Power and Human Freedom (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America (continued)
Made to be Godly 53 come similar to God. As mentioned earlier, Pierre Courcelle has convincingly demonstrated that the homilies Augustine would have heard Ambrose preach leading up to his Holy Saturday baptism in 386 were those making up a majority of the Bishop of Milan's Hexaemeron.44 This is significant to our study because the Latin Neoplatonists were the first to show a decisive break from the way image and likeness had hitherto been understood by Christian thinkers.45
Prior to Augustine, image and likeness were often divided, with the fulfillment of one or the other reserved only for the beatific vision. For some (primarily) Eastern thinkers, imago was defined as an inseparable construct of the human soul while divine likeness was adventitiously obtained only in heaven. Representative of this approach was Irenaeus, the first Christian theologian to develop any sort of sustained reflection on Gen. 1:26–27. Adam is the special creature fashioned directly through the Son and the Holy Spirit (Irenaeus's much celebrated "two hands" of God) in whom God "made man the image of God; and the image of God is the Son, after whose image man was made; and for this cause he appeared at the end of times that he might show the image (to be) like unto himself."46 A clear distinction exists between image, that in which the human person is made, and the likeness which will be revealed to men and women only in the eschaton. According to such a view, an image need not result in closeness or similarity with the original on which it is patterned. Image does not sufficiently liken one to the divine but must be perfected in obedience throughout a lifetime of ascesis, prayer, and charity. "For Irenaeus, image is both form and substance, and likeness is the saving action by
44. Cf. Pierre Courcelle, "Nouveaux aspects du platonisme chez saint Ambrose," Revue des études latines 34 (1956): 220–39.
45. Cf. Mark J. Edwards, Catholicity and Heresy in the Early Church (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), passim.
46. Demonstratio §22; MacKenzie, Demonstration, 107.