrigating and ploughing—so as to transform the rugged expanse of an uncultivated mind into a fertile terrain in which the holy word can fructify. It is thus made clear that the privileged visions she has in the second half of the Vida, beyond her emphasis on their being tokens of God’s favor, are enabled by her concerted effort to apply herself. Consistent with this, in the previous quotation where she speaks of Jesus sculpted in her imagination, Teresa specifically uses the expression “traía presente” (382) [“I made present”] to demonstrate that she consciously culls up his image.15 Also of note is the fact that, far from a purely experiential phenomenon, it has a didactic function, providing her moral benefit (“aprovechamiento”). Relatedly, it is worth underscoring Teresa’s emphasis on the role of the will in her religious maturation. Discussing the interaction between the three powers of the soul, namely, memory, understanding, and will, she reiterates the importance of the latter as providing a rational anchoring for memory and understanding. That is, the receptive function of the latter two faculties that serve to absorb and accumulate experience, needs to be complemented by the will which serves as a protective mooring: “El entendimiento y imaginación entiendo yo es aquí lo que me daña, que la voluntad buena me parece a mí que está y dispuesta para todo bien” (296) [“It is the understanding and the imagination, I think, which are doing me harm here. My will, I believe, is good, and well disposed to all good things . . .”] (201). In the absence of conscious direction, memory and understanding could be lead astray by false illusions. Teresa’s promotion of epistemic agency echoes the aspirations of Ignatius’s Exercises which, we will remember, centered on “preparar y disponer el ánima para quitar de sí todas las afecciones desordenadas” (1) [“preparing and disposing the soul to free itself of all inordinate attachments”] (37). The affinity between Ignatius’s driven spirituality and Teresa’s personal paideia was no coincidence. As previously stated, some

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of her confessors, such as Francisco de Borja and later Juan de Prádanos, were Jesuit and their thought had a definitive impact on her. Moreover, Teresa repeatedly mentions her admiration for members of the Compañía (Libro de la Vida 229, 232, 235, 236, 327). As Rhodes has explained, the order’s will-centered and highly disciplined mindset appealed to her sensibilities, interested as she was in cultivating a militant dutiful religiosity (41). Rhodes further explains that Ignatius’s regimented practice sought to differentiate itself from the languid sentimentality associated by some to the form of recogimiento practiced by such figures as Osuna and Laredo (36). Along similar lines, Teresa cherishes mental vigor, cautioning that in contemplation “si falta la ocupación de la voluntad” (69) [“if the will has nothing to employ it”] (24), the affects collapse into inner doubt and paralysis. The didactic Teresa emerging in these strands of the autobiography molds a temporal experience in harmony with the dictates of linear time. From this standpoint, progressive memory provides a path for actualizing the conception of godly action as a safeguard against temporal disorder (Genesis 1.18). However, equally prominent in the Vida is the inclination to complicate human access to such order. While the exercise of purposeful remembrance is often invoked as an antidote to inner tumult, the limitation of its powers is concomitantly signaled, for communion with the sacred necessarily involves attentiveness to its ontological otherness. In that sense, the experiencing of temporal instability is as much a part of Teresa’s paradigmatic religious subject as are her attempts to order time. Lux et Brevitas The last chapter of Teresa’s Vida is especially ridden with temporal indeterminacy. On the one hand, it describes her achievement of culminating moments of metaphysical plenitude, but on the other, it reinforces her scattered existence. These two sentiments are, of course, causally connected: the conviction that perceiving the divine necessitates migration to a supracorporeal realm renders that enterprise inherently tenuous. This sense of fragility is made evident in Teresa’s emphasis on the transitoriness of her visions. Hence, this section’s title: a departure from the pairing of divine light and truth (well-known as Lux et Veritas) proclaimed in Exodus (28.30), here godly illumination is inextricably linked to a sense of impermanence. Admittedly, to a certain degree, the concluding chapter might be read as the capstone of Teresa’s spiritual journey. She signifies that she has attained a superior level of enlightenment, affirming her commitment to “no hablar sino cosas muy verdaderas” (40) [“speak only of things which

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are very true”] (291). These, moreover, rise to the level of metaphysical certitudes for they derive from an all-encompassing truth “sin principio ni fin” (405) [“without beginning or end”] (292), which is itself conceived as an emanation of God’s love. Sublime ideal is, furthermore, actualized in apparitions of an ethereal Christ invested with transcendental luminosity. Teresa is also visited by a vision reflecting “cómo se ven en Dios todas las cosas” (407) [“how all things are seen in God”] (293). Stamping itself in her soul, the non-visual image is so ineffable that Teresa has to resort to analogy to explain it: Digamos ser la Divinidad como un muy claro diamante, muy mayor que todo el mundo, u espejo, a manera de lo que dije del alma en estotra visión, salvo que es por tan más subida manera, que yo no lo sabré encarecer; y que todo lo que hacemos se ve en ese diamante, siendo de manera que él encierra todo en sí, porque no hay nada que salga fuera de esta grandeza (407–408). [Let us say that the Godhead is like a very clear diamond, much larger than the whole world, or a mirror, like that which symbolized the soul in my account of an earlier vision, except that it is of a far sublimer kind, to which I cannot do justice. Let us suppose, furthermore, that all we do is seen in this diamond, which is of such a kind that it contains everything within itself, because there is nothing capable of falling outside such greatness.] (294) Made possible by her years of persistent meditations, this vision stands as a culminating representation of the eternal. The diamond itself signifies that which is beyond space and time but which, paradoxically, envelops them, just as an immutable God is both “transcendent” of and “immanent” in mortal being.16 Citing Augustine’s assertion that one must look inwardly to find God (Libro de la vida 46), she drives in the point that theophany is now lodged deep within her. At these moments being is, momentarily, no longer “a movable image of Eternity” (Timaeus 77)” for “el alma está en union” (406) [“the soul is in union”] (293), or “recogida” (406) [“recollected”] (293). Such images of absolute wholeness reflect the soul pried from its habitual distention in time, to the extent that “tiene absortas las potencias” (406) [“its faculties are wholly absorbed”] (293): understanding, memory, and will are suspended. The contrast between this aspiration to reach for an absolute end (God as ultimate cause) and Ignatius’s concentration on process is telling. The more Aristotelian Ignatius understands piety as an approximate enactment of principle rather than as an attempt to grasp its essence. Hence, the guidelines he includes toward the end of the Exercises:

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El que está consolado procure humiliarse y bajarse cuando puede, pensando cuán para poco es en el tiempo de la desolación sin la tal gracia o consolación. Por el contrario, piense el que está en desolación que puede mucho con la gracia suficiente para resistir a todos sus enemigos, tomando fuerzas en su Criador y Señor. (324) [A person who is in consolation should take care to humble and abase himself as much as possible. He should recall how little he is worth in time of desolation without such grace or consolation. On the other hand, a person who is in desolation should recall that he can do much to withstand all of his enemies by using the sufficient grace that he has, and taking strength in his Creator and Lord.] (131) Similar to Aristotle’s golden mean principle (Nichomachean Ethics 25–30), Ignatius’s instructions call for commonsensical avoidance of extremes, in this case excessive self-confidence and excessive despair. Uninterested in having the affects yearn for transcendental existence, he understands sentient life as an intuitive and adaptive process that fittingly shifts according to changing circumstances. Meanwhile, in Teresa’s platonizing scheme genuine contact with divine presence hinges upon breaking with time. Her experiences of theophany are thus characterized by an absence of duration. About her state of rapture, she says at one point that “. . . esto dura poco . . .” (406) [“. . . this period . . . is short . . .”] (293), for “. . . en esta vida no podíamos estar siempre en un ser . . .” (410) [“. . . in this life we could not always be in the same condition”] (296). When she comes back from her short-lived extases and her potencias—her memory and understanding—return, she is confronted with her scattered life. Such is her sensation of selfestrangement, that she feels “como cosa muerta” (412) [“like a dead thing”] (298) and finds herself wishing to disappear from living memory. The last paragraphs of her Vida center a good deal on the way in which she inhabits the mortal realm. Quite striking is her description of the temporal no-man’s-land in which this leaves her: “Y hame dado una manera de sueño en la vida, que casi siempre me parece estoy soñando lo que veo, ni contento ni pena, que sea mucha, no la veo en mí. Si alguna me dan algunas cosas, pasa con tanta brevedad que yo me maravillo, y deja el sentimiento como una cosa que soñó.” (412) [“He has given me a life which is a kind of sleep: when I see things, I nearly always seem to be dreaming them. In myself I find no great propensity either to joy or to sorrow. If anything produces either of these conditions in me, it passes so quickly that I marvel, and the feeling it leaves is like the feeling left by a dream”] (298). Lived experience devolves into phantasmatic dream. Such a reduction of life to elusive reverie in some

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respects anticipates the uncertainty about sensate existence articulated in Calderón’s La vida es sueño. Stripped of the visionary status assigned them in eschatological discourses, Calderonian dreams are metaphors for a shadowy experience from which no escape is envisioned. Similarly, Teresa’s ruminations on her own spectral condition also suppose a rereading of Paul’s assertion that the world is in the process of vanishing (Corinthians 7.31). If for Paul this forebodes an imminent divine end, Teresa feels compelled to turn her attention away from apotheotic closure and grapple with her indefinite sojourn in an impermanent world where even heavenly illumination has no staying power. True, she does devote some passages to conveying visions that prophesy the flourishing of her order and the multiplication of its martyrs. Included here is an image that comes to her of a sacred battle against heretics. However, such apparitions take up little space in the chapter which, in many respects, seems more occupied with articulating temporal instability than with proclaiming the realization of sacred telos. We might contrast this outlook with the self-assured tenor of Francisca de los Apóstoles’s testimony which vouches for the endurance of her celestial vision: “upon entering into her interior she finds and has always found a great conformity with the will of Our Lord in all the things that have come to pass” (88). The godly presence she perceives within her is endowed with utter constancy to which she “always” has access. Meanwhile, in Teresa’s Vida, the ability to compartmentalize visionary experiences as separate from the confusions of historical time is ultimately compromised. Teresa’s negative view of time leads to her feeling alienated from her own experiences, something that is also reinforced earlier on in the text. Otras veces tenía males corporales más graves, y como no tenia los de el alma, los pasaba con mucha alegría; mas cuando era todo junto, era tan gran trabajo que me apretaba muy mucho. Todas las mercedes que me había hecho el Señor se me olvidaban; sólo quedaba una memoria como cosa que se ha soñado, para dar pena; porque se entorpece el entendimiento de suerte, que me hacía andar en mil dudas y sospecha. . . . (291) [At other times I suffered from more grievous bodily ills, and, if I had no spiritual distress, I bore these with great joy. It was when both kinds of distress came upon me together that my trials were so great and caused me such deep depression. I would forget all the favours that the Lord had bestowed upon me: nothing would remain with me but the mere recollection of them, like the memory of a dream, and this was a great distress to me. For, when a person is in this condition, the understanding becomes stupid; and so I was tormented by a thousand doubts and suspicions.] (197)

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Unable at these junctures to remain directed in her reliving of the Messiah’s pain, she falls out of synch with Christic time and lapses into a state of mental and sensorial disarray. That the concluding passages of her Vida continue to harp on the fragility of memory highlights Teresa’s ongoing struggle with Chronos. Telling in this respect is her comment: “Dame consuelo oír el relox, porque me parecer me allego un poquito más para ver a Dios de que veo ser pasada aquella hora de la vida” (411) [“It comforts me to hear a clock strike, for when I find that another hour of life has passed away, I seem to be getting a little nearer to the vision of God”] (297). Far from a sign of tranquil resignation to temporalized existence, the remark is followed by an intimation of feeling herself in a kind of phenomenological void: “Otras veces estoy de manera que ni siento vivir ni me parece he ganas de morir, sino con una tibieza y escuridad en todo . . .” (411) [“At other times I am in a state in which I do not feel I am alive and yet I do not seem to want to die: as I have said is frequently the case, I experience a kind of lukewarmness and everything is dark . . .”] (297). Ending her autobiography on a rather prosaic note, Teresa remarks that she has been hasty in writing an account of her life: “heme atrevido a concertar esta mi desbaratada vida, aunque no gastando en ello más cuidado ni tiempo de lo que ha sido menester para escribirla” (413) [“. . . I have ventured to put together this story of my unruly life, though I have wasted no more time or trouble on it than has been necessary for the writing of it . . .”] (299). With this, she relegates her life to hasty clock time, thereby condemning herself to a spectral liminality. Contrastingly to Ignatius’s faith in a robust imaginative memory that anticipates Ricoeur’s reconciliation of phenomenological impression and mental clarity, Teresa destabilizes memory by investing it with phantasmatic uncertainty. In the following chapters, we will see how Teresa’s emphasis on the brevity of the mortal condition and the sense of experiential estrangement that goes with it are revisited on the other side of the Atlantic in ways that further diversify the Christian temporal condition. Notes 1 All excerpts from the Libro de la vida in English, unless otherwise indicated, are from Allison Peers’s translation. 2 Teresa mentions this fear several times in the work. 3 See Forman for a rich reflection on how Teresa’s form of writing captures fraught inward experience. 4 Regarding Teresa’s writings’ relationship to Hispanic mystical literature, see Criado de Val. 5 On her affinity with Dionysus the Areopagite’s contemplative thought, see González Pérez.

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6 See Rhodes 41, Espina Cepeda 3–6, and Iglesias. 7 Regarding the presence of Augustine’s thought in Teresa’s writings, see Cámara and Rey Altuna. 8 On this use of memory in mystical and contemplative practice, see Dupré and Dailey. 9 Translation mine. 10 The English translation of dejamiento is from Hamilton 105. 11 The English translation of recogimiento comes from Hamilton 106. 12 Translation mine. 13 I reproduce this excerpt only in English because there is, to my knowledge, no circulating edition of these Inquisitorial proceedings in Spanish. 14 Translation mine. 15 Translation mine. 16 I borrow the words from one of the first chapter subtitles of Chadwick’s translation of the Confessions (5).

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The Imperfect Conquest of Time In his 1595 Historia eclesiástica indiana, Jerónimo de Mendieta remembers a time in the early stages of New Spain’s evangelization when there were tablets that blended Aztec and Christian calendars. Recalling having had one in his possession, he expresses relief that the church since forbade them, alleging that they encouraged continued allegiance to pagan ritual cycles. Mas porque era cosa peligrosa que anduviese entre los indios, trayéndoles á la memoria las cosas de su infidelidad y idolatría antigua (porque en cada dia tenian su fiesta y ídolo á quien la hacian, con sus ritos y ceremonias), por tanto, con mucha razon fué mandado que el tal calendario se extirpase del todo, y no pareciese, como el dia de hoy no parece, ni hay memoria de él. Aunque es verdad que algunos indios viejos y otros curiosos tienen aún al presente en la memoria los dichos meses y sus nombres. Y los han pintado en algunas partes; y en particular en la portería del convento de Cuatinchan tienen pintada la memoria de cuenta que ellos tenian antigua con estos caractéres ó signos llenos de abusion. Y no fué acertado dejárselo pintar, ni es acertado permitir que se conserve la tal pintura, ni que se pinten en parte alguna los dichos caractéres, sino que totalmente los olviden y se rijan los indios solamente por el calendario y cuenta de dias y meses y años que tiene y usa la Iglesia católica romana. (98–99) [For as it was dangerous that it circulate among the Indians, prompting them to remember the things of their infidelity and ancient idolatry (because for each day they had a designated festivity and idol to which they devoted rites and ceremonies). So with good reason it was decreed that such a calendar be banned and that it not appear, as today it does not appear, nor is there memory of it. Although it is true that some elderly Indians and other curious souls still remember the said

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Pious Subjects for a Post-millenarian New Spain months and their names. And they have painted them in some places; and in particular in the entryway of the Cuatinchan convent they have a painted representation of their old time-keeping system with its characters and signs filled with superstition. And it was not a good idea to allow them to paint it, nor is it fitting to permit that such a painting be preserved, nor that such characters be depicted anywhere, but rather that they forget them and that the Indians adhere strictly to the calendar and days and months and years used by the Roman Catholic church.]1

An eloquent reminder, this, that colonizing time was to the occupiers as important as colonizing space. Incorporating the Americas into the Catholic church necessitated finding compelling ways to intertwine their respective pasts, presents, and futures within a presumptively homogeneous temporal regime. Millenarianism provided the early missionaries a useful framework for such a Herculean enterprise, for it imagined Christ’s Second Coming as a planetary-scale event actualized by Spanish zeal.2 Under this scheme, the founding of an iglesia indiana stood as a divinely ordained axial moment, a harbinger of the long-awaited New Jerusalem. Accordingly, the initial conversion campaigns spearheaded by Franciscan friars and furthered by Dominican and Augustinian mendicants saw themselves as turning New Spain into a Christian utopia. And yet, as the years advanced, it grew more difficult to cast these lands as harbors of paradisaical innocence and exceptional piousness. Against its original portrayal as a paradise immune from the ravages of history, New Spain came to be associated with genocide, destruction, and corruption. As emphasized in various parts of Mendieta’s own account, apostolic aspirations would, in due course, succumb to mercantile greed. This complicates the conception of time Mendieta advocates when he calls for the erasure of pre-Christian calendrical systems. As is evident in the Historia eclesiástica itself, the Christianization of New Spain cannot very well be considered a definitive turn from idolatry to piety as it is ridden with reversals and descents into godlessness. Failing as an inclusive temporal regime which seamlessly absorbs new worshipers, Christianity falls short of its promised universalism: not all worshipers can participate equally in it. A sense of growing misalignments between mortal history and divine plan intensify such divisions. Against the initially trumpeted notion that universal conversion, extending to the most remote “gentiles ocultos” (Baudot 95) [“hidden pagans”], would usher in the fullness of time, the ascendancy of a messianic Christian subject proves to be a shortlived fantasy.3 Now, it is true, as many scholars have demonstrated, that millennialism is adapted to successive stages of the Spanish colonization and in that

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respect does not die out with the demise of mendicant influence.4 We see it live on in a number of ideologically diverse manifestations, from Bartolomé de las Casas’s 1561 Historia de las Indias which ties Columbus’s voyage to the auspicious promise of a universal Church (Boruchoff 7), to Cristóbal de Villalpando’s circa 1700 painting, Mística ciudad de Dios, depicting Sor María Agreda’s mystical Jerusalem along with the figure of Saint John penning the Book of Revelation, to protopatriotic cultural manifestations that celebrate a distinctly Mexican religiosity by endowing it with a messianic aura. Representative of the latter trend would be the flowering cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe who was identified with the lady of the Apocalypse (Lafaye 149). Among its salient founders was the seventeenth-century theologian Miguel Sánchez who “convirtió a su patria en una alegoría viva de la visión descrita por san Juan” (Rubial, “El Apocalipsis” 55) [“turned his country into a live allegory of the vision described by Saint John”], laying the groundwork for a lasting autochthonous prophetic tradition that would attain particular prominence the following century with the republican theology of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier.5 Such examples attest to the adaptability of millenarian thought which, in the face of historical conflict, fuels continued faith in a providential teleology. The revival of Joachimism, on which I will elaborate further in conjunction with my analysis of Mendieta’s work, would play a key role in providing a model through which to adapt destabilizing historical fluctuations to archetypal Biblical design. This does not, though, stem the multiplication of mutually conflicting temporal regimes. Alongside Joachimist currents there percolates a pessimistic Augustinianism which accentuates the discontinuity between worldly temporal experience and divine theophany.6 This is patent in the shifting articulations of imitatio Christi contained in the texts I examine in this chapter. Mendieta’s above-cited Historia eclesiástica undercuts millenarian schemes by imagining the transition of the New World church to a disenchanted era incompatible with early Indigenous converts’ fervent religiosity. Contrastingly, the second text that I consider, Tratado del Apocalipsis de San Juan, written in 1586 by Mendieta’s contemporary, the hermit Gregorio López, situates itself at the threshold of Endtimes. The interiorized spirituality that López models turns the imitation of Christ into an experience of eternity. Not so, however, in the 1613 biography of López written by Francisco Losa. On display there, is an effort to make the hermit emblematic of an earthbound Christocentric vida in keeping with Tridentine anti-propheticism. It bears reiterating that the temporalities modeled in these works provide only a partial view of how time was experienced in this context. As is true of any place and historical moment, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

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New Spain, there is not a finite number of ways of fathoming or inhabiting time. All the more so, considering the juxtaposition of Catholic and Mesoamerican cosmogonies and the variegated as well as fluid process of their comingling. Reflecting on how the explosion of temporalities that this entails would disturb Western linear chronologies, Serge Gruzinski says: Yet mestizo mechanisms disrupt that linearity. They arose in sixteenthcentury America at the junction of distinct temporalities—those of Western Christendom and Amerindian societies—which they brought into brutal contact and mutual interpenetration. Here the metaphor of contiguity, succession, and replacement that subtends an evolutionary interpretation is no longer valid, not only because the temporality of the vanquished was not automatically replaced by that of the victors, but because it could coexist with it for centuries. By suddenly merging societies long held to be distinct, the intrusion of mélange undermines portrayals of historic development as a unique evolution, and sheds light on the crossroads, side streets, and dead ends that should all be taken into account (29). The anxiety expressed by Mendieta regarding the survival of preconquest calendrical systems is clearly symptomatic of this temporal pluralism.7 How Mesoamericans processed these discontinuities, to what extent native populations assimilated Christian time schemes, and whether Aztec understandings of apocalypse (as part of 52-year cycles) are, from their own perspectives, at all reconcilable with Christian millenarianism are all important questions which would require an entirely different kind of study.8 The arguments elaborated here specifically relate to how three Spanish-born authors draw on the fluid time regimes present within Catholicism to articulate versions of Christian subjecthood which contribute in their own ways to the temporal pluralism of the monarquía universal. Mendieta’s Historia eclesiástica indiana: The End of Kairos Mendieta concludes Book IV of his Historia eclesiástica on a grim note. Bemoaning the pangs of a flailing church, he decries its subjection to “la fiera bestia de la codicia, que ha devastado y exterminado la viña, haciéndose adorar (como la bestia del Apocalipsi) por universal señora . . .]” (561) [“the savage bestial greed that has devastated and exterminated the vineyard, demanding to be worshipped (like the beast of the Apocalypse) as universal lord . . .”]. With this he announces the demise of the spiritual apogee presumably attained under the first missionaries. About the association of that bygone era with a buoyant primitive church, David Brading would

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remark, “. . . there is a sunlit, euphoric quality about the spiritual conquest in central Mexico, endowing it with a numinous character . . .” (The First America 103). Under the aegis of St. Francis, understood by Saint Bonaventure as the angel of the Apocalypse who opens the sixth seal—that of the penultimate age when evangelization spreads on a planetary scale—the mendicants, Motolinía salient among them, would tout the Indigenous conversions as a fulfillment of the age of the spirit prophesied to precede the Second Coming (Brading, The First America 108). But such buoyancy is short-lived, as the century closes with a sense that the Golden era of millenarian promise has given way to “the wintry, silver epoch of Philip II” (Brading, The First America 115). A vivid testament to this is Mendieta’s portrayal of a collapsing world in which zealous ministers are left powerless as predatorial greed prevails. Meanwhile, Indigenous subjects are primordially described as blameless victims who endure horrors at the hands of covetous conquerors many of whom themselves end up destitute, for “dinero de Indias es dinero de duendes, que de volverse en carbón ó humo no puede escapar” (562) [“money from the Indies is elves’ money, which inevitably becomes ashes and smoke”]. One might well interpret Mendieta’s diatribe as an effort to perpetuate the link between heinous earthly events and archetypal Biblical history. Along those lines, scholars have emphasized the apocalyptic dimension of the chronicle, seeing in it prophetic denunciations that gesture toward eschatological resolution (Phelan, Cesareo, Trais Folch, Serna). More specifically, the author is said to adopt a millennialist lens to decry the moment when the mendicant friars lose clout as the secular orders gain authority under Philip II. That the chronicler casts the evil forces to which the church has caved as a beast of the Apocalypse along with the fact that in the prologue and the conclusion Mendieta takes on the voice of the prophet Jeremiah would appear to provide solid support for this reading. Like many in colonial America, Mendieta is strongly influenced by the twelfth-century theologian Joachim de Fiore who interpreted history as a series of repetitions of the Hebrew Bible paradigm of exile and return. The excoriation of Jesus and his apostles would be viewed as an instance of exile, a replay of the Babylonian captivity, and of the earlier Egyptian captivity. The subsequent corruption of the Latin Church would constitute another exile which would be brought to an end under the holy direction of the Pope and the monastic orders, leading to the final realization of a new promised land. In Mendieta’s context, the era of the mendicants (1524–1564) is understood to be the golden age of the church akin to the time between Moses and the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, and the ensuing church regime beginning with Philip II becomes New World Catholicism’s period of Babylonian captivity (Phelan 41, Merrim chapter 3).

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While the doom-filled passages of Mendieta’s work undeniably have apocalyptic inflections, they do not look forward to an imminent final reckoning whereby the evils of earthly existence will be extinguished by the triumphal foundation of the New Jerusalem. Even those, like Mercedes Serna, who claim that the Historia eclesíastica has an apocalyptic vein, qualify it as a “pesimismo apocalíptico” (142; see also Phelan 151–53). Meanwhile, Brading notes that it offers little hope for the future and is, rather, tinged with nostalgia. He suggests that such disillusion is politically expedient as it shows Mendieta’s acceptance of the fact that the forsaken flocks now belong under the protection of an earthly Spanish king (The First America 116). Rather, though, than focusing on the work as a consistent argument in favor of a given thesis, I prefer to approach it as shaping a Christian temporality progressively stripped of eschatological anticipation, something that, inevitably, incurs in inconsistencies. We see in the text a kind of palimpsest of mutually conflicting temporalities as, at some junctures Mendieta appears to theologize human time while, overall, accommodating to its desacralization. As the reign of Kairos—defined, again, as the seizing a Christic present (Hartog, Chronos 6)—proves outdated, the advent of a providential future becomes a bygone illusion. In the process, the existence of the Indigenous worshipers as peripheral beings is reinforced. Early on in the work, toward the beginning of the first book which is devoted to the initial arrival of the Spaniards in the Caribbean, Mendieta describes the event as a realization of the chapter from the Gospel of Luke in which Christ has a servant call “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” (Luke 14:13) to supper. Deploying the supper as a metaphor for the end of time, Mendieta uses it to exemplify the divine charge assigned to the Spanish Catholic monarchy: Tenemos, pues, de aquí, que la parábola propuesta en el santo Evangelio, del siervo enviado á llamar gente para la cena del Señor, á la letra se verifica en el rey de España, que á la hora de la cena, conviene á saber, en estos últimos tiempos, muy cercanos al fin del mundo, se le ha dado especialmente el cargo de hacer este llamamiento de todas gentes . . . (25) [From here we may conclude that the parable proposed in the holy Gospel about the servant who is sent to call people to the Lord’s supper, is instantiated in the King of Spain who, at the hour of the supper, that is to say, in these recent times, very close to the end of the world, has especially been tasked with summoning all the peoples. . . .] The peoples referred to here are converted Jews, Muslims, and, importantly, the Indigenous populations whose integration into the church is meant to be a final actualization of the supper—synecdoche of the Incarnation—which ensures universal salvation.

