Theological Anthropology

Orthodox theological anthropology teaches that the human person is created in the image (eikon / tselem) and called to grow into the likeness (homoiosis / demut) of God. The human being is a psychosomatic unity of body and soul, with the nous (spiritual intellect) as the highest faculty, designed for communion with God. The Fall brought mortality and corruption (ancestral sin), but not inherited juridical guilt as in the Western doctrine of original sin. The human vocation remains theosis — the restoration and fulfillment of the divine image through growth into the divine likeness.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (with notes on Russian Orthodox emphases)

Image and Likeness: The Foundational Distinction

The Biblical Text

The foundational text is Genesis 1:26–27:

“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image (tselem / eikon), after our likeness (demut / homoiosis)’; and let them have dominion… So God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

The Hebrew text uses two terms: tselem (image) and demut (likeness). The Septuagint translates these as eikon and homoiosis, respectively. The question of whether these two terms refer to the same thing or to two distinct (though related) realities is central to Orthodox anthropology.

The Irenaean Distinction

St. Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130–202) was the first major theologian to develop a systematic distinction between image and likeness:

The image (eikon / tselem) is a given: it refers to what the human person is by nature at creation — rational, free, endowed with self-determination, capable of knowing God. The image is the structural capacity for relationship with God.
The likeness (homoiosis / demut) is a goal: it refers to what the human person is called to become through growth in virtue, communion with God, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The likeness is the actualization of the image — the dynamic process of becoming godlike.

Irenaeus writes: “In times long past, it was said that man was created after the image of God, but it was not actually shown; for the Word was as yet invisible, after whose image man was created. Therefore also he easily lost the likeness. But when the Word of God became flesh, he confirmed both: for he showed the image truly, by himself becoming what was his image; and he re-established the likeness in a sure manner, by co-assimilating man to the invisible Father through the visible Word” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V.16.2).

Key implications:

Adam was created in the image but was not yet in the full likeness. He was created as an infant, so to speak, with the potential for growth (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV.38.1–4). This is a crucial difference from some Western readings (especially Augustinian) that portray Adam as created in a state of original perfection from which he fell.
The Fall interrupted the process of growth into the likeness, but did not destroy the image (which is inalienable by nature).
Christ, as the incarnate Word, is the perfect Image of God (Colossians 1:15; 2 Corinthians 4:4) and thus the model and source of the restored likeness.

Subsequent Patristic Development

Different Fathers identified the “image” with different human faculties:

St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395): The image is reflected in human freedom, rationality, and the capacity for virtue. Gregory also emphasised that the image of God in humanity is ultimately apophatic — since God is beyond comprehension, the image of God in man participates in that same mystery and cannot be fully defined (Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 11; 16).
St. Maximus the Confessor: Maximus teaches that God gave rational nature four divine attributes — being, eternal being, goodness, and wisdom — the first pair belonging to the essence, the second entrusted to the will: “in the image” corresponds to being and eternal being, “in the likeness” to goodness and wisdom, which the person must freely actualize (Maximus, Centuries on Love, III.25; trans. Philokalia, vol. 2). Closely related is his distinction between the logos of nature (the unchanging rational principle of what a thing is) and the tropos (mode of existence) — the way in which the person freely actualizes that nature (Maximus, Ambiguum 42 [PG 91:1341C]).
St. John of Damascus: “Man was created after the image and likeness of God. ‘After the image’ refers to the mind (nous) and free will; ‘after the likeness’ refers to the likeness in virtue, as far as this is possible” (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II.12).

Pomazansky’s Summary

Pomazansky synthesises the patristic tradition: bringing the Fathers’ various answers together, he writes that “man bears the image of God in the higher qualities of the soul, especially in the soul’s immortality, in its freedom of will, its reason, and in its capability for pure love,” while the majority of the Fathers “see the image of God in the very nature of the soul, and the likeness in the moral perfecting of man in virtue and sanctity, in the acquirement of the gifts of the Holy Spirit” — the image is given together with existence, the likeness must be acquired (Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Part II, “Man — the Crown of Creation,” section “The Image of God in Man”).

