10. Genesis 2:2 and Maximus: Eternal and Temporal Energies

 

Genesis 2:2 (LXX)

Greek:
καὶ συνετέλεσεν ὁ Θεὸς ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ ἕκτῃ τὰ ἔργα αὐτοῦ, ἃ ἐποίησεν, καὶ κατέπαυσεν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ ἑβδόμῃ ἀπὸ πάντων τῶν ἔργων αὐτοῦ, ὧν ἐποίησεν.

English:
“And God finished on the sixth day his works which he had made, and he rested on the seventh day from all his works which he had made.”

St Maximus notes that God “never began” His good things, and so never ceases from them; some divine energies are eternal, while others (like creating the world) have a beginning in time when His eternal power is newly actualized.

The fathers read God’s “rest” on the seventh day not as withdrawal into inactivity, but as the manifestation in time of a goodness and power that are eternally at work. God’s nature is pure act; He does not begin to be good, wise, or powerful, nor does He cease from these perfections. What begins is the world, which at a certain moment is brought into being by energies that are eternally in God and temporally realized in creatures.

Basil the Great distinguishes between God’s essence, which is wholly beyond reach, and His energies, by which “He comes down to us.” Creation, providence, judgment, illumination, sanctification, deification: all these are distinct divine operations that have temporal effects without implying any change in God. Gregory of Nyssa, commenting on Genesis, notes that God’s “rest” marks the completion of one kind of work, the bringing‑into‑being of creatures, but that His “upholding all things” and leading them toward their end continues unceasingly. The cessation is of new kinds of creatures, not of divine activity as such.

Maximus the Confessor develops this with precision. The logoi of creatures, the inner principles of all things, pre‑exist eternally in the Logos as divine intentions or wills. When God creates, He does not add something to Himself; He freely brings forth, in time, what He eternally willed. Thus some energies, like creating heaven and earth, have a temporal beginning in their effects, while the will and power from which they spring are without beginning. God “rests” from creating because the cosmos is complete in its kinds, yet He never rests from sustaining, guiding, and drawing all things to deification.

For Maximus, the sabbath is therefore both a completed work and a prophecy: creation’s history will culminate in an eternal sabbath, when all logoi return to the Logos, and the divine energies that have always been operative in hidden fashion will be manifest as the unending life of the age to come.