Annotatio XLIX

”And when they knew themselves to be naked.” — Genesis 3:7

Origen, in the Tomes on the third chapter of Genesis, weighing these words, left it written that man, by sinning, lost the image of God according to which he had been created.¹ This assertion Epiphanius, in the epistle to John, Bishop of Jerusalem, reckons among the chief errors of Origen. Yet it must be known that the name “image of God” in the sacred letters is taken in two ways,² that is, according to substance and according to likeness. Now the image of God according to substance — as Eucherius says, in the first book of the commentaries on Genesis — is nothing other than the mind naturally conferred by God upon every human soul, of which privilege the other animals are devoid. But the image of God according to likeness is the conformity of a just and holy soul with God, procured from divine grace and the zeal of holy actions: concerning which St. Ambrose, in the commentaries on the epistle to the Colossians, expounding that [saying] of the Apostle — “Putting on the new man, who is renewed according to the image of him who created him”³ — speaks thus: “This image is to be understood in good conversation [and] life, as the first epistle to the Corinthians says: ‘As we have borne the image of him who is of the earth, so let us also bear the image of him who is of heaven.’⁴ He, therefore, is the creator of man, whose image he commands us to bear in sanctity and good works.” Thus Ambrose.

Since, therefore, the name “image” signifies these two things: if Origen understood “image” according to the first signification, he plainly erred, and Epiphanius accused him not undeservedly. For the natural [endowments], after the fall, remained entire — even in the demons — as to substance,⁵ as the great Dionysius attests. But he thought piously and rightly, if he used the name “image” in the second signification, that is, for the original justice lost by man in sinning. And that Origen had this [latter] sense, the third book of the Peri Archon easily persuades — in whose sixth chapter he himself wrote these things about the image of God, as still remaining in man: “Moses, narrating before all things the first condition of man, says, ‘And God said, Let us make man to our image and likeness’;⁶ then afterward he adds, ‘And God made man to the image of God.’ This, therefore — that he said, ‘To the image of God he made him,’ and was silent about the likeness — indicates nothing other than that [man] received the dignity of the image in the first condition. But the perfection of the likeness was reserved for the consummation: namely, that he himself should procure it for himself by his own industry [and] zeal, from the imitation of God — since, the possibility of perfection being divinely given to him through the dignity of the image, he himself should at last, at the end, through the completion of works, consummate for himself the perfect likeness.” From which words it is manifestly gathered that the image of God, received in the first condition, remains in man:⁷ because [Origen] shows the likeness of God — which the soul receives in the consummation, that is, in beatitude — to be nothing other than the absolute and consummate perfection of the image, or of the dignity received through the image. See what St. Augustine retracted concerning this opinion above, in Annotation 31.