Walking past the bookshop at the Bozar Museum in Brussels, one notices something that would have seemed unlikely not so long ago.

Encyclopedias of mysticism, panoramic histories of spiritual traditions, and books on figures such as Hildegard of Bingen are displayed openly, meant to catch the eye of a broad cultural public rather than a specialised audience.

In a place where art, thought, and public debate intersect, this quiet visibility signals that mysticism has once again become culturally legible.

The renewed attention to mysticism reflects a growing unease with the ways West-European societies have learned to understand and organise the world.

Ecological crisis, political instability, and technological acceleration have weakened trust in rational control and long-term mastery.

Mysticism begins to appear as a possible way out of this impasse, or at least as a name for what such an “elsewhere” might be.

Mysticism as magical escape

In contemporary culture, mysticism is often understood as the irrational, hidden, or magical — the shadow side of rational modernity.

It is imagined as what reason excludes: the mysterious, the intuitive, the ecstatic. This understanding has a history.

From the Romantic period onwards, Western culture repeatedly turned outward in order to loosen the grip of Enlightenment rationality.

Eastern mystical traditions were approached as an alternative horizon, promising depth and immediacy.

A similar movement can be observed today in the renewed interest in indigenous, nature-based, and ecological spiritualities.

These traditions are often approached as if they offered what Western modernity lacks: a deeper connection to the earth, a sense of belonging within a living cosmos, a wisdom unburdened by abstraction.

While this interest responds to genuine crises, it also risks repeating an older pattern — locating meaning safely elsewhere, instead of confronting the internal tensions of Western thought and spirituality.

In that sense, mysticism easily becomes a projection rather than a practice that demands transformation.

Heaven and the world

Historically, the word “mysticism” derives from the Greek mysterion, related to myein: to close the eyes or the lips.

It names a reality that resists full disclosure, not because it is irrational, but because it exceeds what can be clearly grasped and controlled.

Classically, this excess was expressed through the language of ekstasis: a standing outside oneself.

In the Christian tradition, this appears vividly in Paul’s account of being “caught up to the third heaven”.

The image of the heavens suggests a world perceived as lying beyond the familiar one.

Read this way, mysticism appears as a vertical movement: an ascent, a reaching beyond the body and the world, a momentary displacement of the self.

Yet this is only one side of the story.

Alongside this outward movement runs an equally decisive inward one: a turning toward the deepest ground of the self.

Mysticism does not simply remove the human subject from the world; it exposes the subject to what cannot be mastered.

The failure of language here is not an error, but a sign that reality presses too closely to be held at a safe distance.

Women’s voices

This tension becomes especially visible in the female mysticism of the Middle Ages.

In these texts, mysticism is not primarily about leaving the body behind, but about entering more deeply into what it means to be human.

Love, pain, desire, fear, and vulnerability are not obstacles to spiritual life; they are its very material.

Language repeatedly breaks down, yet silence is never enough.

Instead, these mystics turn to poetry, imagery, rhythm, and visionary speech.

Their work reveals both the limits of rational language and the remarkable human capacity to keep speaking through imagination and art.

Mysticism here is neither irrational nor anti-intellectual.

It is a disciplined form of attention that refuses to turn the limits of reason into a convenient exit.

Wonderful work

If mysticism is returning today, its urgent task may not be to offer an escape from the present crisis, but to resist the desire to flee from it.

The Christian mystical tradition does not provide an exotic alternative to Western modernity; it calls that modernity back to itself.

It demands a difficult self-reflection on love that wounds, desire that cannot be secured, suffering that cannot be bypassed, and on a world that remains irreducibly opaque, yet capable of awakening wonder.

• Sander Vloebergs (Herentals, 1992) is a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, where he is a member of the Research Unit History of Church and Theology and the Institute for the Study of Spirituality. He directs the Artistic Theology Lab and is a visual artist and choreographer. He works on a project called Visual and Visionary.