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She believed baptism ‘made equals in the grace and cleansing from sins’.
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By Dr. Kevin C.A. Elphick
Scholar of Religious Studies
Introduction
Interest in Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534) has increased since the publication of her sermons in 1999 by Inocente García de Andrés and the re-opening of her cause for canonization by the Vatican in 2015. As a woman preaching sermons during the Inquisition, Mother Juana is a highly unusual figure, all the more so given that gender liminality pervades her thought. Gender fluidity is also a theme in her personal biography. This essay examines gender liminality in her Vida and in her sermon on the Annunciation. Where gender liminality might seem novel and untraditional, Juana’s use of this theme is contextualized and shown to be contiguous both with earlier hagiographic sources and with her professed Franciscan heritage.
Mother Juana de la Cruz (d. 1534) offers a medieval model for modern LGBTQ people, exemplifying radical authenticity to the queer and holy truth of her own identity. Juana’s gender combined masculinity and femininity, and she proclaimed the presence of God she found inherent in that identity. Her sermons invited her listeners, too, to discover God in their own experiences of gender. Juana called on her audience to experience the divine through gender fluidity; gender non-conforming images of God, the saints, the Virgin and Christ are found throughout her sermons. When she told the story of her own re-gendering by God at her conception, she spoke the truth revealed to her of the gender transcendence she lived out in the authenticity of her life. Pointing to her Adam’s apple as proof of this miracle, Juana also pointed to the source of her own miraculous and authentic voice, which is simultaneously both her own voice and the voice of Christ.
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Juana was born in 1481 to farming parents in the village of Numancia, halfway between Madrid and Toledo. Contrary to the gender expectations of her day, she grew to fame for her sermons, whose echoes would reach the New World as her Sisters carried her relics and fame to the Americas and beyond.1 Entering a Franciscan community of women as a teenager, she took the name Juana de la Cruz, eventually becoming the community’s abbess. For centuries Mother Juana has been celebrated in Spain as ‘la Santa Juana’, but more recently she has gained scholarly attention due to the abundant gender theology of her sermons.2 Published as El Conhorte, the seventy-two sermons evidence a theological predisposition toward gender equity that stood in marked contrast to the patriarchy of her day.3 From the Franciscan tradition bequeathed to her community, Juana mined equality between the sexes, and spiritual transcendence of gender boundaries. Her life narrative, her Franciscan tradition, and the support of her Franciscan community all contributed to the unexpected blossoming of a full-f lowering gender theology against the harsh backdrop of the Inquisition. The voices of contemporary religious women in Spain, such as Francisca Hernández and Francisca de los Apóstoles, were silenced by the Inquisition.3 Juana’s compelling sermons were instead embraced not only by her community and local parishioners, but also attended by both King Charles V and Cardinal Cisneros, Minister Provincial of the Franciscan Friars.
Undergirding the gender theology of Juana de la Cruz is her conviction that by Baptism, women and men are ‘made equals in the grace and cleansing from sins’.4 In this, her dependence upon Galatians is clear: ‘For as many of you as have been baptized in Christ have put on Christ. […] [T]here is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (3:26-28).5 But she also grounds this equality in the new creation of God’s Incarnation: ‘If then any be in Christ a new creature…’ (2 Corinthians 5:17a). This new creation transcends gender. Juana explains of the Incarnate Christ: ‘it has been said about you, [that you are a] new human and new law and new thing created on the earth.’6 She then places in the mouth of God the Father this pronouncement upon Christ: ‘You are a new human, making a new law and a new thing upon the earth.’7 While ‘human’ is masculine in Spanish, the nouns ‘law’ and ‘thing’ (in ‘new thing created’ [‘nueva cosa criada’]) are both feminine. In Christ is a new law for this new, implicitly feminine, creation.
Not unexpectedly given her cultural context and period of history, Juana defaults to contrasting the Jewish covenant as inferior and lacking; her perspective is regrettably supersessionist. However, comprehension of this mindset is required to understand her perception that the dynamics of gender relations undergo a positive shift in salvation history. Juana’s logic juxtaposes the ‘Old’ Law against the New Law. Contrasting circumcision and baptism as initiation rituals, Juana notes that since circumcision was solely for men, ‘the blessings’ of circumcision were not equally available to women.8 In contrast, under the New Law, baptism was for both genders, and blessed both genders as equals in grace. By first establishing that in Christ, the new human is a ‘nueva cosa criada en la tierra’ (‘a new [feminine] thing created upon the earth’), she adds to the weight of her conclusion that in this New Law, women are equal to men in grace, and a newly transcendent dynamic has been realized with regard to gender. After naming Christ the new human, the New Law, and a new thing, she has God the Father pronounce a gendered rendering of the Trinity: ‘ancient God, I Myself, You [Son] and the Holy Spirit, we are one thing (una cosa) and one majesty (unamajestad), and one Trinity (una Trinidad) and one essence (una esencia)’.9 Juana’s Sermons were meant to be heard, and here, her rhetorical device is the punctuated repetition of the feminine ‘una’ four times in rapid succession. Each of these attributes, including the Trinity itself, would thus have been heard by Juana’s audience as feminine. God the Father then continues His self-description with a single introductory (masculine) ‘un’ which is used only to introduce the following two masculine adjectives, ‘living’ (‘vivo’), and ‘true’ (‘verdadero’), and concludes by naming and negating three grammatically masculine attributes – ‘without beginning, without middle, without end’.10 By weighting God’s self-description with this litany of gendered attributes, Juana predisposes her audience to next hear highlighted as feminine the ‘nueva cosa’ that God is creating in Christ, and subsequently the new gender equality in this New Law and new creation. Juana thereby provides a rhetorical grounding that predisposes her audience to accept her arguments as to the radical equity between men and women in Christ, and her contention that gender can be – and even should be, for true Christians – transformed, and even transcended.
