Ancias/Anxiousness in Joana de Jesus (1617-1681)

Does fear enable or unable action? Could the writings of a 17th century Portuguese religious woman contribute to the emergence of a subjectivity that empowers women and intellectual production?

In my PhD thesis I conducted a multilayered study on Joana de Jesus, a Cistercian nun who lived in Portugal in two convents and wrote about her daily life, the divine encounters she had with Christ and the knowledge she acquired through those mystical contacts. Joana de Jesus’s teachings were deeply influenced by Rhine mysticism, Modern Devotio and Spanish Golden mystics such as Luis de Granada and Teresa de Ávila. From these traditions  she developed the notion of ‘ancias’, which I translated as ‘anxiousness’. A close reading of Joana de Jesus’ shows how  anxiousness is a source of intellectual empowerment and religious leadership in her community.Her anxiousness is a human and divine attribute: it is a  yearning for true imitation of Christ, physically and spiritually. Joana’s anxiousness leads to a true, scriptural and devotional knowledge of life and community, sharing in God’s divine wisdom, which allows her  emergence of a subject – usually seen as an anomaly in Western philosophy. In the thesis I confront Joana’s notion of anxiousness with two schools of contemporary philosophy, first  canonic  feministphilosophy (De Beauvoir and Irigaray) about the design of a female subject and secondly to the Portuguese philosophy of saudade, which like Joana de Jesus’s concentrates on yearning as a constituent of subjectivity.