Image of the Image

The Fathers, following St Paul, call Christ the image of God and man the image of Christ — “that is to say, that man is the image of the Image” (Deification in Christ, 24–25). From this Nellas draws his central and most consequential sentence: “Man’s archetype is therefore not simply the Logos but the incarnate Logos” (34). Anthropology becomes a chapter of christology, and the order of Adam and Christ is reversed: the first man was made after the pattern of the second.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Pauline Foundation

The argument begins with St Paul, and with a set of texts that the Fathers read together.

Christ is the image of God. “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15); “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4). Eikōn is used absolutely of Christ, without qualification.

Adam is a type of the One to come. “Adam, who is a type [typos] of the one who was to come” (Romans 5:14) — a startling inversion of the natural order of reference, in which the earlier figure is said to be the type of the later.

The order of the two men. “The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:45–47).

Nellas’s summary of what the Fathers do with these: “the Fathers carry further this line of thought found in Paul … Christ constitutes the image of God and man the image of Christ; that is to say, that man is the image of the Image” (Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 24–25).

The phrase is not a rhetorical flourish. It has an exact structural consequence. If man is the image of an image, then the relation “image of” occurs twice and the second occurrence has a determinate content: to ask what man is like is to ask what Christ is like, not to ask what divinity in general is like.

Against the Faculty Theories

The standard way of handling “in the image of God” in Genesis 1:26–27 is to look for the feature of the human constitution that constitutes the resemblance. The patristic tradition offers many candidates — reason, freedom, self-determination, the soul, dominion over creation, the tripartite structure of the soul mirroring the Trinity — and much of Christian anthropology has consisted in arbitrating between them.

Nellas’s first division is headed “Man as an image of the Archetype: ‘image of the Image’” (Nellas 1987, 23), and it changes the question. The image is not a feature of man; it is his constitution as a reference. A portrait is not an image of its subject in virtue of some property it possesses; it is an image because it is of someone. The relation is not a consequence of the thing’s structure; it is what the thing is.

Two things follow that matter for the rest of the book.

Man cannot be defined without reference to another. This is the ground of the whole anthropology-by-destiny (see A Living Creature Being Deified). A being constituted by reference to an archetype is incomplete in itself by definition, and the incompleteness is not a defect but its nature.

The image cannot be lost by the fall, only obscured. If the image were a faculty, it could be destroyed and the creature would cease to be human. Because it is a reference, it persists even when unrealised. The garments of skin obscure the image; they do not abolish it (see The Garments of Skin). This is the standard Orthodox position, and it is why the Church’s anthropology is not one of total depravity (see Theological Anthropology).

The Incarnate Logos, Not the Logos Simpliciter

Nellas’s second division is headed “The Archetype of man: the incarnate Logos” (Nellas 1987, 34), and it contains the sentence on which the book turns: “Man’s archetype is therefore not simply the Logos but the incarnate Logos” (Nellas 1987, 34).

The distinction is fine and everything depends on it.

That the human being is made according to the Logos is common patristic teaching: the Word through whom all things were made is the pattern of the rational creature. But if the archetype is the Logos considered simply as divine, then the archetypal relation holds between the human soul or mind and an incorporeal divine reality, and the body is not in the picture. A great deal of Christian anthropology has run that way, with the predictable consequence that the body becomes at best the instrument and at worst the prison of the image.

Nellas’s claim is that the archetype is the Logos as incarnate — the Word made flesh, the whole Christ, God and man. The pattern according to which humanity was made therefore includes a human body, a human soul, a human will, a human history. The body is not extrinsic to the image; it is part of what the image images.

This is why Nellas’s anthropology can insist so hard on the transformation rather than the abolition of the biological, and why zōon — animal — was the right word to build on (see The Motif in Nyssa and Maximus).

The Reversal: Adam After Christ

The consequence that Nellas draws from Cabasilas is a reversal of the order most readers assume.

The natural assumption is that human nature came first, was damaged, and that Christ came to repair it — that the Incarnation is God’s response to a situation He did not intend. On this account Christ is fitted to humanity: He takes on a nature already defined by Adam.

Cabasilas reverses it, and Nellas follows. Human nature was constituted for Christ from the beginning; the Incarnate Lord is not a remedy adapted to a pre-existing nature but the very pattern according to which that nature was designed. Cabasilas’s formulations in Book VI of The Life in Christ: it was for the sake of the New Man that “human nature was constituted from the beginning, and for him mind and desire were prepared”; Adam was made after the pattern of Christ, not Christ after the pattern of Adam; the first man was “the image of the second” (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ VI, trans. deCatanzaro, SVS Press, 1974; see Christ-Centred Anthropology).

The reversal has large effects, and they should be stated carefully.

Christ is not an afterthought. Humanity was made Christ-shaped, and the Incarnation is therefore the fulfilment of the original design and not merely its repair. The reason for the Incarnation is not exhausted by sin.

The definition of “human” is taken from Christ. When the Church asks what a human being is, she looks at the one human being in whom human nature is entire. Every other human being is an incomplete instance of a nature of which there exists exactly one complete instance.

The fall is measured against a positive standard. Sin is not primarily transgression of a rule but failure to become what one is for. This is the ground of the participatory soteriology Nellas had defended in his doctoral work (see The Doctrine of Justification).

A Necessary Qualification

One question must be handled honestly, because the Christ-first thesis borders on a controverted one.

Western theology knows a long debate — associated with Duns Scotus and, in the modern period, revived in various forms — over the absolute predestination of the Incarnation: whether the Word would have become incarnate had man not sinned. Cabasilas’s and Nellas’s line of argument runs in a direction that appears to answer yes, or at least to make the question ill-posed.

The Orthodox Church has not defined the matter. It is a theologoumenon, and Orthodox writers differ. What the Church confesses is the Incarnation itself, its purpose “for us men and for our salvation” as the Creed says, and the deification of man in Christ. Nellas is expounding a patristic line of thought and drawing a conclusion; he is not reporting a conciliar definition, and this collection does not present his position as the Church’s (repository METHODOLOGY §4.1–4.2). Nor should the Cabasilan thesis be assimilated too quickly to the Scotist one: the frameworks, the questions and the vocabularies differ, and to translate the Byzantine argument into the scholastic dispute is to change it.

Nellas himself, so far as this collection could establish, does not frame the matter as an answer to the scholastic question at all. He is asking what a human being is, not whether God would have become incarnate under a counterfactual.

References

Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Trans. Norman Russell. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987. (Part One, ch. I, “The Image of God,” 23–42; the quoted passages at 24–25 and 34.)
Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ, Book VI. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
Colossians 1:15; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Romans 5:14; 1 Corinthians 15:45–49; Genesis 1:26–27.
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.