Moreover, for Juana, each gender was already encapsulated within the other. She explains:
Man should be differentiated from woman with respect to his body; however, with respect to the soul, both are equals and compeers. Because if a woman has a soul (anima) which is by name female, likewise man too has a soul […] by name female, so that every man and woman can be called female. And conversely, man and woman can be said to be male, because if man has a living and everlasting spirit (espíritu) likewise woman has a living and everlasting spirit.11
For Juana, the grammatically masculine spirit and the grammatically feminine soul transcend gender categories, each indwelling and residing in the other so that the name of each is proper to the other. Throughout her sermons and the lived example of her life, one can hear Juana’s clarion call trumpeting this theme of equality between the genders, gender transcendence in God, and an ultimate human transcendence of gender in the fulfilled Reign of God.
Juana in the Tradition of Gender-Liminal Saints
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The term ‘liminality’ is derived from the Latin word for ‘threshold’ (limen, liminis). It evokes doorways and boundaries. Gender liminality connotes straddling and crossing the thresholds of gender, with movement beyond given borders. In her own life, Juana evidenced and embodied a personal gender liminality. She walked out the door of her family home dressed as a man, determined to cross the threshold into a women’s community. Juana thus belongs to a well-studied category of hagiography, the ‘female transvestite saint’.12 While the term ‘transvestite’ is itself problematic and inadequate, it has commonly been used to describe the medieval phenomenon of saints assigned female at birth who dressed or lived as monks.13 While Juana’s adoption of male clothing was brief, her Vida (Life) recounts that as a young teenager, to escape an arranged marriage, she dressed as a man, equipped herself with a sword, and walked to the convent which would be her vocation instead of matrimony.14 It is not unlikely that Juana would have grown up hearing the story of St Paula Barbada.15 Paula had lived in nearby Ávila during the sixth century. Fearing the unwelcome advances of a threatening man, St Paula prayed explicitly that God transform her appearance to make her unsightly. God then miraculously caused a thick beard to grow upon her face. So complete was this gender transformation that, upon finding her hiding in a nearby chapel, the unruly man took her to be a praying hermit. St Paula remained then as a hermit, embracing this new vocation until her death. Growing up in Inquisitional Spain, it is not unlikely that young Juana would have also heard tales of the Maid of Orléans, who dressed in male attire and similarly had taken up a sword. The two women even shared the same name, ‘Juana’ being the Spanish translation of ‘Joan’. The lives of Sts Paula and Joan evidence vocations that burst gender categories asunder, adding to the dynamically f luid Body of Christ. Juana may have been inspired by their stories.
Juana also would have had a Church calendar filled with saints assigned female at birth, whose sanctity depended upon their subsequent embrace of a male identity. Their stories of personal liberation and salvation could have helped to model her vocational flight from an arranged marriage. Among such saints are Anastasia (Anastasios), Apolinaria (Dorotheos), Athanasia, Eugenia (Eugenios), Euphrosyne (Smaragdus), Hilaria (Hilarion), Marina (Marinos), Matrona (Babylas), Pelagia (Pelagius), Susannah (John), and Theodora (Theodoros).16 Stories of St Paul’s associate, St Thekla, also described her donning male attire. This litany of saints places Juana’s actions solidly within the canon of hagiographies which recognized passing as male as an acceptable strategy to protect virginity and gain holiness. But there were other gender non-conforming examples for Juana, closer to her own time and her own religious vocation. Juana was choosing a Franciscan life, and the Franciscan story clearly had a pull upon her vocational impulse. St Clare had fled her family on Palm Sunday to join Francis’ community of men. She was then tonsured by St Francis and given a habit like that of the fellow brothers. Until later joined by her sister, the Franciscan family briefly existed as a community solely composed of Brothers and Clare. Moreover, St Francis himself was gender non-conforming, repeatedly failing at the role of warrior, and intentionally divesting himself of other male roles of his day. To his companion Leo, he wrote: ‘I am speaking to you, my son, in this way as a mother’.17 He explained that we are ‘mothers’ of the Messiah ‘when we carry Him in our heart […] and give birth to Him through a holy activity’.18 Developing this theme further, Francis wrote in his first Rule that each brother should ‘love and care for his brother as a mother loves and cares’.19
Intended as a definitive Life of St Francis which would provide a paradigm for all other friars, St Bonaventure’s Legenda Maior (written c.1260-1263) also captured this gender non-conforming aspect of Francis’ personality. Bonaventure explains that through the Blessed Mother’s intercession Francis ‘conceived and brought to birth’.20 He metaphorically describes the ‘conception of [Francis’] first child’, and his ‘firstborn son’ – Bernard, one of Francis’ earliest followers.21 Bonaventure then recounts Francis’ own parable to the Pope in which Francis is ‘a poor, but beautiful woman’ who bore the great King Jesus ‘children who resembled the king ’.22 Bonaventure also recounts Francis’ mystical encounter with the Trinity as three poor women, an apparition unique in Christian mystical literature.23 And Bonaventure clearly portrays Francis as the Bride using the typology of the Song of Songs, noting that he ‘followed his Beloved everywhere’ and ensured that Jesus ‘always rested like a bundle of myrrh in the bosom of Francis’s soul’.24 Bonaventure’s writings were published in Spanish by the Franciscan Cardinal Cisneros (1436-1517), so Juana and her community would have had access to these and other Franciscan works. In point of fact, as a fellow Franciscan, Cisneros went out of his way to ensure that women’s communities in particular had access to these formative, printed works.25
