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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
There are probably few theological categories more contested than the image of God. The reasons why are not hard to fathom. Though the priestly writer to whom we owe the phrase nowhere specifies in what this image consists, theologians since Irenaeus have seen in it the key to understanding human distinctiveness. Though Irenaeus’ own interpretation of the imago Dei is remarkably holistic, the phrase has more often been understood in narrowly cognitive terms. And while the faculties cited as the seat of the divine image have generally been viewed as widely inclusive of all human beings, those in power have proved all too willing to question the humanity of those whose cognitive abilities they have judged somehow deficient.
Partly as a protest against narrowly cognitive interpretations of human distinctiveness, the last century has seen an increasing emphasis on the capacity for relationships with others as the defining feature of the divine image in human beings. Insofar as such capacity is also subject to variation among individuals, however, relational criteria seem as open to exclusive interpretation as those pertaining to the use of reason or will. In both cases, an essentialist interpretation of the imago Dei threatens to result in the boundaries of the human being drawn too narrowly.
1 While Irenaeus himself does not offer a formal definition of the image of God, he explicitly denies that it can be restricted to a part of human nature (e.g., the soul or spirit). See Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies V.vi 1 in The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, vol. 1 of The Ante-Nicene Fathers, American ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985).
2 The correlation of image with some property of the mind is already to be found in Philo (De opificio mundi, 69, in Philo, vol. I, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1929), and the same general trajectory is continued in the twentieth century in the work of theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Karl Rahner, who all interpret human distinctiveness in terms of a basically cognitive capacity for self-transcendence.
3 See, for example, Ginés de Sepúlveda's argument for the subjugation of the Indians in his Democrates alter (available in a Spanish translation by Angel Losada as Demóerates segundo o De las iustas causas de la guerra contra los indios (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1984)), as well as the numerous apologies for the enslavement of Africans offered by white Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
4 See, e.g., Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1960) and, more recently, Alistair McFadyen, The Call to Personhood: A Christian Theology of Individuals in Social Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1990).
5 See Harriet A. Harris, Should We Say That Personhood Is Relational? in Scottish Journal of Theology 51:2 (1998), 214-234.
6 See Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Contesting the Gendered Subject: A Feminist Account of the Imago Dei, in Horizons in Feminist Theology: Identity, Tradition, and Norms, ed. Rebecca S. Chopp and Sheila Greeve Davaney (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 114.
7 In this article I follow the convention of citing the Summa Theologiae by means of Arabic numerals separated by periods. Thus, 1.93.4.1 refers to the response to the first objection in article 4, question 93 of the first part. The Latin text is from the Blackfriars edition of the Summa (London: Eyre & Spottiswood, 1964-1981). Translations are my own.
8 Gilson, for example, understands Thomas to affirm that there is in man a quality that makes him eminently similar to God, and it is understanding, or mind. And that is what it means to be an image of God. Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Thomism (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1964),36. Cf. his account in Le Thomisme: Introduction á la philosophie de Saint Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1944), 480, where he argues, Puisqu'elle [the imago Deil ne fait qu'un avec la rationalité de sa nature, la qualité d'image de Dieu est coessentielle avec l'homme. Il est aussi naturel á l'homme d'être image de Dieu que d'être un animal raisonnable, c'est-a-dire d'être homme.
9 Cf. 1.93.1.2, where Thomas also contrasts the relationship between the connatural character of the image in the Son with its presence in human beings.
10 Dei potentia, quae est operationis principium, est ipsa Dei essentia. Quod non potest esse verum neque in anima, neque in aliqua creatura (1.77.1); cf. 1.79.1.
11 I differ here from Catherine Pickstock, who understands this intermediate category of proper accidents as constituting something that is at once essential and super-essential (Catherine Pickstock, Radical Orthodoxy and the Mediations of Time, in Radical Orthodoxy? —A Catholic Enquiry, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 71). As noted in the text, while Thomas denies that the understanding is essential to human being, it is not clear that the status he gives it is helpfully characterized as super-essential. His point is simply that the soul has powers (including, but not limited to the intellect) that cannot he equated with its essence, but whieh nevertheless are ontologically linked to it. As explained below, it seems to me that the ontologically odd status that Pickstock wishes to aseribe to the understanding is more accurately associated with the imago Dei.
12 The point is made explicitly in the Responsio: Si ergo imago Trinitatis divinae debet accipi in anima, oportet quod secundum illud principaliter attendatur quod maxime accedit, prout possibile est, ad repraesentandum speciem divinarum personarum. Divinae autem personae distinguuntur secundum [actualem] processionem verbi a dicente et amoris connectentis utrumque.
13 In De Veritate 10.7 Thomas makes a similar point, distinguishing a purely structural image of God by analogy from an image by conformity.
14 In 1.35.2.3 Thomas speaks of the image of God in human beings as referring to a type of process or movement tending toward a particular goal (motus quidam tendentis in perfectionem); cf. 2-2.175.1.2 where this goal is identified with the beatific vision, which Thomas describes as being above, but not contrary to human nature (non est contra naturam, sed supra facultatem naturae).
15 See especially 1.63.6.4: Sed tamen in angelis tempus accipitur pro ipsa successione operationum intellectus, vel etiam affectus.
16 Et ideo.…liberum arbitrium hominis flexibile est ad oppositum et ante electionem, et post: liberum autem arbitrium angeli est flexibile ante electionem, sed non post (1.64.2; cf. 1.63.6.3). It is on this account that Thomas will later argue that angels are incapable of sinning venially (1-2.89.4).
17 In this context, it is, of course, important to remember Thomas insistence that the demons intellectual nature is preserved even after their fall: etiam in daemonibus data naturalia post peccatum permanserint (1 .95.1 ; cf. 1.64.1). For a fuller discussion of the effects of sin on the good of created nature, see 1-2.85.1.
18 It is axiomatic for Thomas that God makes this grace available to all rational creatures. The point remains, however, that no creature could realize the image of God apart from God's prevenient offer of grace.
19 To be sure, the fact that every angel is its own species implies that each realizes the imago Dei in a different way, corresponding to its own particular degree of intellectual perfection, but these differences have nothing to do with the movement from potency to act in time that is the source of the different modes of the imago within the one species of humankind.
20 For the impossibility of a creature seeing God by its natural powers, see 1.12.4.
21 See in this context, see Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge of God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1995), 90-91.
22 This point can be defended on the grounds that differences between objects that are known are reflected in differences in the internal words by which they are known in a way that disallows extrapolating from one object of knowledge to another (diversitas ohiectorum diversificat speciem verhi et amoris: non enim idem est specie in corde hominis verbum conceptum de lapide et de equo, 1.93.8).
23 Thus, it is possible to affirm that angels realize this image more perfectly than human beings by virtue of the fact that they understand by immediate intuition rather than through discursive rationality (1.93.3; cf. 1.58.3) though even here it remains possible that human knowledge of God may be superior to that of angels in terms of its content, if not of the mode in which it is known (3.11.4).
24 In addition to the references to Christ's particular graces already mentioned, see Thomas remarks on the possibility of seeing God under the conditions of time and space in 1.12.11.
25 Rogers summarizes this peculiar relationship between what we are by nature and what we will be by grace in Aquinas as follows: I) the [graced] end is new to nature as elevating it, and yet it is or becomes 2) internal to nature so as to elevate it as itself, that is, as an inner rather than a violent principle of change. Rogers, Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, 78. Cf. note 21 above.
