A cautionary note on 'image' and 'resemblance'

     "The text of Genesis to which Maximus refers[here, namely Gen 1:26,] juxtaposes 'image' and 'resemblance'.  The Gnostics had attributed to these two words a different sense:  the terrestrial, 'hylic' man was fashioned in the image of God; the 'psychic' man, in his resemblance.  It [was] perhaps this usage of the Gnostics that led also Irenaeus, their adversary, into a distinction of sense:  the image comprehends the natural gifts [of] reason [and] self-determination, and is inalienable [(inamisssible)]; the resemblance is given by possession of the Word and participation in the Spirit; lost in Adam, it is restored in Christ.  For Clement of Alexandria and Origen, image and resemblance are linked as power and act, imperfect state and consummation.  Athanasius, by contrast, abandons the Alexandrine tradition anterior [to him] and rejects every distinction between the two notions.  It is the same with Gregory of Nazianzus and with Basil.  In Gregory of Nyssa, the complexity of the question will allow him to say that the image is itself dynamic and that the resemblance is [on the other hand] ontological, [i.e.] not restricted to the operative order [of action alone].  The Antiochenes Theodore of Mopsuestia and Theodoret of Cyrus ignore the distinction [between] the two notions, as does Cyril of Alexandria.  But it becomes once again common after the homily [from the pen] of Pseudo-Gregory of Nyssa, Quid sit ad imaginem et similitudinem.
     "Many texts of Maximus [the Confessor] give expression to a dynamic straining of the natural image towards the free resemblance. . . .  'He who has allowed [(fait)] his mind to be illuminated [(étinceler)] by the flashes of lightning [(éclairs)] that divine contemplations diffuse, who has occupied his reason in the incessant offering of praise to the Creator, and who has purified his sensibility by means of irreproachable representations, this man adds to the natural good of the image the gnomic good of the resemblance.' . . .
     "But the word 'image' does not have only, in Maximus, the precise signification that we see in the preceding texts.  The absence of a break in continuity between the image and the resemblance permits him to pass from the one to the other, and to employ [often] the word 'image' [by itself] alone in the sense of resemblance[, and vice versa]. . . .
     "In the dithelite argumentation of the Dispute, [which was also] based on th[is very] text from Genesis, Maximus employs the two words 'image' and 'resemblance', but in a manner out of concord with the others in which he distinguishes the two notions[,] . . . [such that] the image, because it preserves its resemblance to the archetype, is naturally capable of self-determination [and] The resemblance does not signify here something alienable [(amissible)]; it adds nothing, it seems, to the image."

     Marcel Doucet, F.I.C., "La voluntaté humaine du Christ, spécialement en son agonie:  Maximus le Confesseur, interprète de l’écriture," Science et esprit 37, no. 2 (1985):  128-130 (123-159), following mostly W. J. Burghardt, The image of God in man according to Cyril of Alexandria (Woodstock, MD:  Woodstock College Press, 1957).