A woman’s human love and divine love are structurally identical movements toward the transcendent

Evidence

Love has been assigned to woman as her supreme vocation, and when she addresses it to a man, she is seeking God in him: if circumstances deny her human love, if she is disappointed or demanding, she will choose to worship the divinity in God himself. It is true that there are also men who have burned with this flame; but they are rare, and their fervor has been of a highly refined intellectual form. Women, though, who abandon themselves to the delights of celestial marriages are legion: and they experience them in a strangely affective way. Women are accustomed to living on their knees; normally, they expect their salvation to descend from heaven, where males reign; men too are enveloped in clouds: their majesty is revealed from beyond the veils of their bodily presence. The Beloved is always more or less absent; he communicates with her, his worshipper, in ambiguous signs; she only knows his heart by an act of faith; and the more superior to her he seems, the more impenetrable his behavior seems to her. We have seen that in erotomania this faith resisted all refutations. A woman does not need to see or touch to feel the Presence at her side. Whether it be a doctor, a priest, or God, she will find the same incontestable proof; she will welcome as a slave the waves of a love that falls from on high into her heart. Human love and divine love melt into one not because the latter is a sublimation of the former but because the former is also a movement toward a transcendent, toward the absolute. In any case, the woman in love has to save her contingent existence by uniting with the Whole incarnated in a sovereign Person. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1899

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how the chapter’s central category — the mystic — operates by showing that woman’s love of God is not a sublimation of human love but the same structure of submission to a transcendent Person.
• XREF: Connects to earlier chapters on the woman in love and eroticism, and to Beauvoir’s master-slave dialectic drawn from Hegel. — connects to: Female religiosity and eroticism both make the self an object for a transcendent being — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 705
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that female mysticism and female erotic love are the same movement, not sublimation and base, is a genuine paradigm inversion: both are ways woman saves her contingent existence by losing it in an absolute Other. This is the analytical core of the chapter and arguably of the whole book.

Broader Connections

• Female religiosity and eroticism both make the self an object for a transcendent being #corroborates (0.92) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 705