HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did Origen teach that the image and likeness of God was lost, no longer remaining in man after the fall?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — the reading weighed here is the charge the heresy-catalogues fasten on Origen: that he taught the image and likeness of God in which man was created “was lost, and was no longer in man after he was expelled from Paradise.” The trouble is that this inverts Origen’s best-attested and most-repeated teaching. His settled distinction — drawn from the difference between “in the image” and “after the likeness” in Genesis 1:26–27 — is the opposite of loss: man keeps the image, given at creation, and must acquire the likeness, reserved for the end and won by the imitation of God (Peri Archōn III.6.1; Against Celsus IV.30). Far from teaching the image lost, he insists in the same work that to ascribe “essential corruption” to what was made in God’s image is an “impious” charge that would touch the Son, and that in fallen man “traces of the divine image” remain (IV.37). The accusation earns weak rather than unsupported only because it distorts a genuine Origenian theme — that through disobedience man takes on, over the abiding divine image, “the image of the earthly” which must be put off and the image renewed — hardening “obscured and to be renewed” into “lost, and no longer in man.” The oldest defenders of Origen already listed this among the slanders he had himself rejected, and even Epiphanius, who levels the charge, refutes it with the very position Origen held.

The claim

The eighth is Origen's cavil that the image and likeness of God, in which man was created, was lost, and was no longer in man after he was expelled from Paradise.

— Jerome, Against John of Jerusalem 7, the eighth and last of the Origenist errors Epiphanius had drawn up, link.¹ The charge is an anthropological one, and it stands apart from its neighbours on the same list — the coats of skins as the mortal body and the allegorized Paradise. Those concern how the body arose; this concerns what the fall destroyed — whether, on Origen’s account, the divine image survived Adam’s sin at all. The interpretation weighed here is the plain reading of the accusation: that Origen actually taught the image and likeness to have been forfeited and to be no longer present in fallen man. The question is whether the reporters read him rightly, or turned his image/likeness distinction inside out.

Who advances it

The charge is entirely a product of the anti-Origenist campaign of the 390s and its afterlife. Epiphanius of Salamis states it in his letter to John of Jerusalem, which Jerome translated: Origen “has presumed to say this, too, that Adam lost the image of God, although Scripture nowhere declares that he did” — and Epiphanius then spends the rest of the section refuting it from Genesis 9:6, James 3:9 and the rest, that man still bears the image after the fall.² From Epiphanius’s list it passed through Jerome into the standard indictment, in the sharpened form quoted above. It surfaces a fourth time, and revealingly, in Photius: reviewing an anonymous five-book Defence of Origen, he reports that among the counts the apology answered — “which he declares to be mere slanders, proving it by quotations from his writings” — was “that the image of God, in reference to him whose image it is, qua image, is untrue.”³ So the earliest surviving Origenist defence already treated the image charge as a slander to be met with Origen’s own words — the same verdict a modern reading reaches, from the other direction.

The evidence for

Origen really does teach that fallen man takes on “the image of the earthly.” The charge is not spun from nothing: it fastens on a genuine strand in Origen, his reading of Paul’s “as we have borne the image of the earthly, let us also bear the image of the heavenly” (1 Corinthians 15:49). Preaching on the tribute coin, Origen says that “man became in the beginning, as it is written in Genesis, ‘in the image of God,’ but later due to his disobedience, he also took on an ‘earthly’ image. Just as a coin bears the image of the ruling king… thus the one doing the works of the ‘ruler of the world’ bears his image” — and the Saviour “exhorts to give up and put away this image and to bear the image which was from the beginning created in the likeness of God.”⁴ Here disobedience does bring on a second image, an alien one that must be shed; a reader looking for the worst could take “took on an earthly image” to mean the divine image was displaced.

He speaks of the image being “renewed” and man “restored” to it. Origen’s language of renewal reinforces the impression. The “inner… rational man,” he writes, “is renewed after ‘the image and likeness of God, who created him’”; the understanding, “nourished to an entire and perfect condition like that in which man was made at the beginning, is restored to the image and likeness of God.”⁵ “Renewed” and “restored” can be heard to imply a prior loss — that what is now to be renewed had, at the fall, gone out of man altogether. This is the strongest form the charge can take: that Origen’s theme of an obscured image to be recovered is, at bottom, a doctrine of an image forfeited and regained.

