March 7, 1274

Of God and His Creatures: An Annotated Translation (with Some Abridgement) of the Summa Contra Gentiles of Saint Thomas Aquinas, (1905)
[translated by Joseph Rickably, S.J.]

Perhaps like mine your heart fluttered to hear Aquinas (1225 to March 7, 1274) wrote a book about creatures. These are not our critters, however, the creatures he references are us. I have annotated myself the following context:

Time follows on local motion, and measures such things only as are in some manner placed in space....On the other hand time is a condition of our intellectual activity [that is binary thought] since we receive knowledge from phantasms that regard a fixed time [pictures in our mind regarding something that happened].

Father Rickaby annotated this page with an example of "motion placed in space": "There stood a lion in the way." And he went on to make a distinction: This kind of intellectual activity is different from "essential propositions [which] do not deal with time: they deal with the 'essences of things,' which e.g., 'a lion is an animal of the cat tribe.'"

We have to cut Aquinas some slack. He undertook to reconcile Christianity with Aristotle particularly.  Aristotle, who asserted the world was not created but had always existed, and also that man did not have an after-life.  I am not sure how Aquinas did it.