The pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 6–5 BC) posited the existence of an all-encompassing, eternal, and spherical God. This conceptualization, which also happens to be an arresting metaphor, endured and resurfaced many centuries later in the second proposition of the pseudo-Hermetic Book of Twenty-Four Philosophers (c. 12 AD). There one can find a reworking of Xenophanes’s conception into what would become one of the most enduring and influential metaphors in intellectual history: God is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere. The austere geometrical beauty of this metaphor was meant to provide an intuitive vision, however fleeting, of God’s infinite being. The sphere’s immanent center is within all of creation, while its circumference will always transcend that same creation. God is simultaneously immanence and transcendence. The metaphor of the infinite sphere navigated across the Atlantic and took root in the work of the most celebrated poet of baroque New Spain: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695). Amongst the recurring emblematic, mythological, and symbolic images that pervade Sor Juana’s oeuvre, the metaphor of the infinite sphere occupies such a prominent place that it led Octavio Paz to the conclusion that ‘this image is one of the axes of Sor Juana’s thought, as it was for Bruno and others’ (1988, 374). The fact that a nun from New Spain engages with this metaphor constitutes an example of the significant negotiation carried out by New World intellectuals with certain trends of European thought. Sor Juana’s distinctive engagement with the metaphor of the infinite sphere, I will argue, places her in the center of a momentous shift in intellectual history and provides us with a crucial entry point into the complexity of her poetic thought. In a brief essay entitled Pascal’s Sphere, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges surveys what he calls various ‘intonations’ of this ancient metaphor (1999, 351). Reviewing thinkers as varied as Plato, Dante, and Copernicus, Borges elegantly recounts how the metaphor of the infinite sphere was reinvented and reinterpreted across millennia. Parmenides employs the metaphor to illustrate the nature of Being, for example, while in his revision of the Corpus Hermeticum, Alain de Lille uses the metaphor to prove the intelligibility of God. Yet, toward the end of this essay, Borges leads his mesmerizing history of the metaphor to a rather neat contrast between sensibilities. During an optimistic Renaissance, Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) writes with great joy that the universe is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere, while Blaise Pascal

中文翻译：

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隐秘的无限：胡安娜神父和无限球体的隐喻

Colophon 的前苏格拉底哲学家色诺芬（约公元前 6-5 年）假定存在一个无所不包的、永恒的、球形的上帝。这种概念化也恰好是一个引人入胜的隐喻，在许多世纪后，在伪赫尔墨斯二十四位哲学家（公元 12 年）的第二个命题中持续存在并重新出现。人们可以在那里找到将色诺芬的概念改写为思想史上最持久和最有影响力的隐喻之一：上帝是一个无限的球体，其中心无处不在，其圆周无处可去。这个比喻朴素的几何之美旨在提供一个直观的视觉，无论多么短暂，上帝的无限存在。球体的内在中心在所有造物之内，而它的圆周将永远超越同一个造物。上帝同时是内在性和超越性。无限球体的隐喻穿越大西洋，并扎根于巴洛克新西班牙最著名的诗人：Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz（1651-1695）的作品中。在 Sor Juana 作品中反复出现的象征性、神话性和象征性图像中，无限球体的隐喻占据了如此突出的位置，以至于 Octavio Paz 得出结论：“这个图像是 Sor Juana 思想的轴心之一，正如这是布鲁诺和其他人的 (1988, 374)。来自新西班牙的修女使用这个比喻的事实构成了新世界知识分子与欧洲思想的某些趋势进行的重要谈判的一个例子。我会争辩说，Sor Juana 对无限球体隐喻的独特参与，将她置于思想史上重大转变的中心，并为我们提供了一个关键的切入点，以了解她的诗歌思想的复杂性。在一篇题为《帕斯卡的球体》的简短文章中，阿根廷作家豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯 (Jorge Luis Borges) 调查了他所谓的这个古老隐喻的各种“语调” (1999, 351)。博尔赫斯回顾了柏拉图、但丁和哥白尼等形形色色的思想家，优雅地叙述了无限领域的隐喻是如何在数千年间重新发明和重新解释的。例如，巴门尼德用比喻来说明存在的本质，而阿兰·德·里尔（Alain de Lille）在他对 Corpus Hermeticum 的修订中使用比喻来证明上帝的可理解性。然而，在这篇文章的结尾，博尔赫斯将他迷人的隐喻历史引向了情感之间相当巧妙的对比。