Saint Teresa’s transverberation is an episode of mystical ecstasy in which Teresa describes an angel’s spear piercing her heart and her union with God as an experience felt through the body. Simone de Beauvoir uses the account to challenge the separation of spiritual experience from bodily life: Teresa is neither reduced to her nerves nor explained away as a hysteric, but understood as a person whose faith reaches into the most intimate regions of embodied existence.

The Vision and Its Bodily Language

Teresa’s account presents the experience through an image of an angel holding a golden spear. The vision describes the spear entering her heart and the pain of its withdrawal; Teresa interprets the encounter as leaving her consumed by divine love. The episode’s language is at once spiritual and physical, making the body the medium through which the encounter is experienced rather than an incidental detail.

Interpretation Beyond Pathology

The passage notes that critics and admirers alike may treat the erotic character of Teresa’s description as grounds for classifying her as hysterical. Beauvoir rejects that inference. Bodily expression, she argues, does not by itself make a person enslaved to bodily impulses; the important distinction is whether freedom is subjugated and annulled. Teresa’s experience is not presented as a hidden sexual desire diverted toward a religious object, but as an immediate movement toward God that is experienced bodily.

Faith, Freedom, and Significance

The account therefore holds together physical intensity and spiritual intention without treating one as a disguise for the other. Teresa seeks union with God and experiences that union in her body; the bodily character of the event does not invalidate the religious meaning Beauvoir attributes to it. Its value, the discussion insists, is measured by the experience’s meaning and scope, not simply by the way it was subjectively felt. Teresa’s mystical experience is distinguished from other women’s religious visions because Beauvoir sees it as addressing the relationship between the individual and a transcendent Being in an intellectually significant way, extending beyond a specifically feminine search for redemption.