There's also a contrast of faith here, doing the impossible yet keeping a foot in reality, within two ostensibly incompatible paradigms, science and faith. The well is the work done in the past building the esoteric corpus, which becomes increasingly difficult to master the more it is added to. It's the understanding of our heritage: in science you can specialise in a part of the domain, in the more ineffable you have to cover the lot, to some extent, and it stretches even the most spiritual.