Summa Contra Gentiles, Book II: XX That No Body Can Create

From Contemplating History

 Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 7 March 1274), was a Doctor of the Church, Philosopher, Theologian, Jurist, Dominican Friar, and Priest. Known as Doctor Angelicus "Angelic Doctor," and the Doctor Communis "Universal Doctor" his writings serve as a defense and proof of the validity of Christ's authority over all. The Summa contra Gentiles (also known as Liber de veritate catholicae fidei contra errores infidelium, "Book on the truth of the Catholic faith against the errors of the unbelievers"). The Summa contra Gentiles consists of four books. The structure of Saint Thomas's work is designed to proceed from general philosophical arguments for monotheism, to which Muslims and Jews are likely to consent even within their own respective religious traditions, before progressing to the discussion of specifically Christian doctrine.

Book II is dedicated to the Creation (in other words, the physical universe, everything which exists). Whether you are a history enthusiast, a student of religion, or simply curious about the impact of the Roman Catholic Church on the world, this playlist is designed to provide an informative and engaging journey through its captivating past. Subscribe to the Contemplating History channel for more educational content and immerse yourself in the rich tapestry of history.

New Survey Reveals What Catholics Think About AI

The Holy Rosary

Saturday, the Glorious Mysteries, in Latin with Cardinal Burke.

Wild History of Scotland’s Crown Jewels. Honours of Scotland. Scottish Regalia. Famous Stuart Jewels

From History Calling

The CROWN JEWELS OF SCOTLAND, otherwise known as the Scottish Regalia or the Honours of Scotland have had some wild adventures in their time. In 1652, after the fall of the monarchy, they were smuggled out of Dunnottar Castle and hidden in Kinneff Kirk for eight years in order to protect them from destruction at the hands of Oliver Cromwell. They were later lost for over a century after the 1707 Act of Union between Scotland and England/Wales, only for the missing crown jewels to be dramatically rediscovered in 1818 by famed Scottish writer, Sir Walter Scott. In the 20th century they were hidden from the Nazis during World War 2, but they now reside (in peace) in Edinburgh Castle, where they can be viewed by visitors. These famous royal jewels consist of the crown of Scotland, the sword of Scotland (more formally known as the sword of State) and the sceptre. They are the oldest crown jewels in Britain, having been created around half a millennium ago for King James IV and King James V of Scotland. Of course, what is the purpose of crown jewels, but to be used in official royal events and as well as their escapades dodging roundheads and Nazis, these items have been used in the coronations of monarchs including the baby Mary, Queen of Scots (just one of the famous royal women who have worn them by the way) and the exiled Charles II, who was crowned in Scotland during the interregnum in what turned out to be the last Scottish coronation. In this royal jewels documentary from History Calling, we look at the history of these stunning and ancient items, which are surely the most famous Stuart jewels ever created for, or given to that royal family.

"The Likelihood of Extraterrestrial Life," Karin Öberg, PhD

From The Society of Catholic Scientists

St Augustine’s Guide to a Holy Summer Rest

"Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty." ~ Isocrates

From Aleteia

By Daniel Esparza

We have forgotten how to stop. Augustine has some surprisingly practical advice.

Somewhere between the last work email and the first day of vacation, something goes wrong. We arrive at the beach, the mountains, or the family home with our phones still buzzing, our minds still rehearsing the unfinished business of June, and a vague sense that we should be doing something productive with all this free time. We have scheduled rest but we do not know how to use it. We have stopped working without actually stopping.

Augustine of Hippo, writing in the 5th century, would have recognized the problem immediately — and he had a name for what we are missing. In The City of God, he wrote: “The love of truth seeks holy leisure; the necessity of love undertakes just work.” The Latin is even sharper: otium sanctum — holy leisure. Not mere idleness, not the collapse of exhaustion, but a quality of rest that is oriented toward something, that has a shape and a purpose. Augustine’s point is that rest is not the absence of work. It is work’s destination.

