Margaret Mary Alacoque

Margaret Mary Alacoque is presented as a Catholic mystic who gives bodily form to a devotional ideal of self-annihilation. Through service to the sick, penitential acts, and devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, her example brings together the chapter’s recurring transformation of humiliation and suffering into spiritual glory.

Identity and Devotional Ideal

The account places Alacoque among women mystics who seek not only passive abandonment to God but also an active surrender of the self. It cites her declaration that her sole concern was to love, forget herself, and annihilate herself. In the book’s interpretation, mystical ecstasy embodies this self-forgetting: the devotee turns away from ordinary awareness of the body and accepts passivity before a divine presence.

Acts of Devotion

Alacoque’s devotion is described through acts of service and deliberate self-denial. The text reports that she cleaned a sick person’s vomit with her tongue and, in her autobiography, recalled feeling happiness after taking excrement into her mouth. It says that Jesus rewarded this act by keeping her lips against his Sacred Heart for three hours. The account uses these episodes to illustrate its claim that some women mystics sought spiritual transformation by abasing the flesh, rather than treating devotion as inward contemplation alone.

The Sacred Heart and the Meaning of Blood

The Sacred Heart becomes the central image linking Alacoque’s physical acts to the chapter’s larger interpretation of mystical devotion. The text recalls her three-hour devotion to the heart and describes her offering for the faithful an immense red clot ringed by flames of love. This image condenses the transformation the chapter traces: bodily suffering and blood are not left as signs of degradation, but are recast as a route toward sacred glory. Alacoque’s example thus makes devotion at once bodily and symbolic, joining self-abasement to the promise of divine love.