The Image Revealed

In the vast quietness of a formless void, the Spirit of God hovered, still and unhurried in the unending, brooding darkness of shapeless matter. He had waited, patient in his power, for what would be called an age – its passing between eternity and a moment, for to him potential was as unshakably certain as the past. His thoughts in the dark and cold and shapelessness were bent toward what he was about to do and so sure was he of his intentions and his ability to carry them out that it was as if they had already been done – so completely was all future existence comprehended in the vast and powerful consciousness of the creator.

And then he spoke, and it was as if the lifeless blackness of existence heard his voice and opened its eyes. And there was light. And the fastness of space rippled with surprise, but it was no surprise to the creator for the light was part of him, emanated from him, burst from him as if a door of the sun had been opened. For age upon age, he had dwelt in the light, and now the darkness laughed to finally see itself and the formlessness gasped to behold its own shape. The creator smiled and his spirit smiled back because they had extended their word and created what had existed forever. What was themselves was now other, such that the creator could see himself, as it were, in a mirror. And seeing himself thus reflected, showing to himself and to the world what had been himself forever, was good. And it would grow better.

God spoke again, and the word he spoke was a thought formed before time and now stretched out into time and stretching out the land and the waters and the expanse, making many of what had been one. The words flowed freely now, in a stream of words containing thoughts, but not thoughts such as one thinks about what exists, but thoughts such as exist themselves and give existence as a gift without themselves ceasing from existence. These were hard thoughts, real thoughts formed into words by the word which, when spoken, planted these words like seeds, each one containing within itself the fully-formed reality of reality itself. Nothing was made that has been made without these word seeds, and nothing was made which has been made from any other seeds save these – emanating from the creator through words made soil, sand, seas, stars, and flesh – all dwelling among us as indeed the creator did at first. The creator blessed them and by his blessing existence flourished and expanded like the branches of a tree, multiplying over and again in complexity and beauty until the world was filled. Again his words and blessing formed an image, and the creator could see Himself in the image as in a mirror, and seeing himself thus reflected repeated that it was good. But it would grow better.

What was hidden in God had been brought out, into the light to reflect the light and give life, and its life was blessed and multiplied. But God spoke again to make known what was hidden, and this last disclosure was to shine brighter than the sun, clearer in its image and likeness than the light which first emanated from the creator. This new word was to contain and rule over all other words for this word was to create in its likeness as God had created in his. For this word would contain in itself words – thoughts – about all the rest of creation and by these word-thoughts would recreate the world after its own image which was the very image of God – the child by its artfulness reflecting the father. In the man and woman, the creation would be comprehended and cared for. They would name and rename and create and recreate and all of the naming and all of the creating would fill up and form what remained of the voids and shapelessness of the cosmos. And God blessed them and by his blessing the man and woman flourished and expanded like the branches of a tree, spreading out like the fractal geometry of a snowflake. And they were to multiply over and again the intricacy and beauty of their own race and of the earth they were given to cultivate. It was to continue forever – until every formlessness was shaped and every void was filled. The man, the woman and generations of their children would look with ever-increasing elation at the ever-increasing beauty  of their creation – as in a mirror – while the creator would see with ever-increasing pleasure as – like two mirrors facing each other – his image expanded until what was good became very good — and continued to grow better.

The Image in Earth

The first words of scripture open like a flower, in breathless delight revealing a secret long hidden and long contemplated. It is the secret of existence, of the form from which matter takes its shape and the being from which all other beings borrow. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the physical world is but the illusory earthly Maya through which the self must pierce in order to experience the liberation of Nirvana – of oneness. But in Genesis, the musky scent of freshly turned soil mingles with that of incense and the songs of birds and angels mix and make melody. The creation is real, and it is truth. It borrows being from God but is distinct from him nonetheless – of the one, and yet many. We are told by the scriptures to trust our senses but to follow where they lead – to taste and see that the Lord is good.

