Abram Herbert Lewis - Spiritual Sabbathism

BIBLICAL SABBATHISM 87
Strives to reconcile motion, activity, energy, work,
with God's eternal peace.
Plato, indeed, had foreshadowed Aristotle's ideal.
"Can we ever be made to believe," he says, "that
motion and life and soul are not present with perfect
being? Can we imagine that being is devoid of life
and mind, and exists in awful unmeaningness an
everlasting fixture? . . . The philosopher can not possibly
accept the notion of those who say that the
whole is at rest, either as unity or in many forms;
and he will be utterly deaf to those who assert universal
motion. As children say entreatingly, 'Give
us both,' so he will include both the movable and the
immovable in his definition of being and all."
Starting from this necessity of our nature, Aristotle
distinguishes between motion, or change, and true
energy or function. The former is the latter in
the process of attaining its goal. True energy is
active, but it is activity with a purpose, and it transcends
the mere idea of change.
Energy therefore,
in the Aristotelian sense, is marked by eternal
achievement of purpose, self-realizing activity.
This Aristotelian use of "energy" is
highly technical,
but it is extremely important in the history of
thought. Nor is it irrelevant to Genesis. Indeed,
it
was a deliberate effort to give real meaning to the
word genesis {y€vem