Image, Likeness, and the Archetype

“Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness” — the two prepositional phrases of Genesis 1:26 carry the whole Orthodox anthropology of deification. The image is the given endowment and the constitution of the human being; the likeness is the term to be reached. This file sets out the distinction, argues that the image is a relation rather than a faculty, identifies the Archetype as Christ, and shows why deification is the fulfilment of human nature and not a violence done to it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Text and the Distinction

“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness’… So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
— Genesis 1:26–27

The Greek of the Septuagint has kat’ eikona hemeteran kai kath’ homoiosin — “according to our image and according to our likeness.” Verse 27 then records the making, and mentions only the image. The Fathers noticed the omission, and out of it built the structure of Orthodox anthropology.

The distinction is classically associated with St. Irenaeus: the image (eikon) is what is given in creation and cannot be lost, and the likeness (homoiosis) is what is to be attained by the free cooperation of the creature with the Spirit (see Theological Anthropology, which sets out the Irenaean distinction and its subsequent patristic development). The human being is therefore made with a beginning and a term, and the distance between them is the space in which the whole spiritual life takes place.

Two consequences follow immediately.

The image is indelible. It is not destroyed by sin, only obscured and defaced. This is why the Church can address any human being, however degraded, as an icon of God, and why the murder of a human being is an offence against God’s image. The fall darkened the image; it did not abolish it (see Ancestral Sin vs. Original Sin).

The likeness is a task. It is not automatic, and it involves freedom. St. Gregory of Nyssa’s epektasis means the task has no ceiling: the likeness is approached without ever being exhausted, because its measure is infinite (see From Irenaeus to the Cappadocians).

The distinction is not held uniformly by every Father, and it should not be pressed into a rigid system. Some patristic writers use eikon and homoiosis almost interchangeably; the point that is universally held is the structural one — that the human being is constituted with a divine reference and directed toward a divine end (Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Oxford, 2004; Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Cambridge, 1957, ch. 6).

What the Image Is Not: Against Definition by Inventory

The most common misreading of “the image of God” is to identify it with a component of the human constitution — reason, or free will, or dominion over the creatures — and to treat the rest of the human being as its housing. Anthropology then proceeds by inventory: locate the faculty, describe it, and you have described the human being.

Panayiotis Nellas’ Deification in Christ refuses this move, and the refusal is the most useful single contribution of modern Orthodox anthropology. He relocates the image from a faculty to a relation: man is an image of an Archetype, and “an image is not a thing with a property; it is a thing constituted by its reference to another” (Nellas, Deification in Christ, trans. Russell, SVS Press, 1987, 24–25; see Panayiotis Nellas: Image of the Image). To ask what in man is the image of God is, on this account, already to have mistaken the grammar.

This has a direct bearing on deification. If the image were a faculty, then the human being would be fully describable now, and deification would be an extra bestowed on a finished creature. If the image is a relation to an Archetype, then the presently observable human being is a partial realisation of something whose measure lies outside him, and deification is the disclosure of what he already is by constitution. St. Gregory the Theologian’s definition of man as ζῷον θεούμενον — “a living creature that is being deified” — says exactly this, and the present passive participle is deliberate: the deification is under way, and man is not its agent (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 38.11; see Panayiotis Nellas: A Living Creature Being Deified).

The reading must be guarded at once against a determinism it does not entail. The participle describes a vocation and a process the Creator has set in motion, not a mechanism that runs without consent; refusal remains really possible throughout (Nellas 1987, 109–162; see Synergy and the Mysteries). What is asserted is that the direction is constitutive — that even the person who refuses is a creature whose nature is defined by the refused end.

The Archetype Is Christ

The decisive question is then: the image of what? And the Orthodox answer is not “of the divine nature in general” but “of Christ.”

The New Testament forces the identification. Christ is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” (Colossians 1:15); the Father predestined us “to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren” (Romans 8:29); and the Church grows “to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13). If the Son is the image of the Father, and man is made in that image, then man is — in Nellas’ formula — the image of the Image (Nellas 1987, 24–25).

Three consequences of this are worth stating plainly.

