On image and likeness, or man as a journey
The Beginning: A Word Spoken in Counsel
The Book of Genesis does not open with a definition of man, but with a deliberation: „Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.” All other creatures come into being by a word of command: „Let there be light,” „let the earth bring forth.” Man comes into being by a word of counsel, spoken as if in the mysterious depths of the Trinity. The Fathers saw here more than a literary style. The model of man is not an abstract idea but the communion of the divine Persons. When Scripture says „in Our image,” it says that man is made for communion and that, by his very structure, he is a being of relation.
The text goes on with a precision that has worked through the centuries of Christian thought: „in the image and according to the likeness.” Saint Irenaeus sees here two distinct things: man receives something at the beginning and has something yet to receive at the end. Thus is born the axis of all patristic anthropology. Man is already something, but he is not yet all that he was called to be.
A necessary caution: the Fathers do not use the distinction uniformly. Origen, Irenaeus, Diadochos, and Maximus keep it clearly, while Saint Gregory of Nyssa often speaks of the image as a whole that embraces both. The difference is one of emphasis, not of faith, and it shows that we are dealing with a living tradition, not a textbook formula.
The Image: A Gift Before Any Merit
The image is what man receives, not what he does. No one earns it and no one can lose it, because it does not depend on man’s merit but on the creative act of God. That is why it is called an ontological gift: not a gift added to being, but a gift that is being, the seal set in its very structure.
The Fathers name, in various ways, what makes up this seal:
- The spiritual mind (nous), the eye of the soul, by which man can know not only things but Person. The nous is not mere discursive reason. It is the heart’s power of contemplation, and calculating reason is only its shadow cast down into the world.
- Freedom (autexousion), the self-mastery by which man is not moved from outside like a stone but moves from within. Without it, love would be mechanism.
- The capacity to love, that is, the opening of one’s being toward another.
- The thirst for eternity, the restlessness that keeps any work of this world from satisfying man. Blessed Augustine said it for all: „You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”
The hardest and most consoling teaching about the image is its permanence. Not even the deepest sin destroys it. Sin can stain it, cover it with rust, make it unrecognizable. But it cannot make man cease to be man. Here lies the foundation of all Christian hope: there is no one so fallen as to be mere remnant. Beneath the layers of earth, gold remains.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa offers the image of the mirror. The image is a mirror made to receive light. Sin does not shatter the mirror but covers it with mud, and a covered mirror no longer receives the light, though it remains a mirror. Asceticism and repentance clean the mirror; they add nothing foreign to man but restore him to himself. In this respect, the spiritual work is closer to restoration than to construction.
The Likeness: The Image Set in Motion
If the image is what man is, the likeness is what man is called to become. The image is given at the start; the likeness is set before him. Irenaeus says that Adam was created as a child, complete in the gift but unfinished in growth. The likeness is the full stature toward which he grows.
It is not a mere moral quality, as in a code of good conduct. It is participation: man comes to bear within himself the life of God, as far as a creature can bear it. Saint Peter says it plainly: we become „partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), and Saint John announces: „We shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2). Likeness and vision are bound together: you cannot see what you are unable to bear, and you become what you behold.
Hence the series of virtues the text names: gentleness, humility, purity of heart, dispassion (apatheia), sacrificial love (agape). In the philokalic tradition they are not „the qualities of a good person.” They are traits of the image of God coming to light. Gentleness is the calm of one who no longer has an inflamed self to defend. Humility is the truth about oneself, spoken without fear. Apatheia is not insensibility, as common thought understands it, but freedom from the passions that drag us along: love remains, but it is no longer enslaved. Agape is their crown, because it is the only one that does not turn back upon itself.
Diadochos’s Paradox: The Bondage That Frees
Saint Diadochos of Photiki, in his Ascetic Discourse, formulates with rare concision the relation between the two: „All of us are in the image of God; but only those who through much love have enslaved their freedom to God are in the likeness.”
The sentence holds a paradox worth keeping in mind. Freedom, which is the highest part of the image, finds its fulfillment in surrender. And this is done not from constraint but from love. Modern man understands freedom as the power to choose among options. The Fathers understand it as the power to give oneself. The first is freedom from, the second is freedom for. The first can be an emptiness from which nothing comes, the second is a fullness that spends itself in loving.