Adversarial assessment

His actual distinction is the reverse of the charge: the image is kept, the likeness is pending. The single passage that governs everything Origen says on the subject is Peri Archōn III.6.1, and it teaches loss of nothing. Reading “Let Us make man in Our own image, and after Our likeness” against “So God created man in His own image” — where the second verse drops the word “likeness” — Origen concludes “that man received the dignity of God’s image at his first creation; but that the perfection of his likeness has been reserved for the consummation, — namely, that he might acquire it for himself by the exercise of his own diligence in the imitation of God.” The image is the standing endowment given at creation; the likeness is the goal not yet reached, to be won at the end when God is “all in all.”⁶ That is not a doctrine of an image lost after Paradise but of a likeness not yet attained — a distinction the charge exactly inverts, converting “the likeness is still to come” into “the image is already gone.”

He states the same distinction in a work published whole. The point does not rest on the Latin of Peri Archōn alone. Answering Celsus, Origen faults him for missing “the difference between man being created ‘in the image of God’ and ‘after His likeness,’ and that God is recorded to have said, ‘Let Us make man after Our image and likeness,’ but that He made man ‘after the image’ of God, but not then also ‘after His likeness’” — which is why, he adds, we do not say “we are altogether like Him.” The image is possessed; the full likeness is withheld.⁷ Origen’s Greek and his Latin agree, and both put the deficiency on the side of the likeness, never the image.

He denies in as many words that the image can be corrupted out of man. Far from teaching the image lost at the fall, Origen makes its permanence an argument. In Peri Archōn IV.37 he writes that “if any one venture to ascribe essential corruption to Him who was made after the image and likeness of God, then… this impious charge extends even to the Son of God Himself, for He is called in Scripture the image of God”; whoever holds it “would certainly impugn the authority of Scripture, which says that man was made in the image of God; and in him are manifestly to be discovered traces of the divine image, not by any appearance of the bodily frame… but by mental wisdom, by justice, moderation”.⁸ The divine image is precisely what fallen man cannot lose; its abiding “traces” are what he builds on. The “renewal” language, read in this light, is renewal of an image obscured and overlaid — covered by the borrowed “image of the earthly” — not the recovery of an image that had ceased to exist.

The accuser refutes himself, and Origen’s defenders had already answered the charge. The clearest sign that the charge misfires is that Epiphanius rebuts it with the very doctrine Origen holds. His proof that “Adam did not lose the image” is a chain of texts — Genesis 9:6, that whoever sheds man’s blood offends because man is made in God’s image; James 3:9, that we curse men “made after the likeness of God” — establishing that fallen man still bears the image. But this is exactly Origen’s position in Peri Archōn IV.37 and Against Celsus IV.30 and VI.63: the image persists, the likeness is the thing outstanding. Epiphanius has attacked Origen with Origen’s own thesis, having first fathered on him its contradiction. And the oldest defence we can trace, the anonymous five books Photius read, had already placed the image charge among the counts it dismissed as “mere slanders,” disproved “by quotations from his writings.” A charge answered from the accused’s own text in his own century, and undercut by the very father who presses it, does not hold on its best case.

Assessment

weak. The charge that Origen taught the image and likeness of God to have been “lost, and no longer in man after he was expelled from Paradise” inverts his best-attested teaching. His governing distinction, stated in Peri Archōn III.6.1 and again in Against Celsus IV.30, is that man retains the image, given at creation, and must acquire the likeness, reserved for the consummation and won by imitation of God — the deficiency lies on the side of the likeness, never the image. In Peri Archōn IV.37 he makes the image’s permanence explicit, calling it “impious” to ascribe “essential corruption” to what was made in God’s image and finding “traces of the divine image” still in man. Even Epiphanius, who brings the charge, disproves it with Origen’s own position, and the earliest Origenist apology already answered it from his writings. It earns weak rather than unsupported only because it distorts a real Origenian theme — that through disobedience man takes on, over the abiding divine image, the alien “image of the earthly” to be put off, and that the image, obscured, is to be “renewed” and man “restored” to it — language a hostile reader could harden into loss. The theme is his; the proposition the charge-lists build from it is not.

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