Christ reveals what a human being is, not only what God is. The Incarnation is anthropological revelation as much as theological revelation. The question “what is man?” is answered by pointing at Jesus of Nazareth, and every other answer is provisional.

The Incarnation is not merely remedial. St. Maximus holds that the Incarnation is the mystery for which the world was made, and that the Word “wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment” (Maximus, Ambigua 7; see St. Maximus the Confessor: Theosis in Maximus). Adam was made in the image of the Christ who was to come; the archetype is prior to the copy even though he appears later in time. [Disputed: whether the Word would have become incarnate had there been no fall is a question the Church has not defined; the Maximian tradition inclines strongly toward the affirmative, and it is treated here as a well-grounded theologoumenon rather than as dogma.]

Deification is Christification. To be deified is to be conformed to Christ, not to acquire divine attributes in the abstract. This is why the route to it is incorporation into his body — baptism, chrismation, the Eucharist — and not a technique of ascent (see St. Nicholas Cabasilas: Union with Christ; The Way).

Nature, Person, and the Nous

Two further pieces of the anthropology are needed before the doctrine can be stated safely.

Person and nature are distinguished. Orthodox theology, following the Trinitarian and Christological grammar of the councils, distinguishes hypostasis (person) from physis (nature). Deification is the deification of a nature in persons; it does not fuse persons or dissolve them. Vladimir Lossky made this distinction central to his account, arguing that the person is precisely what is irreducible to nature and therefore what is not lost in union (Lossky 1957, chs. 6 and 7; see Vladimir Lossky: Person and Nature). [Disputed: the extent to which Lossky’s and later personalist accounts (Zizioulas, Yannaras) faithfully render the patristic sources, or import modern existentialist categories, is debated among Orthodox theologians; see John Zizioulas and Christos Yannaras. The dogmatic point — that deification does not abolish the person — is not in dispute.]

The human being is a psychosomatic unity. Body and soul are not a prisoner and a prison. The nous — the spiritual intellect or the eye of the soul, distinct from discursive reason — is the organ by which God is known, and its purification is the ascetic task; but the body is deified with the soul, and the resurrection of the body is the guarantee of it (see Theological Anthropology, on the nous and on the psychosomatic unity). This is why Palamas insists that the light of Tabor could be seen with bodily eyes transformed by the Spirit, and why the hesychast method involves the body in prayer (see St. Gregory Palamas: The Psychosomatic Method).

Why Deification Fulfils Nature Rather Than Violating It

The most persistent objection to any doctrine of deification is that it must involve a kind of violence — that a creature made God would have ceased to be a creature, and that grace which divinizes must destroy the nature it acts on. The Orthodox answer has three parts.

First, from the logoi. For St. Maximus every creature exists according to a logos, a divine intention that is the truth of what it is. Deification occurs when a creature’s actual mode of existence (tropos) comes to coincide with the logos of its nature. Far from violating nature, deification is the only condition in which nature is fully itself (Maximus, Ambigua 7; see St. Maximus the Confessor: The Logoi of Creation).

Second, from the will. Maximus’ distinction between the natural will, which belongs to human nature and is oriented toward the good, and the gnomic will, the hesitant deliberation characteristic of fallen humanity, allows the tradition to say that deification frees the will rather than overriding it. The deified do not lose the power of choice; they lose the vacillation that came of not seeing clearly (see St. Maximus the Confessor: Natural and Gnomic Will).

Third, from the image itself. If the human being is constituted by reference to a divine Archetype, then the movement toward that Archetype is not the addition of a foreign form but the coming-into-focus of the creature’s own. Irenaeus’ Adam, created immature and meant to grow, is the same point told as a story (Against Heresies IV.38; trans. ANF 1).

The iron in the fire remains iron. That is not a concession wrung from the doctrine; it is the doctrine.

References

Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 38.11. Trans. NPNF II/7.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies, IV.38; V, preface. Trans. ANF 1.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957. Esp. chs. 6–7.
Maximus the Confessor. Ambigua, 7. Trans. Nicholas Constas, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Trans. Norman Russell. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1987. Esp. 24–25, 109–162.
Nicholas Cabasilas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
The Holy Bible, cited in the New King James rendering; Genesis 1:26 also given from the Septuagint.