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From her Vida, we know that Juana had also been exposed to The Little Flowers of St Francis, a collection of stories about Francis and his followers written sometime after 1337, originally in Italian.26 In its Spanish translation, she would have encountered another gender-transcending friar, John of Laverna. In his prayer, Blessed John came to know Jesus as a Mother.27 While experiencing spiritual dryness, John experienced Jesus as being like a mother, temporarily withholding food: ‘But He was acting like a mother with her baby when she withdraws her breast from him to make him drink the milk more eagerly’.28 The author of The Little Flowers also uses the language of the Song of Songs to describe John’s resultant pursuit of Christ: ‘when his soul did not feel the presence of his Beloved, in his anguish and torment he went through the woods, running here and there, seeking and calling aloud with tears and sighs for his dear Friend’.29 When Christ finally does appear to Blessed John, The Little Flowers uses parallels from the Song of Songs to explain the intimacy which John would enjoy:
For he immediately threw himself down at Christ’s feet, and the Savior showed him his blessed feet, over which Brother John wept […] Now while Brother John was praying fervently, lying at Christ’s feet, he received so much grace that he felt completely renewed and pacified and consoled, like Magdalene […] he began to give thanks to God and humbly kiss the Savior’s feet.30
Brother John next kisses Jesus’ hands: ‘Christ held out His most holy hands and opened them for him to kiss. And while He opened them, Brother John arose and kissed His hands’.31
However, the author of The Little Flowers deviates from the expected ‘kiss of the mouth’ of the Song of Songs, seemingly modifying this intimacy slightly for an encounter between the male Jesus and the male friar.32 The ‘kiss of the mouth’ is replaced by the kissing of Christ’s chest: ‘And when he had kissed them [Christ’s hands], he came closer and leaned against the breast of Christ, and he embraced Jesus and kissed His holy bosom. And Christ likewise embraced and kissed him’.33 Through Bl. John of Laverna, Juana would have encountered a well-developed model of Franciscan gender liminality. John experienced Jesus both as mother and male lover. John himself was both the Maiden of the Song and a brother to Jesus. Instead of comparing him to any of the numerous available male saints, he was compared to St Mary Magdalene, with a striking emphasis on her physicality – weeping, and washing Christ’s feet, even going so far as to kiss him repeatedly. It is unlikely that this early Franciscan hero would have escaped Juana’s notice as she had The Little Flowers read to her.
Juana de la Cruz, then, inherits these traditions, and builds upon an existing Franciscan motif. God renders gender-transcendent those He calls, giving them attributes of the opposite binary gender, and ultimately recreating them to be like Him, apophatically transcending gender. It is through this background and context that we can best understand Juana’s life, and her sermons.
Gender Liminality in the ‘Life’ and Incarnation Sermon of Mother Juana de la Cruz
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, Wikimedia CommonsThe story of Juana de la Cruz begins not with her birth, but with God forming her upon her conception. According to her official Vida, God was already forming a male child when the Virgin Mary intervened.34 Needing a woman who would eventually reform a convent dedicated to her, the Virgin persuaded God to mould the embryonic Juana into a female instead. However, as proof of the miracle, God left intact her Adam’s apple as witness to the divine re-gendering. Soon after her birth, she was baptized with the name Juana, the feminine version of her father’s own name. And evidencing holiness even as a newborn, she fasted every Friday, nursing only once.
Her call to a religious vocation involved yet another gender transformation. Praying before a picture of St Veronica, this female saint’s painted image was miraculously transformed into the face of Christ, who promised to ‘espouse and bring her to religion’.35 Gazing upon this newly male image, Juana heard his wedding proposal.36 Having voiced his offer of marriage, ‘the holy picture turned to the former likenesse’.37 The saint, Veronica – whose name means ‘true icon’ – transformed to reveal the male Christ who sought to wed Juana, and having voiced his intent, reverted back to a woman’s guise.38 The gender fluidity inherent in this mystical experience would subsequently suffuse her spirituality and preaching. Inspired by this vision, and threatened with an impending arranged marriage, the teenage Juana decided to flee her hometown and join a nearby Franciscan women’s community.
We can read the story of her journey in the English translation of Juana’s Vida provided by Father Francis Bell. In 1625, Bell published an English translation of the official biography of Mother Juana de la Cruz, originally published in Spanish by Friar Antonio Daza in 1613. Published at St Omers, Bell’s translation was intended for the edification of two Poor Clare nuns who had been elected Superiors of a newly erected English Monastery. Bell promises to ‘faithfully […] translate the book in a plaine and homely language’,39 but interestingly, he added a stealthy gender commentary of his own. The original Spanish and Bell’s translation both explain that Juana’s father and kinsfolk sought to ‘remedy’ her unmarried status. The original Spanish version includes a parenthetical aside noting that ‘remedy’ is the name given to women’s marriages by the world, ‘God leaving f light as the only other option’.40 Bell instead inserts his own commentary (ignoring the theme of f light) and explains that these marriages are considered a ‘remedy’ for women, ‘as if there were no other remedie left by God for them’.41 Clearly Bell, writing for two nuns, knowingly champions the cause that marriage and childbirth are not the only vocations available to women.
