Female mystics destroy their flesh to transform it from abjection into glory

Evidence

Most women mystics are not satisfied with abandoning themselves passively to God: they actively apply themselves to self-annihilation by the destruction of their flesh. Of course, asceticism was also practiced by monks and brothers. But woman’s relentlessness in violating her flesh has specific characteristics. We have seen how ambiguous the woman’s attitude to her body is: it is through humiliation and suffering that she metamorphoses it into glory. Given over to a lover as a thing of pleasure, she becomes a temple, an idol; torn by the pain of childbirth, she creates heroes. The mystic will torture her flesh to have the right to claim it; reducing it to abjection, she exalts it as the instrument of her salvation. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1911

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The ‘grafting’ of bodily abjection into glory resonates with the sacrifice article’s theme of transforming degradation into sacred value through suffering.
• XREF: connects to: Men transform woman from flesh into an ethereal ideal, denying her body — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 383; Sanctified and fairy-tale heroines alike teach girls the prestige of martyred beauty. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 706; Poorly integrated girls convert the drive for the absolute into mysticism or revolutionary heroism — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 914