St. Irenaeus and the Imago Dei : The Importance of Being Human

Abstract

Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 6.4 (2003) 35-50 [Access article in PDF] St. Irenaeus and the Imago Dei The Importance of Being Human Thomas G. Weinandy THE WONDER AND AMAZEMENT that should accompany the astonishing biblical proclamation that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God is often absent today. Among contemporary Christians it may have too much the ring of fixed, and therefore thoughtless, familiarity. For many others it may be thought false in the light of the contemporary scientific understanding of what human beings are and how they historically evolved. Still others may think it utterly irrelevant to our practical secular lives. Irenaeus, an early father of the Christian church (c. 130-200A.D.), thought it neither false nor irrelevant, and, unlike many Christians today, he gloried in its realism. He was even convinced that it was at the heart of God's act of creation and so of his subsequent actions within salvation history. This essay, then, wishes to examine Irenaeus's understanding of what it means for us as human beings to be made in the imago Dei, in the image and likeness of God, and in so doing demonstrate its relevance for our contemporary daily lives. [End Page 15] A Uniquely Christian Idea To grasp the significance that God created human beings in his own image and likeness, a significance that was not lost on Irenaeus, it must first be noted that such a proposal did not originate from within some common universal human religious sentiment. Within classical paganism, it was the gods who were modeled after the image and likeness of men and women and, in so being depicted, they possessed all of the foibles, weaknesses, and vices that human beings possess. Such an anthropological conception of the gods did not enhance the dignity of human beings. Rather, it merely cheapened the dignity of the gods, and, in the end, exposed them to ridicule and mockery. The idea that human beings are icons of God did not originate from the bookish musings of some philosopher either. When ancient philosophers did consider the issue of man's nature, they inevitably concluded that what is divine in human beings, and so what makes them like god, is their soul or mind (logos or nous), that spiritual spark or seed that lies within humankind. While God may not be demeaned in such a view of man's nature, yet, as Irenaeus knew full well, man now is. There is something intimately tied to man, and, in a real sense makes him truly human, that is now evil in and of itself—the body. In the end it is only that which is not human that reflects the imago Dei, the spiritual divine spark or seed. This non-Christian teaching, as found in his contemporary Gnostics, prompted Irenaeus to undertake a thorough defense and examination of the truth that human beings were created in the image and likeness of God. While there were various schools of Gnosticism, one of the common threads within all its various formulations was that there is a conflict between the evil world of matter and the divine world of spirit. This conflict is primarily played out within human beings, for human beings (at least the spiritual elite) are composed of a spark of divine being and a material body. Salvific knowledge (gnosis) consisted in knowing how to extricate [End Page 16] one's true self—the divine spark—from the evil material body so as to obtain the freedom to make one's way back to the realm of the spiritual and the divine. Irenaeus found such anthropology contrary to the Christian faith and thus contrary to the dignity that human beings possess. In contrast to the Gnostics, Irenaeus delighted in the unparalleled and literally incredible thought that human beings, in the totality of who we are, body and soul, are images of God, and were created so by God himself. Moreover, he took pride in the...