Cartwright—The Image of God in Irenaeus, Marcellus, and Eustathius 179Eustathius, like Marcellus and Irenaeus, thinks that Adam and Christ are images
of God in that they reveal God. When Eustathius talks about God revealed in the
incarnation, he believes that Christ reveals God because of the Word dwelling in
him, but emphasizes the revelatory capacity of Christ’s humanity within this con-
text: we see the Word through Christ’s humanity, and the whole Godhead through
the Word: “the human being of Christ is a savior... a bringer of light to the human
race.... [because]... we may behold the word and God through him, through the
word we may behold the universally sovereign authority... through the one image
looking at the dyad of father and son... in the dyad knowing the one godhead.”^50
Paradoxically, the Word both is God and reveals God. This elucidates Eustathius’s dis-
tinction between the Son as image and Christ as image: Christ reveals God by pointing
to something that he himself is not; the Word Incarnate reveals God because he is God
made manifest.^51 The revelatory nature of Christ’s humanity is especially emphatic in
this passage from Contra Ariomanitas, typically of Eustathius’s later work, because it
is not merely Christ qua human who is revealing image but ὁ ἄνθρωπος τοῦ Χριστοῦ
—“the human being of Christ.” This human being, however, reveals God because of
the incarnation.
As in Marcellus, Adam nonetheless similarly (though not necessarily equally)
reveals God. Adam’s pre-ensouled body is “fashioned from [God]... prototypical
ἄγαλμα of God... impressed copy of the divine image.”^52 The statue (ἄγαλμα) meta-
phor echoes Marcellus particularly, with the same implication that Adam represents
God in his absence. Eustathius’s phraseology emphasizes affinity where Marcellus was
careful to maintain difference.^53 Nonetheless, the underlying structure of the relation-
ship between God and Adam is basically the same. Broadly speaking, Eustathius shares
Marcellus’s sense that Adam is a distinct representation of God.
As in Marcellus, humanity is a distinct representation of God, and God’s image in
being the image of Christ, in whom God is manifest. Eustathius may share Marcel-
lus’s view that Adam’s image status anticipates the incarnation. However, there is no
evidence for such synthesis, and it is equally likely that he simply holds these two ideas
in tension. In any case, they hang together emotively in light of the strongly Irenaean
sense that Christ is what Adam is supposed to be.
As in Irenaeus and Marcellus, Christ fulfills Adam’s potential, and people fulfill
their potential in becoming like Christ. Correspondingly, Eustathius draws heav-
ily on Paul’s distinction between “soul Adam” and “spiritual Adam,” ψυχικὸν Adam
and πνευματικὸν Christ—“Last Adam”—and thinks that saved people are likewise
πνευματικὸν.^54 Again, in fulfilling Adam’s potential, Christ is what we will become.
Eustathius’s use of the Pauline πνευματικὸν motif to describe human perfection
echoes Irenaeus in a way that Marcellus, apparently, does not: the difference between
ultimate ἄνθρωπος and original ἄνθρωπος is the spirit. Eustathius’s understanding of the
term πνευματικὸν is hard to reconstruct. His principal concern in discussing it is that,
applied to Christ, it does not imply logos-sarx Christology.^55 He establishes this partly
by offering various scriptural contexts in which it is applied to people other than Christ,
all of whom, presumably, had souls.^56 He therefore applies the term πνευματικὸν both
to Christians in this life and to the resurrected just. It consistently denotes congruence