25 Raising a Nation from the Dead to put a mountain into French words, let alone Latin. His fellow students and his teachers thought he was stupid. “And I am stupid,” he said to himself. “I must keep that always in mind. On my own I can think nothing true, say nothing that anyone will understand, and do nothing that will last.” But if John was often at a loss for words, it was for a reason which the other seminarians did not suspect. He was granted visions. They came to him after many miles of walking in the hills, and the earth seemed no longer earth but the paradise of God, and every moment was like a thousand years of his providing. At those times the greatest mind must gaze in stupor, in wonder. It was as when the brilliant Thomas said to his brother Reginald that he would write no more, because the grandeur of what he had witnessed made all that he had written seem as straw. John could hardly fight his way through a few pages of Thomas. Those were almost the only words of his that John really understood. But he understood them well. To this village of Ars, then, he was sent, to be the Curé of Nowhere. He doubted he could win anyone over with rational argument, not because reason was his enemy, but because, when the people had lost their faith, they lost their reason too. They were like drunken men who argue for the sake of arguing. They had given over the quest for truth.
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