How does one become a mystic? Padre Pio's early correspondence reveals a real apprenticeship, a process of learning to use language to express his spiritual interpretation of pain and relief. In a similar way, secular philosophers like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche used writing to grapple with the anguish of war or the consequences of sudden enlightenment.

Semiotics offers a framework to understand how, through writing, the mystic – both religious and philosophical – make their own bodies a plane of expression of spiritual or interior values. Thus, mysticism survives in secularized culture in its original form as philosophical inquiry.