freedom and the image of God in Man
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 hardly an adequate theory of freedom and it doesn’t escape its own contradictions. If I wished to produce a coherent defense of such a position and yet remain free, in this sense, from any grammatical or syntactical constraints outside of those one happened to desire, I will find that I am no longer free to produce the said 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. 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
One of the most iconic of the world’s creation stories sheds further light on the question of freedom. The well-known Biblical dictum (i.e. in Genesis) states that “Man [is] made in (or “towards”—literally ad imaginem in the Latin Vulgate2) the image of God.”3 In other words, freedom is one of those elements sine qua non of human nature, that, were it to be extracted from him, a man would not remain and that, moreover, to the extent to which he embodies these elements, to the same extent does he become more fully himself.
Above, it was parenthetically observed that the Latin Vulgate announces that man was made ad imaginem Dei, which is “towards the image of God” rather than “in” it. I would like briefly to explore the implication implied by the preposition “towards” instead of “in” in this context before turning to the question of the image as such. Obviously, the preposition “towards” 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 but not the state of having already done so.
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.5
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 free human creativity that we discover the most eminently divine element in ourselves. Prescinding from flights of fancy and idle speculation surrounding the Genesis narrative, we encounter God most saliently 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.”6 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 healthy soul. God’s freedom is his power to create beauty and do Good.
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. Man, by contrast, is imperfect but free to bring his state towards perfection on his own initiative. 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 advantage in our 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.
Of course, we can never know all of the ramifications of any incident or reflexive work that we do, and hence our freedom can never be perfect. Someone who doubts the correlation between freedom and this sort of consciousness or foresight should imagine driving down the freeway with a blindfold on and yet no one to stay his hand, or casting a vote for a candidate on a ballot with no names on it and yet he can mark any box he pleases. Obviously, any action in these contexts will not be free, but arbitrary. The same problem besets all so-called scientific disproofs of free-will, which invariably proceed by removing reasons and grounds to prefer one action over another and then claim to have demonstrated that free-will is an illusion when the subject chooses one action or another apparently at random on the supposed basis of preceding brain states. A will that is free is one that is capable of doing the Good, and we are unfree insofar as this capacity eludes us.
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.
Cf. Saint Augustine:
The God-image is within, not in the body. … Where the understanding is, where the mind is, where the power of investigating truth is, there God has his image. … where man knows himself to be made after the image of God, there he knows there is something more in him than is given to the beasts.
from the Septuagint, Genesis 1:4:
καὶ εἶδεν ὁ θεὸς τὸ φῶς ὅτι καλόν
I see the important point in the Creation story as occurring on the 6th day. This is where the animal kingdom is formed of the cold-blooded reptiles, and the warm-blooded mammals (beasts of burden). Then, God says something that only proves that Man is a divine, supersensible being, from the very beginning of its creation. You can throw out all notions of a Darwinian evolution of Man from lower animal forms with these words. Steiner was always saying that we humans were divine from the very beginning:
24 Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind”; and it was so. 25 God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29 Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; 30 and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so. 31 God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Genesis 1
This point is being emphasized in lectures I am reading right now in the volume, GA 194, "The Mission of Michael", and wherein Lucifer and Ahriman are conspiring, as we speak, to advocate the solution to Darwinian evolution by supporting the creation of the Bionic Man, which will prove the divine creation. Yet, this is Lucifer and Ahriman talking. We can call it: The Transhumanist Objective.
Note the intimate relation between freedom and love. Note a root of the word free is the word love.