In the last issue of this article, I ended saying that it was the thought of the Greek Fathers that to be created according to the image of God and according to His likeness, suggests that we humans have been created with some kind of “affinity” for God which makes possible a process of assimilation to God, which is, presumably, the point of human existence. The point of human existence, namely its purpose, is to, over an eternity of life, to be assimilated to God. Have you ever thought of the purpose of your life in this manner? There is but one goal to life – to become one with God in a true sense. This must necessarily also involve our awareness of being one with God.

This idea, the Greek Fathers maintains, chimes in very well with the few uses of the language of the image in the New Testament, for it is in the context of saying something about the goal of our being disciples of Christ, that the New Testament resorts to such language: we are being changed into His image from glory to glory. Even without using the language of image, there are passages in the New Testament that suggest much the same idea: for instance, in the first epistle of John we read: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He (Jesus) appears we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is (1 John 3:2). The language of image is the language of sight; the suggestion of these passages is that being in the image means there is a likeness between humankind and God that enables us to see, to know, God – it is a kind of epistemological (Epistemology studies the nature of knowledge, the rationality of belief, and justification) principle of much ancient philosophy that only ‘like knows like’: to know something is to discover an affinity. It sug-gests a contemplative understanding of what it is to be human, though there is nothing new in that – both Plato and Aristotle thought the same, and something similar is implied in Isaiah’s vision of the Lord in the Temple.

What then is it to be in the image of God? Often enough, we find the Fathers giving an answer in terms of human qualities, and these turn out to be qualities of the soul. The “according to the image” says John Damascene, “is manifest in human intelligence and free will.” Being in the image means being a rational, or intelligent, being with free will. Sometimes the answer is more complex. I shall, in the coming issue, share the answers given by other Fathers. We must attempt to find an answer that truly helps us understand.