Near the end of his life Aquinus experienced Infused Contemplaion. Thereafter he refused to go back to work on his unfinished book. Compared with this everything he had read and argued about and written - Aristotle and the Sentences, the Questions, the Propositions and the majestic Summas - was no better than chaff or straw. For most intellectuals, such a sit-down strike would be inadvisable even morally wrong. But the Angelic Doctor had done more systematic reasoning than any 12 ordinary angels, and was ripe for death. He had earned the right, in those last months of his mortality, to turn from merely symbolic straw and chaff to the bread of actual and substantial Fact. For Angels of a lower order and with better prospects of longevity, there must be a return to the straw. But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser, but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception