Mortality and Meaning-Making Without Transcendence

Sor Juana lived in a Catholic culture offering eternal life, salvation, and divine judgment; yet her work engages mortality, loss, and the limits of human understanding without seeking escape through theology. Her poems contemplate time, death, and the finitude of beauty and power—not to despair but to understand. For secular identity, this concept directly addresses one of its deepest challenges: creating profound meaning without belief in afterlife, divine purpose, or cosmic significance. Secular worldview does not solve the problem of mortality; it intensifies it by refusing consoling myths. Yet this very refusal creates conditions for authentic meaning-making. If this life is the only one, what we do here matters absolutely. If there is no cosmic judge, we must develop our own rigorous ethics. If we will die, we must ask what deserves our limited time. Sor Juana's example shows that secular living need not be nihilistic or desperate; accepting mortality and finitude can ground both serious intellectual work and deep appreciation for life's goods. The awareness that nothing is permanent and nothing is guaranteed can sharpen attention to beauty, deepen relationships, and motivate justice. Secular meaning-making takes its form precisely from refusal of false consolation and embrace of difficult truth.