Extreme bodily abasement is imitative of Christ’s redemptive humiliation of the flesh

Evidence

It is known that Marie Alacoque cleaned a sick person’s vomit with her tongue; she describes in her autobiography her happiness when she had filled her mouth with the excrement of a man with diarrhea; Jesus rewarded her by keeping her lips glued to his Sacred Heart for three hours. Devotion has a carnal coloration in countries of ardent sensuality like Italy and Spain: in a village in Abruzzo, even today women tear their tongues by licking the rocks on the ground along the stations of the cross. In all these practices they are only imitating the Redeemer, who saved flesh by the abasement of his own flesh: women show their sensitivity to this great mystery in a much more concrete way than males. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1913

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the sacrifice article: the logic of imitating a redeemer whose suffering redeems flesh parallels ritual sacrifice as stabilizing sacred order.
• XREF: Beauvoir’s claim that women experience the sacred more carnally than men echoes her earlier argument (and critiques of it) about woman’s immanence and embodiment. — connects to: Christian theology’s praise of work transvalued an Old Testament curse while despising the body; Physical suffering is instrumentalized to annihilate the human person through the body — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1017; Medieval torture imagery elevated the flesh rather than rejecting it — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 267 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Physical suffering is instrumentalized to annihilate the human person through the body #complicates (0.78) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1017
• Medieval torture imagery elevated the flesh rather than rejecting it #complicates (0.75) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 267
• Desire’s failure to reach incarnation can flip consciousness into masochistic submission #complicates (0.72)