Ancestral Sin vs. Original Sin

The Western Doctrine of Original Sin

In Western Christianity, particularly following St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), the doctrine of original sin (peccatum originale) teaches:

Adam’s sin introduced not only death and corruption but also inherited guilt (reatus) into the human race.
Every human being is born guilty of Adam’s sin, not merely affected by its consequences.
Human nature is totally depraved (in the strong Augustinian/Calvinist reading) — radically incapable of any good without grace.
Augustine’s reading rested partly on a Latin mistranslation of Romans 5:12: the Greek eph’ ho pantes hemarton (“because [or: in that] all sinned”) was rendered in Latin as in quo omnes peccaverunt (“in whom [i.e., in Adam] all sinned”), implying that all humanity sinned in Adam and therefore inherits his guilt.

The Orthodox Doctrine of Ancestral Sin

Orthodox theology speaks not of “original sin” (in the Augustinian sense) but of ancestral sin (propatoorikon hamartema / pervorodny grekh):

Adam’s sin introduced death and corruption (phthora) into human nature. All human beings inherit a mortal, corruptible nature prone to sin — but not the personal guilt of Adam’s transgression.
Each person sins because they are born into a condition of mortality, corruption, and the dominion of the passions — and because they personally choose to sin. Personal sin requires personal guilt; one cannot be guilty of another’s act.
The key patristic reading of Romans 5:12 follows the Greek: “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned (eph’ ho pantes hemarton).” Death (not guilt) is what is inherited; and in the condition of mortality, all have sinned.

St. Athanasius: “When Adam transgressed… human nature fell into corruption and death… all men became subject to death and corruption” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 4–5). Note: Athanasius speaks of the inheritance of death and corruption, not of inherited guilt.

St. Maximus the Confessor makes the distinction sharply: in Quaestiones ad Thalassium 42 he distinguishes two senses of “sin” that arose in Adam — the culpable sin of his free choice, which voluntarily abandoned the good, and the blameless “sin” of nature, the passibility, corruption, and mortality that followed upon it involuntarily. It is the latter, not Adam’s personal culpability, that is transmitted to his descendants; blame attaches only to each person’s own deliberate choice (Maximus, Quaestiones ad Thalassium, 42; trans. Blowers and Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, SVS Press, 2003).

St. John Chrysostom: Commenting on Romans 5:12, Chrysostom takes the inheritance from Adam to be mortality rather than guilt: when Adam fell, “even they that had not eaten of the tree did from him, all of them, become mortal”; and “sinners” in Romans 5:19, he says, “seems to mean liable to punishment and condemned to death” — not personally guilty of Adam’s act (Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, Homily 10 on Rom. 5:12; NPNF I/11).

The Consequences of the Fall

What was inherited from Adam, according to Orthodox teaching:

Mortality (thanatos): The human being lost the grace-sustained immortality of the original state and became subject to physical death.
Corruption (phthora): The human body became subject to decay, disease, suffering, and the disintegration of death.
Darkening of the nous: The highest spiritual faculty (see below) was obscured, making it difficult (but not impossible) to perceive God and spiritual truth.
The passions (pathe): Human desires and faculties, originally oriented toward God, became disordered and turned toward created things — lust, anger, gluttony, vainglory, etc. The passions are not sinful in themselves (they are natural energies) but became distorted by the Fall.
Bondage to the devil: Through sin and death, humanity fell under the power of the devil, who exploits human mortality and the passions to lead people into further sin.

What was not inherited:

Adam’s personal guilt: Each person is responsible only for their own sins.
Total depravity: The image of God is damaged but not destroyed. Human beings retain the capacity for good, for reason, for freedom, and for responding to God — though they cannot achieve salvation without grace.

Infants and Ancestral Sin

The Orthodox doctrine has important implications for the understanding of infants:

Infants are baptized not because they bear inherited guilt but because they need to be incorporated into Christ and the Church, to receive the grace that heals their mortal, fallen nature and sets them on the path of theosis.
Unbaptized infants are not consigned to hell or “limbo” (a Western construct absent from Orthodox theology). The classic patristic treatment is St. Gregory of Nyssa’s On Infants’ Early Deaths (NPNF II/5), which reasons about their condition without consigning them to punishment; Orthodox theologians since have differed in emphasis, and the Church entrusts such infants to the mercy of God without a defined teaching on their eternal state.

