An intimate understanding of the Alexandrian contribution to image theology demands some knowledge of the intellectual and spiritual background that helped to fashion it. I would suggest that four influences were uncommonly strong in this regard.
First, Scripture.1 This is Christian Alexandria's springboard and basic inspiration. And here there is question of creation and re-creation, of Old Testament and New, of Adam and Christ. The origins of the Christian conception of the divine image are rooted in the opening act of salvation history. The text par excellence isis)—a text which the Psalmist elucidated (Ps 8) when he saw man made "but little lower than God," Grt 1:26-27—the first man and the first woman are fashioned in God's image (Hebrew selem, Greek eikdn), after His likeness (Hebrew demut, Greek homoios...
Absent from the Gospels, the image idea plays a significant role in St. Paul's Ohristology and anthropology. There are three prominent themes, each of which will be caught up into Alexandrian thought. (1) Christ is the Image of God (2 Cor 4:4-6; Col 1:12-16; Heb 1:3); for He is the Son of God, and as Incarnate Son He is the visible manifestation or epiphany of the invisible God, the luminous revelation of the Father, radiance of the Father's glory, imprint of the divine nature. (2) Man is the image of God (1 Cor 11:7-9; Col 3:9-10); for the new creation of man in Christ has restored the original image, and here—as Paul interprets the chronological sequence of Gn—man is a direct reflection of the divine majesty, woman the image of that reflection. (3) The Christian is the image of Christ (Rom 8:29; Phil 3:21; 1 Cor 15:48-49; 2 Cor 3:18). This is Paul's thrilling doctrine of the Christian's progressive divinization. The Spirit, whom the believer has received in baptism, transforms him gradually into the doxaimage of the risen Christ, a transformation which is the mystery of grace here below and will be consummated when the risen Christian bears the likeness of the exalted Christ even in his body.
Second, Greek thought. The Alexandrian Fathers are indebted to Hellenic wisdom, without being enslaved thereto. On the image theme, five pertinent ideas were highly influential, though sometimes baptized and often deepened by their contact with Christian theology. I mean (1) the idea of an intermediary image through which a transcendent God touches this material world; (2) a natural kinship between the human and the divine, an image of God which confers on man a potency for perfection; (3) the actualization of this potency in a gradual process of assimilation whereby man reaches resemblance, genuine likeness, to the divine; (4) the imitation of God by moral and virtuous living, an imitation which marks the passage from potency to realization, from image to likeness; and (S) the category of participation, which underlies all the preceding, explains human divinization, reconciles unity and multiplicity. Put another way, Platonism and Stoicism, in their various phases, were tributary streams to the image theology of early Christianity. The effort, however, to assign a more significant role to Greek thought than to the Bible in this area has miscarried.
Third, Philo of Alexandria.2 The most important figure among the Hellenistic Jews of his age, eclectic in his religious outlook and in his theology, Philo united, without ultimately harmonizing, the two principal intellectual currents that streamed into cosmopolitan Alexandria: Hellenism and Judaism. His philosophical and religious speculations, together with his allegorical interpretation of Scripture, had a profound effect on Alexandrian Christianity: he was one of Origen's principal sources, and no one exercised greater influence on Clement. Some of his image theology (e.g., the Logos as the Image par excellence, and the human mind as image of the Image) found rich resonance in Christian thinking, though on some points (e.g., the 2 For a thorough study of Philo, highly important but not without flaws,...
Fourth, Irenaeus of Lyons. Here, for the first time, a theology
fashioned around the image of God, in three stages: (1) creation: man's formation to God's image and likeness; (2) degradation: loss of the higher resemblance through sin; and (3) renovation or recapitulation: restoration of the divine likeness through Christ. Or, to phrase it in Peterson's synthesis:3 Adam was created on the model of the Word Incarnate. The latter is constituted of body, soul, and Holy Spirit; therefore the true man, perfect and living, should consist of body, soul, and Holy Spirit. Before his sin, then, Adam possessed a body that imaged the body which the Word was to assume, and a spirit corresponding to the Holy Spirit who generated and ruled the body of the Word. The Word, becoming man, became what His image was.
In Origen is discoverable a vast theological and spiritual world of ideas centered around the image of God,4 with rich promise for Trinitarian speculation and for the theology of sanctifying grace. For Origen, only the Logos in His divinity is the immediate Image of the Father. Man is kat' eikona, image of the Image; and here Origen's doctrine has four cardinal facets: creation, sin, progress, and transformation. In creation, man received a participation in God's Image. The true locus of this participation, of this kat' eikona, is the interior man, the new man, that sphere of the soul which is influenced by the spirit. It is participation of the Logos by the logos, a communication of Trinitarian life through the Word, a gift whereby the Son-by-nature makes adopted sons. To be logikos, therefore, is not simply to be intelligent, rational. "Only the saint is logikos
Through sin, Satan communicates to man the image of "the earthly," his own image, with all the vices that attend it. This participation in Satan is acquired or strengthened by alogos action, which lessens man's qualities as logikos. Sin assimilates man to the animal..
Only through Christ is the image restored—a conversion effected by the redemptive activity of the Saviour and the sinner's conformation to Christ dead and risen, through contemplation and imitation. But this basic restoration is only a preliminary stage, a point of departure; the image is inchoative divinization, divinization in potency. The phraseology of Gn 1:27 tells Origen that man received in his initial stage the dignity of image, which made it possible for him to acquire by diligent effort, by imitation of God, the perfection of likeness at life's culmination. And in this progress from image to likeness the principal agent is the Holy Spirit. Perfect likeness is achieved not in this life but beyond death, in bodily resurrection, where we uncover the ultimate meaning of man's conformity to Christ dead and risen—a resurrection in which the whole Body of the Lord will share. To be conformed to the glorious humanity of God is to be conformed to the Word of God, and so to God. The ultimate likeness consists above all in this: in heaven we shall be gods, possessing completely the divinity in which we now share only distantly .
