When we think about the human being as made in the image of God, we could start
by thinking about man as a bridge between the physical and the immaterial world.
On the one hand, the human being is an animal, a physical living being with sensation, imagination,
emotions and sense memories.
On the other hand, the human being is a spiritual person with a soul that has uniquely immaterial
powers or faculties, the intellect and the will.
Characteristics of our life that reflect these two spiritual powers are found in things like
conceptual thought and reasoning, free decision making and moral responsibility, the capacity
to know and love God and to pray.
All of these things reflect our spiritual nature.
The key thing to keep in mind according to the teaching of the Catholic church, is
that the human being is one thing, body and soul.
They're not two substances, a soul and a body, each of which is independent, an entity in itself.
Instead, there's one substance, a spiritual animal, an embodied person.
I am both my body and my soul as one thing.
The human being is made in God's image primarily then because we're spiritual creatures.
We're especially Imago Dei, due to our rational faculties of intelligence and will.
We're most like God by knowledge and by love.
In fact, we're most like God when we come to know God and love God, because then in
our spiritual faculties we reflect, we image, what God is.
But we're also like God due to our bodily nature, which reflects our spiritual and personal dignity.
When a person touches us on the shoulder to comfort us, for example, that's a spiritual
and personal gesture as well as a concrete physical act.
So it has a spiritual dimension to it and it can, in a way, image the compassion, not
only of a man, but behind that remotely, the compassion of God.
Aquinas says that in a certain respect, human beings are more in the image of God than angels
in so far as they can communicate human life to another person through reproduction.
Just as there is an eternal, immaterial generation in the Trinity of the Son from the Father,
so there's a kind of faint image of this in ordinary human life where parents convey human
nature to children and God creates the spiritual soul in the body of the child immediately
after conception.
This brings us to the question of the first couple or the first human community,
which is symbolized in the Bible by the figures of Adam and Eve.
The Catholic Church affirms that there is a first beginning to the human race and that
it took place by means of an immediate initiative of God.
Catholics are free to believe in the evolution of animal species and there seems to be good
evidence of a historical evolution of animals that took place over many millions of years,
but there's also something decisively new that takes place when God creates the first
human beings.
These are not merely highly evolved hominids who have higher brain functions and
opposable thumbs or other unique animal attributes, though of course they do have all this, but
the first human beings are also human beings with spiritual souls created immediately by
God and not through the mediation of the parents.
Each of us is in effect endowed with a spiritual soul created immediately by God.
The beginning of this process inaugurated something new in creation, the human story,
the human drama wherein human beings began to be as spiritual animals created in the
image of God.
In addition, based on scriptural teaching from Genesis, St. Paul in Romans,
and a host of other passages, the Catholic Church teaches that the first human beings
were created in a state of grace.
That is to say Adam and Eve were created with faith, hope, and love, grace given to their
spiritual faculties by which they had an elevated knowledge and love of God that was supernatural
in kind.
They were given this in view of a potential life of friendship with God, which, had they
not sinned, would eventually have been confirmed in beatitude, the vision of God and the glorification
of their physical life as well.
Aquinas argues that the first human beings were subject to God in their reason
by virtue of this supernatural grace of the knowledge and love of God.
In addition, they enjoyed a special privilege that we no longer have, of having their sensate
emotional life fully subject to reason, and their human bodies completely subject to their
souls.
That is to say in the state of original justice, not only were the first human beings friends
with God, they also experienced the deep integration of their passions and emotions and instincts
with their spiritual life.
They also were promised freedom from corruption and death as a dimension of
this primal covenant that they had with God.
This protection from death was not due to a natural immortality.
The human body is naturally capable of mortality in virtue of its innate principles as an animal body.
But God elevated the first human beings into a state wherein their body would have been
protected and conformed to their spiritual immaterial souls in such a way as to be preserved
from death, had they not sinned.
So in losing grace, Adam and Eve also lost the grace or primeval gift that
preserved man from death and that subjected the passions to reason, and reason to God.
There remains in us, however, a kind of hidden desire or nostalgia for a state in life where
we can experience this deeper order.
And that order is one promised to us in the grace of Christ, inaugurated already by the
gift of friendship with God that allows us progressively to turn our hearts and minds
back to God, and to govern our passions humanely in light of our best and most profound spiritual
instincts, while awaiting the gift of immortality in the life to come and in the resurrection of the body.
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