The distinction between image and essence

Again, regarding the Colossians and the Hebrews, it is written: 'who is the image of the invisible God' (Col 1:15). And in the Gospel according to John, the Son, presenting his own essence to be stamped with a Fatherly character, said: 'for this God the Father has stamped' (John 5:23).

This makes manifest the co-existence of the seal with the archetype, being of like-nature, and in itself showing perfectly and truly the unity of nature of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. For the seal, just like the character, signifies that which is similar and undefiled.

Since it is a time to speak, and it is not improper or incomparable to have the Father as the archetype, even if he is being imaged and characterized by a created and dissimilar thing. These divine things, not understanding correctly the words of unsearchable interpretation, but twisting them and contending with human thoughts against the words of God, say: 'another God and another image of God, just as another man and another image of a man.'

And in a certain way they represent the living and active God-Logos as a motionless image. But in essence and in every respect, he is an unerring and sovereign image of the Father, and not according to form and shape, like a statue carved or sculpted, breathless and not self-moving, nor according to kind and color, like an artificial and imitative silent image. For these things do not even according to nature, nor indeed in all other respects, manifest the Prototype.

For indeed the Son is an image of his own Father's essence of a man; but it happens to deviate in age or kind or mind or power or dignity or related things or something else. But the God-Logos unerringly and precisely images in all respects the simple, undivided, and unlike Fatherly divinity, naturally and sovereignly.

For it is not possible to think, as if he were an image of God according to something and deviates from something; nor indeed does he become an 'incomparable' image; nor is it possible through the dissimilar or the lesser or the subordinate that the true and archetypal and greater and self-determining and incomparable might be shown; nor again through the creature can the natural form of the creator be understood. For indeed no other nature demonstrates the other within itself. But even the Father is found to have become without subsistence, when the heretics do not teach the character.

Not of his hypostasis. But even the invisible, uncomposed, and formless God does not possess an image such as those they claim is imitative. And he clearly dissolves their argument and their induction, saying: 'To be equal to God was not considered a robbery.' And Moses also leads forward concerning a natural image, saying thus: 'Adam begat Seth according to his image' (Gen 5:3). Yet Seth was not necessarily of a different substance from Adam, yet he called the image and likeness of the essence an 'idea'.

But also concerning man, he says, it has been written, that he is 'an image and glory of God'. But nowhere, O you ones, has it been written that man or any other creature is to be 'an emanation of the glory of God and a character of the hypostasis'. It is something else to be a man as an image of God, that is, the thing made of the maker, just as Solomon says concerning the product of a carpenter: 'The maker is perceived in a likeness to the things created'; but it is something else to be, according to the same form and identical and co-ruling, an emanation of glory and a character of hypostasis, in-dwelling and unerring. For he says: 'He who has seen me has seen the Father' (John 14:9). But he who has seen a man has not seen God, just as he who has seen the product has not seen the carpenter.

But it is also necessary that for the only invisible God, that image is to be only invisible, and not the visible man according to the image. Therefore, the Son is not like any other: for he writes, 'Who shall be conformed to the Lord?' (Rom 8:29). Nor is he unlike his own Father: 'For I and the Father are one' (John 10:30), he says. And those who take the concept of the creator's image upon him, they resemble Nebuchadnezzar, worshipping an unconscious image made by someone.

And God justly cast out Adam through the disobedience from the paradise; but the Son brought in the thief, and Adam with him, and the whole common race, as being altogether equal in divinity and goodness and lordship to the one who cast them out. Where has it been written that 'the Father is incomparable' to his own Only-begotten? Or that his Son is the creator and judge of all, according to his divine nature and the infinite nature of all things removed from them, is a 'creature'? Or altogether that at no time 'he was' (John 1:1)? Or where did the Father say privately, 'Create a son for me,' or the Son say?