176 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacyexpounding Gen. 1:26-27, Irenaeus explains that God took “from himself the sub-
stance of the creatures, and the pattern of things made.”^26 God, the image-maker, pours
himself into his image and the result is a mutual identity.
Irenaeus correspondingly defines creation by its relationship to its creator. This
comes across strongly in his discussion of “Gnosticism.” He basically argues that “Gnos-
tic” cosmology is logically impossible because creatures are necessarily connected to
their creator. Thus, he demands: “How... could either the angels, or the Creator of the
world, have been ignorant of the supreme God, when... they were his creatures and
were contained by him?”^27 A creature is defined by its relationship to its creator.
Importantly, as has often been noted, Irenaeus also emphasizes God’s transcen-
dence, but normally in the context of his creatures’ total dependence on him.^28 This
underscores the conception that the primary distinction between God and humanity
is relational rather than intrinsic. It also suggests that a dependence on God inheres in
shared identity with God.
I hope I have demonstrated that Irenaeus sees the term image of God as denoting
a resemblance between God and Adam grounded in a progressive ontological affinity
between God and humankind in which humanity shares part of God’s being and is
consequently dependent on God for its own being. Body and soul are both part of the
subject of this affinity.
Marcellus
Marcellus shares many of Irenaeus’s most distinctive claims about God’s image:
Christ is God’s image because he reveals God. He “displays the whole of the Godhead
bodily”;^29 Christ is “the first new ἄνθρωπος,”^30 strongly echoing Irenaeus’s “Second
A d a m .”^31 Christ is also the blueprint for Adam. Again, God’s image is corporeal. How-
ever, there are important differences. Here, I want to highlight Marcellus’s divergent
understanding of the relationship between an image and the thing it is imaging.
For Marcellus, Adam is a “statue” or ἀνδρία, for which God takes the pattern from
himself.^32 This seems to echo Irenaeus’s conception of resemblance between Adam and
God. However, the statue metaphor has a particular sense of representing God in his
absence, as statues represented the emperor in distant provinces.^33 Correspondingly,
God takes the “pattern” from himself but not the “substance,” as he does in Irenaeus’s
account. For Marcellus, the resemblance between God and Adam is not based in onto-
logical affinity. Humanity, when perfect, reveals God in its own being, not, as in Ire-
naeus, as an outpouring of God, but as a living representation, an “ensouled statue” that
God created to be distinct from himself.
Corresponding to this strong separation between God and ἄνθρωπος, the blueprint
for Adam is clearly Christ Incarnate. Here’s the salient passage: “[God said]... ‘let
us make a human being according to our own image and likeness,’ well naming the
human flesh ‘image.’ For he knew precisely that a little later it would be the image of
his own word.”^34
Unlike in Irenaeus, God Incarnate, not God qua God, is Adam’s archetype. Being
modeled on Christ emphatically does not mean being modeled on God. In fact, Christ
is the archetype for Adam in the sense that the incarnation was foreordained. This is