Carina's mini-trace and synthesis

[This is from Carina.]

1. The fourth chapter of Vives' discussion of young women's education makes several assertions about the moral character of knowledge--perhaps about the correspondence or lack thereof between language and truth. Vives clearly wishes to argue that knowledge is, in point of fact, a moral force, and to suggest that educating women will moralize them: "It would be to our
advantage to have at least a knowledge of good to protect us from the constant onslaught of evil ... when [your daughter] is assailed by vice, to which she has grow accustomed, what protection will be afforded by moral rectitude, which she never came to know?" (19-20). Vives argues that women need education in goodness to protect them from sin. He writes, "The woman who has learned to make 'reflections' will never bring herself to commit any vile act, for her mind will have been strengthened and imbued with holy counsels" (21).

But the difficulty in this position derives from that fact that it is, in Vives' observation, entirely possible to learn evil and not good. Therefore, learning cannot be said to be an absolutely positive moral force. In order to resolve this dilemma, Vives defines only certain applications of the intellect as knowledge, excluding others. Those that count as learning are: "the study of wisdom," "books that impart instruction in morals," and "that part of philosophy that has assumed as its task the formation and improvement of morals" (28-29). Those that are not included: "idle verses or vain and frivolous ditties," and "eloquence," which in abeyance to Paul his Christian woman will have no need of. By this judgment or division, Vives makes a one-to-one correlation between knowledge and truth--where truth is revealed and is thus also perfectly moral--possible.

2. Religious Humanism strikes me as an attempt to reconcile the issue of where truth comes from. The "religious" part of the movement has to locate truth in scripture, which is divine and above question, or beyond logic. "Humanism" complicates this, because it values individual reason, the kind of knowledge that is discovered. A Religious Humanist work has to walk a tightrope between the two, and I suspect that that tension drives a lot of the philosophy.

Sor Juana defers to scripture as fundamental truth, but she approaches it with more logic than reverence. She's trying to understand it, not merely to accept it, and she finds her reading of the text to be in disagreement at times with the Church. Vives seems to me to be much more reliant on the more image-driven or mythological parts of the bible--note his references to the devil. He goes into discourse with many assumptions as to the universal characteristics of women as a group, and does not reveal his reasoning for accepting them. Several times, as with the Pauline rule against women's speech, he seems to struggle with them. They are, perhaps, pieces of implicit knowledge. Erasmus looks to the learned traditions of both the Church and of the Classics, but he seems to take them not on faith but on persuasion. Erasmus also gives a great deal of power to the listener/reader in their own persuasion through his dominant image of "richness." Could we
say that Erasmus locates truth in the process of discourse?