What does it mean 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 truly manifest in intelligence and free will. Being in the image means being a rational, or intelligent, being with free will. Sometimes the answer is more complex. Athanasius, for instance, talks about God’s creating us and our being ‘given something more’:

…creating human beings not simply like all the irrational animals upon the dearth, but making them according to his own image, and giving them a share of the power of his own Word, so that having as it were shadows of the Word and being made rational, they might be able to abide in blessedness, living the true life, which is really that of the holy ones in paradise.

Being in the image is not for Athanasius simply a matter of being rational, for otherwise the angels would be in the image too, something that he denies: being in the image is a gift to humanity, body and soul, which grants rationality to the human, but must mean more than this. The more is for Athanasius tied up with the fact that the image of God is Christ, the Word of God, whom we cannot understand apart from the Incarnation. It is in some way according to the image of God, understood as the Word of God Incarnate, that human-kind was fashioned. This more complex notion unfolds in two ways, which I will deal with in the next issue.
God became man in the Person of Jesus so that we might have an understanding of the image in which we have been created.