Image Of God

Christ exemplifies the archetype of the self… As Adam secundus he corresponds to the first Adam before the Fall, when the latter was still a pure image of God… The God-image in us reveals itself through ‘prudentia, iustitia, moderatio, virtus, sapientia et disciplina.’

Jung reads Christ as the archetypal Self and the imago Dei as a psychic reality imprinted on the soul rather than the body, drawing on Origen and Tertullian to establish the depth-psychological pedigree of the concept.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis

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The history of Western man can be viewed as a history of its God-images, the primary formulations of how mankind orients itself to the basic questions of life… we are now on the verge of another such evolutionary leap in the development of the God-image.

Edinger, following Jung’s Answer to Job, argues that the Western God-image undergoes evolutionary transformation in parallel with human consciousness, and that a new God-image is now emergent.

Edinger, Edward F., The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996thesis

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The God-image is not something invented, it is an experience that comes upon man spontaneously…. The unconscious God-image can therefore alter the state of consciousness just as the latter can modify the God-image once it has become conscious.

Edinger, citing Jung’s Aion, establishes the reciprocal causality between the evolving God-image and human consciousness, insisting on the spontaneous, non-invented character of the imago Dei as psychic event.

Edinger, Edward F., The Creation of Consciousness Jung’s Myth for Modern Man, 1984thesis

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Psychology… is not in a position to make metaphysical statements. It can only establish that the symbolism of psychic wholeness coincides with the God-image, but it can never prove that the God-image is God himself, or that the self takes the place of God.

Papadopoulos articulates Jung’s strict phenomenological restraint: the God-image and the Self are experientially identical but conceptually distinct, and psychology cannot adjudicate their ultimate metaphysical relation.

Papadopoulos, Renos K., The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006thesis

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We must make a careful semantic distinction between God as Ultimate Reality and the self, or inner image of God, existing in our psyche. We may assume, but cannot prove, that the inner image of God corresponds to the actual reality of God as He reveals Himself in the universe.

Sanford translates the Jungian distinction between archetype and metaphysical reality into pastoral language, preserving the epistemological humility central to depth-psychological treatments of the imago Dei.

Sanford, John A., Dreams: Gods Forgotten Language, 1968thesis

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God made him, and made him in the image of God… man made through God in the image of God. Thus we find that God wrought man after an image and likeness common to Himself and to God.

John of Damascus interprets the Genesis creation narrative as a Trinitarian act — man is made in an image common to Father and Son — establishing the theological basis for the icon tradition and the double reference of the imago Dei.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016thesis

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Man is created, taking the words in their strict sense, in Their common image. Now there can be nothing common to the true and to the false. God, the Speaker, is speaking to God; man is being created in the image of Father and of Son.

John of Damascus argues that the unity of the divine image in which man is made demonstrates the coequal divinity of Father and Son, linking the imago Dei directly to Trinitarian theology.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting

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All created things were beautiful, yet only man was the image of God. The sun arose by command alone: man was moulded by the Divine Hand. ‘Let us make man to our image and likeness.’

Cyril of Jerusalem, cited by John of Damascus, elevates man’s unique status as imago Dei above all other creation, grounding the iconographic tradition in the singular dignity of human form.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting

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The nature of the God-image is almost never discussed in Twelve Step meetings; participants understand that ‘the word God is just a placeholder,’ that the particular God-concept of any individual member is not important.

Peterson shows how the Twelve Step movement operationalizes the Jungian God-image as a fluid, subjectively conditioned symbol rather than a fixed doctrinal object, making the concept therapeutically accessible.

Peterson, Cody, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024supporting

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‘Non in nobis quaerenda veritas, sed in imagine Dei, quae in nobis est’ [Truth is not to be sought in us, but in the image of God which is in us].

Jung cites an alchemical Latin text relocating truth in the inner imago Dei, supporting his argument that the Self — as God-image within — is the proper locus of psychological and spiritual investigation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting

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Without Imaginative Presence or ‘Dignity’ there would be no manifest existence, that is, no theophany, or in other words, no Creation… the Divine Being manifests Himself in this existence whose being is theophanic Imagination.

Corbin, reading Ibn ‘Arabi, locates the image of God in the imaginal realm: theophany is the mode by which the divine discloses itself, and creation itself is a function of imaginative divine self-manifestation.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

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Beauty is the theophany par excellence… the contemplation of human beauty as a numinous, sacral phenomenon which inspires fear and anguish by arousing a movement toward something which at once precedes and transcends the object in which it is manifested.

Corbin, following Ibn ‘Arabi and Suhrawardi, argues that human beauty is itself a theophanic image, a disclosure of the divine through the sensible — an implicitly relational form of the imago Dei doctrine.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

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The spiritual nature given to us by God is uncircumscribed and outside the material grossness of this world, and so is incorporeal, invisible, impalpable, incomprehensible, and an image of His immortal and eternal glory.

The Philokalia tradition identifies the human spiritual nature as itself the image of God’s immortal glory, locating the imago Dei in the incorporeal, uncircumscribed soul rather than in any bodily form.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting

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The world of becoming must travel by the long road of the history of the universe if it is ultimately to succeed in reflecting in itself the face of the divine Sophia, and be ‘transfigured’ into it.

Bulgakov’s Sophiology frames the world’s history as a gradual actualization of divine prototypes, providing a cosmological analogue to the depth-psychological notion of the God-image as a telos toward which existence strives.

Bulgakov, Sergei, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, 1937aside

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That statement hit me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived… It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself.

Wilson’s conversion narrative, mediated by Ebby Thacher’s invitation to choose one’s own conception of God, illustrates in experiential terms the therapeutic power released when the God-image is freed from doctrinal rigidity.

Peterson, Cody, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024aside

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