A naïve notion of freedom might be something like “being able to do whatever I want in the total absence of constraints.” But this is distinctly unsatisfactory. To illustrate the reason why, suppose someone wished to compose a coherent defense of just this view. In that case, if he wished to be free of any grammatical or syntactical constraints, for instance, or constraints inherent in the digital interface, or the rules of logic, etc. I will find that I am no longer free to produce a coherent defense. In other words, positive freedom to accomplish something is often a function of accepting, rather than refusing, the constraints that the given context and medium demands. The strength of a limb’s movement cannot be contrary to its weight, which taken abstractly may seem to stand in the way of its action. Hence, while creativity is an expression of true freedom, an incoherent concept of the latter will actually obviate any attempts at creativity. Chesterton masterfully conveys this point:
Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.1
On a tangential but related note, it may be wonder what is meant by the Biblical dictum (i.e. in Genesis) that “Man [is] made in (or “towards”—literally ad imaginem in the Latin Vulgate2) the image of God”3 and how this relates to freedom and creativity. In other words, what are the “bars” of Man and what are his “stripes”—that is, those elements sine qua non of his nature, that, were they to be extracted from him, he would not remain and that, to the extent to which he embodies these elements, to the same extent does he become more fully himself?
First, let us consider the implication implied by the preposition “towards” instead of “in.” Obviously, the former implies a vector of development that is lacking in the preposition “in,” which seems to imply the foregone subsistence in a given condition. Saint Basil of Caesarea famously differentiated between the “image” and the “likeness” of God in Man and this distinction may serve to lay bare what is at stake in the questions. In On the Origin of Humanity he writes:
As you have that which is according to the image through your being rational, you come to be according to the likeness by undertaking…
Thus the creation story is an education in human life. ‘Let us make the human being in our image.’ Let him have by his creation that which is according to the image, let him also come to be according to the likeness. For this God gave us the power.
If he created you according to the likeness, what would be yours to give? Through what would you be crowned? For if the fashioner gave you the whole of it, how would the kingdom of heaven be opened to you? But now the one is given, the other left incomplete; that you may complete yourself.4
In other words, the “image” of God in Man furnishes him with the power to attain to the “likeness” of God.
Let us now explore the notion of “God’s image” more thoroughly. Clearly the notion of being made in the divine image does not refer to a sensory image because God per se doesn’t have a form that is perceptible to the physical senses except as Christ. But of course, Genesis was composed in a prior eon and hence it was not possible to refer directly to the Incarnation at that time. Nevertheless, it must still have meant something else it would not have been written. It might be that it is precisely in human creativity that we discover the most eminently divine element in ourselves. Prescinding from flights of fancy surrounding the Genesis narrative, we encounter God as an impulse of free and beneficent creative will. God’s will is free in the sense that nothing is there twisting his arm compelling him to set to work. Lacking any such element of compulsion, there is no reason to do anything other than the perception that it is Good—“And God saw the light, that it was Good,” or more poetically and yet no less-faithfully rendered, “and God beheld that it was beautiful.” Indeed, the Septuagint translates the Hebrew ט֑וֹב as καλόν, which is to say, “beautiful.”5 The apparent difference is largely spurious because beauty is a sensory perception of the goodness of something, for which an emotional or moral response to the same thing is love. Just as a flame can be simultaneously hot, bright, and flickering, and perceptible in each of these aspects to a being furnished with the necessary physical and psychical organs, so a good thing will be loved and appear beautiful to a being with properly calibrated spiritual senses.
If then, the imago dei in us is our free and beneficent creative will, we might instructively juxtapose ourselves to animals, who operate by natural wisdom which we call “instinct.” In this respect, they are our counterparts; they are perfect (i.e. per- + facere, “thoroughly fashioned,” “complete”) but unfree. Rilke writes that “we are honeybees of the invisible.”6 Man, from the beginning, has been tasked with collaborating with God in carrying Creation forward towards beatification and the place to commence is the little corner of Creation that we call “ourselves.” Indeed, we should be ashamed to die until we have won some small victories on this front. Of course, we are never starting from scratch, but rather carrying forward a project that was begun long ago. In this way, our greatest freedom consists in conforming our efforts to the medium and conditions that we encounter. In other words, we are undertaking a sort of “sub-creation,” as Tolkien referred to the operation of the capacities conferred in the divine image in us. The activity of striving to attain the divine “likeness” also is not disjunctive, or even commensurable, with any outward task or art. Indeed, the latter is always working back upon us to transform us in the process and hence, quite to the contrary, it is often through art and through work on other things that the magum opus is undertaken.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
1:27 Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam: ad imaginem Dei creavit illum, masculum et feminam creavit eos.
“in the image” would read in imago suam.
Genesis 1:27
Saint Maximos the Confessor elaborates a similar theme:
Through this potential, consistent with the purpose behind the origination of divided beings man was called to achieve within himself the mode of their completion, and so bring to light the great mystery of the divine plan, realizing in God the union of the extremes which exist among beings, by harmoniously advancing in an ascending sequence from the proximate to the remote and from the inferior to the superior.
This is why man was introduced last among beings — like a kind of natural bond [syndesmos] mediating between the universal extremes through his parts, and unifying through himself things that by nature are separated from each other by a great distance.
Ambiguum 41, Constas, vol. II, p. 105.
from the Septuagint, Genesis 1:4:
καὶ εἶδεν ὁ θεὸς τὸ φῶς ὅτι καλόν
Rainer Maria Rilke, in a 1925 letter to his translator Witold Von Hulewicz:
Yes, for our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again, “invisibly,” in us. Passionately we plunder the honey of the invisible, in order to garner it among the great golden hive of the Invisible.
a few questions, maybe to be answered in a future installment:
if creativity is the goal, and limitation is a need, why would it not include the body - which is limitation - in the very image? meaning, wouldn't God also need this limitation or otherwise not be capable of creation?
is it not necessary or at least useful, to understand this whole question, to reverse a bad translation and actual read 'gods' rather than 'god' when Elohim is used, since this suggests rather more than a simple one-to-one relation?
if by Elohim is meant the Trinity of conventional Christianity, does it mean that Man (as such) partakes of this same threefoldness? and if so, how does it map?
why assume image to mean only something immaterial and abstract (a power - creativity) rather than also something straightforward (as the Hebrew word is used in multiple places - a physical image)? isn't this assuming 'image' to actually mean 'likeness' (a more ambiguous term, for non-physical likenesses, as also used in the Bible)? and hence the distinction between image and likeness becomes absurd?
why assume we lost the likeness - when in fact it is later said 'the man has become as one of us' - which suggests more, not less, resemblance (however we understand it)?
with this assumption, why 'male and female'? is there a 'male' creativity and a 'female' one?
Love this one too Max! Have you ever read the preface to Jacob Boehme’s “Signature of All Things”? Here is the beginning quote...
“THIS book is a true mystical mirror of the highest wisdom. The best treasure that a man can attain unto in this world is true knowledge; even the knowledge of himself: For man is the great mystery of God, the microcosm, or the complete abridgment of the whole universe: He is the mirandum Dei opus, God's masterpiece, a living emblem and hieroglyphic of eternity and time; and therefore to know whence he is, and what his temporal and eternal being and well-being are, must needs be that ONE necessary thing, to which all our chief study should aim, and in comparison of which all the wealth of this world is but dross, and a loss to us.”
John Ellistone 1651