Image and Likeness
A Brief Catechesis on CCC, §§355–384
Note: This is a slightly modified catechesis I wrote for the Stella Maris Become Catholic program.
What does it mean that human beings are made in God’s “image and likeness?” We are dealing, here, with a question of anthropology. Who are we as human beings? What is a human being? What does God reveal about the truth of our being? To engage with such questions, Judeo-Christianity takes the Book of Genesis as a starting point. There, the tradition establishes the particular mode of being called “human being” in a relational fashion. To understand what I mean by this, we must go back to the beginning, where, in Genesis 1:26-27, we hear the following:
God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth. God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
It’s worth stopping to think about how the original readers of the book of Genesis would have understood the expression “image and likeness.” We only have to turn a few pages to get the first clue. After Genesis 1, we next see those words image and likeness in Genesis 5:3, which says, “When Adam had lived a hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.” Based on contextual evidence, then, we see that here, “image and likeness” refers to filiation, to sonship—Adam and Eve were the created sons and daughters of God. As such, we can say they were God-like. Our idiom that a child is a “splitting image” of a parent gets at this. I have eight children and inevitably when people meet the newest baby, they try to figure out who that child looks like—"she has her mother’s eyes” or “he has his daddy’s stunning physique” and so on. (Okay, nobody has ever said the latter. Still, you get the point.) This is because the baby is an image of me and my wife. As such, the baby points back to us, his parents, in his very being. An image reproduces its own prototype, like a child’s very being reproduces that of his or her parents.
This pushes into a second point: the Hebrew word selem (image) refers an exact copy or reproduction. An image reproduces the original, and as such, it points to and refers to it. An image re–presents the reality, like a photograph re-presenting an event, a moment in time. Joseph Ratzinger comments on this, saying “the essence of an image consists in the fact that it represents something…it points to something beyond itself…it goes beyond itself and manifests something that it itself is not.”1 Now, an image is a good image to the degree in which it approximates the original. Once, I watched my son paint the Bengals logo (our hometown team) on a canvas and then go up to his room and pull out his Burrow jersey to compare his work to the official logo. He was off in a few spots, but not bad. So too, human beings, made in the image of God, then, are good images the more God-like they are, the more they reproduce and re-present God-like actions on the face of the earth.
Third, to be an image is to have relationality as the foundation of existence. An image only exists insofar as it stands in relation to the original, pointing to a reality beyond itself. Consequently, human beings “cannot be closed in on themselves,” as Ratzinger says. “To be the image of God implies relationality.”2 But human being is not an artificial and lifeless image, like a picture, for example, but a living one who thinks and prays and loves and communicates. As such, human images of God “are most profoundly themselves when they discover their relation to their Creator.”3 As God’s image, the human being discovers himself or herself only in relation to God, for “the truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.”4 With this awareness and through this relationship with God, the human being becomes capable of mediating God’s presence in the created order and communicating with God on behalf of it. With this, we’ve already anticipated the next point.
And that point — the fourth one — has to do with human beings participating in the divine in some way, shape, or form, like a photo participates in some way in the event it captures. The human being has within himself a divine “spark,” a divine “presence.” This doesn’t mean we are God, that pieces of God are in everyone, or that God is everything, like pantheism, but that we participate in God’s being in such a way that we make him and his activity present somehow. We might think of photosynthesis, as an example. The plant needs sunlight to live and is designed to participate in the sun, so to speak, but at no point in that process do we mistake the plant for the sun.
Fifth, and I’ve already alluded to this above, the human being is God’s representative on the face of the earth.5 Alexander Schmemann notes that the human being differs from all other beings on the face of the earth for a number of reasons, the most important of which is the fact that the human being is capable of adoring and worshiping God. “He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God — and by filling the world with this eucharist [i.e., thanksgiving].”6
Image of the Invisible God
Let’s take this whole conversation about “image” one step further. In St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, we hear that Christ “is the image of the invisible God” (1:15). In other words, Jesus, the Incarnate Word is the Image of God. Jesus Christ, the eternally begotten Son, the Incarnate Word of God, he makes the Father known. He makes God visible to us. In Jesus, God has a face.
Human beings, for their part, are made by God “in” the Image of God. And Jesus is the Image. In other words, Jesus is the prototype. We are images of the Image of God. And the Image of the invisible God is the Son of God. If we are made in the Image of the Son of God, then it means we are meant to become sons and daughters of God too. We are meant to become partakers in the divine nature (cf. CCC, §460).
Composite Beings
So far, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on Genesis 1. Let’s look briefly at Genesis 2. There, we see that human beings are both body and soul, corporeal and spiritual. Genesis 2 portrays this poetically with God forming the lifeless man from the dust of the earth, like a potter molding his clay. Then, God breathes life into the man — giving the man his spiritual soul. Soul is anima in Latin and this word means life-force. From this passage we can draw several conclusions: first, that human beings are willed by God, and second, that our spiritual souls come from God. The soul is immortal and not “produced” by our parents. I like to think about the soul like a homing device — it is that most interior part of our lives that constantly reaches out in search of God.
Marriage as Icon of the Trinity
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that if we are made in the “image and likeness” of God, then we are made in the image and likeness of the Trinity. God is a Trinity of persons. This means the essence of God, that is, who God is, is relationality, communion. For this reason, St. John Paul II exclaims, “Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion.” We image God most profoundly, most fully, when we are in relationship with others, in communion with others. Genesis highlights this out with the most fundamental instance of human relationality: the relationship between male and female in marriage. Really, Scripture extolls marriage as the primordial icon of communion.
In Genesis, we see that God creates human beings sexually differentiated as male or female. Sexual difference exists for the sake of complementarity and communion. So there are two ways of being human — male or female — yet there is equal dignity. We see this equality on display as Eve is created from Adam’s side. This shows that she is equal in dignity to the man. She is not taken from his head, indicating that she was above Adam. And, Eve is not taken from Adam’s feet, indicating that she is beneath him. She is Adam’s equal.
Scripture says that Eve is taken, so to speak, from Adam. In its own way, this shows us what their love, their marriage is all about. She is to draw Adam out of himself. He is to love her, to make a gift of himself to her, to affirm her goodness. At the same time, Eve is given to Adam. God himself brings her to the man. She is God’s gift to Adam, to be received by Adam. Eve is given to Adam to mediate God’s love for Adam. Eve is given to somehow incarnate God’s love for Adam who, as a human being, needs to receive love in an incarnate way. But the converse is also true. As Eve’s helpmate, Adam is to draw Eve out of herself and is to be accepted by her. This reciprocal relationship of being drawn out of oneself and given to another while simultaneously receiving the gift of the other, this communion we see in marriage, has the potential to be fruitful — participating in the creative act of God and thus we see the family as a kind of icon, and image, of the Trinity.
Human beings are the only part of God’s creation that is created in God’s “image and likeness.” This means we stand in a unique relationship to him. We participate in creation as God’s presence within it and as his co-creators. This also means God, and his creative act, is the source of our dignity and worth. We have dignity because he created us, because we are his sons and daughters, not because of what we have done or have failed to do. And this makes all the difference.
Joseph Ratzinger, ‘In the Beginning…’, trans. Boniface Ramsey, O.P. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 47.
Ratzinger, ‘In the Beginning…’, 47.
Ratzinger, ‘In the Beginning…’, 48.
Gaudium et spes (Citta del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1965), §22.
See Eugene Maly, “Genesis,” in The Jerome Biblical Commentary, eds. Raymond Brown, et. al. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 11.
Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 15.