Sect. 125Man the Image of GodMan the Image of God

I. The definition of man given in Genesis shows better than any other the excellence and dignity of his essence, position, and destiny among and above the rest of creation.

1. The image of God is seen in man from the fact that man is able and is destined to rule the whole visible world and to turn it to his service. His dominion is an imitation of Divine Providence, with the limitations that necessarily distinguish the rule of a creature from that of the Creator (Ps. 8) This attribute of regal dignity and dominion essentially implies Personality in man. None but a personal being can be the end of other beings, can possess itself, enjoy happiness, and use other things for its own ends. The excellence of personality is founded upon intellect and will. For this reason, the Fathers find the likeness of man to God expressed most vividly in these two faculties. Holy Scripture itself points out in several places the dignity which accrues to man from his being the image of God (cf. Gen. 9:6 and James 3:9).

2. The human soul bears a further likeness to God in the spirituality of its substance; and this is the principal point of similarity, from which all others spring. The soul is created a spirit in order to be like to God; its spirituality implies incorruptibility and immortality, by which it is placed above all things material and perishable, and partakes of the Divine immutability and eternity (see Wisd. 2:23). The same attribute is the reason why the soul cannot be procreated by generation, but is the direct product of an act of creation. Hence the Apostle said, “Being, then, the offspring of God” (Acts 17:29)—to point out the substantial likeness of the soul to God.

3. Lastly, the intellectual life of man has the same contents (= subject-matter), the same direction, and the same final object as the life of God Himself. In fact, the soul is enabled and destined to know and to love God Himself, and so to apprehend its Divine prototype and to be united with Him. “Man is after God’s image,” says St. Augustine (De Trin., xiv. 8), “by the very fact that he is capable of God and can be a partaker of Him.” As the soul receives immediately from God its being and life, so also it has in God alone its direct final object and its rule of life; that is to say, no fruition except the fruition of God can fill the soul; no one but God can claim the possession of the human soul; no will, except the will of God, can bind the free will of the soul.

II. A comparison of man with the Angels as to the perfection of representing the image and likeness of God, shows that, in several respects, man is a more perfect likeness of his Maker than even the Angels. The latter, of course, represent the Divine Substance and the Divine intellectual life in greater perfection; but man has several points in his favour.

1. Just as God, intrinsically present in all things, gives being and activity to all things by a continuous act of creation, so does the soul of man, intrinsically present in his body, hold together and develop its organization, and generate new human organisms, thus possessing a plastic activity not given to the Angels.

2. As the All-present Creator breathes life into His creatures, the human soul communicates life to the vegetative and animal organs of the body, and disposes the new organisms for the reception of life; a privilege also denied to the Angels.

3. The beauty of the world manifests the beauty and grandeur of God: so the noble form and beauty of the human body reproduce and manifest the beauty of the soul The works of the Angels, on the contrary, are only works of art: they are not their own in the same way as the body is the soul’s own, and they bear no intrinsic relation to the internal beauty of their authors.

4. The Divine Concurrence, in virtue of which God is the Author of all that is done by His creatures, and especially of their moral actions, is imaged in the concursus or co-operation of the soul with the body: most actions of the body are so intimately bound up with those of the soul that they form but one action attributable to the soul. Angels, on the contrary, have but the power to move bodies from without as something distinct from themselves.

5. Lastly, as God is the final object of all that is, so the soul of man is the final object of man’s body: the body exists entirely for the soul, and has no dignity or worth except in as far as it is subservient to the soul. But the human body is the highest and most perfect organism of the material world, a microcosm, containing in itself a compendium of all other organisms: hence the whole material world, in and through the human body, bears a relation to the human soul, and through the medium of the human soul is, as it were, consecrated and brought into relation with God. Thus the spirit of man is not only the king, but also the priest of the world. The relation of the material world to the Angels is merely external; they have no other point in common than that they are created by, and for the glory of, the same God.

Man is, therefore, more than the Angels, the image and likeness of God. To man alone this title is given purely and simply in Holy Writ. In the later books of the Old Testament (Wisd. 7:26), and in the New Testament, Christ, as the Son of God, is also called the Image of God (2 Cor. 4:4), in order to place Him in dignity above all creatures whatever, just as the same title places man above all visible creatures. The Son of God, however, is the Image of the Father in a deeper sense than man: the Son is an absolute, man a relative, likeness. Notwithstanding this essential difference, the external image, man, corresponds so perfectly with the internal image, the Word, that man is, as it were, a reproduction of the Word. In the Incarnation the Internal Image entered the external and the external image was drawn into the Internal by hypostatic union, thus achieving the most astonishing of Divine Works.