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By the end of the book, though, it becomes ever clear that the crown’s eschatological mission has been diverted and the promise of the bounteous life-giving supper has been annihilated: “. . . no solo los fructos de su cristiandad y los pámpanos de la temporal prosperidad se han desparecido cuasi del todo, mas aun las mismas cepas (las pocas que han quedado) están ya enfermas, como resequidas y cocosas, estériles y sin provecho, y la viña vuelta un eriazo, bosque ó matorral . . .” (560) [“. . . not only have the fruits of his Christianity and the shoots of temporal prosperity almost entirely disappeared, but even more so the plants (the few that have remained) are already sick, likely dried and damaged, sterile and without benefit, and the vine has become fallow, a wood or thicket . . .”]. Although here too Mendieta applies Biblical tropes to worldly events, they signal a troubling disruption of providential history. The spatio-temporal design marshalled to sacralize the conquest no longer applies as the copious feast has been reduced to sterility and its principal guests have been cast out. Notably, Mendieta contradicts his previous assertion that the integration of America into the monarchy’s divine banquet signaled approaching Endtimes. Weighing in on an ongoing debate about whether Mesoamerican peoples are among lost tribes of Israel destined to be converted to Christianity toward the end of time, the author reflects. ¿Y quién sabe si estamos tan cerca del fin del mundo, que en estos se hayan verificado las profecías que rezan haberse de convertir los judíos en aquel tiempo? Porque en estos (si vienen de judíos) ya lo vemos cumplido; pero de esotros bachilleres del viejo mundo, yo poca confianza tengo que se hayan de convertir, si Dios milagrosamente no los convierte. Dejémoslo á él todo, que sabe lo cierto, que nosotros (como dicen) hablamos de gracia, y podemos dar una en el clavo y ciento en la herradura (540). [And who knows if we are so close to the end of the world that we are seeing the fulfillment of the prophecies about the conversion of the Jews in that time? For in them (if they come from the Jews) we have already seen them accomplished; but regarding those other old world graduates, I have little trust that they will convert if God does not miraculously convert them. Let us leave everything to him, for he knows with certainty what we (as they say) merely speak by grace, and we can be right once and wrong a hundred times.] Far from, as John Leddy Phelan would have it, being a “visionary . . . who like most apocalyptical mystics was apt to confuse this world with the next world” (108), Mendieta emphasizes his mortality. Antithetical to the rhetoric of the prophet, Mendieta’s words evince a considerable temporal uncertainty. Stating his limited discernment powers, he avows his inability to determine the true meaning of events or of their positioning in relation

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to the presumed end of time. Moreover, his open-ended speculations about the disparities between Christian conversion in the old and the new worlds foreground a desynchronized history that undermines the universalizing spirit of providential narratives. This renders the position of the Indigenous worshipers exceedingly tenuous. Dreams about their pivotal role in the realization of Kairos are utterly deflated. Once guarantors of a portentous future, they now face potential oblivion. At the beginning of his fourth book which focuses on the continued evangelizing efforts of the Franciscans along with those of the Dominican and Augustinian friars joining them soon after their arrival, Mendieta says that one of his goals is to show “que no tiene Dios tan desechada y puesta en olvido esta pobre nación indiana, cuanto los hombres del mundo la desechan y apocan” (361) [“for God has not so discarded or forgotten this poor nation, as much as the men of the world have discarded and belittled it”]. However well-intentioned, the observation is damning for those it purports to defend, for not only does it strip them of historical protagonism, but it concedes that they are in the process of being forgotten. His suggestion that God is, after all, not so neglectful of the “poor nation” can hardly pass as advocacy, not least because of its recourse to a negative construction—“no tiene Dios tan desechada”—as opposed to a positive formulation of the relationship. With this in mind, one could read Mendieta’s work as confining Indigenous people to a temporal limbo. Either it is decreed—as exemplified in the passage criticizing hybrid calendars—that they must forget their idolatrous past so as to be reborn as Christians or they are deemed too childlike to be full members of the church. Said otherwise, they are considered to have either too much memory or too little, so that they cannot be temporally assimilated into the Spanish monarchia universal. Much of Book 3, which commemorates the successes of the first conversion campaigns led in New Spain by the twelve Franciscan so-called apostles, plays up their converts’ overly emotional religiosity, as is exemplified in a passage about their extravagant efforts to receive confession: Ver el fervor y lágrimas con que lo pedian, y los ofrecimientos que hacian de padecer por ello hambre y cansancio, era para quebrantar el corazon. Acaecia ir el religioso por la laguna de México, que atraviesa siete leguas, y ir tantas barquillas tras él, que cerraban la laguna, y algunos indios y indias echarse al agua por llegar primero á confesarse. Verdaderamente no parecia sino á la letra cumplirse lo que leemos en el Evangelio, de las turbas ó compañas que seguian á nuestro Redentor Jesucristo por doquiera que iba. . . .(283) [To see the fervor and tears with which they asked for it and their offers to endure hunger and fatigue was heart-breaking. The religious man used to go by the lake of Mexico, which is seven leagues wide, and

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to have so many boats follow him, that they blocked the lake, and some Indians would throw themselves in the water in order to be the first to confess. In truth, it appeared that the words that we read in the Gospel about the hoards or flocks that followed our Redeemer Jesus Christ wherever he went were being fulfilled. . . .] At one level, there seems to be a total collapsing of historical horizons, as the manifestations of extreme faith depicted here appear to be reenactments of Gospel scenes of Christ’s charismatic ministry. Not lost on the reader is the portrayal of Indigenous faith as a revival of Christ’s primitive church—the church of the Beatitudes, of the poor and the downtrodden. Equally noteworthy is the chasm the account creates between the reader and the zealous crowds: the characterization of Indigenous devotion as heartbreaking emphasizes its otherness. Moreover, the persistent use of the imperfect tense reinforces the fact that the scenes describe what used to happen: a golden era that is bygone. Further extending his portrayal of Indigenous worshipers as anachronic Christians, Mendieta says that many of them are so pure that “. . . no saben pecar; tanto, que los confesores con algunos de ellos se hallan mas embarazados que con otros grandes pecadores, buscando alguna materia de pecado por donde les puedan dar el beneficio de la absolucion” (451) [“. . . they do not know how to sin, so much so, that the confessors are made more uncomfortable by some of them than by other great sinners, grasping for some sign of sin so they can give them the benefit of absolution”]. Such is their exclusion from the lapsed history of humanity that they do not even know wrongdoing. From their first exposure to proselytization, Mendieta tells us, the new faithful are keenly drawn to the worship of Christ: “. . . viene á pelo decir algo de la mucha devocion que los indios desde el principio de su conversion tomaron á la imágen ó figura de la santa Cruz, en que nuestro Señor Jesucristo quiso morir para nos redemir” (307) [“. . . it is pertinent to say something of the great devotion that since the beginning of their conversion the Indians displayed toward the image or figure of the holy cross, in which our Lord Jesus Christ died in order to redeem us”]. However, their connection with him is shown to be a puerile one, enabled by the patient pedagogy of the friars. Mendieta describes the whole battery of physical performances and material objects deployed by the Franciscans to help their unschooled subjects absorb religious doctrine. The friars kneel on the ground, placing their arms in the form of the cross and they exhibit paintings and images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and assorted liturgical symbols (218). Anticipated here are Diego de Valadés’ later theories about Christian preaching in America as having to rely on visual images due to its inhabitants’ lack of memory: “Pues siendo [los indios] hombres sin letras,

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olvidadizos y amantes de la novedad y de la pintura, así ese arte para anunciar la palabra divina fue tan fructuoso y tan atractivo . . .” (95–96) [“For being (the Indians) men without letters, forgetful and lovers of the novelty of painting, so it is that that art was so fruitful and attractive for proclaiming the divine word. . .”]. Along similar lines, Mendieta touts the importance of using images so that Catholic doctrine “se les imprimiera en sus memorias desde su tierna edad, y no hubiera tanta ignorancia como á veces hay por falta de esto” (250) [“become engraved in their memories from their childhood, and there would not be as much ignorance as there is sometimes when this practice is not cultivated”].9 The multiple stories of the new converts’ ardent religious performances recounted by Mendieta echo Valadés’s vision of a people who integrate Christian doctrine from a horizon of historical infancy. They also show the double-discourse underpinning the whole enterprise of implanting Christian memory in the New World, for, while purporting to favor the expansion of Catholic doctrine, the churchmen inhibit it by obdurately excluding their new subjects from historical time. Showcasing their unbridled enthusiasm for fasting and giving away all their possessions, Mendieta characterizes their devotions as naïve and excessive. Emphasizing their overeagerness, he shows them entreating friars to mete out punishments to them and, after being absolved, pressing them further with questions such as, “‘¿Á cuántos pobres tengo de dar mantas, ó á cuántos pobres tengo de dar de comer en tal fiesta?’” (291) [“To how many poor people must I give blankets, or how many poor people do I need to feed at such a festivity?”]. Mendieta underscores their childlike imitatio Christi by implying a disconnect between the church norms followed by the friars and their adherents’ visceral insistence on exceeding the norm. Mendieta thus denies them the reasoned voluntad that, as reflected in Saint Ignatius’s Exercises and in Saint Teresa’s Vida, was touted by Peninsular Catholicism as the allowed way of participating in Christian history. There are some exceptions to this, as shown in episodes where Mendieta remembers Indigenous figures who display a mature religious zeal. Such is the case with a young man named Cristóbal who is such a good student of Franciscan teachings that he proceeds to preach Christian doctrine and to combat idolatry. Brutally tortured by his father, he displays stunning forbearance. Forgiving his excessive cruelty, he says that, far from being angry at him, he is filled with gratitude: “‘No estoy sino muy alegre, y sábete que me has hecho mas merced, y me has dado mas honra que si heredara tu señorío’” (239) [“‘I am very happy and know that you have done me more good and you have given me more honor than if I were to inherit your property’”]. Then, there is a man named Francisco who founds many churches and actively participates in the

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institutionalization of ecclesiastical authority. He dies a tranquil death: “. . . confesado con mucho aparejo, y llamando siempre á Dios, murió como fiel cristiano” (262) [“. . . duly confessed and always calling to God, he died a faithful Christian”]. Both Cristóbal’s and Francisco’s deaths evince sage resignation to the limitations of human life. Their stoic demeanor is well suited to a lapsed world of post-millenarian desengaño in which the relationship between worldly time and eschatological closure has become uncertain. And yet, these versions of emotionally savvy Christianity do not become conduits to a collective temporal regime. In a chapter of the fourth book of the chronicle where he describes the lives of various Indigenous men who display what he considers to be enlightened forms of imitatio Christi, Mendieta punctuates the accounts with a reflection about why, unlike the converts of the early antique Church, they cannot become clergy. Rather, the ideal fate for them would be to exist in a timeless utopia. Y que fuera á la manera de aquella isla, que algunos dicen encantada, y los antiguos llamaron Anthilia, que cae no muy lejos de la isla de la Madera, y que en nuestros tiempos la han visto algo lejos, y en llegando cerca de ella se desaparece, donde teniendo gran abundancia de todas las cosas temporales, se ocupan lo mas del tiempo en hacer procesiones y alabar á Dios con himnos y cánticos espirituales. . . . Igual fuera pedir á Nuestro Señor que á todos los indios los pusiera encubiertos, repartidos por islas de aquella misma forma y concierto, pues ellos vivieran quietos y pacíficos en servicio de Dios, como en paraíso terrenal, y al cabo de la vida se fueran al cielo, y se evitaran las ocasiones por donde muchos de los nuestros por su causa se van al infierno. Porque si en aquella isla se vive (segun se presupone) cristianísimamente, claro está que los moradores de ella viven debajo de la obediencia y gremio de la Iglesia católica, cuya principal cabeza (que es ese mismo Dios) tienen por Papa y Sumo Pontífice, y que poseen la suma felicidad que se puede desear en la tierra. Pues con esto concluyo lo propuesto, que los indios no son para prelados ni maestros, sino para siempre súbditos y discípulos. . . . (449) [And it would be in the manner of that island that some deem enchanted, and that the ancients called Antillia, which is not very far from the island of Madeira, and that in our times has been sighted from afar and when one draws near, it disappears. There, amid a great abundance of temporal things, the majority of time is devoted to processions and to worshiping God with hymns and spiritual songs. . . . It would be similar to ask Our Lord to usher away all the Indians and distribute them among those islands in the same manner and concert, for they would live calmly and peacefully in God’s service, as in an earthly paradise, and at the end of life they would go to heaven, and the

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Pious Subjects for a Post-millenarian New Spain circumstances through which many of ours go to hell would be avoided. For if in that island people live (as is presupposed) in a most Christian way, it is clear that its dwellers live under the aegis of the Catholic church, whose principal head (who is that same God) they take as their Pope and Supreme Pontiff, and that they possess the greatest happiness that can be wished for on earth. For with this I conclude what was proposed, that the Indians are not meant to be prelates or masters, but rather forever subjects and disciples.]

In opposition to the earlier metaphor of a multitudinous banquet where all peoples are invited and where the arrival of the latest guests—the Indigenous converts—heralds universal salvation, now it turns out that they are excluded from the promised banquet. Although the passage culminates in what appears a fairly institutional reinforcement of church authority over Indigenous populations, the imagined geography that has been evoked suggests the fissuring of Christian time. That a phantom island, a quintessential non-place, comes to symbolize the ideal abode for Indigenous Christians signals the demise of providential teleology as a unified driver of history. Once triggers of cosmic-scale redemption, the new converts end up consigned to the indefinite stasis of a chimeric territory. According to Mario Cesareo, Mendieta incorporates Indigenous peoples within a messianic temporality as tragic victims whose sacrifice, nevertheless, anticipates renewal: La alegorización se plantea, desde esta perspectiva, como un instrumento de articulación ético-práctica en pro de los derechos humanos del indio americano. Expresa, al tiempo que una vision alienada de la realidad colonial, una libertad espeluznante, que el santo ha de garantizar con el emplazamiento de su propio cuerpo en una continuidad discursiva y práctica que conforma uno de los más impresionantes espectáculos del orden colonial (459). [The allegorization is formulated, from this perspective, as an ethicalpractical articulation in favor of the human rights of the American Indian. It expresses, in addition to an alienated vision of colonial reality, a grisly liberty that the saint must guarantee with the placement of his own body in a discursive and practical continuity that conforms one of the most impressive spectacles of the colonial order.]10 I would qualify this interpretation by pointing out that, as much as Mendieta denounces Spanish corruption and inhumanity and displays pastoral concern for Indigenous communities, he also constructs a historical imaginary that perpetuates religious marginalization. Cesáreo approaches Mendieta’s text assuming a unified temporal continuum in which the tragic

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sacrifice of the Indigenous peoples constitutes an initial step in a sweeping historical process that will eventually result in their release from subjugation (the proclamation of their human rights). Looked at, however, through the prism of temporal segregation—Indigenous temporality as intersecting with but ultimately separate from history—Christian time appears to resist being inhabited in the same way by all. In this respect, Mendieta ultimately subverts the notion of a universalizing temporal regime touted by him in the earlier passage in which he says that Mexica calendars should be effaced so that Indigenous people govern their lives through a purely Christian understanding of time. Now it emerges that Chronos has a different meaning for them as they cannot be assimilated into a temporally splintered world in which Kairos can no longer be achieved. The work might in that respect be understood as a vehicle for imagining the iglesia indiana as a collection of spatio-temporally segregated experiences: the disappearing island is a space outside of history. Gregorio López: Seizing Stillness If Mendieta’s Historia eclesiástica seeks to adapt religious experience to the uncertainties of worldly historical time, the Tratado del Apocalipsis de San Juan [Treatise on the Revelation of Saint John] written by the anchorite Gregorio López, does the opposite: it sacralizes history, turning it into a realization of divine teleology. The bulk of its chapters devoted to an overview of the rise of the church and its successive struggles with its enemies from antique to early modern times, the work culminates by anticipating the sensation of its cosmic victory, a state that, as I will show, is experienced inwardly. López affirms that while the heavenly New Jerusalem has long been prophesied, it is in the present age that it will become a reality. He accordingly claims that where John of Patmos’s revelations had greatly inspired the saints of the past, they speak yet more immediately to him and his contemporaries: . . . y porque es justo que los siervos de Dios gozen de este Libro, pues para ellos le envió Jesu-Christo, añade, ’y díxome: No selles las palabras de la Profecía de este Libro, que el tiempo cerca está’; y aunque entónces se dixo por las persecuciones, y aun por la gloria que se aparejaba para los Santos; pero ahora se puede decir mejor, porque estamos mas cerca de este estado y patria nuestra . . . (López 293). [. . . and because it is just that God’s servants enjoy this book as it is for them that Jesus Christ sent it, he adds, ’and he told me: Do not seal the prophetic words of this book, for the time is near;’ and although in that epoch it was said because of the persecutions, and even for the glory earned by the saints, now it can be better said, for we are closer to that state and country of ours. . . .]11

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Soon, then, the ills of the temporal world will come to an end: ‘Y no habrá cosa mala dende en adelante,’ porque todo será bueno en tal Ciudad, ‘y las sillas de Dios,’ que es la beatificación de los espíritus ‘y del Cordero,’ que es la glorificacion de los cuerpos, serán en ellos para siempre, ‘y sus siervos le servirán allí delante de él;’ y por eso dice: ‘verán su Rostro’ (290) [‘And there will be no evil from thence forth,’ for all will be good in such a city, ‘and the chairs of God,’ which is the beatification of the spirits ‘and of the lamb,’ which is the glorification of the bodies, will be in them always, ‘and his servants shall serve there before him;’ and that is why it says: ‘they shall see his face’]. Reflected here, we might say, is an invitation to seize Kairos which, following on the heels of planetary convulsion, leads time to its culmination. One of New Spain’s first hermits, López, was a lay beato and a somewhat controversial figure. His cultivation of an intense religious life outside of the confines of the church and religious orders, was, as to be expected, a cause of concern. Along with his privileging of mental over vocal prayer, the fact that he did not, at first, carry a rosary, nor use images to accompany his contemplative exercises, preoccupied some of his visitors.12 Perhaps the most damming to his reputation was his popularity among alumbrados, several of whom claimed him as a role model. In Inquisition trial testimonies, some of them speak admiringly of his lack of liturgical equipment and of his apocalyptic visions (Huerga 570–73). This did not, however, stop him from gaining substantial backing from the institutional church which supported the prospects of his beatification and canonization (Huerga 581; Milhou, “Gregorio López,” 74). The fact that he was not ultimately canonized may have more to do with factors such as the lack of documented miracles in his name or the Bourbon dynasty’s loss of interest in increasing the number of American saints, than with the suspicions of his unorthodoxy. Indeed, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, church and crown consider him an exemplary figure and his Tratado del Apocalypsis, deemed doctrinally sound, was given a high pass by church censors. In the prefacing Censura, Fray Anselmo Gómez notes that King Philip III had been an avid advocate of its publication, given the admiration it had elicited in its first readers (III). And yet, despite such acclaim, López cannot be considered an orthodox figure. Even Alvaro Huerga, who stresses López’s respect for doctrinal Catholicism with which he himself evidently sympathizes, calls him “un personaje escurridizo y bifronte” (561) [“a shifty and double-faced figure”]. Providing a more objective portrayal of the hermit, Alain Milhou (“Gregorio López”) notes that he leaves for America at a moment when Spain sees a peak in Inquisition persecutions of Protestantism and alumbradismo. Milhou speculates that the beato’s 1561

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departure might reflect his discomfort with the hardening posture of the church under the ultra-orthodox legacies of Melchor Cano as well as of the Inquisitor General Fernando Valdés (“Gregorio López,” 57). He suggests that López’s brand of spirituality is inspired in first-wave Toledan alumbradismo, that is, the phase in which it manifests itself in the cultivation of non extatic contemplation. Noteworthy in his treatise is its articulation of an intensely personal religiosity with eschatological thought. The manifestations of divine telos on a planetary stage are interiorized by the solitary individual. Not coincidentally, López was drawn to the study of world history, as well as of geography and cosmology: he authored a chronology—or, in Losa’s words, “succesion de tiempos” (67) [“succession of times”] (111)—that spanned from the creation to his epoch and he manufactured a globe and a map which he famously carried around with him.13 And yet, we can say that his religious practice was largely focused on eschewing worldly space and time. Taking himself off the map, López opts for a peripheral existence, spending an extended period in the remote valley of Ameyac, and subsequently wandering across different regions around central and northern Mexico (Rubial La santidad controvertida, “El ermitaño”). The root of the Spanish word for hermit, ermitaño, which is yermo, meaning deserted or empty, is fully realized in the life of this holy man. He reclaims an age-old link between apocalyptic thought and anchorite life in a way that readies the body and mind to experience the timelessness of “el dia de la eternidad” (295) [“the day of eternity”] that succeeds history. The symbolically empty lands he inhabits are a fitting geography for the looming stillness of Endtimes. Hermits had long embodied a form of asceticism directly rooted in eschatological thought. From antique times, when Saint Anthony and his followers interned themselves in the Egyptian desert, remote isolation was considered an ideal stage for the practice of ascesis, the rigorous—indeed, athletic—exercise of deprivation. A reliving of Christ’s fight against temptation in the desert, the exile of the Egyptian monks constitutes a draconian rejection of the material world which prepares them for the world to come. By withdrawing from the sphere of urbane comforts and exposing themselves to the elements and to additional forms of self-inflicted mortification, they ready themselves for the Final Judgement. As Anthony explains in words that appear in his Life, written by Athanasius the Great: For if we also so live as dying daily, we shall not sin. What is meant is this: that when we wake each day, we should think we shall not live till evening . . . for our life is of its nature uncertain, and is measured out to us daily by Providence. So thinking, and so living from day to day, we shall not sin, nor shall we have any longing for anything, nor cherish wrath against anyone, nor lay up treasure on the earth. . . . The desire of

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Concretizing Paul’s analogy between rigorous corporeal discipline and spiritual devotion, Anthony here sees rugged combat against bodily needs as instrumental to achieving Kairos. The goal then is to gain control over ephemeral life and channel it toward the only thing that gives it meaning, namely its own ending, the condition for the realization of Parousia. The call for Christian life to be imbued with the resolve of martial training is explained in, among other Pauline texts, 1 Corinthians: “Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified” (9.24–27). True to this mission, the self-torment practiced by the early monks performs the radical antithesis between the temporal and the eternal worlds. López’s Tratado, in many ways, perpetuates combative this world vs. next world binaries, articulating them in terms of global imperial conflict. Summing up human history through the lens of the Book of Revelation, López understands it as a formidable fight between the soldiers of good invested in eternal truth and the agents of worldly corruption. Highlighting the martial dimensions of Christ’s message, López echoes his exhortation: “‘El que venciere peleando varonilmente, darle he á comer del Arbol de la Vida, que está en el Paraiso de mi Dios,’ que es la sabiduría, con la qual se ve y goza Dios” (14) [“‘Him who prevails through manly fighting, I shall feed from the tree of life that is in my Lord’s paradise,’ which is the wisdom through which God is seen and enjoyed”]. The successive persecutions of Christians from Nero to Diocletian are regarded as periodic reenactments of Adamitic sin and Babylonian evil, part, in turn, of a larger pattern of Satanic action followed by divine purge. Through their sacrificial action, the soldiers of Christ—the saints and martyrs—guide history toward salvation, as they succeed in vanquishing Satan. The author understands the first millennium of the Roman church as the period of a thousand years of Satan’s imprisonment prophesied in Book of Revelation, and the birth of Islam as marking the age of Gog and Magog, the last thousand-year release of Satan preceding the Second Coming. Envisioning himself near the conclusion of this era, as Christianity is battered by the expansion of Islam and religious schism, López holds forth from a peak moment in providential conflict:

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Volvamos ahora á Gog y Magog, de los quales dice, que cercaron el Real de los Santos, y la Ciudad amada que es la Iglesia: porque la Iglesia Griega hásela tragado toda, de manera, que Italia, España y Francia, es ahora el Real de los Santos, y la Ciudad amada, pues veamos si la cerca. Por el Oriente, tiene á Grecia que es suya, y Hungría y Valaquia, que son Orientales: A Francia por el Mediodia: á Egipto tiene á Argel: y aun llega con sus Galeras á Gibraltar, de manera, que no tiene mas que cerrar; porque por el Occidente es mar; y por el Septentrion tambien está cercada de Hereges: Nosotros estamos ahora en esta era, ó tiempo (262–63). [Let us now return to Gog and Magog, about which it is said that they surrounded the fortress of the saints and the beloved city that is the church: because the Greek church has devoured it all, so that Italy, Spain, and France now make up the fortress of saints, and, as to the beloved city, we will see whether it is surrounded. To the East looms Greece which belongs to it, and Hungry and Wallachia, which are Eastern: it gets at France through the South; Egypt it has and Algiers; and it even reaches Gibraltar with its galleys, so that there is nothing left to close off; for to the West is the sea; and to the North it is also surrounded by heretics: we are now in this era or time.] The hermit thus emphasizes his placement at a moment of climactic crisis. The historical acceleration habitual in apocalyptic catastrophism is reflected in the exponential multiplication of battle-fronts to be faced by Catholicism. If in antiquity the struggle was limited to one enemy—Roman paganism—now, under threat from an empowered Islam, an Eastern church, and Lutheranism, the holy city is held to be under unprecedented siege. After having situated us within this tumultuous vision of a world besieged, the author looks forward to an impending age that, as promised by God, defies our established spatiotemporal parameters: “‘Mira que yo criaré Cielos nuevos, y tierra nueva, y no habrá memoria de lo pasado . . .’” (274) [“‘Look, for I shall create new heavens and a new earth, and there will be no memory of the past . . .’”]. Departing from discourses that ensure America a pivotal role in the grand translatii imperium narrative, López envisions the holy city outside of geographical space. Contrary to the gist of Francisco de Gómara’s statement that after the creation of the world, the discovery of America was the most important event in history, López makes no mention at all of America.14 Not seeking to sacralize New Spain, qua territory, he, instead, makes use of eschatology as a springboard to transcend physical space and time. Regarding the visual description of the New Jerusalem contained in Revelations, he takes care to point out that it cannot be taken literally: the specification that it measures five-hundred leagues is merely a signal of its untranslatable immensity (279). Similarly with the mention of its precious

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metals: “. . . esto que dice de oro, y piedras, no lo hay en aquella Patria, ni vale nada esto sino que habla Dios con nosotros, con las niñerías á que nos ve inclinados . . .” (280) [“. . . this that it says of gold and precious stones, does not apply in that country, nor does it mean anything, other than that God speaks to us with the childlike expressions to which he knows we are accustomed . . .”]. The city belongs to the intangible territory of the spirit, outside the parameters of human sequential time. Aside from there being no memory, there will be no palpable temporal movement: “. . . su dia es eterno. . . . No habrá allí noche . . .” (284) [“. . . its day is eternal. . . . There will be no night there . . .”]. Entering that city, which is illuminated neither by sun or moon, but rather by God’s mystical light, means a pealing away of material conditions: “Esto que ahora tratamos, va limpiando de figuras, y es puro grano . . .” (283) [“This which now occupies us starts freeing itself of figures and is indiscernable . . .”]. López thus signals a transition to an airy realm of being. Significantly, the process by which the faithful are purified of earthly attachments is not, as is the case in the inward struggles of the desert monks, pictured as an agonistic battle. This is evident from his portrayal of the progressive maturation of the Christian worshiper across history. In its earliest stages, he notes, Christian piety is championed by the martyrdom of the saints; subsequently, it is perpetuated in the travails of “la vida Heremítica, en la qual sacrificaban los cuerpos con ayunos y trabajos, y las ánimas con oración y peleas” (286–87) [“hermitic life in which bodies were sacrificed through fasting and works, and the soul through prayer and struggles”]. Iterations of such sacrifice, he says, are continued later by monks and clergymen and, he adds, “así poco á poco va llegando á este estado perfecto” (287) [“in this way this perfect state is gradually reached”]. The Christian’s state of perfection would be the final abandonment of the physical: . . . que cómo el hombre sea compuesto de dos naturalezas, espiritual y corporal, ¿qué razón hay para que vea la corporal, y no la espiritual? Si el cuerpo ve y goza este mundo corporal, ¿por qué el espíritu no verá su mundo espiritual, que es Dios, y en él los Santos y los Angeles? Así que aquel es nuestro propio estado: pues prosigamos las excelencias de él (287–88) [. . . as man is composed of two natures, the spiritual and the corporeal, what reason is there for him to see the corporeal and not the spiritual one? If the body sees and enjoys this corporeal world, why will the spirit not see its spiritual world, which is God, and in him the saints and angels? Thus, that is our true state: so let us proceed with its excellencies]. Such privileging of the realm beyond earthly strife as humanity’s true home would be consistent with López’s meditative religious practices.

