The Image and the Likeness

Chapter 6 of the Mystical Theology and the essay “The Theology of the Image” set out Lossky’s anthropology. The patristic distinction between image (what is given) and likeness (what is to be achieved) supplies the dynamic structure: the human being is created as an image of the Trinitarian God and called to become like him. Lossky refuses to locate the image in any single faculty — it is the whole man, and finally the person himself, that images God — and reads the fall as a disorder in the relation of person to nature which the Incarnation reverses.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Image and Likeness

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). A long patristic tradition, going back at least to Irenaeus and developed by Origen, the Cappadocians, and John of Damascus, has read the two words as distinguishing two things: the image (eikōn) is what is given in creation and is not lost by sin; the likeness (homoiōsis) is what must be acquired, the fulfilment of the image in actual conformity to God, which is another name for deification (see Theological Anthropology; Theosis).

Lossky takes over this structure and makes it the frame of his anthropology (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, ch. 6, “Image and Likeness”; “The Theology of the Image,” in In the Image and Likeness of God). Its effect is to make the human being constitutively dynamic: not a finished nature with a destiny attached, but a creature whose very constitution is a vocation. Man is not simply an image; he is an image ordered toward a likeness he does not yet possess.

Where the Image Is

A standing question in patristic anthropology is what in man the image consists in. The Fathers answer variously: the nous or intellect; freedom and self-determination; dominion over creation; the soul as against the body; the tripartite structure of the soul mirroring the Trinity.

Lossky’s characteristic move is to refuse to settle on any of these. The diversity of the patristic answers is not, on his reading, a failure of precision but a signal: the image cannot be located in a faculty because it is not a property of the nature at all. What images God is the whole human being — soul and body together, since the body too is destined for resurrection and deification — and, at the deepest level, the human being as person, precisely in that irreducibility to nature which is the mark of the hypostasis (Lossky, “The Theology of the Image,” in In the Image and Likeness of God; Mystical Theology, ch. 6; see Person versus Individual).

This has two consequences that matter.

The first is apophatic: if the image is the person, and the person cannot be defined, then human nature has an unknowable depth which corresponds to the unknowability of God. Man is, in Lossky’s frequently echoed phrase, a mystery of the same order as the mystery he images.

The second is that the image is not a static endowment but a capacity for God: to be in the image is to be capable of the likeness, capable of receiving the uncreated energies and being deified by them. The doctrine of the image and the doctrine of theosis are one doctrine (see Uncreated Grace and Deification).

Person, Nature, and Will after St. Maximus

The technical machinery Lossky uses here comes from St. Maximus the Confessor and the Sixth Ecumenical Council’s settlement of the monothelite controversy.

The Council defined that in Christ there are two natural wills and two natural operations, corresponding to the two natures — because will belongs to nature, not to person. Had will belonged to the person, Christ, being one person, would have had one will, and his human nature would have been incomplete; and what is not assumed is not healed (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils; Christology).

Lossky takes from this the distinction between the natural will — the built-in orientation of a nature toward its own good, which in human beings is an orientation toward God — and the mode in which the person exercises that will, including the deliberative, hesitant, self-divided mode Maximus called gnomic and located in fallen humanity rather than in Christ.

The payoff for Lossky’s anthropology is precise. Freedom is not the nature’s indifference between options; the nature is not indifferent, it is made for God. Freedom belongs to the personal mode of existing — to the “who” who either lets his nature run toward its end or deflects it. Sin, correspondingly, is not a defect in the nature as created but a personal deflection which then wounds the nature.

The Fall

Lossky’s account of the fall follows from all of this and is characteristically un-juridical.

The fall is not primarily the incurring of a penalty. It is a disorder in the relation of person and nature: the person, made to receive his nature as a gift and to offer it in love, instead takes possession of it — turns inward, treats what is common as private property, and so becomes an individual in the very act of ceasing to be fully a person. What follows is the fragmentation of a nature that was meant to be one: humanity, which in Adam is a single nature carried by many hypostases, breaks into competing individuals whose self-assertion is at one another’s expense.