Rest is not a reward

Augustine knew this from experience. In the autumn of 386, recently converted and worn out by years of teaching rhetoric in Milan, he accepted his friend Verecundus’s offer of a country villa at Cassiciacum, north of the city. He went with a small company — his mother Monica, his son Adeodatus, his friend Alypius, a handful of students — and spent several months there in what he would later call otium philosophandi: philosophical leisure. They talked, they read, they argued about happiness and skepticism and the order of things. The conversations became four books — Contra Academicos, De Beata Vita, De Ordine, Soliloquia — written not in an office but in a borrowed country house, between walks and meals and, as Confessions records with charming specificity, visits to the balneum, the bath, which Augustine notes took its name from the Greek balaneion because it “washes anxiety from the mind.” He would later describe Cassiciacum as the place where “we found rest in thee from the fever of the world.” This was not vacation as we understand it — Augustine was too restless for that — but something more interesting: a season deliberately structured around the love of truth rather than the demands of work. The thinking he did there was among the most productive of his life. The leisure was not despite the rest. It was because of it.

The first thing Augustine would tell us is to stop treating rest as something we have earned. The logic of modern vacation is essentially mercantile: We work hard, we accumulate enough, and then we permit ourselves to stop. Augustine’s otium sanctum operates on a different premise entirely. Rest is not the prize at the end of the race. It is the condition in which we become most fully human — the posture in which the love of truth can actually function. We are, as he wrote in the opening lines of the Confessions, made for God, and our heart is restless until it rests in him. The restlessness is not cured by a fortnight in the sun. It is cured by turning the attention, finally, toward what it was always seeking.

Practically, this means that the first act of a holy summer is not booking the holiday but deciding what the holiday is for. Not what you will do, but what you will allow yourself to receive.

Silence is not empty

Augustine’s inner life was intensely noisy — he was a rhetorician, a debater, a bishop with a packed correspondence and a diocese to run. Yet his writing returns constantly to the image of interiority as a vast, quiet palace, a space within the self where God is already present and waiting. “You were within me,” he wrote, “and I was outside.” Summer, with its longer light and slower pace, is one of the few seasons that genuinely invites us back inside — not to the interior of the house but to the interior of the self. Put the podcast down. Sit with the long evening. Let the silence be full rather than filling it.

Do less, and do it for its own sake

Augustine drew a clear line between negotium — business, the active life, things done for their usefulness — and otium, things done for their own sake. A walk that has no destination. A meal that goes on too long. A conversation with an old friend that produces nothing. These are not wasted hours. They are, in the Augustinian sense, the most human hours of all, because they point beyond utility toward something that simply is. Leisure, properly understood, is a rehearsal for eternity — which will not, Augustine suspected, be particularly busy.

The goal is rest, not restoration

The modern wellness industry frames rest as recovery — something we do so we can work better afterward. Augustine would find this subtly wrong. Otium sanctum is not instrumental. It does not exist to make you more productive come mid-August or September. It exists because the love of truth requires it, and because the heart that never stops moving never discovers what it is moving toward.

This summer, the most Augustinian thing you can do is simple: stop. Not to recover, but to arrive. The restless heart was not made for perpetual motion. It was made, as Augustine knew, for something that will finally hold it still.

From Genesis

Go further in a similar idea to Augustine's by reading Pope Francis' consideration of the Third Commandment: Keep holy the Sabbath Day.

Rest, as God commands it for us, is the "moment of contemplation, it is the moment of praise, not escape. It is the time for looking at reality and saying: How beautiful life is!"

Read more here.

A word from an Augustinian pope

This summer carries a particular resonance for those who read Augustine seriously, because the pope who has just finished his first year in office is himself a son of St. Augustine — a member of the Order of St. Augustine before his election, formed in the same tradition of inwardness, contemplation, and the restless heart seeking rest.

In his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, issued in May, Leo XIV wrote that “in the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human.” Under this light, the document can be read as a defense of everything that otium sanctum protects: interiority, attention, the irreplaceable texture of a human life that cannot be automated or accelerated.

AI, the Pope warned, risks becoming “an instrument of domination, exclusion and death” when severed from the human values that should govern it.

The Augustinian answer to that warning is not only regulatory or political. It is also personal: recover the interior life, reclaim the silence, practice the holy leisure that keeps you human. Put the phone down this summer as a theological act, and not just some digital detox. Augustine would recognize the gesture immediately.