IMAGO DEI
'Made in the Image of God'
Or -
The Spiritual Rearming (that is needed).
There is something about the way we speak of Man that has puzzled me for a long time.
Or, which I didn't see in the first forty-five years of my life - even though I thought I was incredibly clever... "so clever I could do without a head", as my mother always said to me... 😅😆
It's not that we say something outright wrong. But because we say it as though it's settled. As though the word "Man" itself is already an explanation - and not, as it perhaps actually is, a question we've never quite dared ask to the end.
We point. We state. "There is a human being". Like there's a tree, a dog, a cloud. Something we can see with our eyes, and which we therefore think we've understood. But in that movement - in that quick, almost reflexive naming - something unhelpful happens at the same time.
Something closes. We lay the word over what we see, and therefore immediately stop seeing. And that's precisely where it starts to slip. For if you stay just a moment longer, keep open the Mystery we live inside. If you don't move on, but actually try to stand still in what you're looking at - your own kind, your own face in the mirror, the stranger on the street... THE MIRACLE standing there RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU - then something begins to open that cannot be reduced to what we already know.
Yes, a human being is a body. Biology, chemistry, evolution. Dust, as the old texts say - and that's not wrong. But it's just a description of the surface. Of what can be weighed and measured and will one day return to earth. But it doesn't explain what we actually respond to when we meet another human being. The recognition that happens, often without words, often without explanation. That sense that here is something that resembles me in a way nothing else does.
For there is something in man that is not merely in the world, but which is capable of positioning itself in relation to it. Something that doesn't just react... but which can step back and ask - "what does this mean?" Not just what happens, but why it has weight.
That ability - to relate to existence rather than merely live it - is, in my best judgment, not biological. It is not chemical. It is... something else.
The mystical Christian tradition has a word for it. Not the soul in the popular, half-sentimental unconscious sense - but imago Dei.
The image of God.
The thought that man is created as an echo of something he himself is not the origin of. That we are not merely an accidental animal with an accidentally large brain, but a being that carries an imprint of something larger than ourselves - and that this imprint is what enables us to orient ourselves toward what cannot be weighed.
Toward truth, without ever being able to fully possess it. Toward justice, even though history shows it rarely triumphs. Toward beauty, which serves no purpose, but which we nevertheless seek with an intensity resembling thirst. As though inside man there is an inner axis - not created by us, not chosen by us, but still something we must constantly relate to.
Something that calls.
That's also why we can go astray in a way no other living thing can. For an animal can deviate from instinct. But it cannot deviate from its direction. For it has no direction in that sense. It is simply in the world, exactly as it is.
But Man... Man can turn away from what he deeply knows. Not because he doesn't see. Not because he doesn't understand. But because he CHOOSES not to. That's 'the paradox of the fall', as it's described in the earliest layers of Western spiritual tradition - not primarily as an action, but as a turning. A turning away from the Light, not because the Light was invisible, but because the shadow beckoned with something else.
And that's perhaps where the core actually lies, in what I'm trying to write -
That man is not defined by what he is made of. But by what he is capable of directing himself toward.
We are not merely something that exists. We are something that constantly relates. To truth or self-deception. To what gathers, or what fractures. To the direction that carries us toward something greater than ourselves - or to that cramped movement inward, which Christian mysticism calls 'amor sui', love of Self at the expense of all else.
That's precisely why we can create the most sublime and enormous beauty and the most destructive and dark. Not as an opposition - but as a consequence of the same ability.
The ability to see. And the ability to choose what we do with what we see.
And perhaps that's simultaneously exactly why we so rarely truly go all the way in - and open up that question about Man.
For the moment you stop merely saying "it's a human being" - and actually begin to understand what that entails - the last possibility of hiding behind ignorance vanishes. Suddenly you're no longer spectator to your own kind. You are the participant who knows what's at stake.
And that is neither reassuring nor comfortable. But it is, on the other hand, honest.
And isn't it precisely that honesty - that willingness to see yourself as the being you actually are, with the freedom and responsibility that entails - which the old traditions meant was the beginning of what they called wisdom. Not knowledge of the world from outside. But recognition of oneself from within.
An even more precise way to say it could be -
That Man is not merely a being with a direction. But that Man is a pattern - a living, breathing pattern - called to harmonize with another and greater pattern.
What the Johannine tradition calls Logos. The Word that was in the beginning. Not merely an idea, but the ordering ground of all that is.
In that light, man's freedom is not a condition thrown at his head. It is the very nature of the instrument. We are created with the ability to tune ourselves in - or out. To resonate with the pattern of which we are an image. Or to dissonance from it, slowly, imperceptibly, choice by choice.
And that is the most precise answer to what a Man is that I arrive at here.
Not an animal. Not an angel. But a freedom placed in between - with the ability to orient itself toward Logos, and with consequences that reach further than we can see.
That it is not unclear what a human being is capable of.
That it is not even unclear what it is called to.
The only thing that is unclear - the only thing that has ever been unclear - is whether we choose to live in accordance with the pattern we in our innermost already know.
Oh.
❤️🔥🪽
Good Friday, Human friends ☀️