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If Saint Anthony literally does battle with devils in the desert, López evokes a form of spirituality that moves away from pugilistic excesses. Significantly, he uses the verb “quietar” to convey the sentiment triggered by the realization that transition into the realm of the spirit is approaching: “Quietémonos con entender que él hizo el Cielo de nada; y le dió ser nuevo . . .” (273) [“Let us quiet ourselves with the understanding that he made heaven from nothing and gave it new being . . .”]. Just as we know God created a teaming world from nothingness, we ought not be troubled vis-à-vis his evaporating it into sacred being. Contrastingly to Paul who imitates Christ by inhabiting the strife of the moment of transition between this world and the next, and differently also from Teresa who imagines herself indefinitely exiled in her earthly body, López enjoys the timeless stillness of the hereafter. Temporalizing the Life of Gregorio López If Gregorio López’s treatise prioritizes the achievement of a timeless divine present, Losa’s biography resituates Christian subjecthood in open-ended mortal history. Written shortly after his death in 1596 and published in 1613, La vida que hizo el siervo de Dios Gregorio López makes a point of showing that the holy man had no prophetic ambitions: “Ni tampoco deseò veer Angeles, ni tener raptos, ni revelaciones” (91) [“Nor did he affect the feeling of Angels, or having of Rapts, or Revelations”] (151).15 Losa, who had been his friend and disciple, fashions a religious hero in conformity with the requirements of religious dogma that privileged subjugation to earthly time over pretensions to eternity. In that sense, he coincides with Teresa of Ávila’s caveat that, “nosotros no somos ángeles” (Libro de la vida 222) and that aspiring to be so is presumptious. López is accordingly coopted by the priest as a model of a Christic patientia tailored to a time-bounded world. That said, Losa does reveal a certain fascination with López’s techniques for suspending himself in timeless repose. He, for instance, includes detailed descriptions of the extraordinary composure displayed by the hermit during his prayer sessions: Acabada pues la leccion de la Escriptura, succedia aquel exercicio tan interior, y recondito que por ningunas señales exeriores se hechaba de veer, de que qualidad fuesse; si era Oracion, si meditacion, o contemplacion, si era de cosas tristes, ò alegres, si hacia, ò si padecia: si hablaba con Dios; ò si Dios Nuestro Señor era el que hablaba con el. Solo se podia conjeturar (por su gran modestia, y composicion de sentidos, y por la serenidad, y grauedad del rostro) que estaba en continua preferencia de Dios, sin jamas perderle de vista (31).

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[After his reading the Scripture followed an exercise so internal, and secret, that from no exterior signs could the quality of it be discovered, whether it were prayer, or meditation, or contemplation; whether it were about things sorrowful or joyful; whether he were active, or passive; whether he spake with God, or God were speaking with him. Only it may be concluded by his great modesty, and the composedness of his thoughts, by the serenity and gravity of his countenance, that he was continually in the presence of God, without ever losing him out of his sight.] (51–52) Palpable here is Losa’s perplexity vis-à-vis his companion’s doing without set prayer formulas and rituals. Also noted is the fact that he does not accompany his meditations with prescribed bodily poses: “No tenia para esto lugar determinado, ni postura corporal alguna, que de ordinario siguiesse” (32) [“He kept not, herein, any constant place, nor any set posture of Body that he ordinarily used”] (53). In an epoch when the church is so concerned with controlling the imagination through formatting mental worship by centering it around customary prayers and liturgical images, it stands to reason that López’s self-inspired meditations draw attention to themselves. Taking note of his puzzling tranquility, Losa remarks that he is imbued with “una paz y señorio en el modo de batallar tan grande, que jamas persona alguna pudo conocer del, si interiormente estaba peleando, ò gozando. Siempre era uno; sin mudarse” (109) [“so great a Peace and dominion over himself in his way of combate, that never could any one perceive by him, whether in his interior he were fighting, or enjoying. He was always one, and the same, without change”] (179–80). Diverging here from Augustine’s perception of human existence as inherently unstable, the anchorite appears to succeed in transcending mutability. Once again, the presumably quieted and pleasurable state he attains evades the tug of war between juxtaposed temporalities—sacred and profane. Removal from its fray would be the highest goal, as shown by his call for sensing the post-historical timelessness of an ethereal New Jerusalem. As much as this aspect of López’s spirituality is partly acknowledged in Losa’s characterizations of him as the quintessence of aloofness, there is also a systematic attempt to cast him as firmly grounded in the vita activa. If in some sections we see López as a paragon of mystifying calmness, in many others he is represented as a manly and heroic soldier of Christ. He is, furthermore, shown near the start of the work in bloody confrontation with the devil. At that point, probably out of a perceived need to further justify his penchant for solitude, the author points out that although his conduct was misunderstood as hermits were rare in New Spain, in fact he

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was part of a bona fide tradition originating with the ancient Egyptian monks. In this way, he casts his flight from the world as a conventional form of religious leadership. But the analogy with the Egyptian monks ultimately proves inexact. Where the desert fathers, as much as they embrace solitude, attract many followers and imitators that constitute a paradoxical community in isolation, López cannot really be categorized as even a paradoxical charismatic for the signs of his investment in communal good are meagre. Losa downplays this, noting that López abandons his solitude in order to go to mass during which he shows great humility. Losa also makes frequent mention of interlocutors who visit him, among them, well-respected clergy who express profuse admiration for his conduct and wisdom. In these sections, López emerges as something of a Ciceronian vir bonus, as his spiritual habits are turned into traditional political virtues. His silence is cast as discretion and his abstention from sharing his religious visions is characterized as admirable prudence. There is, furthermore, an entire chapter devoted to this subject, titled “De la prudencia que mostraba en sus respuestas, dichos, y acciones” (77) [“On the Wisdome he shewed in his Answers, Words, and Actions”] (127). There, López speaks in defense of the king and hears mass with the requisite deference. Earlier on in the text, he is described in wise conversation with distinguished secular authorities about questions of rulership (33). Also identifiable with this cluster of representations are the multiple mentions of his laudable memory of Holy Scripture. As though contesting allegations about his excessive license in spiritual matters, Losa affirms that “Tenia de memoria todo lo Historial de la Escriptura . . .” (52) [“He had by heart all the Historical part of Scripture . . .”] (87) and that he had memorized the Gospels of Matthew and John word for word, along with the supplementary content of the other two Gospels, while also knowing Revelation and Paul’s epistles by heart (53). He further emphasizes that the beato could quote from any part of the Holy Writ with absolute accuracy (53), making a particular point of his verbatim knowledge of the Psalter, an evident mark of his liturgical training. As though additional proof of his well-schooled memory were needed, Losa mentions how admired he was by churchmen for his ability to appropriately deploy relevant the images: “. . . siempre le representaba su memoria los lugares, y cosas quando, eran menester” (54) [“. . . his memory furnished him both with places, and things, when there was need”] (89). López is thereby safely situated within Catholic oratorical tradition which understands mental archiving of lugares as a necessary anchor of religious doctrine. That is, his spirituality is depicted as a performance of authorized knowledge. Far from impromptu utterings, his prayers are shown to be the product of deliberate exercise:

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En tiempo de estas respiraciones, obraba con tanta efficacia, que casi estaba siempre eleuado, sin acordarse de cosa de esta vida; y era tanta la intension, con que occupaba Memoria, Entendimiento, y Voluntad en este diuino exercicio; que aunque estando en el, le acometian graues tentaciones: en acabando de pasar, no se acordaba dellas (114–15) [During the time of these Respirations his operations were so effectual, that he was almost always elevated, not minding any thing of this life; and such was the intenseness, wherewith he employed his Memory Understanding, and Will in this Divine Exercise, that, though, being in it, violent temptations assaulted him, yet after they were passed over he remembered them not] (189). From this standpoint, however apparently removed his prayers are from the mortal sphere, they are ultimately a product of his applied mental faculties. Through such strategic qualifications, Losa articulates López’s spiritual experience with linear time, showing it to be the fruit of accumulated discipline. Significantly, he avoids the use of the term “quietar” or its derivatives to refer to his mode of prayer. Just as he anchors his contemplative life in the practice of conscious recollection, he enshrines López in collective memory as a resolutely mortal figure. Describing his body and harmonious facial features at length, he concludes his portrait as follows: Esta buena disposicion natural, y bien proporcionada figura del cuerpo; con vna rara modestia, que tubo, era vn dibujo, y demostracion de la grande hermosura del Alma. Este hombre, que hemos pintado (ò por mejor decir, pintò Dios) siendo de diez, y nueue a veynte años, dexò sus Padres Hermanos, y Parientes, y la Corte del Rey Don Philippe, con todas sus esperanças. Y huyò mas de dos mill leguas, à las Indias. Y hallàndolas en su prosperidad, renunciò todas sus riquezas, y deleytes. Y se escondiò entre los mas fieros hombres que en ellas auia: solo por seruir, y agradar mas a su criador, y Señor (71). [This good natural disposition, and well-proportioned feature of body, with a rare modesty he had, was a representation and sign of the great beauty of his soul. This, whom we have here (or, to speak more properly, God himself hath) portrayed out, being about nineteen or twenty years of age, forsook his parents, brethren, kindred, and court of King Philip, with all his hopes, and fled to the Indies, above two thousand leagues, and finding them in their greatest prosperity, renounced all their wealth and pleasure, and hid himself among the most barbarous men there, only the better to serve and please his Maker and Lord.] (117)

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López is thus incorporated into a historical pantheon of hallowed varones ilustres: concretely situated in chronological time and space. Losa ends his biography by underscoring López’s place in a world beset with struggles. Contradicting the portrayals that foreground his remote detachment or his calm composure, he describes him “en continuo dolor, y affliccion” [“in . . . continual grief and affliction”] for “la ceguedad de los peccadores, la obstinacion de los Hereges, las muchas almas que cada dia se condenan” (100) [“the blindness of Sinners, the obstinacy of Hereticks, the many Souls every day damned”] (165). The antithesis of a recluse who transcends societal ills, the beato now emerges as a model emulator of a tormented Christ, racked with agony for “las enfermedades, hambres, injurias, guerras, y demas penalidades de sus proximos” (100) [“the sicknesses, famines, injuries, warrs, and other calamities of his Neighbour”] (165). Christlike, he expiates these ills with his own flesh: “Por que fuera de los dolores corporales que de pies à cabeça intensamente padeciò: fue muy pesada la Cruz interior, que tubo . . .” (40–41) [“For, besides the acute bodily pains which he felt from foot to head, the inward cross he sustained . . . was very heavy”] (67). Availing himself of all the stock tropes of hagiographic narrative, Losa hails him as “excellente Martyr espiritual” (129) [“an eminent Spiritual Martyrr”] (213) whose life is one of self-mortification, inner strife, and steadfast pursuit of pious “caminos varoniles” (128) [“manly ways”] (211). Countering previous characterizations of him as relishing the presence of God, the writer shows him as, in no uncertain terms, opting for pain over pleasure: “Assi que el gusto de Gregorio fue padecer por Christo. Y sus regalos, y gloria en la cruz, diciendo como S. Pablo; ‘Lexos sea de mi el gloriarme, sino en la Cruz de mi Señor IESV Christo’” (129–30) [“So that Gregory’s content lay in suffering for Christ, and his delight, and glory in the Cross; saying as S. Paul; Gal. 6.14. ‘Far be it from me to glory, save in the Cross of my Lord Jesus Christ’”] (213). Losa relatedly highlights his differences vis-à-vis Dionysius Areopagite’s contemplative practice. He reports that after having discussed with him the Areopagite’s devotion to “ocio spiritual” (127) [“Spiritual Rest”] (207), blissful union with God, López expresses his preference for struggle: . . . tubo para si por mejor, y abraçò de mejor gana el estado de obrar, y estar amando siempre à Dios, y al proximo: trabajando en esto de dia y de noche: y decia que este exercicio le auia dado Dios por el mejor, y que auia de poner todas sus fuerças en no dexarle por ningun gozo, ni fruicion. Por que no podia entender, que en esta vida fuesse mas perfecto, lo que tiene menos de merecimiento, y que no le tiene tanto el gozar, como el trabajar (127–28). [. . . yet he accounted it better for himself, and more willingly chose, the state of Action, and to be always loving God, and his Neighbour,

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labouring therein day and night: and he said, God had given him this Exercise as the best, and that he was to use all his forces not to quit it for whatever delight, or fruition. For he could not conceive, how in this life that should be more perfect which had less merit; and of this merit enjoyment participated not so much, as did labour] (209). The acceptance of life as an arduous and shifting path is preferred to the stasis of eternity. Similarly to what we see in Teresa’s Vida, Christian experience is defined by its commitment to enduring the pain of linear historical time. If Mendieta’s and Losa’s works, beyond their distinct genres and agendas, seem to suggest a definitive move away from an apocalyptic imaginary, in seventeenth-century criollo patriotism we see its reemergence, although in that context it morphs into a temporal regime that is decidedly un-eschatological insofar as it veers away from the logic of radical historical breaks. Whereas for the likes of Mendieta, the reign of Philip II, with its disassociation from mendicant fervor, signifies steep spiritual decline, subsequent ideologues hail him as a savior king who inaugurates an age of planetary redemption (Brading, The First America 356). For the founders of criollo patriotism, the New Jerusalem is once again reborn (Brading, The First America 373). But, no longer the Franciscan New Jerusalem of the beatitudes, the spiritual harbor of the dispossessed, but rather a splendorous city, comparable in its cultural opulence to Florence and Venice (Lafaye 107). So it is in the words of Agustín de Betancur who, in his Teatro mexicano, lauds Mexico City as “‘a new Jerusalem with twelve gates through which to enter the Jerusalem of triumph, twelve precious stones . . . twelve tribes of Israel . . . which shine like stars in the crown of the woman of the Apocalypse’” (qtd. in Brading, The First America 373–75). If in the Franciscan “Millennial Kingdom” there is an absolute before and after—present spiritual rebirth being conceived as the erasure of a profane past, future Apocalypse as the end of an embodied present—later imaginings of spiritual renewal deploy a more circular temporality in which pre-Columbian past mirrors Christian present: Queztalquatl is recovered as an anticipation of St Thomas, Guadalupe as a Christian Tonantzin. Where the mendicants’ scheme careens forward toward the future, impatient for the closure of prophetic fulfillment, the inventors of the Mexican patria repurpose apocalyptic symbolism in the construction of a burgeoning present that makes room for new forms of Christian subjecthood. No longer vested in achieving the kind of absolute timelessness aspired to by Gregorio López, their experiences of the present do not hinge upon an attempted elimination of time.

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Notes 1 All English translations of excerpts from Mendieta’s Historia eclesiástica indiana are mine. 2 On the millenarian mindset of New Spain’s first evangelizers, see Phelan, Peterson, and Baudot. 3 Translation mine. 4 About the continued and changing expressions of millennial thought in New Spain and, more generally, in America across the centuries, see Silvério Lima and Torres Megiani, Graziano, Rubial, “El apocalipsis en Nueva España,” Milhou, “Las Casas. Prophétisme et Millénarisme,” Brading, Prophecy and Myth, von Wobeser, and Mujica Pinilla. 5 Translation mine. 6 On the pessimistic dimensions of Augustinianism in comparison with Joachimism’s relative historical optimism, see McGinn, “Introduction: Joachim of Fiore” and “Forms of Catholic Millenarianism,” 5. 7 On the burgeoning of heterogeneous conceptions of time in New Spain, see O’Hara, “Time and Christianity.” 8 See Rabasa (130–61) on the incommensurability of European periodizations and the experiences of Indigenous communities. 9 On the programmatic use of a an ars memoria tradition (rooted in classical antique rhetoric and Christian scholasticism) to inculcate Catholicism in New World converts, see René Taylor. 10 Translation mine. 11 All English translations of excerpts from López’s treatise are mine. 12 Aside from these issues, also drawing suspicion, as Emilio Báez Rivera explains, was his itinerant spirituality, the fact that López did not regularly receive the sacraments, and that did he did not do works of charity. These factors, along with his refusal of an invitation from the Dominicans to join their order, made him subject to accusations of alumbradismo and Lutheranism ( Báez Rivera 19). For further reflections on this, see also Rubial, “Tebaidas,” La santitad controvertida, “El ermitaño,” and Huerga, 561–81. 13 All excerpts from Losa’s text in English are from the translation, The Holy Life of Gregory Lopez. 14 “. . . La mayor cosa después de la creación del mundo, sacando la encarnación y muerte del que lo creó, es el descubrimiento de las Indias, y, así las llaman Mundo Nuevo” (López de Gómara, “A Don Carlos”) [“. . .The most important thing after the creation of the world, aside from the incarnation and death of him who created it, is the discovery of the Indies, and, so they are called the New World”] (translation mine). 15 The complete title is: La vida que hizo el siervo de Dios Gregorio López en algunos lugares de esta Nueva España, y principalmente en el Pueblo de Santa Fe, dos leguas de la Ciudad de Mexico, donde fue su dichoso tránsito.

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A New New Jerusalem Sigüenza y Góngora’s Paraíso Occidental

Resignifying Baroque Space Material display takes on an important role in Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s 1684 Paraíso Occidental, written to commemorate the foundation of Mexico City’s royal Jesús María Convent and the lives its first inhabitants.1 Having enumerated the convent’s distinguished benefactors and specified the sums of money with which they endowed it, Sigüenza alludes to its furnishings and accessories: Y si esto que he referido parece digno de aprecio, y estimación . . . que se dijera si abusando de la preciosidad de las horas las ocupara en inventariar las riquísimas alhajas con que se ilustra la iglesia, sus ornamentos, láminas, relicarios, tronos, lámparas, candeleros, vasos, viriles y custodias, cuyo valor costeado del propio caudal, pasa de 100 000 pesos. . . . (92–93) [And if what I have described seems worthy of appreciation and esteem . . . what might be said if, squandering precious hours, I occupied then in enumerating the very rich jewels with which the church arrays itself: its ornaments, leaves, reliquaries, thrones, lamps, candlesticks, cups, lunas, and monstrances, whose value, covered by its own coffers, exceeds one hundred thousand pesos. . . .]2 A far cry from the rustic hillside crosses erected by the Franciscan friars and from Gregorio López’s bare dwellings, the saturated space that the author sets before us contrasts starkly with their asceticism. The imitatio Christi models celebrated by Sigüenza flourish in a lush New Jerusalem: the sumptuous Baroque city which sets the stage for a new kind of temporal regime. While abandoning the fixation on Endtimes present in López’s writing and in the utopian millenarianism of the early mendicants, Sigüenza also stays clear of the historical pessimism palpable in Mendieta.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003381389-5

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He situates his work within the ongoing flow of chronological time; and yet, differently from the disillusion attached to temporalized history by European Baroque artists and writers, here, Chronos is not preponderantly understood as an indicator of impending physical death or historical decline. This approach to time needs to be understood in the framework of so-called patriotismo criollo, a fairly broad initiative aimed at celebrating the history of New Spain. Once valued as a stage for the ominous end of time, New Spain is now vindicated as a copious archive of memories. No longer a childlike land without a past and ignorant of luxury, it is a proclaimed possessor of a rich heritage. If eschatological schemes invite us to view memory as vanity, a mere index of earthly time—the time that was “passing away,” as Paul reaffirmed (1 Corinthians 7.31)—for the founders of the patria criolla, memory is a rhetorical and conceptual feat: something filled with promise. In Paraíso Occidental, Sigüenza contributes to that promise by intertwining Christian salvational history with Aztec legend. Enshrining extravagant female emulations of Christ as embodiments of a nascent Mexican patria, he reframes imitatio Christi as part of a myth of cultural rebirth.3 Like Saint Ignatius, he reconciles religious exemplarity with human time and embodied life. However, beyond this affinity, the conceptions of Christian time deployed by the two authors obey a markedly different logic. The Spiritual Exercises, we will remember, incite the worshiper to cultivate a linear sense of time conducive to monitoring spiritual progress. Instead of transposing this notion of progressive evolution onto the history of Christianization in New Spain, Sigüenza creates a hybrid chronology, if I may, one that combines linearity and cyclicality. In the process, Christic redemption becomes untethered from a sequential change. It could seem extravagant to credit a work such as Paraíso Occidental with articulating a significant redefinition of time. Some might find this methodologically questionable, given the text’s stature as a minor piece commissioned by the Jesús María nuns to chronicle the history of their monastery. From this perspective, the detailed accounts of its construction which make up much of Book One of the chronicle, the lengthy biography of its principal figure, Marina de la Cruz, contained in Book Two, and the short biographical sketches of its other remarkable women making up the third book, would have value only for those directly connected with the convent. Another factor that might potentially be considered to complicate my analysis would be the author’s emphasis on its documentary function. Sigüenza describes the chronicle as the product of punctilious archival work. Also important to note is his investment in precise chronology, which would be consistent with his role as a mathematician and cosmographer who crafted scientifically based calendars. However, this does

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not justify disregarding the phenomenological experience the narrative transmits. Although it does provide a plethora of dates and bureaucratic minutiae as it proceeds in chronological order, it is also an attempt to create an animated foundational memory. In that sense, it serves as a telling reflection on the new conceptions and sensations of time cropping up with criollo patriotism. Where the mendicant missionaries, impelled as they were by zeal for salvation, called for an elimination of the pagan past, one of Sigüenza’s chief ambitions was to exhume pre-Columbian antiquities so as to found a fecund tradition for his country.4 The assault on autochthonous lore occurring throughout the sixteenth century was, in that sense, a considerable obstacle. The devastation of cultural patrimony caused by military violence and the iconoclastic campaigns of the missionaries had so diminished the oral and material archive that its restitution was dependent on a prodigious memory, understood as something of an “ars inveniendi” (More 13). Although the Christianization and Hispanization of America continued to be viewed as a providential happening, the impetus to create a specifically Mexican history required it to be reframed and here a new hermeneutic proved useful. As Jacques Lafaye points out, the images of abundance characteristic of seventeenth-century figurations of regional grandeur are more inspired in Genesis than in eschatological writings, also drawing from bucolic Renaissance currents (Lafaye 106–107). The intent was not the return to an Edenic purity but rather, as Cañizares-Esguerra (“New World, New Stars”) and Anna More have remarked, to represent artificial landscapes in which images of germination and flowering would become emblems of urban cultural apogee. The very title, Paraíso Occidental—a metaphor that turns the convent into a prosperous Eden and its pious inhabitants into flowers—intertwines religious exemplarity and natural fertility. Underscoring the patriotic vein of the work, Sigüenza claims that he was inspired to write the piece by the “amor grande que me ha debido mi patria” (51) [“the great love that I have had for my country”]. Suggesting that such love has, furthermore, played a key role in his vocation as a historian, he announces that so diligent has he been in his research on his country’s rich past that he would be capable of reconstructing “la serie y cosas de los chichimecas, que hoy llamamos mexicanos, desde poco después del diluvio hasta los tiempos presentes” (48) [“the lineages and actions of the Chichimecas, whom today we call Mexicans, from right after the flood until our current times”]. In this way, he identifies the chronicle with a larger patriotically inspired historiographical agenda premised on the idea that a lengthy past bolsters the cultural prestige of the present. A recurrent motif in his works, his framing of the Christian present in connection with Mexican antiquity is on particularly vivid display in the triumphal arch erected in honor of the Viceroy Tomás Manrique de la

