93. Cf. ciu. Dei 12.5; Gn. lib. imp. 16.60. (continued)
Made to be Godly 35 is able to occur. Although the human person is created for conformity with God, this cannot be perfected until the Son's descent into the flesh. This descent is however hinted at in the creation of the first Adam and we again see that how God shaped creation becomes the way in which he deifies. As an incarnate impression of God on earth, each created person has been endowed with the ability to participate in God insofar as a creature is capable, and this "so great a good" [tam magnum bonum] is made possible only by being made in God's image.1
Second, Augustine's understanding of imago parallels his doctrine of creation, because each plays a paradoxical role of simultaneously distinguishing and uniting. A created image is the reproduction of a temporally antecedent archetype: because it is an "image," it is always like and patterned upon this archetype, but because it is "derived," a created image is always incommensurate with and inferior to its original nonpareil. Something images another only if it is not that other; something can reflect another only if the two are related yet separate. Created ad imaginem Dei, human persons are simultaneously God's receptive icons as well as God's distinct others. As such, Augustine argues that an image possesses a natural propensity to become its truest self through union with its paradigmatic exemplar. The human person therefore becomes most real by becoming most fully God's. In this way we come to understand, first, how only the Son can be said to be the perfect image of God and, second, how the human person can never find any "rest" or lasting satisfaction in the creatures surrounding him but only in communion with God. This again is the paradox of the imago Dei. It simultaneously marks the ontological otherness between eternal and created persons while also highlighting the relationship between them.
1. Trin. 14.8.11: "Eo quippe ipso imago eius est quo eius capax est eiusque esse particeps potest, quod tam magnum bonum nisi per hoc quod imago eius est non potest"; CCL 50A.436.