What has been said above is certainly a sufficient explanation of these words of
150 Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis other are also partly unlike each other; likeness itself, on the contrary, is not in any respect unlike. Yes, the Father all the same is the Father, nor is the Son anything else but the Son; because even while he is called the likeness of the Father, although this shows there is no unlikeness between them, still he is not the one and only Father, but has his likeness.74
Final section, added at time of revision; alternative interpretation of "Let us make man to our image and likeness "
61. And God said: Let us make man to our image and likeness (Gn 1:26). What has been said above is certainly a sufficient explanation of these words of scripture in which we read that God said Let us make man to our image and like ness, insofar as the likeness of God to which man was made can be taken to be the very Word of God, that is to say, the only-begotten Son; not of course that man himself is that same image and likeness, equal to the Father. Man too is for all that the image of God, as the apostle indicates by saying, A man, certainly, ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God ( 1 Cor 1 1 :7). But this image made to the image of God is not equal and co-eternal with him whose image it is; nor would it be, even if it had never sinned.
However, there is a preferable choice of meaning in these divine words, of why we should understand that it was said in the plural and not in the singular, Let us make man to our image and likeness;15 it is that man was made to the image, not of the Father alone or of the Son alone or of the Holy Spirit alone, but of the Trinity itself. This Trinity is a triad in such a way as to be one God, is one
74. This is where he left the work unfinished, only going on to the quotation at the beginning of the next section. See the passage at the beginning of this volume quoted from Revisions 1,18, and note 3 there. The text here differs in a few, but crucial, respects from the text Augustine gives there. The CSEL editor has modified it here to agree with trie text there; in particular he gives at the beginning of Augustine's quotation, Pater tantum Pater est, which is what 1 translated there. But he acknowledges that the CSEL text here has Pater tamen Pater est nee Filius aliud, etc., which is what 1 have translated here, and which in the context makes altogether better sense; Augustine is here meeting, not indeed very lucidly, an objection to what he has just said, that the likeness, which the Son is, is in no respect whatever unlike. Augustine then has to concede, to an imagined but unmentioned objector, that still the Father is the Father, and the Son is the Son and thus not the Father. But there would, no doubt, have been more than one draft of this unfinished work in Augustine's book cupboards. At the end of the quotation 1 read with some manuscripts sed habet similitudinem instead of what this edition and the Revisions text have, si habet similitudinem. 75. This explains why Augustine, when revising his works at the end of his life, decided to add this little section to this work of his comparative youth some thirty-six years previously. Having decided not to destroy it, and at the same time not to be bothered with completing it (because, quite rightly, he did not think it was worth it), he wished to let possible readers know that he had long since opted for this preferable interpretation of these words, that "to our image and likeness" meant to the image and likeness of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and not just to the image and likeness of the Son. This, of course is the master idea that he elaborates at great length in his masterpiece, The Trinity.