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Cerda and the text with which he accompanies it, Teatro de las virtudes políticas [The Theater of Political Virtues]. There Sigüenza represents the Spanish viceroys as a continuation of Aztec dynasties. Tracing the line back to 1327 AD, he fuses Mexican and Christian calendars, presenting the Mexica monarchs as models of classical political virtues—prudence, decorum—vindicated in Catholic mirrors of princes.5 Rolena Adorno has noted that the inclusion of a pre-Hispanic past in the same chronological regime as Christian history is rooted in the principle that “la patria vive en el tiempo” [“the patria lives in time”] and that it defines itself as “respuesta al olvido” (28) [“an antidote to forgetting”].6 In other words, the patria is conceived as an expansive temporality, at once human and enduring. Not surprisingly, this lasting memory has some gaping lacunae, as will be discussed in the last section of this chapter. Although the events narrated in Paraíso Occidental occur for the most part in colonial times, it is helpful to situate the text in relation to Sigüenza’s life-long endeavors as a scholar and collector of Mexican antiquities. Concentrating on how the work incorporates hagiographic narratives into his patriotic enterprise allows me to elucidate the way it engages with imitatio Christi, combining history and myth. Although others have already considered the work’s connections with criollo patriotism, its conception of time has not been sufficiently studied.7 An exception to this would be Kathleen Ross’s study with which I am in dialogue here with the aim of foregrounding the way in which the chronicle ensures Mexico City a pivotal role in the unfolding of a Christian temporal regime, thus ratifying its sustained cultural ascendancy. Focusing on Sigüenza’s conception of time as a determining factor of the spatial imaginary fashioned in Paraíso Occidental, I think about the work as kind of spectacle that seeks to mobilize the affects of its readers. Already in the prologue, the author establishes a connection between his writing and oratory, saying that the style of his work will be similar to the one he employs when he speaks and when he preaches (45). Thus, his cherished role as a historian who is guided by faithfulness to archival documentation and chronological precision combines with the republican idea of the patria as a tableau animated by the auctoritas of the rhetorician.8 As More reflects regarding the collection of antiquities in Sigüenza’s possession, differently from the European cabinets of curiosities which were part of an encyclopedic project aimed at absorbing “exotic” variety within a universal culture, “Sigüenza’s collection had the specific purpose of articulating a local homeland” (25). His patriotic duty required him to inspire himself in the pieces of his archive in order to shape a temporal regime fitting for this beloved homeland. In a direction antithetical to Quevedo’s verse that condemns the present to extinction—“hoy se está yendo sin parar un punto” (4) [“today moves

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on without stopping”]—Sigüenza engineers an organic timeline in which the past, without succumbing to the fractures caused by seismic epochal change, founds a fertile present.9 In some ways reminiscent of Livy’s Early History of Rome, Paraíso Occidental erects a live theater.10 In his history of the foundation of Rome, Livy says that his work enables its audience to “behold the lessons of every kind of experience set forth as on a conspicuous monument” (7). Thus exhibited, the events of the past incite the readers to emulation or condemnation, according to the nobility or villainy of the acts narrated. Similarly, Sigüenza intends the Christic lives he documents to serve as sources of inspiration for his own epoch and desires that they be, in that sense, everlasting. He also draws from a Ciceronian vision—present too in Livy—that understands sensorial display as crucial to civic virtue. It is no coincidence that among the various quotations from Cicero found in his Teatro de las virtudes políticas, he includes the following words that he draws from Philippic 8.29: “‘la persona del príncipe debe servir no sólo a los ánimos sino también a los ojos de los ciudadanos’” (192) [“‘The person of the prince must serve not just the minds but also the eyes of the citizens’”].11 Although the models of heroism promoted by the Latin authors privilege individual agency and would be in that sense distant from Sigüenza’s monarchical ideology, their theatrical bent was immediately pertinent to our author’s agenda. In effect, the vivid descriptions of his female protagonists’ sacrifices, as well as of their physical settings show a marked aesthetic identification with Roman Republicanism, something that might, in turn, be linked to the Sigüenza’s Jesuit education as salient figures of that tradition were part of the ratio studiorum.12 That would partly explain the influence of Republican approaches to the construction of civic virtue on Jesuit conceptions of piety (Kainulainen). Pointing in this direction also is the way in which Sigüenza uses the word “memoria”—that appears repeatedly throughout Paraíso Occidental—to convey the moving remembrance of inspiring public actions. For instance, the spiritual feats of the visionary and reformer Marina de la Cruz are recorded “‘para que su memoria, y vida con ejemplo aproveche adelante, y sea despertadora de nuestras tibiezas’” (118) [“so that her memory and life serve as an example for the future and so that it shake us from our torpor”]. As to the Jesús María church, “servirá de memoria eterna” (88) [“it will serve as eternal memory”] of its beatas and nuns as well as of all those who contributed to its construction, from the rich patrons who donated generous sums to the Indigenous workers who erected the building. Such memory gives shape to an American temporality that avoids both the subjection of history to European millenarian schemes prominent in the early sixteenth century and the reductionisms of Baroque desengaño. By this I mean the equation between material abundance and corporeal

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death that is so central to the Peninsular Baroque, as vividly illustrated in Valdés Leal’s Finis Gloriae mundi and In Ichtu Ochuli paintings analyzed in an earlier chapter (Figures I.2 and I.3). As then discussed, the paintings accentuate the ephemeral nature of remembrance and the destructiveness of chronological time. A reference to 1 Corinthians, the words “in ichtu ochuli,” which mean “in the twinkling of an eye,” have an eschatological origin: “Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (15.51–52). But in Valdés Leal’s composition, all apocalyptic promise is abolished. Remembering Hartog’s analytic paradigm once again, we may say that the work disrupts the connection between Chronos and Kairos and with it the possibility of sensing salvation. While in millenarian discourses, Kairos often translates into violence against the architecture of time—time contracts or accelerates—in the imaginary of desengaño, faithful as it is to the Augustinian avoidance of literalized apocalipticism, human beings cannot transcend the boundaries of clock time and consequently become mired in vacuous hours. In either case, though, whether in variants of Pauline eschatology or Baroque disillusion, chronological time is conceived in negative terms as a movement whose telos is its own annihilation, for true transcendence necessarily lies beyond it. I summarily return to these two kinds of temporal regimes—the apocalyptic and the despondent—to contrast them with the one operative in Sigüenza who equips Chronos with a prodigious vitality. Truth no longer resides, as suggested by utopian messianic discourses, in inhabiting the edge of time in anticipation of its ending, nor, as envisioned within a Peninsular Baroque mindset, in reducing it to nothingness. The idea, rather, is to reinvest it with experiential value. Betraying Paul’s insistence that the faithful ignore the things of this world (1 Corinthians 7:29–31), Sigüenza celebrates them. No longer doomed to serve as an allegory for shortness of life, the candles in Sigüenza’s inventory, like the whole assemblage of liturgical objects and the money spent on them, are symbols of an emergent cultural vitality which, in turn, fosters a new kind of religious subjecthood. Noting Paraíso Occidental’s eclectic combination of chronicle, picaresque narrative, oral testimony, and archival document, Ross views this as a mark of epistemological dynamism apt for a context of protracted historical change and social instability (37). By incorporating testimonies of the sacred lives in the history of his patria, she points out, Sigüenza shifts between “the eternal time of mystical union and the linear, historical time of the chronicle” (162). I would add that the conception of time operating in the work attenuates the division between mystical eternity

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and history. There emerges a fluid temporality, one free from the maximalist ruptures of Christian eschatology. This does not mean that Sigüenza erases historical violence, but rather that he does not think of it as something that changes the course of time. By not reading historical turns anagogically, as signs that make us feel events as anticipations of the rumblings that will accompany the last days, Sigüenza integrates change as part of the regular movement of time which advances toward an openended future. Hence, the experience of crisis is incorporated in a chronological process that is constant and without end. Said otherwise, change is portrayed, not as something exceptional and definitive, but rather as a continuous phenomenon. It would be an oversimplification to describe this as a straightforward secularization of history governed by a one-directional shift toward scientific chronology. Sigüenza’s history is, after all, also shaped by Christic archetypal figurae which are enmeshed with pre-Hispanic legend. Indicative of this is his transposition of the Apostle Thomas to the Aztec past, a theory to which he devoted a work that was since lost, Fénix de occidente, in support of the myth identifying the Apostle with Quetzalcoatl.13 By substantiating this myth which is mentioned in the prologue of Paraíso Occidental, Sigüenza allows himself to tinker with the order of events originally touted as a defense of the conquest: that is, that America had been pagan until the arrival of the Spaniards and their imposition of a European temporality. Contrastingly, in Sigüenza’s revisionist chronology in which Aztec and Christian times are interwoven, history is treated as a malleable hermeneutic terrain, permissively reconfigured in conjunction with the needs of a fluctuating present. Against this reading, some might claim that Paraíso Occidental upholds a wholly Spanish spatio-temporal regime. There are certain features of the work that would appear to support this, beginning with its lengthy title which, in its entirety reads: Paraíso occidental plantado y cultivado por la liberal benéfica mano de los muy católicos y poderosos Reyes de España Nuestros Señores en su magnífico Real Convento de Jesús María de México [Western Paradise, Planted and Cultivated by the Liberal Kindly Hand of the Very Catholic and Mighty Kings of Spain, our Lords, in their Magnificent Royal Jesús María Convent of Mexico.] Complementing this metaphor of the earthly paradise germinating under the auspices of the Habsburg crown are the several passages that cement the ties between the convent and the Spanish universal monarchy, such as the one noting that Micaela de los Ángeles—illegitimate daughter of Philip II—resided there, or the one describing it as a place meant for the daughters of conquistadores, or those emphasizing its continued endowment by the crown. Moreover, Siguënza stresses his allegiance to religious authority in the opening “Protesta de autor” [“Author’s Pledge”] where he promises

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compliance with the rule prohibiting attribution of saintly traits to those who have not been officially canonized.14 He insists that his use of words such as, “santidad, santa, bienaventurada, gloriosa, virtud heroica, revelación, visión, profecía, milagro” (49) [“sainthood, saint, blessed, glorious, heroic virtue, revelation, vision, prophecy, miracle”], to describe the exemplary lives recounted in his chronicle is by no means to be construed as an invitation to worship them, as that is something over which the church, before which Sigüenza claims to humble himself, has sole jurisdiction. However, the work ends up forsaking this promise for, as will later be shown, it competes with the official church pantheon through the ways in which it commemorates its zealous heroines. Moreover, upholding the religious protagonism of the iglesia indiana, it imagines a geographical shift. Superseding the old Eden, Mexico is “mejorado Paraíso” (35) [“an improved Paradise”] graced with flowers born of its own soil. Not only does this “hermoso plantel de las más fragantes azucenas” [“beautiful campus of the most fragrant lilies”] illuminate the present and the future with its “ejemplo de santidad” (62) [“saintly example”], but it also extends its roots within a longue durée that enfolds Saint Thomas Quetzalcoatl and the Aztec vestals. Sigüenza accordingly weaves a tapestry that endows the new—America, a land of Springtime, a nascent republic—with authoritative antiquity (Brading, The First America 362–63). In order to better understand the connection between flowery landscape and American temporality, we can turn to Sigüenza’s poem Primavera indiana [“Indian Spring”]. An encomium of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the poem conjoins her ascendance to cosmic preeminence with Mexico’s apotheotic rise: Sube, México, pues, sube, que dina tu inocencia te aclama de la mano de aquél por quien al orbe ya te induces, pisando rayos y vistiendo luces (71). [Rise, Mexico, rise, for worthy your innocence acclaims you together with him for whom you venture toward the celestial sphere treading on rays and clothed in light.]15 In the process, pre-Christian symbols are coopted into the Christian translatio imperii: Termina el vuelo donde yace altiva la gran Tenochtitlán en áureo trono —selva de plumas, del copil cautiva,

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de su grandeza real es real abono; al hueipil y quetzal da estimativa el oro. . . . (69) [The flight culminates where the great Tenochtitlán sits proud in golden throne —its noble grandeur decorated by the captive copil’s abundant feathers; the huipil and quetzal made splendid with gold. . . .] Rather than obeying an externally imposed linear chronology, Mexico’s Catholicization is pictured as a fluid narrative thread which allows for the continued resurgence of the Aztec past in a pious present. As much as the poem pays homage to Hernán Cortés, represented as a providential soldier before whom America trembles as the atavistic forces of paganism succumb to his might, those forces are by no means defunct. Rather, they reemerge in a new form, as autochthonous symbolism embeds itself in the Christian imagination. Mirroring this process, the Virgin of Guadalupe is identified with semantic copiousness, as can be surmised from Sigüenza’s portrayal of the key episode from her legendary origin story, the one in which the faithful Juan Diego lays open his mantle and her miraculous image emerges among the roses he had gathered.

Hácelo así, y al descoger la manta, fragante lluvia de pintadas rosas el suelo inunda, y lo que más espanta ........................................................... es ver lucida entre floresta tanta, ................................................... una copia, una imagen, un traslado de la Reina del cielo más volado Soberana Pandora de las flores quedó María, a cuyo obsequio dieron esas del prado estrellas los colores, que a influjos de la aurora recibieron: la púrpura el clavel, y los candores la azucena y jazmín no retrujeron, . . . y para más decoro desprendió Clicie sus madejas de oro (77). [So he does and as he unfolds the mantle A fragrant rain of painted roses

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Floods the ground, and what is most awesome ......................................................................... Is to see come forth among such a bounty of flowers ................................................................................... A copy, an image, a likeness Of the highest heaven’s queen. Sovereign Pandora of the flowers Emerged Mary to whom those stars of the meadows Bequeathed the colors, Which from the flooding of daybreak they received: Purple the carnation, and whites The lily and the jasmin did not refuse . . . and for more ornament, Clytie unraveled her golden skeins.] The Lady of Tepeyac becomes a fertile transmutation of the Virgin Mary. Here Ovid’s Metamorphoses are not only a source of mythological references: they are a paradigmatic model for a world in constant flux. In particular, I would point to the portrayal of Guadalupe as “Pandora de las flores,” a daring metaphor given that the mythical Pandora was remembered for freeing malignant spirits from enclosure and allowing them to spread unchecked. But for Sigüenza’s purposes, what better image than that of Pandora’s mischievous act to evoke the explosion of new meanings produced by the amalgamation of diverse traditions? As Andrew Laird has pointed out, the widespread appropriation of Ovid in New Spain reveals the embeddedness of his poetics in a protean process of cultural mestizaje (“Metamorphosis and Mestizaje”). According to Gruzinski, such appropriations constitute a form of resistance to a Christian temporal regime, as Ovidian transfigurations are connected to Aztec cyclical temporality. From his perspective, the awareness that pagan Latin stories had been incorporated into European Christianity meant that Indigenous mythologies could aspire to occupy a role as influential as that of Greco-Roman traditions. Where it would be going too far to take the deployment of autochthonous symbols in Paraíso Occidental as a sign of decisive resistance to Christianity, it is sensible to view it as an imaginative renewal of Christian history that incorporates an Indigenous past into its genealogy. Contra the conception of salvation as a moment of definitive rupture—an abrupt turn from a pre-Hispanic and pre-Christian order to a Hispanic Christian one—Sigüenza enfolds redemption in a more circuitous temporal regime. This makes possible the formulation of new experiences of Parousia which are intimately linked to the shifting topography of the city.

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Mexico City as a Place of Memory To some, it may seem out of place to apply the culturally fluid temporal schemes described above to a work like Paraíso Occidental which celebrates the rigors of imitatio Christi practiced by its pious protagonists. Marina de la Cruz is an icon of self-sacrifice. The same can be said of her contemporaries and successors. In that sense, the cloister’s inhabitants are doubtless wholly invested in a temporal regime in which life is reduced to vanity and impatience for salvific death. However, as I suggest, the work as a whole does not conform to this conception of time. Applauding the women’s passionary vocation, Sigüenza turns it into the stuff of patriotic spectacle. The convent becomes a synecdoche for the republic and its mestizo identity: “. . . siempre me han parecido los conventos grandes como un pueblo de muchas naciones, con la multitud de mozas y criadas que han entrado de tantos géneros de metales. . . .” (247) [“ . . . large convents have always seemed to me to be like a country of many nations, housing a multitude of young women and servants of sundry kinds of metals . . .”]. Consistent with this, Sigüenza devotes the first chapter of the chronicle to the memory of the Aztec temple virgins whom he treats as precursors of his Christian heroines. Betraying the reverence for ecclesiastical authority exhibited in his “Protesta,” as well as his emphasis on the convent’s ties to the crown, Sigüenza provides it with an alternative beginning. Rather than suggesting a radical break with the pagan imaginary, the opening of the chronicle connects it with Christianity. Not unconscious of the liabilities of his position, the author devotes several lines to defending it. Alluding to his mastery of Mexico’s antique histories, he affirms that there is no need to depend on foreign legends to illustrate them (51). He adds, furthermore, that linking pagan and evangelical history was common practice among canonical Christian writers (51). He thus legitimates the act of inscribing memory of the Mexica past in the Christian present and future. To this end, he includes a detailed description of Aztec temple practices. Recording the Nahuatl titles of the priests and other temple officials, as well as the vows and recitations made when new vestals were initiated, Sigüenza describes their lives in ways that incite his readers to draw direct comparison between them and his angelic nuns and beatas. Much is made of the rigors to which the Aztec girls are submitted: obligatory silence, no social contact, fasting, and sleep deprivation. The author tells us they have to rise three times during the night to perform ceremonial rites, which is harsher on nocturnal repose than the canonical hours. Such corporeal sacrifice, we further learn, is embraced by them as a means of serving God, their creator. The legacy of Mexican antiquities continues to appear in later parts of the text that focus on the Christian era. It is, for instance, discernable in

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the following passage that celebrates Mexico City as receptacle of divine grace: . . . ciudad verdaderamente gloriosa y dignamente merecedora de que en los ecos de la fama haya llegado su nombre a los más retirados términos del universo, aun no tanto por la amenidad deleitosísima de su sitio, por la incomparable hermosura de sus espaciosas calles, por la opulencia y valor de sus antiguos reyes, por la copia y circunspección de sus tribunales, por las prendas que benignamente les reparte el cielo a sus ilustres hijos y por las mejoras con que en el tiempo de su cristiandad ha conseguido ser la cabeza y metrópoli de la América, cuanto porque, a beneficio de éste y de otros innumerables templos, con que se hermosea su dilatado ámbito, se puede equivocar con el cielo empíreo, cuando desde ellos, sin intermisión, se le envía a Dios Nuestro Señor el sacrificio y holocausto . . . y a donde viven los que los habitan con pureza angélica (113). [. . . a veritably glorious city and one amply meriting that its name beis borne by the echoes of fame to the most distant parts of the universe, not so much because of its exceedingly pleasurable location, nor the incomparable beauty of its spacious streets, nor the opulence and valor of its ancient kings, nor the quantity and prudence of its tribunals, nor the benefits that heaven kindly bestows upon its illustrious children, nor the improvements because of which in Christian times it has succeeded in becoming America’s capital and metropolis, but rather because, thanks to this and other innumerable temples with which its expansive realm is embellished, it can be confused with the empyreal heaven as from them are sent directly to God our Lord the sacrifice and utter abnegation . . . and in them dwell those who live in angelic purity.] Mexico emerges as an iconic, as well as cosmic, capital city. Evident to those still steeped in the memories of an already mythical Tenochtitlan would be its condition as a kind of palimpsest: Mexica antiquity looms among the stones of this New Jerusalem. Sigüenza appears to push us in this interpretive direction by associating the glory of apostolic Mexico to “la opulencia y valor de sus antiguos reyes,” words which are reminiscent of the Aztec genealogies in Teatro de las virtudes políticas. The physical representation of the city, of its architectural and natural attributes, may remind us of the famous description contained in Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España [The True History of the Conquest of New Spain]. I am referring to the episode in which Hernán Cortés and his men look down from atop a temple tower upon a bounteous urban and natural landscape (331–32). Impacted by its majesty, some pronounce it more splendid than Constantinople and Rome. Tapping into these visual tropes—whose archetypal elements are ample streets, temples, natural

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abundance, and benign climate—Sigüenza compares Mexico City to Rome. Although we are now before a Christianized landscape, the vocabulary he uses—especially his mention of “templos” and “sacrificios” carried out by the “heroicas vírgenes” [“heroic virgins”] (the expression used on the same page to refer to the nuns)—maintains an epochal ambiguity. We are, then, before an inclusive spatio-temporal order, one divergent from a strictly Christocentric regime, based on categorical rupture with a pre-Christian past. The Christian body is one with the shifting life of the city. Said otherwise, the space of the city emerges as a transhistorical archive made up of different epochal layers which flow toward the present. Just as Livy connects the bloody feats through which the Roman empire is founded to the architecture of its capital city in order to imbue the uncertain present with temporal density, Sigüenza insistently connects the res gestae of the Christian virgins to the edifices of his metropolis, themselves also mirrors of the unravelling of history. It is more than a simply celebratory use of the laudatio urbis that had gained popularity at the time as a means of praise for the capitals of viceregal America.16 Rather, looming before us is a liberal temporal structure that aspires, not to build a static eternity, but rather to express the Christian city, icon of the patria, as a live space ever in the process of being constructed. Hence, Sigüenza’s considerable affinity with Livy whose history of early Rome links its founding heroes to its architecture and topography, emphasizing that a given event occurred in a given place. For example, the Tiber sets the stage for the aristeia of Mucius Scaevola who flings himself in its waters to combat the enemy, the Capitoline hill is the theater where Romans resist the Gallic invaders, and the battle against the Sabines takes place in what would later become the forum. In this way, the expansion of the city from rustic collection of dwellings to an icon of imperial might is fused with the history of its founders, the buildings and landscape functioning as legendary places of memory. But far from producing an immutable myth, the sacralization of the city registers change: as present as the venerable antiquity of its majestic buildings is the memory of the ruins to which these are reduced in times of crisis. If Cicero tends to formulate the loci of memory that animate urban landscape as eternalizing phenomena, Livy conceives them as mirroring the fluctuation of times, situating them as he does in a volatile history where the memory of foundation is juxtaposed with that of devastation.17 We encounter an analogous pattern in Paraíso Occidental, particularly in connection with its recounting of the challenges weathered in the construction of the convent buildings, a subject which occupies much of the first book of the chronicle. After discussing the logistical and financial difficulties that precede the laying of the first stones, Sigüenza pays tribute to the occasion, detailing the pomp with which it was celebrated as well as the numerous distinguished attendees who participated. Foremost among them was Viceroy Gaspar de Zúñiga y Acevedo

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who oversees the engraving of bronze plaques recording the date of the foundation and other related events “a la posteridad” (81) [“for posterity”]. The chronicler thus immortalizes a scene of maximal civic pride. But subsequent to this auspicious event, Sigüenza shifts to a catastrophic panorama. Soon after building begins, the project has to stop, not only because of financial problems, . . . sino por la calamidad penosa de aquellos tiempos, así por haberse una y otra vez anegado México, como por la grande mortandad de indios que destruyó estas provincias, causada de querer congregarlos a nuevos sitios, quemándoles para esto sus pobres casas, desposeyéndolos de sus bienes, tan lastimosamente cuanto lo publican las ruinas de sus pueblos, que no pueden ver los ojos sin que se aneguen en lágrimas (82). [. . . but because of the sad calamity of those times, resulting from Mexico’s recurrent flooding as well as from the deaths of countless Indians which destroyed these provinces, it having been caused by the attempt to group them in new places, for which purpose their poor houses were burned, their goods were taken away, as is made pitifully plain by the ruins of their villages, upon which no eyes can gaze without being moved to tears.] What exists of the convent at this point is destroyed by floods and by a subsequent earthquake. One of the worst America has experienced, it reduces a large part of Mexico City to rubble. This devastation, although tremendous, is notably free of apocalyptic connotations. In keeping with the anti-prophetic stance espoused by Sigüenza in the framework of contemporary debates about comets, which many still regarded as divine presages, here periods of destruction, succeeded by propitious times, make up the currents of a human temporality that constitute the dynamic texture of the patria.18 Emerging from the ruins after the earthquake, the monastery flourishes, as its edifices are repaired, expanded, and richly equipped by its proliferating benefactors, “continuándose por el decurso de años que corrieron hasta el de ahora, el ir levantando capillas y colaterales. . .” (88) [“continuing throughout the years spanning until today, to erect chapels and naves. . .”]. A memorial of desolation, reconstruction, and expansion, the convent unites past and present. By saying that its building complex has continued to grow from the time of its founding, Sigüenza not only establishes an organic connection among distinct periods, but he paints the republic of the present as an entity that is still in the process of crafting itself. It is not a matter, as in messianic logic, of aspiring to a theophany beyond mundane time, but rather of making possible the emergence of the auratic within the shifting tides of history.