In the same chapter Diadochos also gives the image of the painter: one who portrays a likeness begins with a sketch in a single color and then adds the colors gradually until the resemblance to the model comes alive. So too baptism renews the image and restores it to its first beauty, while the colors of the likeness are added by man’s own work, under the light of the Spirit. The sketch is the gift, the colors are the response. God does not paint man without him, and man cannot paint himself without God. Here we see in an image what theology calls synergy.
Maximus the Confessor: Principle and Mode
Saint Maximus gives the whole teaching a philosophical precision. He distinguishes between the logos, the principle of being, and the tropos, the mode of being. The logos is what makes man man: the word of God set in his nature, unchanged by the fall. The tropos is the concrete way man lives his nature: toward God or against Him, in communion or in closure.
The fall, for Maximus, does not change the nature but the mode. Man did not become a different kind of being; he began to use the same nature backwards. Love, which was meant to turn toward God, twisted toward self-pleasure. The will, made for co-working, became a will to dominate. What in Adam was freedom became, in fallen man, enslaving caprice.
Salvation, therefore, is not a remaking of nature but a conversion of mode. The image (the logos) does not need to be recreated, because it was not lost. What must be healed is the way it is lived. The likeness is precisely this healed mode: nature lived in truth, in freedom, and in love. And who made this healing possible? The One in whom human nature was lived perfectly in a divine tropos: Christ.
Christ, the Perfect Image
The point on which the whole teaching rests is not an idea but a Person. Paul calls Christ „the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). This turns the perspective around: man is not made after an abstract model but after the Son. The image in man is, ultimately, the image of the Image, a likeness at one remove to the One who is the likeness of the Father.
In a formulation the Fathers repeat with wonder: the One who is the Image took the image, in order to restore the image. Saint Athanasius: „God became man so that man might become god.” Christ does not merely teach the likeness; He is it. In Him, man is for the first time fully what he was meant to be. And because His human nature is our nature, the way of likeness is not a solitary ascent but an entrance into His body, the Church, through the Mysteries, through prayer, through obedience to the Gospel.
This is the heart of synergy. Neither Pelagianism, as if man were saved by his own strength, nor passivity, as if grace worked over man’s head. Grace meets, calls, supports, and man answers with what he has: obedience, struggle, tears, patience. Not because grace needs man’s help, but because love cannot be imposed. It can only wait for an answer.
Deification: A Boundary That Guards the Mystery
When speaking of theosis, a boundary must be kept. „Beings who attain by grace what God is by nature” states a truth, but it needs clarifying: by grace, not by nature. Man does not become God in essence. He does not dissolve into the divinity, as pantheism would suggest. He remains a creature, with his own being, yet becomes a partaker of the uncreated life.
Saint Gregory Palamas gave this safeguard its foundation: God is unapproachable in His essence, yet gives Himself in His uncreated energies, in light, in power, in love. Man does not share in His essence but in His working. This protects two things at once: God’s transcendence (no one comprehends Him) and the reality of communion (we do not share in an image, but in Life itself). Without the first, divinity would be lowered to man’s level. Without the second, salvation would be merely a moral framework.
Man as Itinerary
Now the sentence that closes the text can be understood: man is not a static entity but a spiritual itinerary.
Whoever thinks man is defined by what he is now, by his condition, his past, his weaknesses, misses half the truth. Man is also defined by what he is called to be. The image says: you have a dignity that nothing can take from you. The likeness says: you have a height toward which nothing prevents you from setting out. The first sentence guards against despair, the second against complacency. Together they hold the soul between the two abysses of the spiritual life: the despair of the one who thinks he can no longer be healed and the arrogance of the one who thinks he has arrived.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa goes further with the idea of epektasis: the way of likeness has no end, because God is infinite. However high the soul climbs, it finds there is still further to climb, and this „more” is not weariness but delight. Perfection is not a stopping but an eternal growth. Whoever reaches the summit discovers another mountain, and his joy is that it never ends.
Therefore the last word about man is not about what he has lost but about what is being prepared for him. The image is the pledge that nothing of what God placed in us has gone out. The likeness is the promise that what He began He will bring to completion: „He who began a good work in you will complete it” (Philippians 1:6). Between the two lies our life, which is not an accident but a road.