The account of Juana’s fleeing an arranged marriage immediately follows her mystical experience before the image of St Veronica. Having been called to spiritual marriage and religious life by an image which transforms from female to male and back again, Juana followed this same transition in journeying to the convent. Bell’s translation continues, portraying Juana’s gender transformations:
She resolved […] to go to the happy monastery, two leagues from her town […] not as a weak woman, but as a strong and forcible man, putting herself into the garments of one of her male cousins, and making a pack of her own, in the habit of a man; and so with a sword under her arm, alone and on foot, she took her way one morning before the rising of the sun[.]42
Arriving at the Convent, Juana’s first impulse was to pray:
She came to the holy monastery, where having made her prayer in the habit of a man […] she went and adored the holy image of the Mother of God. She turned aside to a corner of the church, and putting off that apparel, put on the woman’s apparel which she brought with her. Lifting up her eyes to an image of our Blessed Lady […] which stood over the regular door of the convent […] and kneeling before it, [she] gave thanks to her anew […] The image spoke unto her and said: ‘My daughter, in good time you have come to my house, enter merrily, for well you may, when for the same God created you, and I give you the superiority and care over it[.]’43
Juana then shared her fear that the community would not receive her, but our Lady said in response: ‘Fear nothing, for my Son who has brought you hither, will cause that they accept you.’ Emboldened, Juana sought out the abbess and confided her intention to join, explaining that ‘she had left her Father and kindred, and to take that holy habit [of St Francis] had come in the habit of a man so as not to be known.’44 The abbess reprehended her for placing herself in such manifest peril, but still welcomed her, internally thanking God ‘who had infused such spirit and fortitude into so tender a damsel’.45
Like the miraculous image of St Veronica which had first initiated her journey, Juana had transformed from female to male appearance, and then fluidly back to the female gender that God had gifted her with in the womb. Veronica’s transition had given a pattern for Juana’s flight from arranged marriage to her intended homosocial vocation. Waiting above the Convent door, the statue of the Virgin approvingly greeted and welcomed her gender-fluid child. Juana then joined this community of religious women and, like them, was invested in the habit of another man, St Francis of Assisi.
Juana was eventually made Abbess of the community, and thereafter began a thirteen-year period of imitating St Francis by her preaching, a role traditionally reserved for men. As Jessica A. Boon remarks, ‘it is Juana’s many years as a preacher that make her unique in the history of Christianity’.46 Her activity in preaching sermons is all the more noteworthy given that she was preaching in inquisitional Spain. These sermons were based on the liturgical year, focusing on individual feast days. In what follows, I will focus on just one, her Sermon on the Incarnation.47 In this foundational sermon, Juana highlights themes which are present throughout her work: consent, gestation, and the mutability of gender roles, underpinned by her use of feminine images of God.
Juana’s ‘Sermon on the Incarnation’
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Similar to Juana’s own situation, in which family members were planning an arranged marriage for her, in Juana’s Sermon on the Incarnation, Mary is faced with the dilemma of a proposed pregnancy which seems to conflict with her vocational intent and vow of virginity. Like Juana herself, in this sermon Mary is demonstrably characterized as determined, ‘strong and forcible’, in advocating for her chosen vocation. In this sermon, Mother Juana presents a very different image of the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation than is found in the original account in St Luke. In this Gospel, Mary asks only: ‘“How will this be, since I am a virgin?”’ (Luke 1: 34). Juana’s rendering of the angel Gabriel’s visit presents Mary as having many more questions. Mary actively challenges the archangel with eight questions, several of which are multipart inquiries. While Juana highlights the intended perpetual virginity and humility of Mary by the nature of her questions, the theme of her willing consent is also clearly at stake, and important to Juana. At one point the narrative comes to a standstill as the Virgin considers her options: ‘[T]herefore she delayed giving her consent, asking the holy angel how…? ’48 A blessed Virgin who needs all her questions answered before she consents to God’s will is fully novel in the homiletic tradition up to this point.
While withholding immediate consent creates dramatic tension for her audience, it is also clear that, in her departure from the Gospel precedent of Mary’s single question, Juana is intentionally crafting the image of a woman who does not give in easily and strives to understand fully before giving consent. In fact, Juana uses this dramatized example of informed consent as an opportunity to explain: ‘This means that God himself never wants to use force to enter anyone’s heart if they do not consent first and open it willingly’.49 It is not until Gabriel concedes that he is telling her everything he knows about how this will affect her that Mary finally agrees with her traditional ‘Fiat’ of consent.50 Juana next describes the entire Trinity entering Mary’s womb and beginning the work of making the Second Person of the Trinity incarnate.51 She highlights the Second Person as Lady Wisdom/Sophia, using the language of Proverbs 8:12: ‘and then came wisdom and discretion, which are the Son, and gave birth to t he Word’.52 Uniquely, Juana herein casts the Trinity in a female guise, as being like a seamstress (‘lavandera’) constructing a shirt, as the Trinity weaves together divinity and the fabric of humanity in the Incarnation. She attributes the actual sewing of this fabric directly to the Holy Spirit.53 Throughout her sermons, Juana uses these familiar domestic images again and again to convey the Divine to her audiences, counterweighing traditional male images with balancing female metaphors. Embedded in his new dwelling place, the foetal Redeemer is delighted by this new home.54 Juana announces: ‘And he was as happy and delighted inside there in that sacred dwelling of the virginal womb (vientre) of Our Lady as in the bosom (seno) of the Father’.55
Ronald Surtz here translates the Spanish ‘seno’ as ‘bosom’, but‘seno’ can also be readily translated as ‘womb’. Juana’s audience would have likely heard and envisioned both ‘womb’ and ‘bosom’. Justification for translating ‘seno’ as womb is found in her Sermon on the Trinity. There she describes the Father pregnant with the Son: ‘And for this reason it is said that the Son is enclosed in the bosom (seno) of the Father. And just like the woman, when the time is up, [the pregnancy] concludes, and after giving birth, they can all see and take and enjoy it, which could not be done when it was in the mother’s womb (vientre).56 For Juana, a clear parallel exists between the Father’s bosom and Mary’s womb. In fact, Jesus does not want to leave this new home in Mary’s womb. Juana tells us: ‘[H]e was very warm and cozy there and did not wish to leave so quickly, and said, speaking to the Father, “Oh my powerful Father! I am so happy in such a delicious dwelling! May I dwell in it a long time, for I do not want to leave this home”’.57 Juana does not chronicle the Father’s response, but her intent is clear: Jesus is equally at home in the bosom of the Father and in the womb of his Mother. It was the Church Council of Toledo in 675 CE that had declared that the Son was begotten and born ‘from the womb of the Father’ (‘de Patris utero’), on the basis of Psalm 110:3. Juana was clearly evoking this image of the wombed and birthing Father. A less overt, but still discernible parallel is then elaborated by Juana, already alluded to by Jesus’ reluctance to leave his new home. The Incarnation, the remedy for the Fall of Humanity, also occasions something akin to a ‘fall’ in God. Like Adam and Eve, God is depicted as enduring a temptation. Seeing generations of human perdition, Juana portrays God as stating: ‘I am tempted not to go to the world […] to redeem and ransom t hem’.58 However, unlike sinful humanity, God overcomes this temptation. And thus God falls in another sense, downward from his throne as he descends to become flesh in the Virgin’s womb.
