Image and Likeness of God

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Genesis 1:26). Everything Orthodoxy says about the human being begins here. The image is not a physical resemblance — "God is a Spirit" (John 4:24), without body or shape. The Fathers point instead to what makes persons persons: reason and understanding, freedom, the capacity for love and communion, and dominion over creation exercised as God's steward. Some locate the image in the soul's faculties, others in the whole human being, body included, since the body too is fashioned for God; the Church has never narrowed the mystery to a single definition. What is definite is the fact: every human being is a living icon of God.

That fact carries moral weight everywhere Scripture goes. Genesis grounds the prohibition of murder in it — "for in the image of God made he man" (Genesis 9:6) — and the Christian duty toward the poor, the stranger, and the enemy rests on the same foundation. One cannot venerate icons of wood and paint on Sunday and deface the living icon of God on Monday; mercy toward the neighbor is a form of reverence toward God.

Many Fathers drew a deliberate distinction between the two Genesis words. The image is given: every person has it simply by existing, and sin can darken but never delete it. The likeness is the calling: actually becoming like God in virtue and holiness, by free cooperation with grace. St. John of Damascus states it plainly: the image lies in mind and free will, the likeness in "likeness in virtue so far as that is possible." On this reading, to be human is not merely a fact but a vocation. We are born icons; we are meant to become saints. That growth into likeness is precisely what the Church calls theosis, and it advances by synergy — grace working, and freedom answering.

It is honest to add that this distinction is a cherished teaching device of the tradition rather than a defined dogma. In the Hebrew of Genesis the two words are nearly synonyms, and some Fathers use them interchangeably. But the truth the distinction protects does not depend on the vocabulary: there is a difference between what we already are by God's gift and what we are called to become by God's grace.

The Fall marred the image — tarnished the coin, as the Fathers liked to say — but did not destroy it. And its restoration is not a doctrine but a Person. Christ is "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15), the true Adam in whom we finally see what a human being was always meant to look like. In Him the Christian is "renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him" (Colossians 3:10), "changed into the same image from glory to glory" (2 Corinthians 3:18) — the icon cleaned and re-gilded by the hand of the original Painter.

St. Irenaeus compressed the whole teaching into a single line: "the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God." The image of God in us is not finally a property to be analyzed but a face turned toward its Original — and Scripture's last word on the subject is a promise: "we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2).