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to mystic institute.org. Starting with a story, and it takes place about 800 years ago on the 6th

of December, 1273, when friar Thomas Aquinas was celebrating his morning mass, as was his usual custom.

However, something about that mass that day was different.

So a witness at his subsequent process of canonisation would testify that while Brother Thomas

was saying his mass one morning, this morning, in the chapel of St. Nicholas at Naples,

something happened which profoundly affected and altered him. After Mass, he refused to write or dictate, indeed,

to put away all his writing materials. What was it that had affected this erudite man of

towering intellect that morning in December 1273?

Did he suffer a nervous breakdown?

Had a life of strain and constant study and application of himself finally get to him?

Up until this point, St. Thomas had worked together with his secretaries, four of whom he dictated to at the one time, we are told, to produce about 8 million words of work.

That's about 68,000 words per day in the short span of his career. So basically an academic article per day or a short book every

month. His daily regime never changed. He rose early. He chanted the divine office with his brothers

in community, celebrated his own mass and then served the mass of one of the community. After

meditation, he would retire then to his cell to begin to read and to write.

And in an atmosphere of a Dominican convent, especially in the medieval context,

distractions were non-existent.

Silence was kept as a room, even outside of the times of of recreation that was the only time the friars would

tend to speak unless it were absolutely necessary so that provided an atmosphere of intense

concentration which was ideal for study and indeed for the search for truth but on that morning

of the sixth of December, 1273,

...