Jesus Christ is the Image of God and the Idea of the Good

“no man cometh unto the Father, but by me”

Saint Paul observers in 1 Corinthians 1.23-24:

...we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock (skandalon), and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom (sophian) of God.

Christ is called “the wisdom of God,” in the quote above, and also “the image of God”¹ in other contexts. By image is indicated a visible, concrete symbol of an invisible, transcendent essence. The image reveals to us the nature, character, and quality of the essence, which threatens to evade our attempts at apprehension. Thus, Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” is an image of the philosophical ascent, which otherwise presents as something abstract and intangible. And the human body is the image of the human soul, which would otherwise remains forever concealed behind an impenetrable veil of perceptible appearances and “garments of skin.”² In just this way, Jesus Christ is the image of God, who was conceived as the agnostos Theos, or “unknowable God” of the Ancients.

Why unknowable? Because transcendent, quintessentially. Saint Dionysius observes that God, “is not (oute estin) [because] He is the essence of being for the things which are.” As light is the invisible condition of visibility—for we see colour alone, and not light, for light is that by which we see rather than something seen—so God is the super-existential source of existence. Saint Maximus elaborates on the difficulty in raising our minds to adequation with their very source and essence:

If I must say whether or not God exists, I am closer to His truth when saying that He does not exist, since God is something entirely different from that which I recognize as existence.

It may be said, therefore, that God’s infinite existence is too great to be compassed in my finite understanding; infinite being is not merely quantitatively, but categorically different from finite being. Saint Gregory Palamas skirts the Scylla and Charybdis of this question when he concludes that God “is not a being (on estin), if others are beings; and if he is a being [on], the others are not beings.”

So long as we live and speak, we will never entirely elude the temptation to conflate our ability to use a name or term in a sentence, to having understood the being or meaning which the term denotes. And as Plato suggests in respect to the similarly transcendent referent of “the Good,” the meaning of the unassuming, three-letter term “God” is perhaps the very highest, ultimate, and most difficult word to understand. So we should not presume already to know what the word means, and thus to take all manner of standpoints and form all manner of opinions about it, before we have first accepted our original and essential inability to understand its referent: God beggars our ordinary categories of understanding and to pretend otherwise is to worship an idol whom we call by a name that should be reserved for the Most High.

But God, as the Gospel infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke, and the prologue to the Gospel According to John describe, condescended to disclose his nature to Man by assuming a knowable, perceptible form—a perfect image of himself. Thus, Christ arrayed himself in the nature of Man as Jesus.

Adam was, as the well-known saying from Genesis goes, granted “dominion,” or “lordship” over his fellow creatures, wrought as he was in the very “image and likeness” of their LORD and Maker:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.³

But Adam failed to learn from God what “lordship” really means. In the serpent-seeded “reversal,” Adam, as Eve, took the fruit for herself. Christ—prefigured in the archetypal gesture of Mary (who received the fruit from God⁴), as the perfection-in-reversal of the archetypal gesture of Eve (who took the fruit for herself) came to show Man what “lordship” really means, and by extension, what the word “God” means.

As wisdom is, technically, “that power by which we perceive the Good,”⁵ and the Good is also God,⁶ wisdom can be paraphrased as “the Idea of the Go(o)d”—since the idea of something is that by which we see that thing, as light in respect to color. Philosophy, in turn, as the pursuit of wisdom, can be paraphrased as “the striving to refine and perfect our Idea of the Go(o)d.” Christ, therefore, is the Idea of Go(o)d—that by which we see Go(o)d.

When we speak about wisdom, we are speaking of Christ. When we speak about virtue, we are speaking of Christ.

in the words of Saint Ambrose of Milan. And as the Master sayeth:

I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.⁷

1. Attested by Saint Paul in countless instances:

God, having in the past spoken to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, has at the end of these days spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds. His Son is the radiance of his glory, the very image of his substance

 Hebrews 1:3

...the Son of his love; in whom we have our redemption...who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all Creation.

 Colossians 1:13–15

And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.
— Colossians 3:10

that the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God,
— 2 Corinthians 4:4

2. Cf. Genesis 3:21

3. 1:26-27

4. “benedictus fructus ventris tui,” as the well-known Ave Maria prayer goes

5. Cf. Plato, Republic, 508e:

This reality, then, that gives their truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, you must say is the idea of the Good, and you must conceive it as being the cause of knowledge, and of truth in so far as known. Yet fair as they both are, knowledge and truth, in supposing it to be something fairer still than these you will think rightly of it. But as for knowledge and truth, even as in our illustration it is right to deem light and vision sunlike (ἡλιοειδῆ), but never to think that they are the sun, so here it is right to consider these two their counterparts, as being like the good or boniform, but to think that either of them is the good is not right.

6. cf. Mark 10:18-21 KJV:

And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.

7. John 14:6