The Human Person as Psychosomatic Unity

Body and Soul

Orthodox anthropology affirms the psychosomatic unity of the human person — the human being is not a soul trapped in a body (Platonism/Gnosticism) but a unity of body (soma) and soul (psyche):

The body is not evil or a prison; it is created good by God (Genesis 1:31) and destined for resurrection and glorification.
The soul gives life to the body; the body gives the soul a mode of expression and action in the world.
Death — the separation of body and soul — is unnatural, a result of the Fall, not part of God’s original design. The resurrection of the body is the restoration of the natural unity of the human person.

St. Irenaeus: “The complete man consists in the commingling and the union of the soul receiving the spirit of the Father, and the admixture of that fleshly nature which was also moulded after the image of God” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V.6.1).

St. John of Damascus: “The soul and body were created together — not one before the other, as the ravings of Origen would have it” (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II.12).

Trichotomy vs. Dichotomy

There is a longstanding debate in Orthodox anthropology about whether the human person is bipartite (body and soul) or tripartite (body, soul, and spirit):

The dichotomist view (body + soul) is the majority patristic position and was affirmed by various councils. The “spirit” (pneuma) in biblical usage often refers to the highest faculty of the soul rather than a third component.
The trichotomist view (body + soul + spirit), based on 1 Thessalonians 5:23, is held by some Fathers and theologians but is generally understood as a functional distinction within the soul rather than an ontological one. St. Maximus and later hesychast theology tend to adopt a nuanced position in which the “spirit” or “nous” is the highest part of the soul (see below).

Pomazansky notes that “a significant majority of the Fathers and teachers of the Church directly acknowledge that man’s nature has two parts: body and soul,” and reads the “spirit” of Scripture not as a third substance but as “the inward and most hidden side of the soul” — the soul’s higher, grace-formed life (Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Part II, “Man — the Crown of Creation,” section “Soul and Spirit”).

The Nous

Definition

The nous (Greek: nous; sometimes translated as “mind,” “intellect,” or “spiritual intellect”) is a central concept in Orthodox anthropology and spirituality. It is not identical with discursive reason (dianoia / ratio) but is the highest faculty of the soul:

The nous is the faculty by which the human person directly perceives God, spiritual truth, and the logoi (rational principles) of creation.
It is the “eye of the soul” — the organ of contemplation (theoria).
When the nous is purified, illumined, and turned toward God, it becomes the primary locus of theosis.
When the nous is fallen (darkened), it descends into the body and becomes fragmented, identifying itself with discursive thoughts (logismoi), sensory impressions, and the passions.

Patristic Teaching on the Nous

St. Maximus the Confessor: The nous in its natural state is oriented toward God. The Fall caused the nous to turn away from God and toward created things, resulting in a fragmented, distracted consciousness enslaved to the passions. Salvation involves the restoration of the nous to its natural orientation (Maximus, Centuries on Love, I.5–12 — e.g., I.8: to withdraw the intellect from its love for God and fix it on some sensible object is to value “the things made by God more than God Himself”; trans. Philokalia, vol. 2).
Evagrius of Pontus (345–399): Evagrius developed a detailed psychology of the nous, its temptations (the eight logismoi or thoughts, which became the basis for the seven deadly sins), and the stages of its purification: praktike (ascetical practice), physike (natural contemplation), and theologike (direct contemplation of God / theology proper) (Evagrius, Praktikos; Kephalaia Gnostica). Note: Evagrius’s speculative theology was partly condemned at Constantinople II (553), but his ascetical and psychological teachings were widely received through the mediation of St. Maximus and the Philokalia.
St. Gregory Palamas: The nous must “return to itself” and descend into the heart (in the psychosomatic sense), where it unites with the heart’s prayer and becomes capable of perceiving the uncreated light. The hesychast practice of the Jesus Prayer, with attention fixed in the heart, is the practical method for this restoration of the nous (Palamas, Triads, I.2; II.2).

The Nous and the Heart

In hesychast anthropology, the heart (kardia) is not merely the physical organ or the seat of emotions but the centre of the whole person — the deep self where body, soul, and spirit converge:

The goal of ascetical practice is to “bring the nous into the heart” — to achieve the integration of the whole person in prayer and attention to God.
This is the anthropological basis of the Jesus Prayer and the hesychast tradition preserved in the Philokalia (compiled by St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and St. Makarios of Corinth, first published 1782) and transmitted in the Russian tradition through the Dobrotolyubie (the Slavonic Philokalia, translated by St. Paisius Velichkovsky, 1793) and through works like The Way of a Pilgrim (19th century, anonymous).