In addition to being one of the great philosophical minds of human history, St. Thomas Aquinas was also a mystic who experienced visions and ecstasies while in prayer. Near the end of his life, while still working on his magnum opus, the Summa Theologica, he was granted a vision of Christ. When he came out of it, he vowed never to write another word, as he said that compared with the reality he had seen, “all my writing is as straw.”

This is something we would do well to keep in mind; there is an unbridgeable gap between what a thing is and what can be said about it. Whether we’re talking philosophical or scientific or written descriptions, they always and necessarily can only convey an approximation of the thing. The most obvious instance of this is that no description of a beautiful object could ever convey its beauty to someone who did not already have an idea of beauty. But in the same way, even the most complete, perfect scientific description of a thing; a picture that takes in every natural law and accounts for every factual observation (assuming such a thing is possible) could contain the complete nature of even a single stone.

Words can suggest something of what what a thing is, but only to an extent, and like the dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park, it has to be completed by what we ourselves bring to it. In the end, real things cannot be formularized; they can only be encountered.

“All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.”