The expansion and variegation of existence, we are told, is an imprint, pressed into the fibre of unadorned matter by the creator as he pulls and stretches the void into its contrasting elements. Different types and levels of life dilate into different species within that life – minerals and rock, grasses and trees, sparrows and eagles. This diversity is not tangled together in a random swirl but arranged in rhythmical and ordered patterns and relationships. Flowers turn towards the sun as it rises and the seas swell with the moon as it waxes. The seasons ebb and flow with the movement of the heavens gently and yet inexorably.

And the creation is beautiful. This is not said explicitly, but it takes no extrapolation.

It is indeed very good. And it is not merely good in an aesthetic sense, but reflectively good as an expression – an emanation – of the one who made it. God’s creation is not merely given meaning as a veneer of spirit on top of matter, but contains meaning within itself. Creation is not an analogy of truth, but truth itself given physical form – incarnated. The smallness of a mustard seed contains within its smallness truths inseparable from its form. The number of the sands and of the stars is not a mathematical accident but the generosity of God cast in matter. If water cleanses, restores, and enlivens, it is because the very nature of water is salvific. The reason eagles soar, wine intoxicates, wind blows, and flowers bud is because these things are themselves the true image of the true God. If the edges of this image are not discreet, it is simply because the image is continuous throughout, folding and interlacing – the very texture of reality.

The Nature of the Image

We have been speaking of God’s image as if we knew what it meant. We do not. It is an imprint, surely, a reflection, a turning and folding and stretching of inert matter into the shapes and tastes and scents of God. But if that is all then God remains aloof, separate from His creation as the craftsman is separate from the work he has fashioned. The creation is of God, from him, borrows its existence from his, but the relationship is still amorphous, for who is to say whether the craftsman loves his workmanship for what it is or simply as a means of self-glorification? Are we not told that the world was made for the glory of God and does this not betray a certain divine utilitarianism: God making the world for his own amusement.

When Moses wished to record the early lineage of the human race, he began:

This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.

The scriptures do not speak of God’s image until they come to the man and the woman, and it is only here, in the fifth chapter – after the fall, after the garden, and after the death of Able – that it becomes clear what that image entails. For the image of God in the man and woman was not merely that of a craftsman imprinted on clay but the nature, character, wealth, and status of a father bequeathed to his children. Adam and Eve resembled God as Seth resembled Adam and Eve. The man and the woman were God’s offspring and so bore his likeness.

As children are the glory of a father, the human race was the glory of God. As with a father, God’s glory was proportionate to his love such that the flourishing his love created became the source of his honor. The desire to display and propagate one’s own qualities may, in some contexts, be megalomania, but in a father it is an act of generosity and compassion, giving of the life that cannot be gotten elsewhere and delighting to see it bear fruit in the being of another. A father’s glory derives from the child’s oneness (my own life in miniature) and yet also from the child’s otherness (a new life – two new eyes looking back at me). A father gives his life to save his child from death because the life he saves is his own life – the life he has given to bring the child to life. It is in the heart of a father exulting in his child that self-centeredness and selflessness meet. Thus are we to understand God’s glory in his children.

The tenderness with which the scriptures speak of God’s craftsmanship in the rest of creation is an extension of this fatherly love. The reason the righteous man is compassionate even to his beasts is that the beasts, too, partake of the life of the Father. The creation was not an impersonal exchange, like the assembly of an automobile, but the conception of a new world, each small flowering of life and animation the offspring of God. This is why there is sorrow even in the death of sheep and goats to atone for the sins of men and women.

The Breath of Life

The blessings of God on creation and on the man and woman were that his offspring would have offspring of their own. The breath of life once conferred, would not stagnate, but grow and expand. Even in the world of plants and animals, in the very earth itself, we see the tree of life growing outward and upward, filling the earth with ever more intricate ecosystems and patterns as life collides with life, species interacts with species, water flows over stone, and new life is given birth. The creation is not still for an instant, for the breath of life once breathed is never still.

How this life grows is a commonplace and yet also wonderful and incomprehensible. Most of advanced organic life reproduces sexually, through the joining of two genders, completely alike in species and yet opposite. This duality woven into the fabric of creation ensures that each new creature will be distinct – not merely additive to the existing order, but multiplicative. By including humankind in this pattern, God ensured that the sea of human faces and personalities would have no end. We are accustomed in western Christianity to speak of the image of God residing in the soul of an individual, but the multiplication of humanity through sexual union would lead us to understand that God’s image is also plural, requiring an eternity of human offspring to show it most fully.