Juana switches the perspective from the biblical account of the Annunciation on earth to what is happening in Heaven at the same time. At the moment of the Annunciation, the angels and heavenly guests are celebrating in festival. The angels’ merriment occasions them to inquire of God how they could best serve and please him on this great feast. Unexpectedly, God says: ‘[T]ruly I feel like eating now.’59 This statement is remarkable to the angels, who exclaim: ‘[A]s long as we have been in your Kingdom, we have never heard you say such a thing!’60 Ironically, the Virgin Mary is the one who is pregnant, but it creates in God a sympathetic craving! And what God wants to eat is the fruit of a tree. Readers will no doubt recall the story of Genesis: ‘And the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and fair to the eyes, and delightful to behold: and she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave to her husband who did eat’ (Genesis 3:6). However, here a pear, not an apple, is desired.61 Yet the intended parallels are clear: tempting angels, and the fruit from a tree. God acknowledges the angels’ bemusement at his request, but only reinforces it, stating: ‘I do not want to have anything other than wine pears as refreshment’.62 God’s craving is very specific. After a parade of pears are brought to God by various angels, finally, only the pear offered by Gabriel is chosen. And to continue the parallels with the Fall, where Adam and Eve covered themselves in garments of fig leaves, the Lord adorns himself with the pear: ‘“[I]t belongs as a jewel around my neck […].” And saying these words […] he hung it around his sacred neck’.63
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But in marked contrast to Adam and Eve, instead of eating this pear, ‘the Lord received it with great joy and took it in his sacred hands, kissing it and embracing it and smelling it and tucking it into his womb (seno), greatly delighting in it’.64 Notably, the pear is placed in the same location previously occupied by the Son, the bosom and womb of the Father. It is only after this intimate enthronement of the pear in God’s centre that we learn that the pear is in fact the Virgin herself: ‘And while everyone was watching, they saw that suddenly that very pear was changed into […] Our Lady, the Virgin Mary’.65 Juana leaves her listeners with an image of God reminiscent of nesting Russian dolls. Enclosed in God is the Virgin, and enclosed in the Virgin is the Christ. Juana has God go on to proclaim: ‘“You alone, my beloved, chosen among thousands. You alone, my Queen, inside whom I ruled and dwelled”’.66 Juana’s allegory of this Fall of God offers something of an antidote to the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve, in which Eve is blamed for original sin and the expulsion of humankind from paradise. Juana explains that all the pears brought before God were actually the holy women of humanity up to that point in salvation history. Juana describes them as ‘the many holy and blessed women’, adding that ‘some were virtuous and good […] others were holy and servants of God’.67 In response to the ill fate which befalls all women in the Genesis account, Juana offers a feast and banquet of holy and good women, each presented before God ‘because he wanted to become incarnate in a woman.’ And where the Fall in Genesis occasions God to pronounce four curses – upon the serpent, the land, the woman, and the man – in Juana’s revision, God instead utters four blessings upon Mary.68
Both stories culminate in relocation from Paradise. Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden. God falls from Heaven and comes to dwell in the womb of the Virgin on earth. Juana describes the Virgin’s womb: ‘[T]here inside was the Redeemer himself, playing with the angels and ruling the world and judging souls’.69 His exile is a self-imposed banishment, but a banishment from Heaven nonetheless. Where the Genesis Fall concludes with God driving Adam and Eve from the Garden, Juana’s Fall concludes with God’s entry into the Virgin, ‘inside whom he would rule and the dwelling in-side which he would live’,70 making her womb the new judgment seat of God. In both stories, women are the pivotal point upon which salvation history turns. Both stories begin with angels offering fruit. And in the parallelism set up by Juana, both God and humans find the fruit desirable. The role of women is central to each story. Taking the fruit results in dislocation for all. But Juana’s is a reverse parallelism. When God takes the fruit, humanity is saved. God falls to earth. The woman is no longer the occasion of perdition, but instead, the source of salvation. Banished humanity now becomes the dwelling place of God. Instead of curses, only blessings are uttered. And woman, who was first judged and condemned by God (Eve), now becomes the judgment seat (Mary) from which God rules and judges all. By adding gender fluidity throughout her sermon, Juana’s narrative further dramatizes this great salvific inversion: ‘He has cast down the mighty […] and has lifted up the lowly’ (Luke 1:52). In response to the patriarchal society of her day, Juana crafts a salvation parable in which the story turns upon the actions of the otherwise ‘weaker sex’, and the Almighty is recast in female guise, complete with womb, bosom, and gestational cravings.
