Likeness

Likeness occupies a densely layered position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as an ontological category, a soteriological goal, and a methodological concept. The most ancient strand — traceable through Plotinus and carried forward in the Philokalia — frames likeness as the soul’s telos: the progressive assimilation to the divine through virtue, culminating in the imago Dei fully restored. Here likeness is not mere resemblance but participatory ontology, an analogia entis in which creaturely being reflects and returns to its divine prototype. John of Damascus amplifies this by insisting that the Son is the visible likeness of the invisible God, making the doctrine of the image theologically explosive. Erich Neumann imports the structure into analytical psychology, reading the ‘family likeness’ between ego and uroboros as the mythological ground for hero-consciousness. Wolfgang Giegerich mounts the sharpest critical intervention: he argues that Hillman’s archetypal psychology reduced the rich neoplatonic notion of likeness to a mere methodological ‘matching’ — a cognitive operation stripped of ontological continuity. Giegerich further distinguishes Hillman’s impoverished version from Jung’s own usage, which retained something of the neoplatonic depth. Across all these registers, the term marks the fault line between participatory cosmology and representational epistemology — between a world in which things truly resemble their divine source and a world in which resemblance is only a heuristic convenience.

In the library 14 passages

The notion of likeness, as it functions in archetypal psychology, is nothing else but the abbreviated formula for the methodological stance of matching… it is not at all the same ‘likeness’ as the Judeo-Christian idea of man having been created ‘in Our image and likeness’ nor as the neoplatonic idea of resemblances.

Giegerich argues that Hillman’s deployment of ‘likeness’ as matching evacuates the ontological depth that the term carried in neoplatonic and Judeo-Christian tradition, reducing it to a procedural shorthand.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis

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grace is beginning to paint the divine likeness over the divine image in us… Only when it has been made like God — in so far, of course, as this is possible — does it bear the likeness of divine love as well.

The Philokalia presents likeness to God as the progressive spiritual goal of the intellect, achieved through illumination by the Holy Spirit and consummated in spiritual love.

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

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Only when it has been made like God—insofar, of course, as this is possible—does it bear the divine likeness of love as well. In portraiture, when the full range of colors is added to the outline, the painter captures the likeness of the subject, even down to the smile.

St. Diadochos employs the metaphor of portraiture to articulate likeness as the completed transformation of the soul’s image into the full beauty of the divine original.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 1, 1979thesis

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virtue is one thing, the source of virtue quite another. The material house is not identical with the house conceived in the intellect, and yet stands in its likeness… it is from the Supreme that we derive order and distribution and harmony.

Plotinus distinguishes the creaturely likeness from its divine source, insisting that resemblance is real but asymmetrical: the soul attains likeness by absorbing virtue from a principle that itself transcends virtue.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270thesis

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I ask whether He is the visible likeness of the invisible God, and whether the infinite God can also be presented to view under the likeness of a finite form? For a likeness must needs repeat the form of that of which it is the likeness.

John of Damascus interrogates the theological logic of likeness itself, arguing that the Son’s being as the image of the invisible God raises the question of how an infinite reality can be genuinely mirrored in a finite form.

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

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God created us in His image and likeness (cf. Gen. 1:26). We are in His likeness if we possess virtue and understanding… We are also in the likeness of God if we possess uprightness and goodness.

Nikitas Stithatos identifies likeness with the active possession of virtue and wisdom, translating the ontological category into an ethical and noetic programme.

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

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He, Who expressed His meaning in the words I have cited, shews that His thought was suggested by the true Divinity of Him to Whom He said, After Our own image and likeness… man is being created in the image of Father and of Son.

John of Damascus grounds the creation narrative’s ‘image and likeness’ in Trinitarian theology, arguing that the common image implies ontological unity between Father and Son.

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

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grace is beginning to paint the divine likeness over the divine image in us. … Our power of perception shows us that we are being formed into the divine likeness; but the perfecting of this likeness we shall know only by the light of grace.

Gregory Palamas distinguishes between the perceptible process of formation into likeness and its eschatological perfection, locating completion exclusively within divine illumination.

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

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The likeness between ego consciousness and the uroboros is the fundamental ‘family likeness’ between ego and self, which corresponds mythologically to that between father and son.

Neumann transposes the theological concept of likeness into analytical psychology, reading the structural resemblance between ego and uroboros as the psychological substrate of the mythological motif of divine filiation.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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Marius Victorinus interprets the Biblical doctrine of man being created after the likeness of God in terms of the special relation between the Logos, the second hypostasis of the Trinity, and human nature… St. Augustine explicitly opposes those who restrict that likeness to only one person of the Trinity.

Dihle traces the patristic debate over whether the divine likeness in humans refers to the Logos alone or to the whole Trinity, documenting Augustine’s insistence on the Trinitarian scope of the analogy.

Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting

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‘Thou shalt not make to thyself the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath’… It is good to examine the Scriptures, but let your mind be enlightened from the search.

John of Damascus confronts the iconoclast use of the biblical prohibition on likenesses, arguing that the command must be read discerningly within the whole dispensation of revelation.

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

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the Man Jesus Christ, Only-begotten God, as flesh and as Word at the same time Son of Man and Son of God, without ceasing to be Himself, that is, God, took true humanity after the likeness of our humanity.

John of Damascus uses ‘likeness’ in its Christological register, designating the Incarnation as a genuine assumption of human form that nonetheless preserves the integrity of the divine nature.

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

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the real meaning of the saying, as I imagine, is, that the good are like one another, and friends to one another; and that the bad, as is often said of them, are never at unity with one another or with themselves.

Plato’s Socrates recasts the maxim ‘like attracts like’ by restricting genuine likeness to the good, implying that moral identity, not mere resemblance, is the basis of authentic friendship.

Plato, Lysis, -390aside

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Can we point out any difference between the congenial and the like? For if that is possible, then I think, Lysis and Menexenus, there may be some sense in our argument about friendship.

Socrates attempts to distinguish congeniality from mere likeness, opening the possibility that kinship of soul provides a more precise account of the bond of friendship than surface similarity.

Plato, Lysis, -390aside

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