In his brilliant historical study, Michel de Certeau liberates the mystics of the early modern period from the aura of a religious niche existence and places them at the center of the intellectual and political debates surrounding modernity. They are sensitive to the crisis of religious institutions, noticing first what changes when traditional contexts of meaning collapse and the sociocultural transmission mechanisms of the religious no longer function. Mysticism does not establish a secret language but fights with the means of the declining world for its possible future. Tradition becomes a field of ruins that must be reinhabited in the interest of regaining plausibility. As figures of transition, mystics mark the genealogy of an epistemological break: religion and modernity maintain a difficult yet close relationship; they are not as far apart as one might think.