Gender fluidity – fluctuations of gender identity between and beyond the poles of binary gender – pervades her other sermons and reaches a culmination in the sermon on the Trinity where she depicts God the Father and God the Son as each pregnant with the other.71 By unsettling the supposed fixity of gender, Juana presents a God who transcends all human boundaries and categories. This vision offers a f luid mode of imitatio Christi, a call to inhabit one’s authentic identity in all its God-given complexity. Her own gestation having had a miraculous beginning, Juana’s sermons frequently employ themes of pregnancy and fecundity, as well as gender fluidity and gender transition. In anticipation of her cause for canonization, the Vatican re-examined all her sermons and found them consistent with the Catholic faith, allowing for Pope Francis to declare her ‘Venerable’ in 2015.72 Mother Juana in turn has gifted the Church with language, metaphor, tradition, and precedent to articulate new understandings of God, the human person, and gender. It is my hope that as her sermons become newly available to the English-speaking world in Boon and Surtz’s translation, and her cause advances toward canonization, she can increasingly become a catalyst for dialogue and convergence on issues of faith and gender. Through her profusion of re-gendered or gender-fluid images of herself, God, and the saints, Juana effectively creates an apophatic theology of gender, a via negativa which denies ultimacy both to the ascendancy of one gender over the other, and to the gender binary itself. In her sermons there is a recognizable ascetical discipline at work, reverencing a transcendently-gendered mystery, as acutely nuanced as the tradition of not pronouncing G-d’s Name. Repeatedly in her sermons, where the audience complacently expects to hear specific gender identifiers, Juana prophetically interjects the unexpected.
Juana the Prophetess
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Juana’s life and sermons do not readily f it into preconceived notions and categories. While there is ample precedent for a female saint dressing as a man, a hagiography which begins with God re-gendering a foetus at its creation is entirely unprecedented. Her Adam’s apple attests to the miracle, but it also points to gender ambiguity, which she embraced. Juana clearly identified as female, seeking out a female vocation and rising to its height as an abbess. But she also knowingly transgressed rigid gender boundaries through her homilizing, recasting salvation history and re-gendering images of God and the saints before an audience of king, cardinal, and the astounded laity. Her mystical experience of St Veronica’s visage transforming into the face of Christ – this proposing Bridegroom Christ who then reappeared as the saintly woman – was seminal in her developing spirituality. This Bridegroom’s call was also to an imitatio Christi in which gender fluidity was implicit as part of the faithful imitation. At her conception, there was gender flux, at her baptism she was named after her father and the Beloved Disciple of Christ, at her mystical espousal, gender fluidity is central, and in response to this engagement, she dresses as a man to escape heteronormative marriage. It should be of little surprise then that she realizes a call and vocation to preach, sonorously speaking with the claimed authority of Christ ’s voice.
But Juana’s life and sermons should not be read in isolation from her Franciscan heritage. Juana was nurtured and protected by the Franciscan Cardinal Cisneros who visited her community and attended her sermons, in addition to being embraced and succoured by her Franciscan Sisters. The gender theology and spirituality in her sermons are a full and faithful flowering of her Franciscan tradition, building upon the trajectory of Clare and Francis, Bonaventure, and other early Franciscans such as Angela of Foligno and Rose of Viterbo. Juana’s gender theology should not be seen as a solitary and unique aberration during the patriarchal Inquisition, but as a prophetic counter-voice, echoing otherwise drowned-out salvific refrains from the Christian tradition. Through her voice and narrative we hear hints of fully redeemed and divinized humanity, sharing in the glory of God which is beyond any gender binary. In ‘la Santa Juana’, we have a saint who during her life recognized the imposed limitations of a rigid gender binary and prophetically proclaimed both God and human as beyond gender categories.
In her sermons, God, the Saints, and even the Blessed Virgin herself are described in gender-f luid and gender-transgressing terms and metaphors. To orient her audience, Juana had recourse to traditional gender categories to name and describe God, the Trinity of Persons, and the Saints. But as a poet-prophetess, she introduced unexpected gender metaphors for each, pointing her audience to a gender-transcendent reality which is proper both to the Divine and to the fully human. The cumulative effect of her liturgical year of sermons is a Divine-human pageantry in which gender is malleable and fluid, pointing to its ultimate inability to fully describe or delimit either ineffable human nature or Divinity. Barbara Newman’s observations regarding the mystic Hildegard of Bingen apply equally well to Mother Juana. With regard to gendered images of God, Newman writes:
[I]t must be a still greater folly to apply them literally to God, to understand the Transcendent One as ‘merely’ masculine or feminine, or even masculine and feminine. Here again, in our current struggles with spirituality and gender, Hildegard can be a guide. For what mystics of the via negativa achieve by the systematic denial of images, she accomplished by their sheer profusion.73
Juana also provides a profusion of gendered metaphors in her sermons, effectively communicating that no single gendered metaphor alone is adequate. Both she and Hildegard created a via negativa of gender, an apophatic theology of gender that points to the inadequacy of all gender categories in the final analysis, and to a Deity beyond all gender. Unique to Juana’s perspective is her lived experience of the inadequacy of gender categories, a gender apophaticism present in both her body and her life experiences. Boon arrives at a similar conclusion, noting that: ‘Juana’s life and sermons in fact propose a new mystical language of bigender, genderqueer, trans, and intersex, culminating in a gender performance continuum that transgresses and transmutes all boundaries between heaven and earth’.74 Juana de la Cruz was a startling and visionary voice during the Inquisition; she is all the more prophetic in our own day, giving us language and church precedent to address the gender complexities of our times. Her sermons, gender theology, and life example are a prophetic remedy and corrective for our world and faith.