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The Christic Bodies of the Patria Along with the cityscape, the bodies of its heroines and their sacrifices are the backbone of Sigüenza’s historico-mythical enterprise. Although they lead reclusive lives, the author treats the Jesús María convent as a theater of public religiosity. The pathos of its inmates’ torments trespasses the walls of the monastery and spills over into the city streets: those walking by can hear the lamentations they proffer during “el ejercicio de los rigores y penitencias con que maltratan sus carnes y en que se les pasan las noches” (100) [“the exercise of rigors and punishments with which they mortify their flesh and in which they spend their nights”]. So moving are their cries, says Sigüenza, that they provoke many passersby to take stock of their own sins and amend their corrupt ways. The lives of the devout women constitute a collective memory palace whose images compete with the sensationalism present in Livy’s history. Coming to mind in particular is the graphic corporeal violence that abounds in the pages of the Ab urbe condita and which is often visited on female bodies, as in the case of the violated Lucretia whose bloody remains, exhibited in the forum, trigger the founding of the Roman Republic. Beyond the evident ideological and religious differences separating Sigüenza from his Latin precursor, they share a gruesome aesthetic. While it is true that the cult of pain is endemic in Catholicism, the institutional church is much concerned with keeping it within the bounds of decorum. Saint Ignatius, for instance, discourages the practice of excessive physical torment and Saint Teresa is also opposed to it. In the realm of artistic representation, as expressed at length by Francisco Pacheco in his Arte de la pintura, martyrological portraits that border on indecency or lend themselves to voyeurism are repudiated (291–316). But such stipulations do not appear to concern Sigüenza, to judge by his hyperbolic and passionate chronicling of his heroines’ afflictions. Juana, the daughter of Marina de la Cruz, for example, dies a grizzly death, becoming disfigured and spitting up “espumarajos y borbozadas de sangre” (143) [“quantities of frothy blood”]. Equally graphic are the biographical sketches contained in the third book. There we witness bloodied bodies, cancerous sores, blindness, deforming illnesses, and excruciating torments. About a certain Ana de San Cristo, Sigüenza affirms that “fuera de las disciplinas con que todos los días se hacía pedazos, trajo una cruz a las espaldas y otra en los pechos, sembradas de puntas de acero, de que se le originaron lastimosas llagas” (300) [“aside from the punishments with which she daily destroyed herself, she carried a cross on her back and another on her breasts, lined with steel nails which caused painful wounds”]. This episode is followed by a detailed description of the lacerations that Francisca de San Lorenzo inflicts on herself; these are so

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extreme that “. . . dejaba el suelo y las paredes llenas de sangre . . .” (301) [“. . . she left the floor and walls drenched in blood. . .”]. So awe-inspiring are the nuns’ religious feats that they are deemed miraculous. When Marina de la Cruz dies, her wimple and habit become relics that cure the sick. Sigüenza remarks that stories about such events subsequently multiply and he goes on to say that his chronicle could have been much longer if these miracles, of which, as Inés de la Cruz herself affirmed, there were many, had been properly documented at the time (223). This intimation is roundly significant. Although, at first sight, it appears to be a candid admission of the obstacles Sigüenza encountered in his work as a researcher, it is, in fact, an ingenious rhetorical tactic that calls attention to his role as an architect of collective memory who must compensate for unfortunate lacunae in the historical record. In suggesting that many miracles occurred which were not duly documented, Sigüenza shows that, in his country, sainthood abounds but that what is lacking is reliable chronicling. With this, he subtly disrupts the church’s monopoly on determining sainthood. In the third book of the Paraíso Occidental, the one that collects the biographies of the numerous women who followed in the footsteps of Marina de la Cruz, we can observe the fertile expansion of the “paraíso de flores.” In calling attention to the number of women with a vocation for sainthood who resided within Jesús María’s walls, Sigüenza presents that exemplarity as a multiplying phenomenon. It is a bold gesture for, as Francsico Rubial has shown (La santidad controvertida 500), ecclesiastical authority was so opposed to expressions of spontaneous devotion that in 1625 it forbids painters to include supernatural attributes such as halos or rays in their depictions of figures who have not been officially beatified or canonized. With its scenes of graphic torments linked, moreover, to the urban landscape of Mexico City, Sigüenza crafts a patriotic religious imaginary that transgresses the boundaries of centralized church control. Not limited to the exaltation of the religious virtue of Spanish women or criollas of higher social status, the work also enshrines more humble figures. Such is the case with Petronila de la Concepción, described as “india donada” (282) [“a bequeathed Indian”] and one who gave ample proof of unequalled beatitude. Telling of her prophetic visions and extatic raptures, Sigüenza comments that there are many others like her and that there is no reason to omit mentioning these lowly role models who today enjoy the fame they deserve in heaven (286). The move is all the more significant given the Inquisition’s campaign against alumbradas which, as Nora Jaffary has shown, was often targeted at humble women, and particularly Indigenous, Black, or mixed-race. Many of these cases involved accusations of false prophesying; yet the specter of

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alumbradismo does not stop Sigüenza from attributing visionary powers to the Indigenous heroines. He also immortalizes a Black woman named María de San Juan “de quien pudieron las que se preciaban de muy blancas aprender virtud” (288) [“from whom those who prized themselves as very white learned the meaning of virtue”]. Clearly though, the author’s purpose is not to tout equality. Sigüenza does not contest hierarchical divisions among the Spanish and criollo women and those who are not allowed to profess due to their ethnicity. It is not, then, a democratizing spirit that informs the narrative but rather the ambition to create a compelling memory palace. This is also evident in the presence of images that acquire a key role in the narratives about the Indigenous and Black protagonists. María de San Juan worships an image of the infant Christ and also saves another image of Christ from desecration. As to Petronila de la Concepción, her cancered hand is healed as she is entranced by an Ecce Homo painting and she later experiences extasy before a portrait of the Messiah. About another Indigenous heroine, Francisca de San Miguel, we learn that she so fervently wishes to have an image of the crucified Christ in her possession that one miraculously appears for her. There is something more profound going on here than a simple instance of the Tridentine use of images for proselytization, or of an infantilizing view of non-European Christians as being impulsively drawn to images. Not simply passive consumers of images, they have an active role in a growing network of spiritual transmission. Reflective of this is Sigüenza’s explanation of how the miraculous painting was delivered: “. . . una mañana muy de mañana se oyó llamaban a la portería con grandes golpes; hallaron en ella las que bajaron a abrir las puertas tres indios todos vestidos de blanco . . . ” (287) [“ . . . one morning very early loud knocks were heard at the entrance. Those who came down to open the doors found three Indians dressed in white . . . ”]. According to witnesses, the author tells us, they request that the image they are bearing be given to Francisca. Sigüenza plays up the wondrousness of the event, remarking on Francisca’s befuddlement about who might have graced her with the painting as she was so poor and obscure. Although the nuns try to discover the identity of the painter, they never succeed and the episode remains a mystery. The painting itself, we are told, today hangs on one of the walls of the convent. Sigüenza goes on to state: “El mismo origen se le da a otra imagen del Santo Cristo, que llaman de Totolapan, y que se venera en la iglesia de S. Agustín de México, de la cual afirma el Maestro Grijalva en su historia de esta provincia habérsela traído un indio—de quien jamás se supo. . .” (288) [“The same origin is attributed to another image of the saintly Christ, known as the one from Totolapan, and which is worshiped in the San

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Agustín of Mexico church; about it Master Grijalva says in his history of this province that an Indian, of whom nothing was known, brought it to him. . .”]. Sigüenza further points out that there are many more religious paintings in sundry churches that have a similar origin story. Just as the miracles linked to Marina de la Cruz multiply beyond the confines of documented history, here there also emerges a marvelous reality—the apparition of paintings brought by Indigenous carriers who later vanish. Thus, the images still to be found in many churches are laden with the aura of material indexes rooted in an allusive genealogy. By bringing to light these extraordinary circumstances, Sigüenza evokes an encompassing theater of Christic piety that transcends the bounds of established archive. Memory thereby fuses with a living present. We can think about this ductile temporality as promising in its avoidance of the strictures both of Baroque desengaño and messianic zeal. However, ultimately, it is not without its limitations. Mitigating the fractures between Indigenous and criollo worlds depends not only on historical knowledge but also on selective memory. In order to understand this further, we can go back to Sigüenza’s repeated mentions of miraculous paintings brought by Indigenous messengers who vanish without a trace. We may view these magical porters as metaphors of Sigüenza’s temporal regime. They are symbols of an ingenious fusion of pre-Columbian past and Christian present, but spectral symbols that, enveloped in mystery, render opaque the destruction in which the patria criolla originates. Sigüenza, it is true, can be credited with overcoming the limitations of strictly linear periodizations. Where in Mendieta’s nostalgic historical scheme the scenes of extraordinary Indigenous zeal emblematizing a buoyant iglesia indiana are marvels consigned to a past that is never to return, in Paraíso Occidental a magical religiosity can continue to bloom in the present. Untethered from linear historical patterns, the versatile body of Christ perpetuates itself in the Mexican patria’s multiplying heroines. And yet there are discernable parallels between Mendieta’s phantom island-bound Indigenous utopia, and Sigüenza’s magical emissaries. In both cases, Indigenous piety has something of a chimeric existence. Where Sigüenza’s chronicle is concerned, though, while it would be very misguided to view its temporal scheme as a conduit to racial integration, we can understand it as a hybrid regime insofar as it undermines the subsumption of America within European time. Reinventing the Christic body, Sigüenza weaves it into the genealogy of his patria, a space unconstrained by absolute beginnings and endings. In the following chapter, we will see how such a temporality also lends itself to a sense of inward limitlessness.

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Notes 1 This chapter is a translation, with some variations, of my earlier article, “Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, artífice de una temporalidad americana.” Atardece el barroco, Ficción experimental en la España de Carlos II (1665–1700). Ed. Enrique García Santo-Tomás, Madrid: Vervuert Iberoamericana, 2021. 216–46. 2 All English translations of excerpts from Paraíso Occidental are mine. 3 While the adjective “Mexican” is, in a sense, anachronistic in that Mexico did not yet exist as a nation state, I allow myself to use it advisedly to refer to a local cultural heritage, noting also that Sigüenza employs it in connection with the traditions of the antique dwellers of the Mexico City basin and its surroundings. 4 On Sigüenza’s work as a collector and bibliophile, see Trabulse, Los manuscritos perdidos. For an overview of his eclectic intellectual production, see Leonard. 5 Sigüenza’s efforts to create a continuous history are also reflected in his extremely precise dating of the myth of Mexico’s founding. In his Noticia de los reyes, emperadores, gobernadores, presidentes y virreyes de esta nobilísima ciudad de Mexico [Account of the Kings, Emperors, Governors, Presidents, and Viceroys of this Most Noble City of Mexico], he writes: “De las singulares diligencias que para investigarlo he hecho, me consta que se comenzó a fundar esta Ciudad de Mexico a 18 de julio del año de 1327, que fue el día en que Quetzalcóatl y Axolohua hallaron las señas del tunal y águila que les predijo Huitzilopochtli en el lugar mismo donde hoy está la capilla del Arcángel en la Santa Iglesia Catedral de esta ciudad. . .” (qtd. in Teatro de las virtudes políticas 237, endnote 13). [“Based on the singular probes I have conducted to investigate the event, I know that Mexico City was first founded on the 18th of July of the year 1327, which is the day that Quetzalcoatl and Axolohua discovered the signs of the prickly pear tree and the eagle which Huitzilophochtli prophecied in the same place where today we find the Chapel of the Archangel in the saintly cathedral of this city”]. 6 Translations mine. 7 For a robust treatment of the work’s relationship to patriotismo criollo see Brading, The First America 362–90. On this subject, see also Glantz, “Introducción.” 8 Emblematic of this line of thought would be Cicero’s understanding of the talented orator’s unique powers of communication which could compete with the allure of visual art: “There must be added a delivery that is free from monotony and forceful and rich in energy, animation, pathos and reality. In such labours, if any man shall have so firmly grasped this art as to be able to produce a statue of Minerva, in the manner of Phidias, assuredly he will have no trouble in learning how to carry out the lesser details, as that same Master did, upon the shield” On the Orator 253. 9 Translation mine. 10 Sigüenza would have been acquainted with this canonical text which circulated in New Spain. In fact, he quotes from it in his Teatro de las virtudes políticas (204). Regarding early modern Spanish translations of the work, see Millares Carlo. 11 Translation mine. 12 I am deeply thankful to Professor Andrew Laird for having generously shared with me his rich knowledge about the influence of classical Republicanism on Sigüenza’s work. On the prominence of Latin Republican authors in Jesuit

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education, see Kainulainen and Nelles. Finally, I note that after studying under the Jesuits and joining the order as a novice, Sigüenza was expelled from it, which does not, however, detract from the impact of those formative years on his intellectual trajectory. On this subject, see Leonard 8–9. I should clarify that the myth about Saint Thomas’s sojourn in America centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards was also amply appropriated within eschatological currents (see Cuadriello). Cyclical conceptions of time are, furthermore, operative in millenarianism insofar as it is based on typological interpretations that translate successive historical events into repeated figurae which anticipate future salvation (see Auerbach). What is different, then, from Sigüenza’s cyclical schemes, is that these millenarian discourses emphasize the definitive progression of cyclical patterns toward the all-important end of time. On the complex politics of canonization in colonial Spanish America, see Greer and Bilinkoff. All English translations of excerpts from “Primavera indiana” are mine. On the history of the Guadalupan tradition, see Brading, Mexican Phoenix, and Lafaye. On this tradition, see Luis Javier Cuesta Hernández. On Cicero’s views about memorial urban landscapes, see Diony González Redón. Also pertinent is the following reflection articulated by Cicero about the city as a place of memory: “For we are moved, I know not how, by the places in which traces of those whom we cherish or admire are present. That Athens of mine surely delights me not so much because of the magnificent works and refined arts of the ancients as because of the recollection of the highest men—where each one used to live, where he used to sit, where he used to argue; and I even observe their graves eagerly” (On the Laws 154). We can draw a contrast between this emphasis on the enduring lives of the city’s heroes and the following passage from Livy’s history: “When the Albans had quitted the city, the Romans everywhere levelled with the ground all buildings, both public and private, and a single hour gave over to destruction and desolation the work of the four hundred years during which Alba had stood” (107). On Livy’s construction of urban memory, see Jaegar. Regarding Sigüenza’s understanding of comets as physical and natural phenomena in a context in which there is still strong belief in astrological prophecy, see his Libra Astronómica y filosófica. On this issue, see also Bauer.

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Redeemed Temporality The Infinite Self in Sor Juana’s “Primero sueño”

Dreaming Wonder In seventeenth-century Spain, dreams had become fairly tenebrous affairs: grim reminders of the illusoriness of temporal life. The idea is famously formulated in Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño which deploys dream imagery to convey extreme distrust of perceived reality, a “confuso laberinto /. . . donde no puede / hallar la razón el hilo” (111) [“puzzling labyrinth/Where even reason toils to find/The thread”] (33).1 Lope de Vega expresses a similar sentiment in a sonnet that describes the night as “fabricadora de embelecos, /loca, imaginativa, quimerista” (257) [“creator of deceptions,/mad, imaginative, fictionmaker”].2 Its gloom replicates the spectral nature of existence: “la sombra, el miedo, el mal se te atribuya,/solícita, poeta, enferma, fría,/manos del bravo y pies del fugitivo” (257) [“darkness, fear, evil should be attributed to you,/solicitous, poet, sick, cold,/indomitable hands and fugitive feet”]. Identifiable with the symbols of a tyrannical Chronos present in vanitas paintings—the hourglass, the clock, the skull, the scythe—the night’s swift feet are a telltale sign of life’s reduction to fleeting time which leaves mortals in a state of perpetual bewilderment. In the equation they draw between sentient experience and elusive chimera, such ruminations rival the intense disillusion palpable in Macbeth’s definition of life as “a walking shadow” lumbering toward “dusty death” (Shakespeare 156). No longer conduits for transcendental wisdom or illuminating prophesy, dreams are, in these instances, daunting symptoms of self-estrangement. A cruel deformation of what Saint Paul had in mind when he urged the faithful to live as though the world were vanishing (1 Corinthians 7:31), they connote a pathologized temporal regime rooted in the ubiquitous memory of bodily death. The promise of salvific closure present in eschatological discourses is demoted to an emphasis on the radical emptiness of corporeal existence.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003381389-6

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There are many ways in which this face of the Baroque also takes root in New Spain, as suggested, to begin with, by the abundance of vanitas images produced there.3 Moreover, the pastoral symbolism often used to associate its capital with a fertile Eden grew marred with the emergence of lurid representations of America. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra observes that in the course of the seventeenth century, there crop up pseudo-scientific discourses that describe its land and skies as breeding “mental and physical degeneration” (“New World, New Stars,” 68). Meanwhile, Stephanie Merrim points out that the laudatio urbis genre central to the grandeza mexicana tradition is undermined by damming characterizations of Mexico City as a theatre of urban chaos. However, as indicated in my analysis of Sigüenza’s Paraíso Occidental, bucolic aesthetics continue to be used in ways that render New Spain emblematic of a flourishing present (Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors 195–97). In a similar vein, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s “Primero sueño” creates an auspicious temporality that breaks with death-centered Peninsular time-schemes. Of particular interest to me is the manner in which the poem draws on the celebration of natural wonder to formulate an experience of interior fulfillment. Contrary to the ominous pessimism of the Calderonian dream, here the oneiric imagination is graced with buoyancy. Known for its labyrinthine syntax, the 975-verse silva depicts a mental journey that occurs during sleep. The first part of the poem, abounding in Greco-Roman mythological images, describes the darkening of the sky and the natural and animal worlds’ gradually succumbing to rest in the hush of night. We then come upon a depiction of the physiological processes that occur as the human body falls asleep. The second part of the poem goes on to contemplate the flight of the soul which rises to the supralunary spheres in an attempt to reach supreme understanding. With its pyramids, triangles, and ladders, the ciphered universe beheld by the celestial traveler is laden with Hermetic and Neoplatonic references. But Sor Juana undermines the idea of the cosmos’ readability propounded in these traditions: overwhelmed by the multiplicity of earthly and heavenly bodies, the mind falls into confusion. In the next section, though, likened to a ship gathering its sails, the mind resumes its journey, this time, attempting to attain wisdom, not simply through physical apprehension, but through the application of Aristotelian hierarchies. Yet that method also falls short with the realization that, in the absence of a solid grasp of the physical workings of natural phenomena, such categorizations are excessively abstract. And this brings us to the final part of the silva where, as the mind grapples with this recognition, dawn breaks and chases away sleep, leaving the world illuminated and the poet awake. One might, as many critics have done, regard the poem as dramatizing a failure to reach supreme knowledge, or, said otherwise, the displacement

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of Platonic idealism by Baroque disillusion. There are certainly aspects of the poem that justify such readings. The fact that the dreaming self is at times deeply disoriented would seem to indicate skepticism of human cognition, as does the reflection on the lack of correspondence between Aristotelian conceptual categories and the functioning of physical matter. Such expressions of the impossibility of achieving understanding would, moreover, appear consistent with the humility that one would expect from a colonial world nun. Also pointing in this direction are the recurrent references to the perils of intellectual ambition exemplified in the scaling of great heights—mountains, pyramids, the vault of the sky—and the subsequent mention of a fall from them. According to Margot Glantz, playing out there are anxieties about the steep costs of scholarly vocation levelled at Sor Juana by church authorities (“Sobre ‘El sueño’”). She suggests that the poem aligns with Catholic orthodox thought, noting its citation of John of Patmos’s view of mortals as divided between two polarities, their heads looking heavenward and their feet mired in the mud. Glantz further claims that, conceived as a living contradiction—at once “ángel” y “bruto” [“angel” and “brute”]—, the human being is portrayed as tragically flawed (“Sobre ‘El sueño,’” 54)4. Relatedly, Octavio Castro López sees in the silva a demonstration of the “tragedia de la historia humana” (11) [“tragedy of human history”] and argues that its worries about the failure to know are anchored in an archetypically Christian narrative about human fallibility.5 By deeming the poem deferent to Catholic orthodox thought, such readings fail to recognize that, taken as a whole, much more than an assertion about the insufficiencies of a mind unable to transcend mortality, the poem marks a phenomenological shift that redefines cognition. While Sor Juana confronts us with visions of darkness, chaos, and perplexity, she also gestures toward intellectual adventure and, albeit partial, enlightenment. Far from abdicating mental exploration, the silva exposes its constantly changing epistemological parameters. Where doctrinal assertions about human imperfection are echoed, they take on new meaning as they are purged of tragic implications. Countered thereby is the thought that life is a mere harbinger of its imminent dissolution. If the traditional Baroque subject is defined by Augustine’s conception of human time as the antithesis of divine timelessness, Sor Juana’s silva avoids getting caught in this aporia and engages with the other facet of Augustine’s legacy: the mandate to “‘Increase and multiply’” through continued hermeneutical renewal (Confessions 295). In her “Primero sueño,” presumably the only work, as we read in her “Respuesta a Sor Filotea” (64), that she wrote out of her own volition, Sor Juana exemplifies the fluctuating nature of human existence in a way that resists its dilution into shadowy nothingness. Hence, the dream, in some senses,

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recovers the lofty status it had enjoyed in Neoplatonist traditions, as suggested by the verses that celebrate the human condition: “el Hombre. . . mayor portento/que discurre el humano entendimiento” (lines 690–91). [“Man. . . the greatest marvel/posed to human comprehension”]. If in Sigüenza’s Paraíso Occidental, the neo-Arcadian aesthetic that emerged in the framework of patriotismo criollo is channeled toward the evocation of a prosperous urban geography that serves as an enduring theater of public female virtue, in Sor Juana’s “Primero sueño” it is metamorphosed into a venturesome inner self that does not bow to the requirements of feminine humility. Partaking of the cornucopian cultural present, the fertile dreamscape disrupts doctrinal conceptions of time that reinforce the evanescence of the phenomenal world. This does not mean returning to a Renaissance equilibrium between the corporeal and the ideal. Far from it: deploying a poetics of confounding miscellany and profusion, the silva combines formal and intellectual extravagance. Teeming with ostentatious imagery, Sor Juana’s composition is also a medley of scholarly traditions—the already-mentioned Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and Aristotelianism, in addition to scholasticism and scientific empiricism.6 Merrim sees the poem’s epistemic mixture as emblematic of the American Baroque. She links its surfeit of cultural references to wonder aesthetics issuing from chroniclers’ constructions of America as a land of marvels, grandeza mexicana writers’ touting of awe-inspiring urban spaces, and curiosities cabinet collectors (chapter 5). Her rich analysis contributes significantly to making sense of the silva’s mesmerizing theater in the framework of the American locus amoenus turned geography and architecture of accumulation and bizarre excess. But while Merrim emphasizes the epochal pessimism of the poem, viewing it as an artistic embodiment of Augustine’s earthly city, a fallen space of mortal turmoil remote from the felicities of the City of God, I would argue that it channels Baroque spectacle in a different direction. As I see it, the enchanted landscape of the silva undoes hard and fast dichotomies between the earthly and the heavenly. Through reiterated hyperboles that emphasize the immensity and diversity of the natural world, Sor Juana imbues it with transcendental significance. Its boundlessness in the process becomes a mirror for the ebullient mobility of the thinking soul and its shifting among diverse conceptual registers. In that respect, I would agree with Verónica Grossi that the poem celebrates the expansiveness of human thought. While Baroque excess is often coupled with monumental heaviness, Sor Juana’s poem exhibits a dynamism comparable to that of some of Bernini’s signal sculptures. In its depictions of the soul’s continual movement through the stunning sights of the theatrum mundi—its

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majestic animal kingdom, its remote mountain caves and deep sea caverns, its stormy oceans, its volcano peaks, its towering architectural structures, its vast skies—the silva showcases the restlessness of mental sensation. Vertiginous ascents, abrupt falls, shipwrecks, and smooth sailing are concatenated in what can be understood as a moving picture of the perceiving mind. Rather than aiming for lapidary sententiae, the focus is on the practice of apprehension itself: no longer a mere means to a higher end, thought gains significance as an ongoing as well as open-ended process. Regarding how the dynamism of the poet’s mental journey might be related to her criollo cultural identity, it is helpful to recall Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel’s thoughts on Sor Juana’s engagement with heterogeneous forms of understanding. She conjectures that, in its adoption of different subject positions—Indigenous and Hispanic—the author’s corpus reflects the quintessentially mixed nature of criollo culture: “. . . en América el saber surgía como un campo de múltiples negociaciones donde ya no era posible sostener un paradigma cognoscitivo unívoco, absoluto e ilimitado” (“Saberes americanos” 646) [“. . . in America knowledge emerged as a sphere subject to multiple negotiations, so that it was no longer possible to maintain a monolithic, absolute, and universal epistemological paradigm”].7 The issue of temporality, however, has not been sufficiently incorporated into the discussion about Sor Juana’s cultural hybridity, neither within the line of scholarship that views her criollismo as undisruptive of imperial ideologies nor within that which has argued for her conscious interest in integrating marginalized voices and which has focused a good deal on her Nahuatl songs and on El Divino Narciso.8 The exception to this would be Juan Luis Suárez’s interpretation of the loa to El Divino Narciso as staging the incorporation of Indigenous culture into providential Christian time and thereby representing salvational history as a culturally varied whole. By focusing, rather, on the inward sensation of temporal fluidity present in Sor Juana’s silva, my analysis points in a different direction, not seeing in it a concern with particular embodied cultural identities, nor with backing teleological time schemes. As I have begun to suggest, I see “Primero sueño” as participating in an agentive process of epistemological appropriations and mixings. The strands of Neoplatonist, scholastic, and Hermetic thought present in the silva can hardly be understood as straight-forward intellectual borrowing. Far from an act of deferential mimicry, it makes use of these currents in a way that shows considerable cognitive autonomy, laying before us a freeranging mental experience in which Epicurean, Ovidian, and grandeza mexicana imaginaries collude. In that sense, I would disagree with the gist of Tarsicio Herrera Zapién’s statement that “El Primero sueño de sor Juana . . . es como la Biblia del saber occidental . . .” (179) [“Sor Juana’s

