Rest in the West, Rest in the East: The Story of Grace

I might be the only person watching Super Bowl 51 while reading & writing about St. Augustine. That said, here is an excerpt from Augustine's Confessions: 

"And then you will rest in us, as now you work in us, and your rest will be rest through us as now those works of yours are wrought through us. But you yourself, Lord, are ever working, ever resting." -Augustine Confessions  Book XIII

Augustine cares deeply about rest. True rest. God's rest. His most famous quote from Confessions speaks of restless hearts seeking rest in God. Indeed, Confessions is Augustine's journey towards true rest. He thinks this is our story too. If my story is a story of a restless heart, then what rest am I seeking? The answer, it turns out, varies upon who you ask. I will give the two answers you are most likely to hear in the global Church, at least, the part of the Church which cares enough about Augustine to give an answer. These answers are unfairly broad, but they are the best overview I can yet offer to views in the East & West.

In the West, the way we understand God's rest stems from unlikely sources. Plato & Aristotle, the two giants of Western philosophy, provide two insights to the Western answer. Plato prioritizes the unchangeable & eternal over what we see in the world around us. Augustine owes much to Plato, as Confessions catalogues his first "awakening" after reading Neo-Platonist authors. God is unchanging & whole, lacking no thing. Augustine might mean that when we participate in God's rest, we are perceiving His unchanging nature by grace and reflecting God as a result. To rest in God is to take your eyes off of the things of this world that are always changing, and instead turn your eyes to the unchanging God. Many answer, following insights from Aristotle, that God is actus purus. God is all actuality and no potentiality. Thus, God's rest is the inseparability of His essence from His actions. This may be what Augustine means that God is "every working, ever resting." So, when you're understand something God does (like creating stars & our capacity for art) you are understanding something about the essence of God. In summary, the West has answered that God's rest relates to His unchangeability & completeness that we come to know about & participate in by grace. God's rest is not achieved through any works of our own.

In the East, Saint Gregory Palamas offers a distinction which relates to God's rest. In defending the Eastern practice of hesychasm (a form of inward prayer which opens oneself to union with God beyond senses & language), Palamas made a distinction between God's essence (ousia) & energies (energeia). God's essence is beyond comprehension. His essence is not just unknowable to us, it is beyond all concepts, even beyond the concepts of existence & non-existence. However, God's energies & existences (as Father, Son, & Holy Spirit) are knowable & can be experienced. This distinction offers a dose of humility to how we understand God. God's creative & redemptive work aims at bringing together created mankind with the uncreated God. Yet, in the East, salvation is a work of synergy between God & man. As David Bradshaw writes in Aristotle East & West, "It (synergy) led to a tendency to think of earthly, bodily existence as being able to be taken up and subsumed within the life of God" (265). Thus, the East may answer that God's rest is our work with God to become like Him in His uncreated energies, while remaining aware that this only takes place with God's grace & keeping in mind that our union is not in His essence but rather in His energies.

What does all this mean? The West assumes we can know more about God's essence, and the East assumes we can't know God's essence at all. However, in both the East & the West, God's rest only comes through grace. Rest does not happen without grace. The project of Augustine unites both East & West to live out God's redemptive work of grace. God's grace makes a way for our restless hearts to rest in Him. Whether we truly know & participate in God's essence or we participate in His uncreated energies, we are in desperate need for God's grace through faith in Jesus. God's work in us is not yet complete, but when it is, we will perfectly rest in Him. Yet even then, it will only be through a grace we could never earn. In the end, our story is a story of grace.

-HGM

If all of this does not make much sense to you, I suspect my limited understanding of the subject and inability to write it clearly are to blame.