Appendix
Endnotes
- For a detailed treatment of her Sisters’ subsequent missionary activities, see Owens, Nuns. See also Elphick, ‘Cubas Women’s Community’.
- Foremost among scholars writing about Mother Juana are García de Andrés (Teologia), Surtz (Guitar of God; ‘Privileging of the Feminine’, and Boon (‘Limits’; co-editor or Juana’s Visionary Sermons). The Sermons remained in manuscript form until 1999 when García de Andrés edited and published them in two volumes as El Conhorte: Sermones de Una Mujer. La Santa Juana (1481-1534). The title, El Conhorte, is an antiquated variant of modern Spanish ‘conforte’ (‘comfort’), and García de Andrés’s full title may be translated as ‘The Comfort: The Sermons of a Woman’.
- Ahlgren, Inquisition of Francisca, pp. 2-3.
- ‘[T]ambién como los hombres y sean iguales en las gracias y limpias de pecados’. ‘Que trata de la Circuncisión de Nuestro Señor Jesucristo’ (‘Sermon on the Circumcision’), El Conhorte, i, p. 297. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from El Conhorte are my own.
- Biblical citations are from the Douay-Rheims Bible.
- ‘[P]orque se ha dicho de ti nuevo hombre y nueva ley y nueva cosa criada en la tierra.’ El Conhorte, i, p. 296.
- ‘Y pues tú, Hijo mío, eres nuevo en cuanto hombre, haz nueva ley y nueva cosa sobre la tierra’. Ibid.
- ‘[L]as bendiciones’. Ibid., p. 297.
- ‘[V]iejo Dios, por cuanto Yo y Tú y el Espíritu Santo somos una cosa y una majestad, y una Trinidad y una esencia’. Ibid., p. 296.
- ‘[Y] un Dios vivo y verdadero, sin principio y sin medio y sin fin’. Ibid.
- Surtz, Guitar of God, p. 25.
- Anson, ‘Female Transvestite’. See also ‘Nuns Disguised as Monks’ in Talbot, Holy Women, pp. 1-64; ‘Transvestite; Transvestism’ in the Appendix (p. 322).
- See ‘AFAB’ entry in the Appendix: p. 286.
- Daza wrote the earliest printed Life of Juana de la Cruz, published in Madrid in 1613 (Historia). It was translated into English by Bell (Historie)in 1625.
- Cleminson and Vázquez García, Sexo, n. 179-183 on pp. 96-97.
- Patlagean, ‘L’histoire’, p. 600. See also in this volume: Bychowski on St Marinos (pp. 245-65), Ogden (pp. 201-21) and Wright (pp. 155-76) on St Euphrosine.
- ‘A Letter to Brother Leo’, in Armstrong et al., St Francis of Assisi, p. 123.
- ‘Earlier Exhortation’ in Armstrong et al., St Francis of Assisi, p. 42.
- ‘The Earlier Rule’ in Armstrong et al., St Francis of Assisi, p. 71.
- Bonaventure, Life of St Francis, in Soul’s Journey, pp. 177-327 (p. 199). The Life of St Francis is the title given to the Legenda Maior in this volume.
- Ibid., p. 200.
- Ibid, p. 205.
- Ibid., p. 243. See also Elphick, ‘Three Poor Women’.
- Bonaventure, Life of St Francis, in Soul’s Journey, pp. 177-327 (p. 263).
- Pérez García, ‘Communitas Christiana’, pp. 107-08; Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila, pp. 9-11, 26.
- Published in Spanish as the Florento de Sant Francisco (Seville, 1492). Juana’s Vida records that this book was read to her (Surtz, Guitar of God, p. 59, footnote 18).
- See Bynum, Jesus as Mother.
- Brown, Little Flowers, p. 158.
- Ibid., p. 156.
- Ibid., p. 158.
- Ibid.
- Song of Songs 1:2.
- Brown, Little Flowers, p. 159.
- Surtz, Guitar of God, pp. 6-7.
- Bell, Historie, p. 26. ‘Religion’ here refers to religious life as a professed Sister. I have somewhat modernized Bell’s English spelling in all citations for ease of reading.
- Francis too hears an initial call from a painting, the San Damiano Crucifix. Bonaventure uses a quotation from Genesis 24:63 to situate this episode in parallel to Isaac’s marriage to Rebekah (The Life of St Francis, in Soul’s Journey, pp. 177-327 (p. 191)).
- Bell, Historie, p. 26.
- On Veronica, see: Spencer-Hall, Medieval Saints, pp. 243-54.
- Historie, p. 3.
- ‘Que este nombre pone el mundo alos casamientos delas mugeres, como sino huuiera dexado Dios otro para ellas’ (Daza, Historia, p. 11).
- Bell, Historie, p. 24.
- Ibid., p. 27.
- Ibid., pp. 28-29.
- Ibid., p. 29.
- Ibid.
- Juana de la Cruz, Visionary Sermons, p. 5. While female preaching was otherwise known (we might think of the lay Franciscan St Rose of Viterbo (1233-1251)), the liturgical context and the ecclesial location in which Juana delivered her sermons constitute her uniqueness. For broader context, see: Muessig, ‘Prophecy and Song’.
- Juana de la Cruz, Visionary Sermons, pp. 40-65.
- Ibid., p. 51.
- Ibid., p. 50.
- Ibid., p. 53.
- The popular and widely disseminated anonymous Meditations on the Life of Christ imagines the Trinity present and awaiting Mary’s response. However, the Meditations envisions only the Second Person, not the entire Trinity, entering Mary’s womb (McNamer, Meditations, p. 11).
- Juana de la Cruz, Visionary Sermons, p. 53.
