Chapter X: The Use of this Commonplace and the Definition of the Divine Image, § 138
CHAPTER X: ON THE USE OF THIS COMMONPLACE AND THE DEFINITION OF THE DIVINE IMAGE
The use of this doctrine.
§ 138. Three uses of the doctrine of the divine image can be established, because it leads us: (1) To the knowledge of divine goodness, to which we can attribute the fact that in Adam the human race was created after the image of God and that Christ is beginning to restore that lost good in us and He intends to finish this work in eternal life. (2) To acknowledge our wretchedness because, having fallen from so high a level of dignity as if from heaven, we are born of those parents who cause us to be condemned before we are born. (See Bernard, Meditat., ch. 2, col. 1190.) Ezra relates that the elders who had seen the beauty of the temple which Solomon built were brought to tears at the sight of the latter temple which Zerubbabel had rebuilt after the Babylonian captivity [Ezra 3:12]. How much more just is our cause for grief and tears when we remember that the first man was created after the image of God as the dwelling place and beautiful temple of the Holy Trinity, but that it was destroyed terribly by the Chaldeans of hell and that those concreated gifts were snatched away from it. (3) It leads us to the support of our hope. The day of final judgment will be a time for the “restoration of all things” (Acts 3:20). As the first temple at Jerusalem did not remain destroyed forever but was rebuilt and restored and, in fact, was made more glorious than before by the coming of Christ, so also, by the grace of Christ and by the efficacy of the Holy Spirit, the image of God, after which we begin to be reshaped in this life, will shine in us someday more brightly and gloriously than it once shone in Adam. He was able not to die, but we shall not be able to die.
The definition of the divine image.
§ 139. From all the above, the following description of the image of God can be established: The image of God in the first man was the natural and total perfection of the whole man and the uprightness of all his powers of soul and body, his wholeness, his conformity with God his archetype, without any wrestling between flesh and spirit, namely, the wisdom and light of the knowledge of God in his mind, righteousness in his will, and holiness in perfect conformity with the Law of God. Thus there was a consensus and harmony of all superior and inferior abilities and members without any rebellion, a consensus and harmony in agreement with the will of God, and dominion over all animals and all the rest of creation. All of this would have been propagated into his descendants if man had continued in his concreated integrity.
§ 140. This concludes our discussion about the image of God in the first man. We have discussed it as people detained in a dark prison seek out the brilliance of the light. What survives of that image in the descendants of our first parents we shall treat in its own place [cf. On Original Sin (Commonplace XII), §§ 49–54, 69–82].
To God the Father, who created us in Adam after His own image; to the Son, who is the substantial image of God and has earned for us the restoration of the image of God; and to the Holy Spirit, through whom His image is again restored in us, be praise and glory forever.