Annotatio XXXII

”He breathed into his face the breath of life.” — Genesis 2:7

Philo, in the book On the Fashioning of the Six Days, in the exposition of that sentence, teaches that the first man — formed of an earthly body and an immortal soul — is not the man whom God created to his own image;¹ because the man made to the image of God is the archetypal and intelligible man himself, or the very idea of man in the mind of God. Which words indeed seem, at first glance, to disprove that spiritual and divine image which all Catholic authors place in the mind of man, led by the authority of the divine voice saying: “Let us make man to our image and likeness.”² It is by no means to be thought that Philo, by these words, wished to strip the mind of man of the divine image, which above in the same work he had attributed to man; but it is credible that he brought these things forth not absolutely, but by comparison — having regard to the sensible man in relation to the archetypal man in the divine mind: in comparison with whom the sensible man scarcely has any image of God; for the archetypal and intelligible man has such an image and likeness of God that in a certain manner he is God himself. For that the archetype and the idea are nothing other than the divine essence, St. Thomas is witness,³ in the first part of the Summa Theologica, question 15, article 1.

I should like also here to note another thing about the image of man, which Philo left written not far from the preface of the same book — namely, that the whole universe reflects the divine image more than man does, who is a part of the world.⁴ Which opinion seems foreign to the common consent of the theologians, who say that man surpasses the other corporeal creatures in this, that he alone was made to the image of God. But it is resolved if we say that the divine image is considered in two ways: either according to extension and diffusion — in which manner indeed the universe, more than man, represents the image of the divine goodness, because in its compass it embraces that whole multitude of creatures, of which Moses said [Moses] said: “God saw all the things that he had made, and they were very good.”⁵ Or [the divine image is considered] according to intension and the gathering-together of perfection — in which manner indeed man rather presents the image of the divine loftiness, both because he is capable of divine felicity, and because in him, as in a brief compendium and in a little world [a microcosm], all the wonders of the greater world are beheld.

At the end of the same book, and in the first book of the Allegories of the Law, [Philo] so treats the things which Moses wrote about Paradise that it appears he destroys the whole history of the truth, and places that garden, the plants, and the rest which are described in it, in allegory alone. Which error Origen, and very many others of ours (as we shall indicate below), followed.