On the feast of St. Nicholas in 1273, Italian Dominican Friar Thomas Aquinas entered a chapel in Naples to say Mass before beginning a day of lecturing and writing. During the Mass, something profound happened to him: some kind of physical or nervous breakdown, perhaps accompanied by an overpowering mystical vision. Afterward, he ceased dictating his theological masterwork, the Summa Theologiae. "All that I have written," he explained to concerned friends, "seems to me like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me." He never wrote another line. Three months later—700...
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