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‘First Dream’ . . . is like the Bible of Western knowledge . . .”].9 Defying orthodox classical and Christian habits of thought, the work imagines a boundless mental journey that troubles the confinement of mortal life to finite space and time. This is not to say that we are before a secularized conception of the self. Rather, the inward experience traced in the poem bears strong connection with the paradigms of Christic rebirth formulated in Sor Juana’s El Divino Narciso. The 1689 auto sacramental presents the Messiah in the guise of Ovid’s Narcissus: just as the latter lives on in the ever-blooming flower that bears his name, Sor Juana’s Cristo-Narciso perpetuates himself in a bountiful natural world. Weaving together images of germination identified with an Aztec “Dios de las semillas” [“God of Seeds”], Ovidian metamorphoses, and bucolic grandeza mexicana associations, the play imagines Christ’s body as a prodigiously multiplying entity: Maremagnum Se ostentaba de perfección, infinito, de quien todas las bellezas se derivan como ríos. (180) [The great sea showed itself in infinite perfection, from which all other beauties, like rivers, find their source.] (181) The association of Christ with an agonistic death is displaced by an emphasis on his body as a felicitous symbol of regeneration. So it is that the figure of Grace calls for all to stop lamenting his death: “¡Vivo está tu Narciso; no llores, no lamentes, ni entre los muertos busques Al que está Vivo siempre!” (170) [“Your Narcissus lives; weep not so piteously, nor look among the dead. He lives eternally.”] (171) The sacrifice of Christ is thus inventively cast as a source of prodigious transformations as the sacred body infuses nature with its life-giving bounty: Él mismo quiso quedarse en blanca Flor convertido, porque no diera la ausencia

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a la tibieza motivo; que no es mucho que hoy florezca, pues antes en Sus escritos Se llama Flor de los Campos, y de los Collados Lilio. (182) [He chose to stay behind, transformed to a white flower, for absence might make tepid the warmth of love’s sweet bower; no wonder that He blooms today, already called in Scripture, the flower of the fields and lily of the hillocks.] (183) No longer identified with a cataclysmic fissure between earthly and divine time, Christ’s body is disassociated from radical beginnings and endings, thereby becoming part of an organic temporal flow. Contrary to the spirit of Ludolph of Saxony’s conception of Christ as “unidad,” “esencia,” [“unity,” “essence”], and “verdad” (9) [“truth”], Sor Juana’s Christ embodies perpetual dissemination, similar to that I discussed in connection with Sigüenza’s “Primavera indiana.”10 An analogous pairing of natural vitality and semiotic renewal unfolds in “Primero sueño.” For there too a munificent cosmos spawns new ways of thinking and perceiving. The fact that some critics have made convincing arguments for regarding the poem as a feat of Baroque aesthetics and others for reading it as representative of the scientific revolution further attests to its varied conceptual folds.11 Rather than focusing on one aspect to the exclusion of the other, I take note both of its surfeit of visual tropes and mythologized landscapes that are identifiable with Gongorist and Ovidian poetics and of its interest in natural and cosmological observation. In this I would disagree with Elías Trabulse who, comparing Sor Juana’s silva to some of the works produced by Sigüenza y Góngora, concludes that while his work is truly scientific, hers is simply imaginative: “Sigüenza trazó la fina línea de demarcación que separaba a la ciencia de la fantasía y se consagró a cultivar a la primera como un auténtico científico” [“Sigüenza upheld the fine line separating science from fantasy and he devoted himself to cultivating the former like a genuine scientist”], where “el hermetismo de Sor Juana ya no es científico sino poético. Ya no importa el dato sino la metáfora, no la hipótesis científica sino la expresión poetica” (“El tránsito del hermetismo,” (64) [“Sor Juana’s Hermeticism is no longer scientific but rather poetic. It is not the data that is important but rather the metaphor, not the scientific hypothesis but rather poetic expression”].12 To take the text’s saturation in conceits as a sign of its exclusive function as

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poetic expression, narrowly understood, would be to overlook its ontological and conceptual significance.13 If we categorize the work as “simply” literary, we may be tempted to consign it to the sphere of a belated Baroque poetics understood as a tired artform that is conscious of its own intellectual shortcomings and formal exhaustion. Relatedly, it would be overly simplistic to conceive of early modern scientific thought in opposition to mythical thinking or even to its esoteric manifestations: alchemy and magic (see Mescall). These are not utterly disconnected practices, as is demonstrated by the writings of Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, which were assiduously read by Sor Juana. They encompass Hermetic symbolism, Neoplatonic ideals, mechanistic understandings of the universe, natural science, and empirical experimentalism, showing that these were not invariably considered mutually opposed forms of cognition (Findlen).14 Moreover, as Paolo Rossi has demonstrated, the iconocentric arts of memory tradition operative in Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, were also foundational in scientific revolution thought. Even Francis Bacon who deems that the ars memoriae cannot lead to new discoveries—given that they center on remembering received images and concepts—, assigns them an indirect role in the process of discovery by recognizing that they help order the contents of the mind and render its cognitive abilities more effective (Rossi 118–21). Descartes similarly values the way that retained images can help structure thought (Rossi 124–25). In dialogue with Rossi’s work, I would add that “Primero sueño” constitutes an important illustration of how an American Baroque imaginary anchored in iconocentric culture is not epistemologically opposed to scientific rationalism or empiricism. I would thus, once again, question Trabulse’s positioning of Sor Juana at the periphery of the scientific revolution “. . . Sor Juana no puede ser calificada como una mujer de ciencia, porque su universo científico era más vasto, rico y subjetivo que el de cualquier hombre de ciencia” (“El universo científico” 49) [“Sor Juana cannot be qualified as a woman of science because her scientific universe was more vast, rich, and subjective than that of any man of science”].15 I am not suggesting that Sor Juana was a scientist. However, I contend that it is not helpful to essentialize her cosmology as feminine and, on those grounds, utterly sever her poem from the contemporary development of scientific observation and experimentation, especially as the interaction between the mind and the natural world occupies an important role in the silva.16 I would venture that the perhaps unwitting presumption behind Trabulse’s opposition between the realm of “true” science and that of Sor Juana’s so-called dreamy science has to do with the supposed confinement of the feminine to the realm of the personal. In my view, the

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epistemological importance of the poem resides in the fact that it posits the interrelatedness of subjective thought, conceptual understanding, bodily sensation, and imagination, a move that goes beyond the narrowly personal. As Emilie Bergmann shows, the modernity of the poem has much to do with its focus on the individual’s “cognitive process of perception” (131). One might, indeed, go as far as to say that the text anticipates the phenomenological turn of twentieth-century philosophy in that it centers subjective experience while concurrently endowing first-person perception with genuine knowledge value. There is particular affinity between Sor Juana’s intertwining of sensing, poetic imagination, and discovery and Ricoeur’s reconciliation of literary hermeneutics and mnemonic cognition (La mémoire). While certain parts of “Primero sueño” appear to wrestle with the discontinuity between physically perceived phenomena and ideal principles, ultimately the interaction with the world in all its physical variety prevails over a quest for universals. Similarly to “Respuesta a Sor Filotea,” where Sor Juana defiantly suggests that Aristotle would have written yet more had he had to carry out menial chores (43), her poem reconciles reading the book of nature with sentient appreciation of its phenomena. In this the poem bears comparison with Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura which similarly bases its message on the poet’s observation of a wondrous as well as fluid cosmos. The imprint of Lucretius’s conceptions of infinite space is detectable in Sor Juana’s dynamic inward experience. It is possible to draw connections between the spatial limitlessness fathomed by Lucretius and the boundless temporal regime insinuating itself in Sor Juana’s verses. In this scenario, recurring regeneration displaces eschatological selfannihilation as the paradigm that defines the thinking and feeling self. The robust scholarly corpus that has explained the intellectual and formal content of the silva from different critical angles has hardly broached its treatment of time. The exception is Jacqueline Nanfito’s work on its representation of psychic time. In twin articles, Nanfito thinks about how space in the poem captures subjective temporal experience (“‘El sueño,’” “Time as Space”). Particularly productive is the connection she suggests between the dynamic landscapes of the poem and Bergsonian durée: Essentially, the reader is confronted with what could best be called a Bergsonian conception of time: real time or human time (“durée”, the constant creative flow of Becoming, suffused with élan vital, or the force that drives it) fuses with time in the narrow sense, spatialized or clock time, in order to create a temporal reality within the poem which is based primarily upon the principle of synchrony rather than diachrony (“El sueño,” 429).

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In this framework, Nanfito provides substantial insight on the ways in which the poem reproduces inward rhythms of consciousness. While I am in agreement with much of her argument, I would diverge from its characterization of the fluid temporality evinced in the poem as perpetuating a dichotomy between the real and the ideal. In Nanfito’s telling, the boundless temporality at issue here denotes a liberation from the physical and corporeal world. That is, the dreamscape would be an ethereal realization of freedom from matter, a Platonic ideal: Time in El sueño is best conceived as a progressive image, a process of transfiguration and of mythical evolution, from negative to positive, from darkness to light, from ignorance to enlightenment, all of which can be traced in the gradated presentation of ascendent images, at once particular and timeless. The poetic imagination at work within the poem is based upon the concept of time not as a social construct of horizontality, but rather, as a fundamentally human, interior time whose vertical axis provides a means of evasion from the realm of material reality into the diaphanous sphere of poetic thought and form (“El sueño,” 427). Whilst I concur with Nanfito that the poem centers subjectivity and interiority, I disagree that these are predicated on the mind/body opposition foundational to Platonic and Christian thought. The silva, I would say, marks a philosophical turn precisely by resisting this binary. It is, moreover, in that sense that it approaches Bergsonian thought and its attempt to find a middle ground between the extremes of idealism and materialistic realism (Bergson 117–20). Partly, that shift can be linked to maravilloso americano currents which, as I have begun to suggest, diverge from traditional Baroque reductions of the physical world to naught. That is to say, revivified thanks to an aesthetics of wonder, the material world is not confined to representing a ruin or prison from which the truth-seeker would need to escape; rather, it can serve as a space for restorative newness. To cite Bernardo de Balbuena’s seminal eulogy of Mexico’s natural abundance, “Aquí entre sierpes de cristal segura/la primavera sus tesoros goza,/sin que el tiempo le borre la hermosura” (93) [“Here among crystal snakes secure/Spring its treasures enjoys,/without its beauty being erased by time”].17 Sor Juana audaciously transposes the idea of an abundant world—which was often leveraged to serve political interests—to the terrain of subjective cognition. Considering her identity both as a colonial subject and as a woman in the church, the step is a daring one, in that it moves away from the radical self-doubt of vanitascentered visions that would have been better aligned with the epistemological humility expected of her.

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In her reading of the poem Sor Juana addresses to “Las inimitables plumas de Europa,” [“Europe’s inimitable pens”] Martínez-San Miguel points to her ironic distance from her Spanish audience (“Otra vez Sor Juana”). While displaying apparent humility, Sor Juana, the critic claims, engages in taunting double-entendre, as is shown in the verses, No soy yo la que pensáis, sino es que allá me habéis dado otro ser en vuestras plumas y otro aliento en vuestros labios, y diversa de mí misma entre vuestras plumas ando, no como soy, sino como quisisteis imaginarlo (A Sor Juana Anthology 102). [I am not at all what you think. What you’ve done is attribute to me a different nature with your pens, a different talent with your lips. Borne on your feather-pens’ plumes, my flight is no longer mine; it’s not as you like to imagine not what your fancy depicts.] (A Sor Juana Anthology 103) Appearing to belittle her own worth, Sor Juana, in the same breath, suggests the opposite by implying that her European readers are illequipped to understand her. Further highlighting her status as cultural other is the self-exoticizing statement, ¿Qué mágicas infusiones de los Indios herbolarios de mi patria, entre mis letras el hechizo derramaron? (A Sor Juana Anthology 104) [What kind of sorcerer’s brew did the Indians inject —the herb-doctors of my country— to make my scrawls cast this spell?] (A Sor Juana Anthology 105) In the case of “Primero sueño,” I would offer that Sor Juana’s “Americanness” is not so much manifest through the claiming of specific cultural or geographical affiliations, but rather through imagining a mental experience liberated from a binaristic temporal regime. Once again, the intent is to engage with the fluid terrain of inward experience. I would thus diverge from those who have argued that “Primero sueño”

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champions Aztec cosmogonies (Velasco and Savukinas), holding, as I do, that the silva embraces epistemic indeterminacy as opposed to consecrating any one system of signification. Sor Juana’s poem makes peace with the volatility of experience and thought, thus departing from Augustine’s characterization of the mutable world as lapsed (Confessions 123). I would, with that in mind, explain her modernity differently from how Octavio Paz did. Interested in the poem’s deviation from preceding European traditions, he notes that it departs both from the archetypical Christian dream in that it lacks a revelation and from classical didactic lore in that it excludes any encounters with a wise demiurge in possession of superhuman knowledge (e.g. Dante’s Beatriz or Virgil, or Hermes Trimegistus’s Pimander) (Paz 481). Based on these observations, Paz declares that Sor Juana anticipates both the lonely romantic artist and the yet more disenchanted poets of later modernity, pinpointing certain similarities between her poem and Paul Valery’s “Cimetière marin” [“The Graveyard by the Sea”], José de Gorostiza’s “Muerte sin fin” [“Death without End”], and Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dès” [“A Throw of the Dice”]. With this he situates her as a forerunner of a drastically skeptical zeitgeist, saying that the silva “constituye a la tradición poética moderna en su forma más radical y extrema” (Paz 500) [“it constitutes modern poetic tradition in its most radical and extreme form”].18 In my view, unlike these poetic works, Sor Juana’s is not about absence. Godless as they are, the above poems, at the most profound level, are identifiable with the destructive temporality of the Baroque vanitas. In them the scythe of time is still rampant. For instance, in the tellingly titled “Muerte sin fin,” writing is identified with foundational loss: Es el tiempo de Dios que aflora un día, que cae, nada más, madura, ocurre, para tornar mañana por sorpresa es un estéril repetirse inédito, como el de esas eléctricas palabras —nunca aprehendidas, siempre nuestras— que eluden el amor de la memoria, pero que a cada instante nos sonríen desde sus claros huecos en nuestras propias frases despobladas. (111) [It is God’s time that surfaces one day, that falls, that just ages, occurs, only to return tomorrow by surprise it is a sterile unprecedented repetition,

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like that of those electric words —never apprehended, always ours— that evade the love of memory, but which each instant smile at us from their luminous holes in our own empty phrases].19 In these verses poetry is identified with post-lapsarian disenchantment and sterility, as language is literally depleted (as signified by the mention of holes and vacuous phrases). Adrift in mortal time, the creative act is defined by self-effacing irony, the dejected awareness of its own trifling inconsequence: “un ilustre hallazgo de ironía” (Gorostiza 116) [“an illustrious discovery of irony”]. The sentiment is further reinforced in the following verses of “Muerte sin fin” in which phantom dreamscape is conflated with sleepless vigil: “desde mis ojos insomnes,/mi muerte me está acechando” (143) [“from my sleepless eyes,/my death is keeping watch on me”]. Reminiscent of the specters of Lope de Vega’s fitful night as well as of Quevedo’s “sucesiones de difuntos” (4) [“successions of dead”], the draconian equation between poiesis and death perpetuates the enclosure of human life in a temporal regime antithetical to eternity.20 By regarding Sor Juana as a precursor of this facet of modernity, Paz would seem to ignore her move away from crisis-centered time. All the more so given that he ends his commentary by comparing “Primero sueño” to Dürer’s “Melencolia.” In fact, “Primero sueño” diverges considerably from the temporal regime represented by Dürer’s brooding angel, a precursor of the angel of history imagined by Benjamin. Where those figures represent historical time as a ruin, Sor Juana invites us to sense human time and memory as life-giving.21 The Permanence of Change Elías Rivers holds that, in its intellectual objectives, “Primero sueño” is unprecedented except by Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. In Hispanic literature at the time, there was no single poem devoted to philosophical or scientific inquiry as these fell within the purview of prose treatises. Where it is true that, as Elías points out, the anti-providentialist materialism propounded by Lucretius’s poem was considered blasphemous by Sor Juana’s contemporaries, this would not justify discarding it as a precursor. All the more so given the revealing connections between his world view and the temporal regime deployed in Sor Juana’s verses. As can be gathered from the recent spate of studies on the reception of Lucretius’s epic in early modern Europe, it exerts a broad influence. Even though its

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arguments against a divinely directed world were commonly excoriated, this did not mean a wholesale suppression of the work which, in fact, circulated rather widely. This was partly due to the beauty attributed to its verses that were regarded as a worthy aesthetic model, which is not to say that its content was not taken seriously. An example of this would be the evidence of Lucretius’s role as a kind of maître a penser to Michel de Montaigne, in particular as regards the latter’s articulation of an undogmatic ethics (Greenblatt 246). But even religiously orthodox readers found in the epic compelling messages. As Ada Palmer has remarked, it would be an oversimplification to associate Lucretius solely with a turn toward radical secularization. Among his most renowned readers, Pierre Gassendi, for example, fuses his notions about time and space with the tenets of Christian providentialism (Wilson 25). In Spain, despite the power of the Inquisition, Lucretius is both read and popularized as attested by the presence of his work in polianteas, collections of extracts from famous texts.22 Even the ultra-orthodox Quevedo found useful lessons in his philosophy, as shown in his Defensa de Epicuro. Unfortunately, the recent renewal of interest in the early modern reception of Lucretius has yet to yield a more robust understanding of his influence in New Spain. So I am aware of the need to tread lightly as I think about the ties between his work and Sor Juana’s poem. It does, though, appear safe to say that De Rerum Natura would have circulated in colonial Mexico.23 As Trabulse has shown, the stringency of church censorship in the Americas did not stop the steady supply of prohibited books to interested buyers (Ciencia y religión 128). Paz points out that although—for obvious reasons—Sor Juana never mentions Lucretius, she might well have had access to his poem.24 Whether due to direct perusal of it or via intermediaries or by dint of Lucretius’s pervasive mark on Renaissance intellectuals and emergent scientific thought, what is certain is that there are telling parallels between Sor Juana’s and the antique poet’s cosmic theaters. In both cases, knowledge is grounded in the contemplation of a colossal and motile universe. Where Lucretius is concerned, this has led to his identification with the conception of the sublime. In that direction, James Porter shows how his atomistic theories are bound up with an experiencing of the overpowering majesty of nature: “DRN 6 contains a series of images that will become iconic in the sublime tradition from Longinus to Kant: storm-tossed seas, earthquakes, jagged mountains, impending clouds, the yawning abyss between heaven and earth” (172). While the “cosmic wonderment” (Porter 172) such phenomena elicit approaches the fearful awe often attached to gazing on the sublime, it also lays the foundations for a consolatory discourse that offsets dread of impending ruin and death by emphasizing the ceaseless movement of the physical

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universe. That is, rather than ominous signs of a destructive divine wrath or inherent human inadequacy, they are put into perspective as part of a boundless and ever-changing universe that, properly understood, can assuage fears of death and destruction and ensure tranquility. The notion of an infinite cosmos is among the most striking ideas articulated by Lucretius, and one that continues to draw the attention of today’s scientists who growingly devote themselves to understanding the workings of an unbounded universe, as most famously exemplified by Stephen Hawkins’s work. Vividly depicted in Lucretius’s epic is temporal and spatial limitlessness: atoms “fly around forever without stopping” and there is no “limit to their sum” (1.951; 1.953). In subsequent verses we encounter the explanation that, “It does not matter in what region of the universe you place yourself;/so true is it that whatever place anyone occupies, he leaves/the universe infinite in all directions to the same extent” (1.965–67). Pushing these notions to the extreme, the poet later imagines that there are many worlds: “. . . it must/be admitted that there are other worlds in other regions,/as well as different races of men and breeds of wild beasts” (2.1074–76). Part of this infinite world where change is a constant instead of a harbinger of cataclysmic ending, the psyche integrates its inexhaustible cycles, as evidenced in Lucretius’s description of human apprehension: Moreover, it is not remarkable at all that the images move and shift their arms and other limbs in smooth succession. For it happens that an image in sleep seems to do this, since, when the first image perishes and another is then born with a different position, the first seems to have changed its posture. Of course this must be thought to occur in rapid fashion, so great is the mobility, so great the plentiful supply of things, so great the supply of particles in any one noticeable moment of time, so that a ready source is available (4.768–76). Similarly, in “Primero sueño” the formidable profusion of the phenomenal world has a paradigmatic epistemological and ontological significance and, in turn, conditions the workings of the mind. So it is that memory maintains such an important role in the poem. Acting as an archive,—“oficiosa,/grabó tenaz y guarda cuidadosa” (262–63) [“punctiliously graved and guarded”] (263)—memory records images of the world’s countless bodies. These are then conveyed to the creative imagination which . . . iba copiando las imágenes todas de las cosas, y el pincel invisible iba formando

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de mentales, sin luz, siempre vistosas colores, las figuras. . . . (280–87) [. . . her fictive brush, though immaterial, composing images of all being, painting in brilliant colors, even without light, figures. . . .] (280–87) As demonstrated in these verses, even within the realm of immaterial mental visions, variety of colors and figures is registered. While it is true that the poem subsequently portrays the mind paralyzed by and unable to process such diversity, the celestial traveler continues to engage with it, as I shall make clear in a later part of this analysis. It is worth recalling the kinship between Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, given the recognized importance of the latter as a model for Sor Juana’s poem. Specifically, Ovid’s work can help us further conceptualize the temporal implications of Lucretius’s kinetic cosmos. This is particularly palpable in the last book of the Metamorphoses devoted to the doctrines of Pythagoras where time mirrors ever-shifting nature: In all creation Nothing endures, all is in endless flux, Each wandering shape a pilgrim passing by. And time itself glides on in ceaseless flow, A rolling stream—and streams can never stay, Nor lightfoot hours. As wave is driven by wave And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead, So time flies on and follows, flies and follows, Always, for ever new. What was before Is left behind; what never was is now; And every passing moment is renewed. You see how day extends as night is spent, And this bright radiance succeeds the dark. . . . (357) Opposite to the Catholic tempus fugit principle which accentuates the terminal nature of bodily death, in the Ovidian universe, earthly time is represented as perennial. Moreso, with its ceaselessly unraveling web of myths, Ovid’s carmen perpetuam is in its very form an imitation of the world’s perpetual movement. Comparably, with its long meandering composition, Sor Juana’s silva also captures the sensation of protean flow. Unlike her antique predecessors though, Sor Juana focuses on portraying the process of a mind in action while avoiding didactic pronouncements. Lucretius, we note, uses his poem to deliver lessons on

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achieving happiness, while Ovid emits a self-serving message pitting the transitory power of empires against his own tale which will last “to all eternity” (379). Contrastingly, “Primero sueño” devotes itself entirely to capturing the mutating bodily and mental states through which thought is experienced without using that as a basis for moral or authorial grand-standing. Resisting Allegory Departing from an allegorical understanding of dreams as channels to divine truth, Sor Juana’s dreamscape is a platform for open-ended perception and sensation. From the silva’s initial descriptions of nightfall, its attentiveness to the realm of the senses is manifested. The evocative natural scenery displayed before us is animated by mythological creatures: a lonely owl, introduced as the shamed Nictemene, the legendary princess punished by the gods with bestial transformation; in a similar vein, bats, represented as King Mynyas’s daughters, likewise transformed for having been “a la deidad de Baco inobedientes” (41) [“for want of faith in Bacchus’s deity”] (41); and a deer compared to the doomed Acteon. In contrast with the popular Christianized versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses which reframe their stories as moral lessons, Sor Juana’s poem refashions them as intimations that induce agreeable bodily repose as reflected in the words, “lánguidos miembros, sosegados huesos, /los gajes del calor vegetativo, /el cuerpo siendo, en sosegada calma” (199–201) [“(languid limbs and inert bones)/the gift of vegetative warmth, the mortal/shell in restful lassitude”] (199–201).25 What is more, while in Ovid’s epic the representation of the silenced bird women perpetuates the macabre dimensions of Greek tragedy, in the silva these figures become part of the pleasing cadence of the night. In the Metamorphoses, the portrayal of Minyas’s daughters turned into bats culminates in their being stripped of their power to communicate. Once captivating story-tellers, they see their voices literally decomposed: “. . . when they try to speak/They send a tiny sound that suits their size/And pour their plaints in thin high squeaking cries” (Ovid 86). The opposite of mellifluous poetry, their utterances are reduced to unseemly animalistic sounds. Here Ovid taps into the longstanding pantheon of tragic heroines whose speech is reduced to unintelligible bird chirps. A salient example would be The Oresteia’s Cassandra whose pronouncements, repudiated as incomprehensible, are identified with twittering (Aeschylus 91). Compared to another tragic character, the tongueless Philomela who was transformed into a swallow, Cassandra is one among several female tragic victims brutally destined to emitting garbled aviary sounds: the same can be said of Sophocles’s Antigone who shrieks like a bird over her brother’s

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grave (177).26 Not so in Sor Juana’s oneiric theater. While referring to Minyas’s daughters’ punishments, Sor Juana alters the valence of their associations with the barbaric bestial realm, focusing instead on how their singing turns to quiet: . . . y pausas más que voces, esperando a la torpe mensura perezosa de mayor proporción tal vez, que el viento con flemático echaba movimiento, de tan tardo compás, tan detenido, que en medio se quedó tal vez dormido. Este, pues triste són intercadente de la asombrada turba temerosa, menos a la atención solicitaba que al sueño persuadía; antes sí, lentamente, su obtusa consonancia espacïosa al sosiego inducía y al reposo los miembros convidaba. . . . (59–72) [. . . more silences than sound, hoping, perhaps, the apathetic drone might quicken in intensity, or else, phlegmatically, the wind might stir to song, a tempo so lethargically composed that halfway through, the wind itself might doze. This gloomy, then and fluctuating strain from the penumbrous, awe-inspiring throng, less than a summoning to wakefulness, persuasion was to sleep; but first, and slowly, the prolonged and constant refrain invited peacefulness, lulling the body gently to its rest. . . .] (59–72) While the bats’ lugubrious past is evoked, its meaning is concomitantly transformed as their garbled mutterings become a calming hush. Of a very different ilk from the tuneless squeaking described by Ovid are the notes crooned by the chorus that now contribute to the somnolent mood evoked in the verses through the proliferation of words relating to lethargy and sleep: “pausas,” “torpe,” “perezosa,” “flemático,” “dormido,” “sueño,” “lentamente,” “sosiego,” “reposo.” The figures of the chastened Nictemene and Minyas’s offspring are thus repurposed into the lulling notes of a nocturnal calm that envelop the sleeper as she dozes off. In so

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transforming Ovid’s myths, Sor Juana appropriates his poetics. The subject matter of Ovid’s song—“bodies changed to various forms” (1)—that, in turn, applies meta-literarily to the format of the poem with its perpetual shifting from one transformation story to another with only cursory transitions is reflected in Sor Juana’s undulating mental scapes. Sor Juana’s integration of Ovidian and Lucretian poetic and cosmic paradigms shows her silva’s distinctiveness vis-à-vis one of its most obvious models, Athanasius Kircher’s “Iter Extaticum Celeste.”27 Cited also in the “Respuesta a Sor Filotea” (22) as part of the canon of authors on which her autodidactic education was founded, the Jesuit savant is directly evoked in certain passages of the poem. The picture of the mind’s attempted migration from the wide base of the “Ptolomaic” pyramid to its lofty pinnacle and the oblisk-shaped shadows with which the poem begins gesture toward Kircher’s Hermetic Egyptology which incorporated pyramids, along with obelisks and hieroglyphs, as privileged symbols of a ciphered cosmos. Antique shibboleths to universal knowledge, such icons are seen as condensing Egyptian, Hebrew, and Christian wisdom which is, in turn, part of a universal landscape of transcendental signs. In keeping with Hermetic tradition, Kircher approaches the world as a vast territory of decipherable symbols. The protagonist of his allegorical “Ecstatic Journey” is transported into a visionary state, in the course of which he is led by an angel, Cosmiel, to gaze upon the enormity of the sky, the moon, the sun, and the planets. Illuminated by the angel, he wields a magic compass with which he measures the celestial orbs. Kircher’s imperial geographies, like Sor Juana’s universe, do reflect a prodigious world of particulars. In that respect, they participate in the aesthetics of excess foundational to the Novospanish imaginary: as shown by his collection of natural and cultural objects from far-flung corners of the globe housed in the Collegium Romanum museum, Kircher is fascinated by exotic variety. However, his cognizance of a vast and varied cosmos did not alter his continued investment in vertical hierarchies, as is evident from his tireless quest for unifying metaphysical principles underlying cultural and natural multiplicity. Like the protagonist in Kircher’s allegory, the poetic persona in “Primero sueño” ascends to a celestial sphere. However, there is no angelic guide with the key to a heavenly logos, nor is there a momentous theophany. Not inspired by an omnipotent divinity, the dream is a product of the natural rhythms of the human body: . . . de profundo sueño dulce los miembros ocupados, quedaron los sentidos del que ejercicio tienen ordinario ..................................................

