Saint Thérèse of Lisieux’s spiritual love for Jesus

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux’s spiritual love for Jesus is presented as an intense language of longing and surrender, in which devotion imagines a beloved whose gaze and embrace promise union. Simone de Beauvoir quotes Saint Thérèse’s address to the child Jesus not to reduce religious feeling to sexuality, but to show how devotional imagery can intersect with the forms of love a girl is taught to expect: a transcendent male beloved, the hope of being chosen, and the ideal of yielding oneself. The passage makes that connection while explicitly resisting the claim that such expressions are always sexual.

Devotion and the Language of Longing

Saint Thérèse’s prayer is quoted as a series of appeals to her beloved. She accepts that she may not experience the sweetness of his gaze or the kiss of his mouth on earth, yet asks to be embraced by his love. She longs to glimpse the sweetness of his first smile, to remain in a state of burning delirium, and to hide in his heart. The prayer culminates in the image of becoming the fortunate victim of divine love: she hopes that the beloved will draw her into its burning chasm and carry her toward love’s hearth.

These images make devotion emotionally vivid without turning it into a report of an earthly relationship. Their movement is from renunciation of immediate contact toward a promised intimacy beyond ordinary life. The beloved is at once absent from direct earthly experience and imagined as capable of an encompassing embrace. In Beauvoir’s reading, the passage’s significance lies partly in this pattern of desire: the speaker gives herself over to a being who transcends her and looks toward an eventual union she cannot claim in the present.

The Girl, the Father, and the Sacred Gaze

The prayer appears within Beauvoir’s discussion of how religious life can influence a girl’s understanding of love. She observes that girls may be more subject to religious influences than boys, and that the divine figures of Western religion are commonly presented in masculine form: God the Father, Christ, and angels with masculine names and appearances. Earthly religious authority is likewise embodied by men, including the pope, bishop, priest, and preacher. For a pious child, Beauvoir argues, the relation to the eternal Father can resemble her relation to her earthly father, while its imaginary character can make the surrender more complete.

The images of women in Christian devotion reinforce this structure. The Virgin receives the angel’s words on her knees; Mary Magdalene is shown at Christ’s feet; and women saints express love for Christ in a posture of submission. Beauvoir places Saint Thérèse’s prayer alongside these examples, noting that the child’s surrender takes place under a man’s gaze, even when the object of devotion is divine. The prayer thus belongs to a larger religious imagination in which a girl encounters love through reverence, waiting, and self-abandonment.

Devotional Feeling and Earthly Love

Beauvoir draws a comparison between the language of women’s mystical devotion and the language of erotic love, but she sets a clear limit on that comparison: such expressions must not be taken as invariably sexual. Rather, she suggests that when female sexuality develops, it may already be interwoven with religious feeling that a girl has learned to direct toward men. The comparison concerns a shared structure of experience—the consciousness making itself an object for a being it regards as transcendent—not an assertion that prayer and sexual desire are identical.

In this account, religious devotion can help form an expectation about happiness in love. A girl learns, Beauvoir writes, that happiness depends on being loved, and that being loved requires waiting for love. The devotional posture of surrender therefore connects with a broader romantic script in which the girl receives and endures while the man seeks, acts, and chooses. Saint Thérèse’s prayer is one example through which Beauvoir makes that connection legible, while preserving the distinction between spiritual devotion and earthly erotic experience.

Significance in Beauvoir’s Argument

The passage links a particular devotional text to Beauvoir’s larger analysis of how girls learn to imagine love and their own place within it. Saint Thérèse’s language gives direct form to longing for a beloved’s gaze, smile, and embrace; Beauvoir then places that language beside social and religious images that cast women as recipients of love and men as transcendent figures. The result is not a claim about Saint Thérèse’s private motives, but an account of how a culturally available pattern of surrender can shape the vocabulary through which female desire is understood.

The careful qualification is central: similarities between mystical and erotic language do not erase the distinctness of religious feeling. Instead, Beauvoir treats their resemblance as evidence that a girl’s later experience of love does not begin in isolation from childhood ideals. Saint Thérèse’s prayer becomes a revealing instance of how devotional aspiration and inherited expectations of femininity can share images of waiting, surrender, and hoped-for union, even when the devotion itself cannot be reduced to sexuality.