As a student of philosophy, it is one of my joys to occasionally stumble over in the course of my explorations into philosophers and theologians from the past certain statements which remind me how deeply aware some of the Mediaevals were of our inability to grasp or express what lies at the boundaries of speech or language. St Augustine, for example, at the end of his book De Civitas Dei, a book that took him around twelve years to finish, simply writes : 'If my readers think that in this book I have said too much about God or too little about God, I beg for their forgiveness. But if they think that I have said just the right amount, I ask them to join me in praising God.' Some seven hundred years later, a famous disciple of his, St Aquinas, another prolific writer whose texts run into twenty-two volumes in one French edition, said a few days before he died : 'Everything that I have written in my life so far now seems like a piece of straw to me.'