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si privados no, al menos suspendidos. . . . (166–72) [being, then, the body engaged by deep and welcome sleep, and if not ended what might be thought the normal occupation of the senses . . . ................................. . . . at least this while suspended. . . .] (166–73) Included in the poem, moreover, is a detailed description of the coordinated workings of the principal corporeal organs which in unison distribute the requisite heat throughout the body, thus activating the imagination. Hence, the ascent of the mind does not constitute a separation from the physical world, but exists, in many respects, in continuity with it. Not belonging to a time outside of time, the dream is principally orchestrated by the rhythm of the heart, . . . reloj humano vital volante que, si no con mano, con arterial concierto, unas pequeñas muestras, pulsando, manifiesta lento de su bien regulado movimiento. (205–209) [. . . the vital mainspring of the human clock: its movement marked not by hands but harmony of vein and artery, the slow, pulsing, regulation of the heart.] (206–209) Unlike memento mori clocks, this one connotes pulsating life rather than cadaveric transience. Sor Juana, then, deviates from the metaphysical aspirations of didactic dream literature. However much Kircher’s Neoplatonic fantasy or Calderón’s melancholic analogy between life and dream constitute significant variations upon seminal antique dreamscapes, they, each in their own distinct manner, continue to uphold the division between embodied sensation and metaphysical knowledge. Kircher, as suggested, does so by imagining the dreamer exiting the world and subsuming its multiplicity within the universal measure of the celestial compass, while Calderón does so by wagering that all of mortal life is a phantasmatic dream alienated from divine truth. In this they, albeit in opposite ways, perpetuate the dichotomy articulated in Plato’s Republic. There, in a divinely inspired reverie, Er the Pamphilian gazes upon the transmigration of the souls

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(320–26). Significantly, he does not recall his actual journey back into the world, a testimony to the fact that that transition would be inconceivable given the absoluteness of the breach between eternal and mortal time (326). The souls of the recently dead may remember what transpired during their lives as they hover in the illuminated realm of the intelligible, for eternity is all-encompassing. However, human remembrance is finite. The return of the mind to embodied existence entails an exclusion from the world of timeless forms: before rejoining the body, the soul is required to drink from the River of Forgetfulness. The after-life cannot be contained in memory for it is ontologically separate from human experience. Similarly, in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, another seminal dream allegory, the celebrated protagonist ascends to the eternal realm of the immortal soul from which the limitations of finite linear time are transcended and the future is visible so that the hallowed general can gaze at his coming glory. That vision, originally the concluding section of Cicero’s De republica, is also framed as a journey to the celestial sphere, a realm only accessible to the virtuous soul which even “‘while it is still shut up, will rise above it, and in contemplation of what is beyond, detach itself as much as possible form the body’” (Macrobius 77).28 Again, truth lies outside a finite embodied existence which is alienated from it. Said otherwise, the source of bodily life lies beyond it: “‘For that which is always self-moved is eternal, but when that which conveys motion to another body and which is itself moved from the outside no longer continues in motion, it must of course cease to be alive’” (76). As for Sor Juana, she resituates the intellectual journey in contiguity with sensate life. Unlike Kircher’s celestial ascent which, laden with symbols destined to be unlocked by privileged decipherers, continues to operate in an order of similarities and affinities identifiable with the legible universe described by Foucault as emblematic of a pre-modern episteme (47), Sor Juana’s visible world is not designed to be decoded but rather experienced, because it is infinite. We can say the work in a sense parodies the Kircherian universe. It includes signal elements of that universe—again, pyramids, obelisks, hieroglyphs—but toward an utterly different end. If Kircher treats these symbols as part of a heavenly script which, traceable to the foundational language of Moses, demanded expert translation, in Sor Juana’s silva, contrarily, they are incorporated into an experiential voyage and tinged with opacity. To begin with, the very act of decoding is impeded. The summits of the two prodigious pyramids evoked as markers of mental ascent, are shrouded in clouds: Gitanas glorias, Ménficas proezas, aun en el viento, aun en el Cielo impresas: éstas—que en nivelada simetría su estatura crecía

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con tal diminución, con arte tanto, que (cuanto más al Cielo caminaba) a la vista, que lince la miraba, entre los vientos se desparecía sin permitir mirar la sutil punta que el primer Orbe finge que se junta. . . . (352–61) [‘Gyptian glories and Memphistean feats, though on the wind and in the Heavens scribed, ........................................................................... these two, which, in their paired symmetry, increased in stature as they decreased in girth, both with such artistry that (the farther they ascended toward the Sky) despite a lynx-eyed observation, they vanished, lost high among the winds. . . .] (350–59) The use of the term “impresa” to conjure up the notion of pyramids imprinted in the sky gestures toward the world of the Neoplatonic magus who reads celestial configurations. However, in “Primero sueño” the treatment of such configurations as legible symbols is no longer viable, as is strikingly expressed through the conversion of the pyramids into “bárbaros jeroglíficos de ciego/error” (381) [“blind deviations and barbaric / hieroglyphs”] (381–82). In a certain sense, the dissipation of an intelligible heavenly script is present from the opening lines of the poem where night is ushered in by the rising of “vanos obeliscos” (3) [“vain obelisks”] (3) of shade that shroud the day. No longer, as it was in the Hermetic tradition, a manifestation of divine writ, the obelisk icon becomes an allusive phenomenological vision. Now, some would say that such passages should be read as straightforwardly signaling the failure of human understanding. Under that reading, the poet, like Calderón’s Basilio, in an act of untoward ambition, attempts to scale to forbidden mental heights to grasp timeless truths accessible only to God, and fails. This would appear to be reinforced in the passage where the mind ends up “despeñada” (363) [“plunged back earthward”] (364), tumbling down to the base of the pyramid after having sprung for its summit. However, taking into account the poem as a whole, we can ascertain that Sor Juana gestures toward the Baroque topos of intellectual hubris in order to veer away from the post-Edenic-Fall grandnarrative. Subsequent to every time the soaring mind plummets, it recovers. For instance, after the initial failure of intuition, the intellectual soul changes its methodology and attempts to understand the world, no longer through intuition, but rather through conceptual abstraction. Pressing reason into service, the poet regains her intellectual agency

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ascending to the highest rungs of the mental ladder: “término dulce de su afán pesado” (612) [“treasured terminus to her endeavor”] (612). Then, after a later setback, the soul again regains its bearings. At that point, she says daringly that there exists no punishment that can prevent another attempt. In other words, there is no stopping intellectual ambition, and, despite constant doubt, the will to know remains vibrant, as is illustrated in Sor Juana’s gloss of the Phaethon myth. Instead of accepting that the story serves as an effective lesson about the perils of undue ambition, Sor Juana reflects that the publicizing of Phaethon’s excesses, rather, has the unwarranted effect of stoking audacity. She is not the first to complicate the meaning of the myth by questioning its didactic worth. Garcilaso de la Vega does something similar in his famous sonnet in which gazing on the image of a falling Phaethon does little to quell the frenetic passions of the lover: ¿qué me á de aprovechar ver la pintura d’aquel que con las alas derretidas, cayendo, fama y nombre al mar á dado, y la del que su fuego y su locura llora entre aquellas plantas conocidas, apenas en el agua resfriado? (Obras completas 99) [What can it serve to see the pictured tale Of him who, falling with scorched wings, gave name And celebration to the Icarian seas; Or that where (poplars now) seven maids bewail Their Phaëthon’s past frenzy, and the flame Whose rage the’ Italian waves could scarce appease?] (The Works 336) What is distinctive, though, about Sor Juana’s version of the legend is that it does not perpetuate a tragic vision of human shortcoming, even as it emphasizes cognitive limitations. Contrarily, the Phaethon passage is followed by an illuminating sunrise which I will explore in further depth in the next section of this chapter. Awakening As previously noted, more than once in the course of “Primero sueño,” the intellectual soul is overwhelmed by an infinity of things which its senses cannot process. Emblematic of this is the passage where, muddled by the sheer diversity of phenomena lying before it, the soul struggles and the mind’s eye is left generating unformed concepts and disorganized images: “inordenado caos retrataba/de confusas especies que abrazaba” (550–51)

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[“the disorienting chaos of the/confusing images her eyes beheld”] (550–51). We may at first glance view this as symptomatic of a traditionally Baroque mindset that approaches the phenomenal world as something rife with confusion. Under this view, alienated from the chaosshrouded reality that surrounds it, the mind is left reeling in doubt and self-doubt as is the case in the Calderonian world where sentient perception is discarded as phantasmatic—“una ilusión,/una sombra, una ficción” (Calderón 162) [“A shadow. Fiction filling reams”] (79). Such insistence on the arbitrariness of what individuals see, feel, and remember encloses them in a kind of extreme, as well as paradoxical, idealism, one coincident with an orthodox Christian contemptus mundi. However much some of the silva’s passages seem to identify with this outlook, taken as a whole, the work registers a changed attitude vis-à-vis the sentient realm. While at times appearing to read its overwhelming multiplicity as dooming human beings to intellectual paralysis, the poem inches toward a less defeatist conception of the physical world. No longer enclosed in an anagogical mindset that casts its abundance as a sign of mortals’ condemnation to, in Augustine’s words, “‘the region of dissimilarity’” from which only the post-temporal afterlife can provide liberation, Sor Juana envisions the possibility that, far from a monstrosity, profusion can be the basis for meaningful intellectual adventure (Confessions 123). The ending passages of the poem certainly point in that direction. After having attempted to apply Aristotelian categories, the soul as previously mentioned, declares these to be flawed. The reasoning adduced is that it makes little sense to aspire to all-encompassing conceptual schemes in the absence of an understanding of the mechanics of particular natural phenomena. Investigating nature, the poem proceeds to claim, is a huge enterprise, difficult in the extreme, more burdensome still than the weight of the globe Hercules carried on his shoulders. In the accompanying expansive description of the elements escaping the poet’s comprehension, Sor Juana evokes the crystalline fountain whose sweet meandering waters run deep into the earth without mixing with the ocean’s salty waters, the “campañas hermosas, /los Elíseos amenos” (719–20) [“meadows, / Elysian fields”] (719–20), and the dazzling combination of colors that dress a diminutive flower. Whilst, sprinkled with allegorical inuendo—such as that likening the beauty of the flower with poisonous feminine wile—, the verses celebrate the pleasures of nature’s bounties in a way that anticipates the luxurious bucolic universe of El Divino Narciso. It is at this point that Sor Juana goes on to invoke the Phaethon myth as kindling ambition; she then punctuates this reflection with the portrayal of herself unsure about her objectives. As she is caught in this quandary the darkness gives way to the luminous light of morning. Taken together, this

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sequence of events—the gazing upon the study of nature as a formidable task, the basking in nature’s beauties, the contemplation of the thrills of intellectual ambition, the doubt about which path to pursue, the reconnection with the palpable world of daylight—reflects the protean condition of thought and through it an open-ended experience of time. As much as Sor Juana represents herself as “confusa”—a quintessentially Baroque state—that confusion is not a preamble to pious renunciation to intellectual foray. Contrarily, it is a momentary state, much like the previous thought processes making up the poem and the fact that it is followed by the emergence of glittering light means that we are not before a lugubrious assertion about the vanity of all human knowledge. It is noteworthy that the presumed confusion is mentioned right after the passage on the Phaethon myth’s potential for inciting boldness. A heavily codified word that was often used by female literary characters to veil critical discontent by exhibiting powerlessness—many a Baroque heroine alleges being “confusa” so as to express fear of reprisal rather than actual lack of knowledge—, in the context of the poem its slipperiness proves productive. Akin to the “tretas del débil” [“tricks of the weak”] that Josefina Lúdmer ascribes to the rhetorical techniques the poet uses in her “Respuesta a Sor Filotea,” here the mention of confusion is a kind of doublespeak that curtsies toward modesty but in fact is far from an intellectual demission. Importantly, the confusion is not elicited by doubt about whether or not to continue engaging intellectually and sensorially with the world, but rather by the variety of possible epistemologies (the countless “rumbos” mentioned) available to the poet. Her reference to being paralyzed, from this perspective, has less to do with absolute want of understanding than with the ability to detect the limitations inherent in different systems of thought and perception. And yet, again, this realization does not redound in philosophical skepticism but rather in an openness toward further philosophical speculation. That is, Sor Juana eschews the conclusion that the different forms of philosophical and natural knowledge are insufficient because only God is all-knowing and the best wisdom lies in humble resignation. Breaking free of the doctrinal link between curiosity and original sin, Sor Juana invites us to envision her continuing her intellectual explorations. Her alleging confusion is an encoded way of saying she will not halt. Had it been her intent to embrace intellectual resignation, she would have conjured up a definitive mental shipwreck, rather than a momentary bewilderment followed by a dawning day. While, in the course of the poem Sor Juana often turns to expressions of orthodox desengaño to portray her relationship with an expansive universe, she ends by disrupting the Baroque equation between spectacular excess and death. From the early passages of the poem that convey the sensation of extreme height through vivid metaphor, such as that of the eagle scratching the skies with its talons or the giant pyramids rendered puny by towering

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volcanoes (354), to the many passages that transmit the awesomeness of cosmic immensity and natural abundance, the epistemological significance of experiencing a plethoric world is foregrounded. Not surprisingly, among the many, indeed ubiquitous, iterations of limitless profusion is included a reference to the countless “idiomas diversos” (418) [“many tongues”] (418), legacies of “aquella blasfema altiva Torre” (414) [“that blasphemous, arrogant/Tower”] (414–15). Following this admittedly ominous reflection, the poet freely casts her intellectual gaze “por todo lo criado” (445) [“across all creation”] (445) [“cast her gaze across all creation”] (445), taking in an immensity (“inmenso agregado”) (446) that exceeds classification, appearing as “cúmulo incomprehensible” (447) [“enigmatic whole”] (447) and “sobra de objetos” (451) [“rich profusion”] (451). Piling hyperbole upon hyperbole, Sor Juana further foregrounds her tenacious intent to process a copious world. Overwhelmed by “la inmensa muchedumbre/de tanta maquinosa pesadumbre” (470–71) [“the immensity/of such a massive mechanism”] (470–71), understanding “cedió: tan asombrado/que. . ./............./equívoco las ondas zozobraba” (475–79) [“acquiesced, /so awestruck that, / ............/indecisive, it feared that it might founder”] (475–79). Never appearing to forget the immensity before it, the intellectual soul remains enveloped in a sensation of awe vis-à-vis “diversidad tanta” (543) [“such diversity”] (543). Regarding her subsequent lament that she cannot grasp the particulars of certain natural processes, Sor Juana poses the rhetorical question “¿cómo en tan espantosa/máquina inmensa discurrir pudiera, / ...............?” (770–71) [“. . . how could one/deliberate on the complexities/of a mechanism so immense. . . ?”(770–72) To emphasize the intellectual challenges posed by the vastness of the universe is not tantamount to invalidating interaction with the phenomenal world. Contrarily, the poet’s steady focus on it emphasizes the importance of the pursuit. The shadow cast by the previously mentioned tower of Babel is, moreover, undercut by evocations of world’s fruitfulness. Exemplary in this respect is the luxuriant vision of the vegetable world blessed by the goddess Thetis’ “fértiles pechos maternales” (628) [“maternal breast”] (628), filling springs with “dulcísimo alimento” ( 632) [“dulcet nourishment”] (632). Along with this and other expressions of natural bounty interspersed in the poem, the flood of sunrays in which the silva culminates strikes a restorative note. In the opening verses of the penultimate strophe, we read: Llegó. . . el Sol cerrando el giro que esculpió de oro sobre azul zafiro: de mil multiplicados mil veces puntos, flujos mil dorados. . . . (943–46)

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[. . . the Sun had risen, closing a circle sketched of gold on sapphire blue: a thousand thousand sparkling motes and spokes of fire. . . .] (943–46) Distinct from Luciferian chaos, this multiplicity is metamorphosed into rich iridescence. We are before an imaginary that subverts catastrophist philosophies of history—traceable to the biblical Tower of Babel—, according to which profusion means a spiraling fall from the divine speech act. A creature of the ebbs and flows of a boundless cosmos, the self that is thereby born need not conform to a linear plotting of time. As much as the poem shares Ignatius’s conceptions of sensorial remembrance, it poses a challenge vis-à-vis his emphasis on disciplining memory to achieve incremental spiritual progress: Sor Juana’s psyche embraces a for more fluid temporality, one fitting for an infinite universe. Solar Time Not overcome by the confusion customarily felt by Baroque personae when they are aroused from dreams, Sor Juana passes from dream to wakefulness in placid lucidity. Concluding the poem by representing herself “despierta” (975) [“awake”] (975) and in a luminous world, she evokes an untroubled transition from the oneiric to the material sphere. Here again she distinguishes herself from figures like Segismundo who awakens from his faux dream befuddled by the sight of the dungeon in which he finds himself, and Hamlet who is harrowed by the nightly images of his father’s ghost that vanish at dawn. Haunted by the uncertain boundaries between life and dreams, the princes are condemned to a perpetual sense of unreality. In a world where reality and imagination cannot be clearly distinguished, the passage from sleeping to waking hardly affords subjects any sense of clarity: it leaves them racked with suspicion about the veracity of their own perceptions. Contrastingly, Sor Juana saves herself such disempowering bewilderment by undoing the equation life=imagination=dreams=shadows=nothing. Her poem does not view the imagination as unseating logos: memory, reason, and observation are all maintained as functional faculties. That is to say, the powers of perception and intellect are not reduced to mere instruments of deception, subservient to a distortive imagination. Hence, upon coming out of her dream, in the course of which she has benefited from dynamic thoughts and visions, the poet intimates that she can see clearly. She thus liberates memory from being unduly pathologized, a problem which, as Ricoeur notes, can result from excessive distrust of the subjective mind (La mémoire, chapter 1).

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The last words of the silva, “yo despierta” [literally “I awake”], constitute the first time Sor Juana refers to herself in first person and identifies overtly as a feminine subject. All the more striking, then, that mention of that subject is not accompanied by misgiving or selfabasement. Contrary to the form of subjecthood present in Saint Teresa’s Vida in which the female condition yields a fractured phenomenological experience, Sor Juana exudes bodily and mental selfpossession. If Teresa, still beholden to Platonic oppositions, uses dream metaphors to stress the unreality of lived experience, Sor Juana views dreams as ratifying the marvels of embodied existence. Enjoying the benefits of her oneiric journey—and thus exhibiting a remarkable sense of intellectual entitlement—, she reconnects with her conscious self, well-rested, refreshed, and clear-sighted. It will not be lost on the reader that this return to quotidian existence is the reverse of Plato’s cave allegory. There, the attainment of wisdom is expressed as an assent out of the shadows and toward the light of truth which is compared to the sun. Having basked in its rays, the philosopher king can no longer see when he returns to the corporeal world: “If this man went back down into the cave and sat down in his same seat, wouldn’t his eyes be filled with darkness, coming suddenly out of the sun like that?” (Plato, Republic 210). “Primero sueño” meaningfully disrupts this opposition between luminous metaphysical essence and shadowy physical bodies by imagining awakening—the reconnection with palpable reality—as emergence into a “Mundo iluminado” (975) [“World illuminated”] (975). That reemergence into the sunlit world, has important temporal ramifications. For it underlines the framing of Sor Juana’s intellectual journey as part of a natural shifting of night and day. More so, the internal rhythm of the poem is structured around sequential phases of advancing night and breaking day. For instance, the moment when the poet is overwhelmed by the multiple routes she might take, the first shards of light start breaking through. By connecting the thought process to a natural time scheme, Sor Juana reinforces her distance from agonistic temporalities. If the Tridentine church makes a concerted effort, in accord with its agenda of increasing the presence of the Passion in daily life, to explicitly link the experience of time to Christ’s sacrifice so as to promote humility, “Primero sueño” defies this objective. Relatedy, we might view its imagining the night as a free-ranging exploratory experience paced by the rhythms of the sun’s path as veering away from the spirit of the canonical hours. While Sor Juana’s Hieronymite convent did not belong to a Reformed order, the canonical hours, as was the case for all convents, were part of its rule. Where nuns were allowed to stay in their cells and keep the liturgical office through personal prayer,

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it nonetheless dictated their schedules. Departing from that form of Christic temporality, Sor Juana embraces the fluidity of natural time which is particularly well-suited to the ebbs and flows of her mental journey. Her silva marshalls Baroque tropes to represent a curious and speculative mind, one that is, at the same time, aware of discord among its own epistemological methods. Sor Juana’s recognition that she has not reached her goal, that she has not been able to understand all creation, is not conceived as a tragic flaw or a mark of sin, but rather a mindful confirmation that knowledge is not finite: ways of knowing change and we can continue to enjoy looking for new ways to understand in the coming nights and days. The objective, then, is not, as is the case in agonistic and eschatological Christian schemes, to yearn for the end of change, but rather to embrace change itself. Sor Juana thus construes a subject that, like her Cristo-Narciso, embodies burgeoning transmutation. Rather than finding meaning through rendering itself phantasmatic in order to access the finality of Endtimes, the Sorjuanian self engages in a protracted process of exploration and wonder. Thereby undone is the epistemology behind the “subject of control” described by Anthony Cascardi as quintessential to Spanish Counter-Reformation culture (Ideologies of History). Cascardi argues that in Calderonian theater the aesthetics of wonder are tied to terrified awe, as exemplified by Segismundo’s designation of the strange events he has witnessed as “. . . este raro / espectáculo, esta extraña, /admiración, este horror/este prodigio” (207) [“this amazing spectacle, /These strange events, this horror show/And wondrous pageant play”. . .] (117). Cascardi identifies such ruminations with acute historical pessimism: “In La vida es sueño the allegory of absolute power built on the edifice of a disenchanted, historicized, and violently social nature is theatrically sustained” (Ideologies of History 104). That is to say, the spectacle on which political authority rests is an order that is entirely fictitious or constructed, in the sense of being antithetical to nature. The subject formed within that framework is defined by its complicity with the mystifying theater of power: “It is a process that allows us to see that once the essential order of nature is imagined as withdrawn, then power—in Calderón’s case, an absolute and aesthetic power—rushes in to fill any gaps that may remain” (Ideologies of History 104). Conceived as a lapsed heir of Pauline eschatology, this historical regime is forced, in the last instance, to regard its existence as pure vanitas. Evading this view of cultural artifice as an aberration of a blessed state of nature—the lugubrious manifestation of a steep fall from divine grace—Sor Juana’s silva invites us to reinfuse the great theater of the world with redemptive possibility. Framed within the cosmic cycles of

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night and day, imaginative fabrication is no longer conceived as a deformation of natural order. Reconnecting with the germinating world of hexameral literature, the poem imagines a space that eludes the tyrannies of Chronos, for rather than fixating on its distance from the One, it partakes in the generosity of the many. Notes 1 All excerpts from La vida es sueño in English are from Gregary Racz’s translation. 2 English translations of excerpts from Lope de Vega’s poem are mine. 3 Vanitas iconography in New Spain is also influenced by pre-Hispanic funerary ritual traditions (see Obregón). 4 Translation mine 5 Translation mine. 6 See Pascual-Buxó and Sabàt de Rivers, El Sueño, on the poem’s relationship to Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, and Hermeticism. Regarding its appropriation of Hermetic traditions, see Beaupied. 7 Translation mine. See also Martínez-San Miguel, Saberes americanos: Subalternidad y epistemología. 8 Regarding the presence of Indigenous traditions in Sor Juana’s corpus, see Bokser, Egan, Leal, Moraña, and Sabàt de Rivers, “Blanco, negro, rojo.” 9 Translation mine. 10 Translation mine. See Checa on the celebration of verbal exuberance in El Divino Narciso. 11 See McKenna on the poem as an anticipation of future scientific thought; also on its scientific content see Olivares Zorrilla. 12 Translations mine. 13 Sigmund Méndez sees the poem as a kind of Baroque fantasy that offers an archeology of antique cultural references. 14 For an encompassing treatment of the interconnectedness of early modern European literary and scientific thought see Grafton, Defenders of the Text. 15 Translation mine. Castro López analogously draws a dichotomy between her poetry and philosophical thought; Alfonso Méndez Plancarte also denies it philosophical stature. 16 González Echevarría has viewed Sor Juana’s limitless universe as grounded in post-Copernican cosmologies. 17 Translation mine. 18 All English translations of excerpts from Paz’s work are mine. 19 All English translations of excerpts from Gorostiza’s poem are mine. 20 Translation mine. 21 Walter Benjamin takes Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” image as exemplifying an “angel of history” in the sense that it symbolizes catastrophic change. He holds that, its back turned to the future as it is blown forward by the uncontrollable winds of history, the figure gapes at the accumulating debris left in its path (Benjamin, “Theses” 257-8). The despondence at issue here is comparable to the pessimism attached to Dürer’s downcast angel. 22 On the reception of Lucretius in Spain see Durin and Traver Vera. 23 See Laird, “Lucretius in the Spanish American Enlightenment.”

