44. Enn., 1.6.8; Augustine, Unfinished Book on Genesis, 16.59-60.
INTRODUCTION
things are vestiges of God, He created only one species according to the Image, His Son. This species is man: male and female completing the species. Christ is the perfect Image, equal to God, while man is an imperfect image, not equal to God but approaching Him by likeness. This likeness is effected through wisdom, the understanding of faith exercised in love, and the fullest possible likeness is in the risen life of glory.43 The creature made to the image of God comes directly from God and between this image and God no other nature intervenes. It has an immediate tendency toward God as its Exemplar-Principle because it not only participates in being and life but has the capacity for wisdom. All creatures are like God in some respect because they are created through the Word of God, but only those intellectual creatures who are made ad ipsum ('toward him') are images of God. The capacity for conversion is found in the image's intellectual dynamism and in the presence of God. The journey to God is by way of becoming a more perfect image of God the Trinity. God's perfect Image, His Son, is the only way to this.
The image theme is to be found in the Enneads of Plotinus. But Augustine's use of it is different in an important respect. For Plotinus the Nous or Intellectual Principle proceeds directly from the One as an image of it and when it turns and contemplates the One, it becomes the One's likeness but only as an inferior copy. As an image it also generates All-Soul, which again is inferior to Nous and to the One. Only by contemplating its source does Soul produce its own images. The final generation is Matter, which is only a very faint vestige of the One. To attain likeness to its source every image must generate a copy of itself, which Plotinus speaks of as an illuminating process.**
So we see that inferiority is considered essential to the Plotinian image although Augustine shows that there can be equality between the Image and the Exemplar when the Image is perfect. Instead of the Plotinian dynamism of return to the One, there is for Augustine a dynamism of return to the Trinity, and here the Word's relation to the Father becomes exemplary. Although for Plotinus both Nous and Soul are imperfect copies of the One, they
43. Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, 22.37-24.42; Homilies on St. John's Gospel, 40.9; On True Religion, 45.81, On the Trinity, V1.10.11. — 44. Enn., 1.6.8; Augustine, Unfinished Book on Genesis, 16.59-60.