The consequences are then natural rather than forensic. Corruption and death enter because the nature, cut off from the uncreated energies that are its life, cannot sustain itself; the passions arise as the disordered movement of a nature deprived of its proper object. This is the standard Greek patristic account of ancestral sin as an inheritance of mortality and corruption rather than of inherited guilt, and Lossky presents it as such (see Soteriology; Theological Anthropology).

The Reversal

Redemption, correspondingly, has a person/nature structure.

In the Incarnation, a divine person assumes the whole human nature. What Christ does, he does for the nature: in his death and resurrection human nature as such is healed, made incorruptible, and raised. This is the objective side, accomplished once and for all, and it belongs to what Lossky calls the economy of the Son.

But a healed nature is not yet a deified person. Each human hypostasis must appropriate personally what has been given to the nature, and that appropriation is the work of the Holy Spirit, given at Pentecost and conferred on each in chrismation. Hence Lossky’s insistence on two distinct and irreducible economies — the Son’s, which restores the nature, and the Spirit’s, which deifies the persons — treated in successive and deliberately parallel chapters of the Mystical Theology (chs. 7 and 8). Christ becomes what we are so that we may become what he is; the Spirit makes the gift ours, one by one, without dissolving the “one by one” (Lossky, Mystical Theology, chs. 7–8; see Two Triadologies and Their Consequences).

This is the anthropological point on which Lossky’s ecclesiological argument against the Filioque finally rests: an ecclesiology that subordinates the Spirit’s economy to the Son’s will, on his account, subordinate the personal to the institutional and lose the irreducibility of the human hypostasis in the Church (see The Filioque Thesis). Whether the inference holds is contested; the anthropology on which it rests is the material of this file.

Theosis as the Likeness

The likeness, then, is theosis: the state in which the person, freed from the possessive inward turn, exists as pure receptivity to God and pure gift to others, and in which the nature is wholly permeated by the uncreated energies. The saint is not a human being who has acquired an additional divine property but a human being who is by grace everything God is by nature, except identity of essence (see Uncreated Grace and Deification; Theosis).

The Theotokos is, in this frame, the created person in whom the likeness is fully realized — the point Lossky develops in his contributions to the volume on icons with Leonid Ouspensky (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons; see The Theotokos).

The Contested Element

The image-and-likeness structure, the account of ancestral sin, the two-wills doctrine, and the doctrine of theosis are all common patristic property and are not in dispute. What is Lossky’s own — and what Section 08 examines — is the person/nature machinery through which he interprets them: whether the fall is well described as a collapse of person into individual, whether the Fathers’ hypostasis will carry the weight of Lossky’s “irreducibility,” and whether the ascetical and ethical corollaries he draws follow from the Fathers or from a modern personalism read into them (see The Person-versus-Individual Debate).

References

Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Trans. members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. London: James Clarke, 1957. Chs. 5–8 (Created Being; Image and Likeness; The Economy of the Son; The Economy of the Holy Spirit).
Lossky, Vladimir. “The Theology of the Image” and “Redemption and Deification.” In In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
Lossky, Vladimir. Orthodox Theology: An Introduction. Trans. Ian and Ihita Kesarcodi-Watson. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978. (The dogmatic lectures on creation and the image.)
Lossky, Vladimir. Dogmatic Theology: Creation, God’s Image in Man, and the Redeeming Work of the Trinity. Trans. Anthony P. Gythiel; French edition ed. Olivier Clément and Michel Stavrou. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2017.
Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky. Bern/Olten: Urs Graf, 1952; later editions Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Maximus the Confessor. Opuscula theologica et polemica; Ambigua. 7th century. (The natural and gnomic will.)
Third Council of Constantinople (681). Definition on the two natural wills and operations in Christ.
Torrance, Alexis. “Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology: Reassessing the Debate.” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 700–707.
Repository: Theological Anthropology; Theosis; Christology.