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24 Octavio Paz says “ni una palabra sobre Lucrecio” (328) [“not a word about Lucretius”]; see also Castro López (9–10) on the affinities between Lucretius’s and Sor Juana’s poems. 25 On early modern Christianized and allegorical readings of the Metamorphoses, see Schevill, 12–15, and Barry Taylor. On Spanish literary appropriations, see de Armas. On the importance of Ovid in New Spain, see Laird, “Metamorphosis and Mestizaje.” 26 It is later, in Roman literature, that Philomela is associated with a nightingale; in the world of Greek tragedy, she is identified with a sparrow. 27 On the influence of this text on the poem, see Paz 476 and Garza. 28 The translation of Cicero’s text cited here is based on the version provided in Macrobius’scommentary on it.

Epilogue

The chapters of this book bear witness to the world of possibility opened up by Augustine’s realization that although everyone knows what time is, nobody can truly explain it (Confessions 230). Like guitar strings that need constant tuning, time demands ongoing realignment between idea and lived reality, a task that is, by definition, infinite. The disconnect between abstract time measures (divine eternity, chronological order) that purport to serve as mental buffers to chaos, and the fluctuating conditions of sensate existence thrust the self into an always unfinished phenomenological and hermeneutical predicament. Ignatius responds by interiorizing clock time; Teresa, by struggling with it; Mendieta by conjuring up a lapsed history; López by attempting to feel eternity; Losa by championing mortal struggle; Sigüenza by intertwining history and myth; Sor Juana by imagining a limitless mind. Through their works, the mystery of Christ—God made flesh, eternity made time—takes on multiple meanings, in some cases exacerbating a sentiment of fractured impermanence, in others, celebrating time’s malleability. The evolving conceptions of time explored here are not intended to chart a strict linear trajectory that supposes an incremental resolution of aporias. Certainly, the authors discussed would not—perhaps with the exception of Gregorio López—have thought of the senses of time they convey as a decisive improvement upon previous temporal regimes. In the pages of their works, time is not an extrinsic geometry to be pinned down, but rather an embodied state to be actively shaped and managed, something that involves creative reworkings of extant time models. Where it is true, as shown in the last chapter, that Sor Juana succeeds in avoiding the inner turmoil withstood by Teresa, her prodigious dreamscape does not bring closure to the problem of time. Rather, by underscoring the protean nature of perception, it suggests that no one temporal experience is universally paradigmatic. In line with Augustine’s idea, the silva performs time, bypassing the pitfalls of attempting to explain it. DOI: 10.4324/9781003381389-7

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In sum, it is through their animated imaginaries that all the texts here analyzed grapple with Augustine’s question: “What is time?” (230). They do not, of course, answer it. Instead, with it, they spin different experiential horizons and forms of subjecthood, which is why it would probably be futile to write a definitive history of time.

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Index

Note: Italicized page numbers refer to figures. Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes. à Kempis, Thomas 38; Imitatio Christi 5, 40, 42, 56 abundance 31, 108, 127, 149; of knowledge 37; material 110; natural 118, 135, 151; of temporal things 91 acceleration 2, 12, 32n4, 97 accommodatio 7, 8 Adorno, Rolena: “Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora y las antigüedades mexicanas” 109 Aeschylus: The Oresteia 142 afterlife 5, 21, 43, 66, 146, 149 Agamben, Giorgio: The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans 25 Ahlgreen, Gillian T. W.: Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity 63 Alexander the Great 13 Altdorfer, Albrecht 13 alumbradismo 94, 95, 105n11, 122; as rejection of time 69–73 alumbrados/alumbradas 62, 69 amplificatio 37 anachronism 13, 30, 67, 73 antiguo régimen 27 Aristotelianism 129, 155n6 Aristotle 35, 45, 127, 128; De Memoria et Reminiscentia 5, 55; golden mean principle 77; Nichomachean Ethics 77 ars memoriae 11, 73, 133 artes sermonicales 37 Athanasius the Great 95–96

auctoritas 51, 109 Augsburg Treaty (1555) 24 Augustinianism 83 Aztec 31, 81, 84, 107, 109, 112–117; cosmogonies 137; “Dios de las semillas” 131 Bacon, Francis 133 Balbuena, Bernardo de: Grandeza mexicana. Reproducción facsimilar de la edición príncipe 135 Baroque 2, 9, 21, 27, 29, 31, 42, 106, 107, 110, 111, 123, 127, 128, 129, 132, 133, 135, 137, 147, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155 Barthes, Roland: Sade, Fourier, Loyola 35, 51 Bataillon, Marcel: Erasme et L’Espagne 69 Bellarmine, Robert: Disputationes contra Haereticos 24 Benjamin, Walter; The Origin of German Tragic Drama 21; “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 138, 155n21 Bergson, Henri 6, 27; Matter and Memory 54, 134, 135 Betancur, Agustín de: Teatro mexicano 104 Bireley, Robert: “Les Jésuites et La Conduite de l’état Baroque” 60n4 bodily death 12, 126, 141

Index Book of Revelation 8, 12, 20, 83, 96 Borja, Francisco de 75 Brading, David 8, 84–86; The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 32n7, 85, 104, 113, 124n7; Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries 125n15; Prophecy and Myth in Mexican History 105n4 bureaucratization of government 14 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro: La vida es sueño 78, 126, 154, 155n1 Calvino, Italo: Seis propuestas para el próximo milenio 35, 59n2 Camara, Gonçalvez da 80n7; Autobiografía de San Ignacio de Loyola 45 Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge: “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650” 108, 127; Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 127 Cano, Melchor 73, 95 carmen perpetuam 141 Cascardi, Anthony J.: Ideologies of History 154; The Subject of Modernity 9 Castillo, Bernal Díaz del: Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España 117 Catholicism/Catholicization 2, 24, 30, 40, 62, 70, 85, 94, 114 Certeau, Michel de: Le lieu de l’autre: histoire religieuse et mystique 55 Cervantes, Miguel de 36; Don Quijote/ Don Quixote 1, 45, 46 Cesareo, Mario 85, 92–93; “Jerónimo Mendieta: Razón barroca, delirio institucional” 92 Christian providentialism 139 Christian temporal regime 5 Christocentric history 12 Christocentrism 40

175

chronological time and sacred time, relationship between 9 Chronophobia 2 Cicero 110, 118, 124n10; De republica 146; Hortensius 57–58; On the Laws 125n17; On the Orator 124n8; Rhetorica ad Herennium 69; Somnium Scipionis 146 Cisneros, García Jiménez de 5, 60n7, 62; Exercitatorio de la vida spiritual 38, 40, 42 Cohen, Simona: “The Early Renaissance Personification of Time and Changing Concepts of Temporality” 32n1; Transformations of Time and Temporality in Medieval and Renaissance Art 2, 3, 32n1 Columbus, Christopher 28, 83 commodified time 17 Conrod, Frédéric: “The Spiritual Exercises: From Ignatian Imagination to Secular Literature” 36 contemptus mundi 149 Corinthians 25, 40, 42, 78, 96, 107, 111, 126 Cortés, Hernán 114, 117 Coyne, Ryan 33n22; Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in Being and Time and Beyond 65, 66 criollo patriotism 31, 104, 108, 109 cultural hybridity 3, 130 death: agonistic 131; awareness of 43; corporeal 12, 126, 110–111, 141 dejamiento 70, 71 de la Madre de Dios, Gracián: Diez lamentaciones del miserable estado de los ateístas de nuestro tiempo 71 de las Casas, Bartolomé 28; Historia de las Indias 83 Demoustier, Adrien 59n3; “L’originalité Des ‘Exercices Spirituels’” 55, 61n24 Descartes, René 133 d’Étaples, Lefevre 60n14

176

Index

Diego, Juan 114 Dinshaw, Carolyn 33n10; “Temporalities” 67 DuPont, Denise: “Teresa’s Experiences” 64 Dürer, Albrecht 155n21; “Melencolia” 138 Ecce Homo 122 El Greco: Dream of Philip II 15, 16 epistemology 154; epistemological humility 135; epistemological plasticity 9 erasmista 69 Erasmus, Desiderius 60n14, 61n25; Ecclesiastes 56, 58; Enchiridion 40, 56, 58, 70 eschatology 11, 13, 17–19, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31, 42, 46, 64, 66, 78, 85, 86, 91, 95, 97, 104, 107, 108, 111, 112, 125n13, 126, 134, 154 Estella, Diego de: Tratado de la vanidad del mundo 41–42 eternal time 18, 111, 146 evangelic utopianism 8 feminine humility 129 Fénix de occidente 112 Fiore, Joachim de 28, 33n24, 85 Fortuna 1, 4, 13 Foucault, Michel 9; Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines 146 Franciscan utopianism 30 Genesis 38, 57, 75, 108 Gerli, Michael: “El Castillo interior y el arte de la memoria” 73 Gillespie, Michael Allen: The Theological Origins of Modernity 7, 32–33n8 Glantz, Margot: “Introducción: Un paraíso occidental: el huerto cerrado de la virginidad” 124n7; “Sobre ‘El Sueño’” 128 Glennie, Paul 6, 33n9; “Reworking E. P. Thompson’s `Time, WorkDiscipline and Industrial Capitalism’” 33n10

golden mean principle 77 Gómez, Fray Anselmo: Censura 94 Gorostiza, José de 155n19; “Muerte sin fin” 137; Poesía 138 Gospel of Luke 20 Gospel of Matthew 20 Grafton, Anthony: Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 155n14; Joseph Scaliger 16–17 Granada, Fray Luis de: Seis libros de la retórica eclesiástica 60n6 Grossi, Verónica: Sigilosos v(u)elos epistemológicos en Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 129 Gruzinski, Serge 8, 32n7; The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization 84, 115 Guevara, Antonio de: Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea 14, 15 Harris, Jonathan Gill 33n10; Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare 7 Hartog, François: Chronos: The West Confronts Time 7, 8, 24–28, 43–44, 55, 63, 72, 79, 86, 93, 107, 111, 126, 155; on Kairos 43–44, 55, 84–93, 96, 111; Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time 10, 12, 32n1 Hawkins, Stephen 140 Heidegger, Martin 6, 10, 30, 33n22; Being and Time 27, 33n23, 65 Hermetic Egyptology 144 Hermeticism 129, 132, 133, 155n6 historicity 9, 32n8, 56 history-as-crisis 13 homogenization 2, 32n4 Hoy, David Couzens: The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality 10, 11 Huerga, Alvaro 105n11; Los alumbrados de hispanoamérica (1570–1605) 94 Husserl, Edmund 6; Logical Investigations 10, 27

Index imitatio Christi 8, 10–11, 25–31, 39, 40, 66, 67, 83, 90, 91, 106, 107, 109, 116 Incarnation 7, 9, 12, 47, 63, 86, 105n13 Indigenous proselytization 8 industrialization 2, 12 infinite cosmos 140 Islam 96 Italy 3 Jaffary, Nora E.: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico 121 Jameson, Frederick: “The End of Temporality” 6, 32n4 John of Patmos 93, 128 Judgment Day 12 Kairos 43–44, 55, 63, 84–93, 96, 111 Kamen, Henry 32n7; Spain, 1469–1714: A Society of Conflict 3 Kant, Immanuel 10, 139 Kempe, Margery 67, 73 Kiening, Christian 33n10; Temporality and Mediality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture 6, 7 Kircher, Athanasius 133, 144–146: Hermetic Egyptology 144; “Iter Extaticum Celeste” 144 Koselleck, Reinhart: Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time 11–13, 24 Krisis 63 Kristeva, Julia: “Women’s Time” 67 Lafaye, Jacques 8, 32n7, 125n15; Quetzalcóatl y Guadalupe: la formación de la conciencia nacional en México 83, 104, 108 Laird, Andrew 115, 124n12; “Lucretius in the Spanish American Enlightenment” 155n23; “Metamorphosis and Mestizaje: Ovid in New Spain” 156n25 Laredo 75; Subida al Monte Sión 64 “Las inimitables plumas de Europa,” 136 late capitalism 32n4

177

Lavrin, Asunción: “Santa Teresa en los conventos de monjas de Nueva España” 33n25 Lefebvre, Martin: “Eisenstein, Rhetoric and Imaginicity: Towards a Revolutionary Memoria” 59n2 Le Goff, Jacques 6, 16, 17, 33n10; “Au Moyen Âge: Temps de l’Église et temps du marchand” 2–3 Livy 118, 120, 125n17; Early History of Rome 110 López, Gregorio 30, 60n6, 83, 105n10, 105n11, 157; Comentario al Libro del Apocalipsis/Tratado del Apocalipsis de San Juan traducido del latín al castellano con su explicación interlineal 4, 83, 93, 94, 96; Tratado del Apocalipsis de San Juan traducido del latín al castellano con su explicación interlineal 83, 93, 94, 96 López, Octavio Castro 128, 155n15, 156n24 Losa, Francisco 8, 10, 30, 83, 95, 99–104, 105n12, 157; La vida que hizo el siervo de Dios Gregorio López 4, 99 Lucretius 140–142, 144; De Rerum Natura/On the Nature of Things 134, 138, 139, 141; on human apprehension 140 Lúdmer, Josefina: “Tretas del débil” 150 Ludolph of Saxony/Ludolph von Sachsen 50; conception of Christ 132; The Life of Jesus Christ 50; Vita Christi 5, 40, 45, 49, 51–52 luterano 69 Lutheranism 24, 105n11 Lux et Veritas 75 Machiavelli, Niccolo 43; The Prince 60n12 Mallarmé, Stéphane: “Un coup de dès” 137 Manrique de la Cerda, Tomás 108–109 Marina de la Cruz 110, 116, 120, 121, 123 Márquez, Antonio 71–72; Los alumbrados: orígenes y filosofía 70

178

Index

Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda: Saberes americanos: Subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana 130, 155n7; Saberes americanos: Subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana 136 McGinn, Bernard: “Forms of Catholic Millenarianism: A Brief Overview” 24, 105n6; “Introduction: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Culture” 105n6; Mysticism in the Golden Age of Spain 1500–1650 64; “Teresa de Jesús: The Contemplative in Action” 64 memory 29–31, 33n12, 34, 35, 40, 44, 48, 49, 52, 65, 71, 72, 77–79, 81, 88, 90, 101, 102; agentive 69; corporeal 39; didactic role of 11; “dysfonctions” of 11; Mexico City as place of 116–119; performative 46; perceptual 41, 42; presence of 55–59; prodigious 108; progressive 75; rhetorical 69; schooling 73–75; spiritual 68; textual 73; visual 9, 37, 73 Mendieta, Jerónimo de 8, 10, 104, 106, 123, 157; Historia eclesiástica indiana 4, 30, 81–93, 105n1 merchant time 17 Merrim, Stephanie 85; The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture 127, 129 mestizaje 8, 115 Mexico: colonial 4, 5, 8, 23 Mexico City as place of memory 116–119 Mier, Fray Servando Teresa de 83 Milhou, Alain 94–95; “Gregorio López, el iluminismo y la Nueva Jerusalén americana” 94; “‘Las Casas. Prophétisme et Millénarisme’” 105n4; “La Chauve-Souris, Le Nouveau David et Le Roi Caché (Trois Images de l’empereur Des Derniers Temps Dans Le Monde Ibérique: XIIIe–XVIIe s) 33n20

millenarianism 24, 82 millennialism 82 Miller, Tyrus 33n10; Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context 6 mnemonic cognition 134 modernity: early, time in 1–33; late 2, 11, 12 Montaigne, Michel de 139 More, Anna Herron: Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico 9, 108, 109 mortal time 15, 18, 25, 30, 31, 46, 138, 146 Mujica, Barbara 105n4; “Beyond Image: The ApophaticKataphatic Dialectic in Teresa de Avila” 64; Teresa de Avila, Lettered Woman 63 Mujica Pinilla, Ramón: “Prophecy” 105n4 Nanfito, Jacqueline: “‘El sueño: The Baroque Imagination and the Dreamscape’” 134–135; “Time as Space in Sor Juana’s ‘El sueño’” 134 Neoplatonism 129, 130, 133, 155n6 New Spain 9, 12, 23, 28, 30, 32n7, 33n26, 107, 115, 124n10, 127, 139, 155n3, 156n25: postmillenarian 81–105 Northern Europe 3 O’Hara, Matthew: The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico 33n11; “Time and Christianity in Early Latin America” 8, 33n26, 105n7, 8, 33n26, 105n7 Olney, James 12; Memory and Narrative: The Weave of LifeWriting 48 ontological indeterminacy 68 ontological plasticity 9 Osuna, Francisco de 5, 75; “recogimiento” practice 52; Tercer abecedario espiritual 39, 64

Index Ovid 143, 144; carmen perpetuam 141; Metamorphoses 115, 131, 141, 142 Pacheco, Francisco: Arte de la pintura 120 Palmer, Ada: “Lucretius after The Swerve” 139 Paraíso Occidental (Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora) 4, 30, 106–125, 127, 129; Baroque space 106–115 Parousia (the Second Coming) 3 Pascal, Blaise 8 Pastore, Stefania: Un’eresia spagnola 69 patria, christic bodies of 120–123 patriotismo criollo 107, 124n7, 129 Paul III, Pope 59n1 Petrarch: Trionfi/Triumphs 1, 3, 32n1 Phaethon myth 148–150 Phelan, John Leddy 105n2; The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World 85–87 phenomenology 10, 24, 65 Piedrahita, Beata 69 Pintaric, Miha: Le sentiment du temps dans la litterature franqaise (XIIe s.-fin du XVIe s.) 32n6 Plass, Paul: “Augustine and Proust on Time and Memory” 61n18 Plato 58, 135; cave allegory 153; Republic 145, 153; Timaeus 48, 76 Plotinus 47; Enneads 61n20 Porter, James: “Lucretius and the Sublime” 139 Prádanos, Juan de 75 pre-Christian symbols 113–114 Protestantism 94 providential order 23 Quevedo y Villegas, Francisco de 21, 109–110, 138; Defensa de Epicuro 139 Quinones, Ricardo J. 32n2; Renaissance Discovery of Time, The 3 ratio studiorum 110 religious marginalization 92

179

religious schism 96 Renaissance 2, 3, 7, 27, 32n1, 108, 129, 139 Rhodes, Elizabeth 40; “Join the Jesuits, See the World: Early Modern Women in Spain and the Society of Jesus” 41, 75, 80n6 Ribeira, Francisco de: Commentarius in Apocalypsin 24 Ricoeur, Paul 6, 11, 27, 34, 45; La mémoire 35, 44, 134, 152; Time and Narrative 24–25, 29, 59 Rivera, Emilio Báez 62, 105n11 Rivers, Elías: “Sor Juana’s Dream: In Search of a Scientific Vision” 138 Rojas, Fernando de: La Celestina 1, 18, 20 Rojas y Ausa, Juan de: La Torre de David con el Relox de la muerte 17–20 Roman paganism 97 Roman Republicanism 110 Ross, Kathleen 109; The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: A New World Paradise 111 Rossi, Paolo: Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language 133 Rubial, Antonio: “El Apocalipsis en Nueva España: Los cambios de una tradición milenaria” 8, 83, 95, 105n4, 105n11; La santidad controvertida. Hagiografía y conciencia criolla alrededor de los venerables no canonizados de Nueva España 95, 105n11, 121; “Tebaidas en el paraíso. Los ermitaños de la Nueva España” 105n11 Saavedra Fajardo, Diego de 4; Empresas políticas 1 Sabàt de Rivers, Georgina: “Blanco, negro, rojo: Semiosis racial en los villancicos de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” 155n8; El Sueño de Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz: Tradiciones literarias y originalidad 155n6

180

Index

Sadia, Juan Pablo Rubio: “El Oficio Divino en la vida del clero entre los siglos XIII y XVI” 26 Saint Anthony 99; Life 95–96 Saint Augustine 13, 23, 26, 28, 30, 33n14, 34–35, 45, 46, 61n18, 68–69, 158; The City of God 24, 25; Confessions 4, 5, 12, 25, 27, 44, 46–50, 54, 55, 57–59, 65–67, 137, 157; on human time 128; perception of human existence 100; on temporal existence 27; on time 46–49 Saint Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises 4, 29, 34–62, 64, 66, 74, 76–77, 90, 107 Saint John of the Cross: “Noche oscura” 68 Saint Paul 126; Corinthians 25, 40, 42, 78, 96, 107, 111, 126; epistles 15, 66, 101; Philippians 15 Saint Teresa of Ávila 8, 9, 28–30, 41; El castillo interior 73; Libro de la vida 4, 29, 62–80, 99, 104, 153 Saint Thomas Quetzalcoatl 113 Sánchez, Miguel 83 San Miguel, Francisca de 122 scheduled devotion 34–41 Schlegel, Friedrich 13, 18 self-punishment 60n5 Shakespeare, William 7, 126; Hamlet 3; King Lear 3 Sherman, Stuart: Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 7, 33n10 Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de 9, 10, 31; Paraíso Occidental 4, 30, 106–125, 127, 129; Primavera indiana 113, 132; Teatro de las virtudes políticas 109, 110, 117, 124n5, 124n10 solar time 152–155 Sophocles: Antigone 142–143 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 9, 10, 28; “Americanness” 136; El Divino Narciso 130, 131, 149; “Primero sueño” 4, 27, 31, 126–156; “Respuesta a Sor Filotea” 128, 134

Sor María de Ágreda 83 Spain 4, 5, 23, 33n20, 62, 71, 139, 155n22; political structures 3 spirituality 5; Christian 7 Stercken, Martina 6–7, 33n10; Temporality and Mediality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture 6, 7 Suárez, Francisco 60n14 Suárez, Juan Luis: La reordenación del tiempo y la replicación cultural en el primer ciclo atlántico: La ‘Loa para El Divino Narciso,’ de Sor Juana” 130 temporal: anxiety 30, 44; awareness 5, 11, 27; existence 12, 27, 29, 48, 51; fluidity 130; plurality/ pluralism 7, 8, 84; regime 2, 5, 6, 8, 10–12, 18, 23, 28, 34, 38, 70, 82, 83, 91, 93, 104, 106, 109, 111, 112, 115, 116, 123, 126, 134, 136, 138, 157 temporality 2–10, 29, 32–33n8, 126–156; Christian 3, 8, 18, 86; divine 9; eschatological 28; human 12, 20, 43, 46, 54, 66, 119; messianic 25, 92; mortal 9; post-millenarian 30 temporalization 12–14, 24 tempus fugit 141 theatrum mundi 129–130 Thompson, E. P. 6, 33n10; “Time, Work, Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” 32n5 Thrift, Nigel 6, 33n9; “Reworking E. P. Thompson’s `Time, WorkDiscipline and Industrial Capitalism’” 33n10 time: clock, in Spiritual Exercises 34–61; commodified 17; divine 4, 24, 28, 132; in early modernity 1–33; eternal 18, 111, 146; eternity 8, 12, 19, 28, 43, 44, 53, 72, 157; human 4, 18, 23, 31, 44, 62, 86, 107, 128, 134, 138; imperfect conquest of 81–84; merchant 17; mortal 15, 18, 25, 30, 31, 46, 138, 146; as problem 46–49; as scythe

Index 12–23; solar 152–155; as space 134; temporality 9; timelessness 7, 29, 44, 46, 64, 68, 128; see also individual entries Trabulse, Elías 132, 133, 139; Los manuscritos perdidos de Sigüenza y Góngora 124n4 Trachtenberg, Marvin: Building-inTime: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion 2, 32n1 Tridentine 13, 31, 122, 153; antipropheticism 83; Catholicism 36; religiosity 9, 13 Valdés, Fernando 95 Valdés Leal, Juan de 23; Finis Gloriae Mundi 20, 21, 22, 111; In Ictu Oculi 20, 22, 111 Valery, Paul: “Cimetière marin” 137 Van Ginhoven Rey, Christopher: “The Jesuit Instrument: On Ignatius of Loyola’s Modernity” 35 vanitas, transcending 41–46

181

Vega, Garcilaso de la: Obras completas con comentario 148; The Works of Garcilasso de la Vega 148 Vega, Lope de 155n2; Poesía Selecta 126, 138 via illuminativa 68 via purgativa 68 via unitiva 68 Villalpando, Cristóbal de: Mística ciudad de Dios 83 Virgin of Guadalupe 28, 83, 113, 114 virtus 41 vita activa 45, 100 vita contemplativa 45 Weber, Alison 63; Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity 64 Zapién, Tarsicio Herrera: “Del ‘Primero sueño’ al ‘segundo sueño’. De aristóteles a Teilhard de Chardin” 130–131 Zúñiga y Acevedo, Gaspar de 119