Mystics at war: Padre Pio and Ludwig Wittgenstein

Max Weber describes a coherent ideal type of mystic, characterized by passivity and "living on berries in the woods, or on alms." This way, Max Weber disregards the paradoxicality of mystical discourse, selecting a coherent path in a contradictory semantic universe and producing a semiotic ideology, functional to his argument about the relation between capitalism and Protestantism. On the contrary, mystics operate inside the social world and take sides in its conflicts. They react to social crises, such as war, by linking a spiritual reading to their bodily experiences. Eco's notion of "semiotic labor" can be useful to analyze how this semiotic relation is produced in mystical writings through metasemiotic statements. The paper focuses on two case-studies: Padre Pio's letters and Ludwig Wittgenstein's diaries, both written during World War I. The analysis will highlight a common structure: both mystics associate spiritual values with pain, anguish, and fear through catalysis, interpreting them as divine trials. This is done thanks to metasemiotic assertions introduced and validated by speech acts. This structure is interpreted as a semio-technique, producing the semantic values with which the subject wishes to join.