Human dignity and moral agency as creational, not deterministic.
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For the Scripture speaks about us when he says to the Son: “Let us make the human according to our image and according to our likeness, and let them rule the beasts of the earth and the birds of the heaven and the fish of the sea.”
ἀνακαινίσας ἡμᾶς ἐν τῇ ἀφέσει τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν, ἐποίησεν ἡμᾶς ἄλλον τύπον, ὡς παιδίων ἔχειν τὴν ψυχήν, ὡς ἂν δὴ ἀναπλάσσοντος αὐτοῦ ἡμᾶς.
For the heavenly Word, who became Spirit from the Father and Word from the rational power, made the human being an image of immortality after the pattern of the Father who begot him, so that, just as incorruption is with God, a human who shares in a portion of God may also have immortality.
Λόγος γὰρ ὁ ἐπουράνιος, πνεῦμα γεγονὼς ἀπὸ τοῦ πατρὸς καὶ λόγος ἐκ τῆς λογικῆς δυνάμεως, κατὰ τὴν τοῦ γεννήσαντος αὐτὸν πατρὸς μίμησιν εἰκόνα τῆς ἀθανασίας τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἐποίησεν, ἵνα, ὥσπερ ἡ ἀφθαρσία παρὰ τῷ θεῷ, τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον θεοῦ μοῖραν ἄνθρωπος μεταλαβὼν ἔχῃ καὶ τὸ…
To them alone he allowed an upward look toward himself. He formed them from his own image. To them he sent his only-begotten Son.
ὁ γὰρ θεὸς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους ἠγάπησε, δι᾽ οὓς ἐποίησε τὸν κόσμον, οἷς ὑπέταξε πάντα τὰ ἐν τῇ γῇ, οἷς λόγον ἔδωκεν, οἷς νοῦν, οἷς μόνοις ἄνω πρὸς αὐτὸν ὁρᾶν ἐπέτρεψεν, οὓς ἐκ τῆς ἰδίας εἰκόνος ἔπλασε, πρὸς οὓς ἀπέστειλε τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ, οἷς τὴν ἐν οὐρανῷ βασιλείαν…
This is the one after the image and likeness: the true knower, who imitates God as far as he can, leaving out nothing that belongs to that possible likeness — self-controlled, enduring, living justly, ruling his passions, sharing what he has as he is able, and doing good in word and deed.
Οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ κατ’ εἰκόνα καὶ ὁμοίωσιν, ὁ γνωστικός, ὁ μιμούμενος τὸν θεὸν καθ’ ὅσον οἷόν τε, μηδὲν παραλιπὼν τῶν εἰς τὴν ἐνδεχομένην ὁμοίωσιν, ἐγκρατευόμενος, ὑπομένων, δικαίως βιούς, βασιλεύων τῶν παθῶν, μεταδιδοὺς ὧν ἔχει, ὡς οἷός τέ ἐστιν, εὐεργετῶν καὶ λόγῳ καὶ ἔργῳ.
I. [1] Having joined battle with Hermogenes on the soul’s census alone — insofar as he presumed even this to have stood from matter’s stock rather than from God’s breath — now turned to the remaining questions I shall seem to fight with the philosophers most of all.
[1] It belongs to the status of the faith to determine the soul simple according to Plato — that is, uniform, at least under the name of substance. Let arts and disciplines look to themselves, and likenesses too.
XII. ON THE MIND. [1] Likewise the animus — whether it is mens, nous among the Greeks — we understand as nothing other than the soul’s inborn and implanted and natively proper equipment, by which it acts, by which it understands, which, having with itself from itself, it moves with itself in itself… ****** Mind is the…
XIII. [1] What remains to examine for this is where principalitas sits — that is, what rules what — so that that whose primacy appears may be the mass of substance, and that over which the mass of substance rules may be counted to the natural office of the substance.
XIV. [1] Besides, it is singular and simple and entire of itself, no more assembled from elsewhere than divisible from itself, because it is not even dissoluble. For if it is assembled and dissoluble, then it is already not immortal.
XV. ON THE HEGEMONIKON. [1] First, whether there is some highest vital and sapiential grade in the soul, which they call the hegemonikon, that is the principal — because if it is denied, the whole status of the soul is endangered.
[1] Some believe they have come down from the heavens with as much persuasion as they also promise they will return there without doubt — as Saturninus, Menander the Simonian’s disciple, introduced, affirming man made by angels and that the first work, futile and weak and unstable, wriggled on the earth like a worm…
XXIV. AGAINST PLATO’S LEARNINGS AND RECOLLECTIONS. [1] First, indeed, I will not grant a soul capable of forgetfulness, because he conceded it such divinity that it is equated to God.
XXXVI. ON THE SEX OF THE SOUL AND OF THE FLESH ARISING TOGETHER. [1] Into these questions we digressed, I think, from the place to which we must now return.
XLIV. ON HERMOTIMUS. [1] For the rest, concerning Hermotimus.
XLV. ON DREAMS. [1] We are held here to bring out the Christian sentence on dreams also, as accidents of sleep and not small tossings of the soul, which we declared busy and always exercised from the perpetuity of motion — which is the ratio of divinity and immortality.
V. [1] Let them summon some Eubulus and Critolaus and Xenocrates and, in this place, Plato’s friend Aristotle. Perhaps they will be built up more toward removing the soul’s corpulence — if they do not look at others on the contrary, and indeed more of them, who vindicate a body for the soul.
LI. THAT NOTHING OF THE SOUL REMAINS BEHIND IN THE BODY. [1] But death’s work is in the midst: the separation of body and soul.
VI. [1] These things the Platonists confuse by subtlety rather than by truth. Every body, they say, must necessarily be either animal or inanimate.
VIII. [1] It is otherwise abrupt and absurd to decree something removed from the census of bodily things because it does not match other bodily examples.
Nor are those to be passed by who strip the soul of intellect even for a little time. In the same way they pave a way for inducing it afterward, as also of mind, from which intellect would come.
Think back from the last things to the first: if death is determined as nothing other than the disjoining of body and soul, the contrary of death — life — will be defined as nothing other than the joining of body and soul.
ON THE UNBORN. After the definition of origin the question of status suffers. For it follows that, having professed the soul from God's breath, we should assign it a beginning.
I hope he is not guilty who obeys Caesar’s spoken orders; but the proud opposite destroys his own life. Sometimes what is mine — I who erred before — I show: the right road to you who still wander empty. You, however, choose, pleasing your own judgment: who wants poison, or the sweet cups of life!
For he is the image of the invisible God, so that the mediocrity and frailty of the human condition might already then begin to grow used to seeing God the Father someday in the image of God, that is in the Son of God. So also Christ, that is the image of God and Son of God, is looked upon by men as he could be seen.
II. 1. Above all which things he himself, containing all things, leaving nothing empty outside himself, has left place for no superior god, as some suppose, since he himself has enclosed the universe in the bosom of perfect greatness and power, always intent on his work and going through all things and moving all…
Who does not recognize the Son’s second person after the Father when he reads the Father saying to the Son: Let us make man unto our image and likeness, and afterward: And God made man, unto God’s image he made him? 4.
I will still add that part too in which the heretic, while he almost rejoices in his own eye, having lost truth and light, may recognize the whole blindness of his error. For again and again he objects that it was said by the Lord: I am in the Father and the Father in me.
V. 1. Whose legitimate angers and certain indignations we hold described and whose reported hatreds we know, yet we do not understand these things to have been referred to examples of human vices. 2. For all these things, although they can corrupt a human being, cannot at all spoil the divine power.
This sixth day is called parasceve — preparation of the kingdom. He completed Adam after his image and likeness. For that reason he finished his works before he created the angels and fashioned the human, lest they falsely claim they had been his helpers.
15.1. Therefore there is nothing that should deceive us, nothing that should promise us empty hopes—that which is said by certain new men and ones lifted up by an immoderate opinion of themselves—that souls are immortal, nearest to the Lord and Prince of things in grade of dignity, brought forth from that Begetter and…
16.1–2. And while we slip and hurry toward human bodies, from the worldly circles causes follow us by which we are evil and worst, burn with desires and anger, spend life in outrages, and are condemned to public lust by prostitution of bodies for sale.
17.1. "But we are rational and by intelligence we conquer the whole kind of mute things." — I would believe that said most truly if all humans lived with reason and counsel, kept the course of duties, abstained from illicit things, did not approach base businesses, and no one by depravity of counsel and blindness of…
18.1. "They do not know clothing, to join chairs, ships and plows, nor finally the other furniture that household use demands." — Those are not gifts of knowledge but inventions of poorest necessity.
And that we may show you more clearly and manifestly of what price the human is, whom you believe to exist most like the superior power, conceive this image in your minds and, as far as it can be done if we undertake it, let us hold it by assuming a likeness as if we had undertaken it. 2.
Now since we have prepared a seat for the image, let us next take someone just born and into the hospitality of that place which has nothing and is empty and vacant—of Platonic or Pythagorean stock if you like, or of any of those who are said to have been of divine sharpness or named most wise from the gods' answers.
22.1. Where then do these things look? So that, since it has been believed that souls are divine, immortal from God, and fly to human bodies with all disciplines, we may test from that one whom we have wished to be raised in this manner whether the matter takes faith or has been lightly believed and presumed by a…
23.1. If to one hungry you give a grape, a cake, an onion, a thistle, a cucumber, a fig, will he know that hunger can be settled by all of these, or in what way each ought to be for eating?
24.1. Why in the Meno, O Plato, do you ask a little boy things fitted to the reasonings of number and try from his answers to prove that we do not learn but return into the memory of what we knew of old?
Is this that precious human endowed with most august reasonings, the so-called lesser world fashioned and formed into the likeness of the whole: better than no beast, as it appeared, blunter than wood, than rock, who does not know humans and always lives in mute solitudes, remains idle, thrives emptily, though he live…
26.1. But when I hear the soul called I-know-not-what outstanding thing, near and next to God, knowing all things as it arrives here from superior ages, I refuse that it learn and instead want it to teach, and not become from learned an elementary pupil, as they say, but, keeping its own things, bind itself round with…
27.1. Therefore if souls also lose all they had known when occupied by bodily bonds, they must necessarily suffer something that makes them put on the blindness of forgetfulness.
28.1. And yet, lest we leave you without fuller instruction on how you say souls, once wrapped in earthly bodies, have no recollection of prior things, while set in those very bodies and nearly senseless by mixture with them they stubbornly and faithfully hold what eighty years ago or more, if you will, they did or…
37.1. But if souls were, as rumor has it, of the Lord’s offspring and a principal generation of power, nothing would have been lacking to them for perfection when they were begotten by most perfect virtue; all would have had one understanding and one consent;
38.1. For what does it profit the world—to begin from serious things—that there be greatest kings here? What tyrants, what lords, what countless other and most ample powers?
39.1. Unless perhaps the king of the world—whom it is utmost rashness to utter from a human mouth—sent hither souls begotten from himself so that those who had been goddesses with him, free of bodily touch and temporary bound, should be plunged into human seeds, spring from women's births, utter and continue most silly…
40.1. Did he therefore send souls so that, while other animals would be fed on things born of themselves and brought forth by no sowing and would not seek for themselves protections of houses or coverings of clothes, a wretched necessity would be added to these: that with greatest expenses and perpetual sweats they…
41.1. Did he therefore send souls so that those who had lately been mild and ignorant how to be moved by feelings of savagery should build for themselves slaughterhouses and amphitheaters—places of blood and public impiety—in one of which they would see humans eaten and torn by beasts' mangling, others kill one another…
42.1. Did he therefore send souls so that some might infest the paths of roads, others circumvent the unknowing, forge false wills, mix poisoned drinks, break into houses by night, solicit, drive off, prevaricate and betray, shake pickiness of tastes from the palate, know how to keep slipping fatness in cooking fatted…
43.1. What do you say, O offspring and first progeny of the divinity? Did those wise souls, brought forth from principal causes, know these kinds of shames, crimes, and malice, and—that they might practice, carry out, and make much of these evils—were they ordered to depart and dwell in these parts and be clothed with…
45.1. But far be this monstrosity of a wicked opinion—that almighty God, sower and founder, begetter of great and invisible things, should be believed to have begotten souls so mobile, of no gravity or weight or constancy, liable to vices, sloping down into every kind of sins, and though He knew them such and of this…
47.1. "But if God is not the parent and begetter of souls," you say, "by what author were they begotten and by what reason brought forth?" — If you wish to hear it unpainted and not drawn from any show of voice, we likewise confess that we are ignorant of that, do not know it, and judge that knowledge of so great a…
48.1. So likewise here also, when we refuse that souls are offspring of the chief God, it does not immediately follow that we must explain by what parent they were brought forth and by what sorts of causes procreated.
49.1. "But," you will say, "there are also good men in human affairs, wise, just, of blameless and most corrected morals." 2. — We raise no question whether there ever were any such in whom that very integrity which is spoken of would desire absolutely nothing.
52.1. And yet lest you think that only you are allowed to use conjectures and suspicions, we also can do the same, since what you ask is common to set forth. "Whence," you say, "are humans, and of those humans themselves what or whence are the souls?" — Whence are elephants, bulls, stags, mules, asses?
When the world was finished, He commanded animals of various kinds, unlike forms, both great and small, to be made. And they were made in pairs—that is, single creatures of different sex—from whose offspring air and earth and seas were filled, and God gave to all these by kinds foods from the earth, so they could be of…
They say that by certain turnings of heaven and motions of stars a ripeness for sowing animals arose, and so the new earth, holding genital seed, put forth from itself certain little bags like wombs—of which Lucretius: 'wombs grew fixed to earth by roots'—and when they had matured, broken by nature's force, they poured…
Whoever therefore strives to keep man's sacrament and to obtain the reason of his nature, let him raise himself from the ground and with mind erect stretch his eyes into heaven.