Two years before his death, St. Thomas the Aquinas, the Catholic Church's greatest theologian and philosopher went silent. He just stopped speaking.

Why? No one is entirely sure why but the last thing he wrote is this: All that I have hitherto written seems to me nothing but straw.

As a writer I understand this sentiment, but St. Thomas the Aquinas is no ordinary writer, scholar or thinker. As I said earlier, he was the Catholic Church's greatest theologian. Pope Benedict XV even once went so far as to declare: "The Church has declared Thomas's doctrine to be her own."

I suspect Pope Benedict wasn't including Thomas' final "straw" statement in this assessment — although it should. I say this because Thomas also once wrote that the ultimate in knowing God is "to know that we do not know Him."

This idea — which is a big one — requires a lot of unlearning. If more people could, however, embrace it, the world would be a better place because those who claim to "know God" are the ones who are really grasping at straws — and making a great mess of the world while doing it.