Within the depth-psychology corpus, Imago Dei functions as a pivotal conceptual node where theological anthropology and analytical psychology intersect, producing one of the field’s most productive and contentious convergences. Jung positions the term with characteristic care: he insists, repeatedly and with some exasperation, that he speaks only of the imago Dei — the psychic image, empirically apprehensible — and never of God’s metaphysical reality as such. This epistemological boundary is the axis around which his entire psychology of religion turns. In Aion, Jung traces the patristic lineage of the concept through Tertullian, Origen, and Augustine, demonstrating how successive theologians located the God-image differently — in soul rather than body, in the inner man, in Christ as the true image after whose likeness our interior life is fashioned. For Jung, this image is coextensive with the archetype of the Self; the two symbol-systems become, at a certain depth, indistinguishable. Murray Stein amplifies this equation by grounding it anthropologically: every human being bears the imago Dei as an innate stamp, making contact with unity and totality an intrinsic human capacity. Edinger’s Jungian exegesis extends the concept into transformation symbolism, while Hillman critically presses on its monotheistic assumptions, arguing that the imago Dei aligns the Self with the senex archetype and with a totalizing unity that polytheistic psychology would resist. The patristic stream — John of Damascus, the Philokalia — preserves the imago as the ontological ground of theosis, a complementary but distinct trajectory.
at the very most I speak of an imago Dei, as I have repeatedly emphasized in countless places, and I am not like the idiot who believes that the image he sees in the mirror is his real and living I.
Jung draws his sharpest methodological boundary: his usage of imago Dei is strictly psychological — the psychic image of God — never a metaphysical assertion about divine reality itself.
, Letters Volume 1: 1906-1950, 1973thesis
I thank God every day that I have been permitted to experience the reality of the imago Dei in me. Had that not been so, I would be a bitter enemy of Christianity and of the Church in particular.
Jung testifies to the existential centrality of the imago Dei as a personally experienced psychic reality that grounds his engagement with Christian tradition rather than merely theorising about it.
, Letters Volume 2, 1951-1961, 1975thesis
The imago Dei imprinted on the soul, not on the body, is an image of an image, ‘for my soul is not directly the image of God, but is made after the likeness of the former image.’
Tracing Origen’s patristic formulation, Jung establishes the hierarchical structure of the God-image — Christ as the true imago Dei, the human soul as derivative image — which grounds his identification of the Self archetype with the Christ symbol.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
Since each of us is stamped with the imago Dei by virtue of being human, we are also in touch with ‘unity and totality [which] stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values.’
Stein articulates the anthropological universality of the imago Dei within Jungian psychology: the God-image is not an achievement but an innate imprint, connecting every individual to the orienting values of wholeness and totality.
, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998thesis
The contrast between anima/animus and self appears in Aion as a contrast between pagan gods and the imago Dei.
Hillman identifies Jung’s structural opposition in Aion between the polytheistic anima/animus figures and the monotheistic imago Dei, using this contrast to critique the Self’s alignment with totalising unity over against the plural gods of archetypal psychology.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
The self of psychological wholeness, briefly, more clearly reflects the God of monotheism and the senex archetype.
Hillman argues that the Self, as the psychological correlate of the imago Dei, carries the conservative, ordering, and unified character of the monotheistic God — a structural bias that archetypal psychology’s polytheistic orientation seeks to counterbalance.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei.
Stein records Jung’s observation that at the deepest level of the psyche, Self-symbols and God-images become phenomenologically indistinguishable, collapsing the psychological and theological registers into one another.
, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting
though every creature is a vestige of God, the soul is the natural image of God.
Campbell cites Meister Eckhart’s distinction between the vestige of God in all creatures and the soul as the natural image of God, placing the imago Dei within the mystical-contemplative tradition of interior divine birth.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
The human soul is (even in your assertion) an image of God. Now God can neither be divided nor composed. Therefore neither can the human soul.
Pauli, citing Kepler’s Neoplatonically inflected syllogism, shows how the imago Dei functions as a premise in early modern natural philosophy, establishing the soul’s indivisibility and unity as reflections of divine nature.
, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting
On Jung’s psychology of religion, see James Heisig, Imago Dei: A Study of Jung’s Psychology of Religion.
A bibliographic citation in the editorial apparatus of the Red Book directs readers to Heisig’s monograph as the foundational scholarly study of Jung’s psychology of religion under the rubric of the imago Dei.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009aside
There is something in human beings which is directly related to the essence of God. It is no one natural quality, but our whole humanity, which is the image of God.
Bulgakov grounds the imago Dei not in a single faculty but in the totality of human nature, closely relating it to Sophiology’s claim that humanity as such bears a constitutive orientation toward the divine.
, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, 1937supporting
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.
John of Damascus, citing Cyril of Jerusalem, asserts the singular dignity of humanity as imago Dei within creation, distinguishing the personal, handcrafted character of humanity’s origin from the rest of creation.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
God wrought man after an image and likeness common to Himself and to God; that the mention of an Agent forbids us to assume that He was isolated.
John of Damascus uses the Genesis account of the imago Dei to argue Trinitarian theology: the plural agency of creation (‘Let us make’) reveals that the image in which man is made is held in common by the divine persons.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting