CP (#9) / Image of God
Why this erect, bipedal, large-headed, loose-lipped, narrow-hipped creature, whom we already know from Genesis to be murderous and rapacious at scale?
What you read about last time (In CP#8) — In which we learn how Thomas’s systematic development of Natural Law moral philosophy offered the Church a rational basis for establishing and extending its authority on legal foundations that for the first time could claim to provide universal justifications for the exercise of its power.
What you’re reading about now (In CP#9) — In which we focus our attention on the notion that “mankind” was made in the “image of God,” which is the foundation stone of Catholic Natural Law. What could this possible mean? Why can no one say what we’re supposed to look like if we’re made in God’s image? What does God even look like?
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Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Genesis 1
God created humans in his image. This is the nut of the matter. Everything follows from this foundation premise of the three major Abrahamic faiths. Thomist-Catholic Natural Law draws its full power and authority from this premise. Without the idea of humans as the image of the God, there is no Natural Law and no Western Civilization.
In Question 93 of the First Part of Summa Theologica, Thomas considers “the end or term of the production of man.” In other words, why did God create the human species? After all, he’s God! He could have created whatever he wanted. Why this erect, bipedal, large-headed, loose-lipped, narrow-hipped creature, whom we already know from Genesis to be murderous and rapacious at scale? What does the creation of this creature in God’s own image reflect back on God?
Natural Law moral philosophy adduces an elaborate series of demonstrations, or proofs, to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that humans were created in the image of God. By emphasizing the intellectual rapport between God and man, these demonstrations and proofs would appear to extend well beyond the Dominionist declaratives in Genesis — but as we shall see, perhaps really do not. Here is what Aquinas writes on the topic in Question 93.
Augustine says : "Man's excellence consists in the fact that God made him to His own image by giving him an intellectual soul, which raises him above the beasts of the field." Therefore things without intellect are not made to God's image. Augustine excludes the inferior creatures bereft of reason from the image of God; but not the angels. Our being bears the image of God so far as if is proper to us, and excels that of the other animals, that is to say, in so far as we are endowed with a mind.
The lower creatures differ from humans and from God, then, because they lack an intellectual nature (save perhaps in a “trace” form). The lower creatures live entirely within their appetites and emotions and cannot reason, except in the most primitive, instrumental sense, as a way to achieve that toward which their emotions and appetites incline them. [In the 18th century, of course, David Hume would entirely disagree with this distinction between humans and other sensate creatures. We will get to Hume at a later date.]
Humans thus are twinned creatures, half God and half beast. As Augustine writes about the Fall, "The prince of sin overcame Adam who was made from the slime of the earth to the image of God, adorned with modesty, restrained by temperance, refulgent with brightness." Natural Law is thus largely about how post-lapsarian [after-the-fall] humans regulate the relationship between reason, appetites, and emotions. We are centaurs — upright, transcendent, aspirational minds atop horny, prancing, priapic bags of bone and muscle.
Although the image of God in man is not to be found in his bodily shape, yet because "the body of man alone among terrestrial animals is not inclined prone to the ground, but is adapted to look upward to heaven, for this reason we may rightly say that it is made to God's image and likeness, rather than the bodies of other animals," as Augustine remarks.
It is a bit weird that Aquinas would lean so heavily on the authority of Augustine to establish that reason and the intellect are the basis of the human resemblance to God (the visage of which we literally know nothing, and so can imagine anything). Aristotle is otherwise far more central to his efforts to base Natural Law on the precepts of reason.
But Aristotle had no conception of, or belief in, a monotheistic, creator God and his natural philosophy does not theosophically separate humans from other animals. So Aquinas is reduced to merely telling us that Aristotle “says that the hunting of wild animals is just and natural, because man thereby exercises a natural right.” For Aquinas, this counts as Aristotle’s contribution to the belief that, “in keeping with the order of nature, that man should be master over animals.”
Aquinas cannot escape from this Dominionism, which is rooted in the consequences of disobedience. “In the state of innocence, before man had disobeyed, nothing disobeyed him that was naturally subject to him.” However, once Adam ate the apple of the tree of knowledge, all creatures became intractable, and thus required the heavy hand of man to restore and maintain the natural order of things. “For his disobedience to God, man was punished by the disobedience of those creatures which should be subject to him.”
One reason I’m referring to “man” is that humans themselves also are not equally created in the image of God. The Great Chain of Being has its origins in the differences between men and women, and extends thereon to the lower plants and animals. Aquinas here also leans on Augustine.
The image of God, in its principal signification, namely the intellectual nature, is found both in man and in woman. Hence after the words, "To the image of God He created him," it is added, "Male and female He created them" But in a secondary sense the image of God is found in man, and not in woman: for man is the beginning and end of woman; as God is the beginning and end of every creature. So when the Apostle had said that "man is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man," he adds his reason for saying this: "For man is not of woman, but woman of man; and man was not created for woman, but woman for man."
Ultimately, the value of this idea — that humans were created in the image of God — seems to have a lot to do with establishing an ordering basis for all of the Creation. As God’s image, humans can serve as surrogates for God in acknowledging, organizing, and enforcing the Great Chain of Being, that hierarchy of created things that an ordered universe requires.
We’ll visit the concepts of order and disorder in Catholic Natural Law in subsequent newsletters. Suffice to say for now that the rigid, unyielding premises of Natural Law requires power through the enforcement of both law and order. This is the enduring subtext of the Summa Theologica.
Let’s consider the idea that Natural Law exists as a social control mechanism — accessible to humans intellectually, via their capacity to reason. Let’s imagine God as a cosmic sheriff who has deputized humans to use Natural Law to establish and maintain good order within God’s Creation.
And what is this Creation, this everything that is not-Creator? Framed slightly differently, if one were to remove reason from the world, what would remain?
One word I like to use to characterize the Abrahamic God’s Creation is carnal, a term that appears nearly 500 times in the Summa Theologica. Here are some definitions of carnal from Wordnik.
Pertaining to the flesh or the body, its passions and its appetites; fleshly; sensual; lustful; gross; flesh-eating; ravenous; bloody; impure.
Not spiritual; merely human; not partaking of anything divine or holy; unregenerate; unsanctified.
Let’s use the carnality of Creation as our lens. Consider the symbolism of carnal appetites as physical representations of sin — of everything that is disobedient, deviant, disordered, and dysregulated.
If carnality is the embodiment of sin, we can better appreciate the obsessive fascination — which otherwise might seem merely prurient — of Catholic Natural Law with its protean, shapeshifting capacity to define (and redefine) immorality.
Catholicpunk Draft: #5
March 25, 2025