- Ibid., p. 54.
- The Meditations also describes the enwombment of the Son as a homecoming: ‘the Son of God, having been without a home, entered her womb at once’ (McNamer, Meditations, p. 11). McNamer posits a female Franciscan as the author of the Meditations (p. x x i i).
- Juana de la Cruz, Visionary Sermons, p. 55.
- ‘Y por esto es dicho que el hijo está encerrado en el seno del Padre. Yasi como la mujer, cuando es llegada la hora, pare el hijo y despues de parido luego le pueden todos ver y tomar y gozarse con el, lo qual no podian faser cuando estava en el vientre de la madre.’ Madrid, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, MS J-II-18, fol. 207v.
- Juana de la Cruz, Visionary Sermons, p. 55.
- Ibid., p. 41.
- Ibid., p. 56.
- Ibid.
- St Ephrem the Syrian also describes God hungering for fruit: ‘The Heavenly One desired the delicious fruit, the fruit that a flow of tears grew. The High One hungered very much…’ (Hymns, p. 452).
- Juana de la Cruz, Visionary Sermons, p. 56.
- Ibid., p. 57.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 58.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.,pp. 57-58.
- Ibid., p. 55.
- Ibid., p. 58.
- See Surtz, ‘Privileging of the Feminine’; ‘Genderfluid (or Gender-Fluid); Gender Fluidity’ in the Appendix (pp. 298-99).
- Pentin, ‘Pope Francis’.
- Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. 270.
- Boon, ‘Limits’, p. 284.
Bibliography – Primary Sources
- Armstrong, Regis J., J.A. Wayne Hellmann and William J. Short, eds., St Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, 3 vols. (New York: New City, 1999-2001), i.
- Bell, Francis, trans., The Historie, Life, and Miracles, Extasies and Revelations of the blessed virgin, sister Joane, of the Crosse, of the Third Order of our Holy Father S. Francis by Anthonie of Aca (St Omers, 1625).
- Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St Francis, trans. by Ewert Cousins (Ramsey: Paulist, 1978).
- —, Commentary on the Book of Wisdom, trans. by Campion Murray (Phoenix: Tau, 2 01 2).
- Brown, Raphael, trans., The Little Flowers of St Francis (New York: Doubleday Image, 1958).
- Daza, Antonio, Historia, vida y milagros, éxtasis, y revelaciones de la bienaventurada virgen Sor Juana de la Cruz (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1613).
- Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns, ed. by Kathleen E. McVey (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1989).
- Florento de Sant Francisco (Seville, 1492).
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- —, Mother Juana de la Cruz, 1481-1534: Visionary Sermons, ed. by Jessica A. Boon and Ronald E. Surtz (Tempe: Iter Academic, 2016).
- McNamer, Sarah, trans., Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2018).
- Talbot, Alice-Mary, ed., Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1996).
Bibliography – Secondary Sources
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- —, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1996).Anson, John,‘The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism: The Origin and Development of a Motif ’, Viator, 5 (1974), 1-32.
- Boon, Jessica A., ‘At the Limits of (Trans)Gender: Jesus, Mary, and the Angels in the Visionary Sermons of Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534)’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 48.2 (2018), 261-300.
- Bynum, Caroline Walker, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California, 1984).
- Cleminson, Richard, and Francisco Vázquez García, Sexo, identidad y hermafroditas en el mundo ibérico, 1500-1800 (Madrid: Cátedra, 2018).
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- —, ‘Mother Juana de la Cruz: Faithful Daughter of St Francis and Patron Saint of Gender Inclusivity’, in Franciscan Women: Female Identities and Religious Culture, Medieval and Beyond, ed. by Lezlie S. Knox (St Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute, 2020), pp. 175-85.
- —, ‘Three Poor Women Appeared’, Franciscan Connections: The Cord – A Spiritual Review, 66.4 (2016), 15-17.
- García de Andrés, Inocente, Teología y Espiritualidad de la Santa Juana (Madrid: Madre de Dios, 2012).
- Muessig, Carolyn, ‘Prophecy and Song: Teaching and Preaching by Medieval Women’, in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. by Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California, 1998), pp. 146-58.
- Newman, Barbara, Sister of Wisdom: St Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Los Angeles: University of California, 1987).
- Owens, Sarah E., Nuns Navigating the Spanish Empire (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2017).
- Patlagean, Evelyne, ‘L’histoire de la femme déguisée en moine et l’évolution de la sainteté féminine à Byzance’, Studi Medievali, ser. 3, 17.2 (1976), 597-623.
- Pentin, Edward, ‘Pope Francis Approves Canonization of St Thérèse’s Parents’, 18 March 2015, National Catholic Register <http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/pope-francis-approves-canonization-of-st.-thereses-parents> [accessed 19 June 2020].
- Pérez García, Rafael M., ‘Communitas Christiana: The Sources of Christian Tradition in the Construction of Early Castilian Spiritual Literature, ca. 1400-1540’, in Books in the Catholic World during the Early Modern Period, ed. by Natalia Maillard Álvarez (Boston: Brill, 2014), pp. 71-113.
- Spencer-Hall, Alicia, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University, 2018).
- Surtz, Ronald E., The Guitar of God: Gender, Power, and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1990).
- —, ‘The Privileging of the Feminine in the Trinity Sermon of Mother Juana de la Cruz’, in Women’s Voices and the Politics of the Spanish Empire, ed. by Jennifer Eich, Jeanne Gillespie, and Lucia Harrison (New Orleans: University of the South, 2008), pp. 87-107.
Chapter 3 (87-107) from Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, edited by Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt (Amsterdam University Press, 04.06.2021), published by OAPEN under the terms of an Open Access license.