On the Importance of Limitation

As we move to Genesis 2 and get closer to the first lines of the Adam and Eve story, there is a quick end to the creation of Genesis 1. After extracting habitable order from chaos using the articulated word, God sets to the task of creating the world as we know it. He does this through differentiating undifferentiated wholes: separating light from darkness, day from night, the water above and the water below, the land from the sea, etc. After the six days of creation God rests on and blesses the seventh day.

Genesis 2 says, “thus the heavens and the earth, and the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it he rested from all his work” (Gen 2:1-3).

Today I want to discuss some of the significance of the day of rest which was sanctified by God.

To be sure there are several levels of analysis that this can be viewed from. I think the most obvious one is the need for a day of rest. In this world, man, we are playing catch up all the time. One idea we might have, and for good reason, is we better just keep working constantly because no matter how much we do we never seem to catch up. The problem with this is that it will kill you — and for people high in trait conscientiousness it often does.

The problem is, net productivity over time for people who work without a break does in fact suffer. It is important for people who feel like they are drowning the second they aren’t actively engaged to confront the fact that if they actually take a rest now and then the end productivity will be higher. But this argument isn’t always convincing. So here, at the start of Genesis 2, we have the insistence that even God needed to take a break.

In the end this is excellent advice. It corresponds to reality quite well and as it turns out it corresponds perfectly to the modern field of Industrial-Organizational Psychology. Once again we see modern science finally coming around to the understanding that Genesis has been correct all along.

This said, I think there is more going on here than merely the establishment of the need for rest. I think we are dealing with the need for ontological boundries. You may recall a few days prior when I said that it was great fun being a philosophy professor for an intro class when you ask your students to draw the inside of a circle without the outside of one.

We can think of this in terms of what people call “freedom” as well. What exactly is freedom? Would it surprise you that the constitutive aspect of freedom is law. Without rules, freedom merely descends into chaos. We can think of this in terms of a game like chess. There are nearly an infinite number of permutations on a chess board — a nearly infinite number of chess games that can be played. But without the rules which govern the game, there is nothing.

Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), perfectly explains this as freedom being the freedom from, not the freedom to. Animals have a freedom to. It is in man that we see the ability to acknowledge rules. It is in the setting of boundaries through the imposition of rules that freedom is born. Rules and laws do not limit freedom, they are a precondition for its existence.

In the Genesis account we see the creative act of the divine where, through separation and limitation, God creates the world. Light is separated from darkness. Without the separation, neither can exist in any way other than an undifferentiated soup of potential. It is the boundary of light that allows darkness to exist and vice versa. The same for the sky and the waters, the land and the sea, the sun, moon and starts and the sea creatures and the birds. When we draw the inside of a circle, we create the outside of a circle and when we draw the outside we create the inside. Neither exists without the limitation of the other and as such the restriction is a precondition for its existence.

When God blesses and sanctifies the seventh day as a day of rest, a day different than the other days, a boundary on the work week, he in effect creates time. We are not just getting a look into the brilliance of a civilization who figured out that the week was split into seven equal parts (a discover still valid today and one that was not come upon by chance or with any ease), we are seeing the emergence of temporality into being.

It is only by setting aside a day of rest that we are able to have a complete week and, in turn, have cycles of time. This is why the day of rest is sanctified — set aside as holy. It is the limit which acts as a precondition for the whole with regard to temporality. Further, that it is, like all of the other aspects of creation, brought into being through the creative act of speech is another exemplar of the pattern of being which God is setting down here before the creation of man.

Limitation is essential to existence and we see that even in the original creative act on God’s part. God is, after all, omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. With these qualities there would seem to be no reason to create the universe. No reason to structure the void with the articulated word.

Creation implies a need or a lack, but what is it that God could lack which would spur on the creative action at the beginning go Genesis? What God lacks is limitation and because he lacks limitation his own being is undifferentiated to some degree. In creating a world and placing in it a creature which is capable of free will, God imposes restrictions and limitations on himself — restrictions and limitations which are boundaries, yes, but also constitutive of concretized reality.

Without death, there is no life. Without rules, there is no game. Without structure, there is no existence and without the sanctification of the seventh day, there is no time.