The Creation of Culture

Amid the exponential progression of God’s image in the natural world, the man and the woman are given a special task. They are asked to garden and out of their garden grew the whole of human culture.

Unlike the rest of creation, the man and the woman were to be creators also and employ their creative energy in re-creating the world after their own image. They were, as Lewis and Tolkien would say, in the business of sub-creation, making new creations out of what had been made. It was at first a humble endeavor – cultivating the ground, pruning trees, and tending livestock – but this re-creation, this remaking, continued in cycles one after another until the whole world was remade and continues to this day. Out of sound came music and instrumentation. Out of wood and stone came art and science. Out of the garden and the fields came every culinary delicacy.

The remaking of the world after the image of humanity was as God intended, for it was after his image that humanity was made, and it included not only the remaking of the physical world, but remaking the world of the self. Adam’s naming of the animals was but the first instance of this remaking as Adam gave to each animal not only a place in nature but a place in the mind – a name by which it and all others of its kind would be known. This sort of knowing was foreign to the other creatures, but would become the primary occupation of the human race. It was, in fact, through this knowing that humanity’s cultural re-creation became possible – the knowing of the mind and the working of the hands intermixed and interlaced so as to become indistinguishable – such that when the musician picks up her violin to play no one is sure where mind ends and body begins.

A Child of God

As a child who opens her eyes for the first time out of dark, warmth, and being into the consciousness of light, seeing, and knowing, I believe we are to look up through the first words of the scriptures to see a father. Like the child, who has no thought to herself – indeed does not know herself as a self – but looks for knowing into the knowing and gentle face of one who brought her into being, we are to see God not as a proposition or an idea, but as the wellspring of reality from which everything we can touch, know, and feel flows – as a person who’s gravity holds the heavens, and our very selves, in constellation. It is God’s image which gives us shape.

It is, ironically, this humble posture of a child held up by our parent that has enabled us to reach so high. When, in childlike wonder, we set out immediately to explore and to create, assuming the foundations of purpose, truth, beauty, and morality as our birthright, we tend to make great progress. The same cannot be said of our efforts to explicate our own existence and create our own image for knowledge stable enough for all that we would build on top of it. After thousands of years of philosophy and science we are still no closer to knowing for ourselves why it is we know anything or even why we exist and are conscious. If we had waited for these efforts to reach a conclusion before exploring elsewhere, human culture would not exist. We have not waited, and we are the better for it. Each one of us, like a child, has waked into the world of nature and of thought in mid stride – learning and growing and making without thought to where it all came from or what it all means.

It is a peculiarity of existence that if one attempts to create a foundation for existence by one’s own efforts, then everything one has built on it topples. If, like Descartes, we arrive through strict logic at “I am” by way of “I think”, then we must either childishly assume the validity of inference (“therefore”) or abandon all knowledge. If, in the abandonment, we (like Hume) adopt strict empiricism, then we must justify our empiricism on non-empirical grounds. If, like the materialist, we trace the origin of consciousness to naturalistic causes, we must explain how matter can be conscious of itself without being other than matter – a constellation of atoms able to see itself, not merely its reflection – and how a consciousness comprised solely of matter can be trusted to create valid inferences such as those required for a materialistic theory. As far as we climb, we must fall back. Back to the trusting, wide-eyed credulity of childhood – to the basic, unexamined underpinnings of reality – if we are to accomplish anything at all.

If one cannot create a new image for existence, then one must be content with what one is given even if it is not of our own making. This foundation does not prove that we are children of God, but our inescapable trust in it implies that we are children of something. The image we bear may not be of God, but is of something very like him.

Perhaps our reticence to acknowledge our parentage may be traced back to Genesis as well. There, we are told, the first man and the first woman cast off their childlikeness and became like God, knowing good and evil. If this was the case, then they might very well have used their newfound knowledge to recast their own existence instead of being content to cultivate the existence already given. In this case, God’s image in humankind would have been badly marred, although one suspects that an image as indelible as that of God’s would not be easily erased.