Deification and the Divine Image

Abstract

One of the really significant features of Khaled Anatolios' s groundbreaking study is that it obliges us to think more clearly about what the divine image is that is restored or liberated in the process of our redemption – our theosis. That this is pre-eminently the image of ‘filial’ love and intimacy is rightly at the centre of this discussion: to be ‘deified’ is to be renewed in the likeness of the eternal Son (not to acquire a set of detached supposedly divine qualities). But this in turn draws our attention to what it means to say that the Son or Word is the primary image of the eternal Father. The Son glorifies the Father: Anatolios underlines this theme perhaps more copiously and creatively than any theologian in the last century. And this glorification may be understood as the Son making manifest who and what the Father is, and the Son fulfilling or actualizing who and what the Father is. Not that there is some primordial ‘lack’ or potentiality in the Father's hypostatic being which the Son ‘makes good’: we are bound to avoid any such mythologizing narratives where the divine life is concerned. There is no precosmic time in which the Father exists alone, needing to be fulfilled by the generation of the Son, no progression of the Son towards the realizing of a more perfect union with the Father: the creed and anathemas of Nicaea saw off such errors. But we can say that in the generation of the Son, the Father establishes that the divine being in its eternal quality and actuality as Source is eternally and perfectly actual only in pouring out the infinite excess of its life in the active reality of the divine life as Word, as the ‘derived’ life which shows that the divine Source is inexhaustible – that it exists precisely, intrinsically, as Source, as a life that is never contained within itself. The Son/Word is first and foremost that eternally actualized reality which exists because of the truth that divine love is love without containment; and as we discern this, we see how the very being of the Word – and of the Spirit – manifests that the Source of divinity is immeasurably generative, capable of generating what is equal to itself in divine beauty and liberty. So limitless is the divine life as Source that it cannot generate what is less than itself; and so too, what is generated cannot be thought of as living with anything less than a full equality of the glory, radiance and freedom that is intrinsic to the generating action of the divine Source, so that the divine life cannot be simply a relation of two reciprocal agencies – a theme that is familiar in much of the theology of the fourth century.

The fundamental texts in Scripture that open this up are to be found in the Fourth Gospel, especially in the Farewell Discourses of chapters 14 to 17, where we read of how the eternal Word receives and shares the glory, the active radiant outpouring of life and generative love, which belongs to the eternal Source; and the Word incarnate ‘glorifies’ the Father in reflecting this generative love in every moment of the fleshly life of Jesus – supremely in humiliation and death, because this fleshly life in its mortal fragility is the means by which creation is fully brought to life, literally re-generated. The Word is the image of the Father in receiving and reflecting the Father's generative power; the Spirit in eternity is the actualization of the fact that the generative freedom of the divine Source is not exhausted in the mere binary of Father and eternal Son but exceeds even this. The divine actuality is the generation of the Word by the Father; but it is also the eternal ‘opening’ of this mutual gift of Father and Son to the further hypostatic reality which represents the fact that this simple mutuality is not exhaustive of divine life and generativity. The existence of the Spirit eternally establishes and manifests the truth that the divine ‘excess’ of generative love is never exhausted, not even in the eternal Word. One aspect of what the Father gives the Son is precisely the capacity to bestow divine life in his own self-outpouring, not only to give back to the Father what has been given, in a mechanical symmetry. The Father bestows on the Son the Father's own abundance of bestowing; or in the language of the tradition, the Father both ‘breathes out’ the Spirit and equips the Word to ‘breathe’ it in turn. So in relation to creation, the Word exercises a generative power appropriate to a being that is itself already generated, and the Spirit is active and free to unite all the created fruit of the Word's ‘generated generativity’ to the Source. The Son is free to breathe the Spirit he receives so as to generate finite images of his filial life. The Son/Word and Spirit are in themselves the supreme and complete eternal actualizing of what the divine Source necessarily is, and thus, in relation to the created order, are equally involved in the active manifestation of divine actuality.

If we are created in the divine image, it must be in the image of that ‘generated generativity’. Because there is an eternal image of ‘derived’ or received glory and liberty, it is possible for us who are radically derived and contingent beings to exist (despite our generated and dependent character) in God's image. We might imagine that to be ‘like God’ would be to be free of dependence or origination; but we are able to become like God within our basic dependence because the eternal Word/Son in whose likeness we are re-created is precisely that divine agency that receives life and gives it in turn – giving it back to the Source, affirming and fulfilling the Source's character as giver, and giving it in turn to the finite world in and through the divine Spirit. As we have noted, the Spirit in this context is what constitutes the life of God as an eternally moving and fertile exchange – not a simple reciprocity of one and another, sameness and difference, but unity in difference; not two ‘containers’ of divine life or act confronting and balancing, but a mutuality whose inexhaustible flow is always in excess of any ‘content’. And what this implies for our status as created in the image of the Image is that we fulfill our vocation of living this image through the exercise of our own dependent generativity, our own giving of what we have received. And in this giving of what we have received, our own nature as gift is further opened and empowered to receive – not only from that other that is immediately before us but in the entire network of difference and exchange that is the finite world. So one way of thinking of the state of fallenness and frustration from which we need deliverance is to see it as sterility: we have not acknowledged the gift, we have not adequately glorified the source, and so are incapable of generating new life in others or in our dealings with the rest of the created world, and thus incapable of receiving life as we need to; − or, to come at it from a different angle, we fail to generate new life or liberation, and so are incapable of worshipping as we ought and so of being nourished as need to be. This is where Anatolios's focus – following on the brilliantly illuminating scheme outlined by Scheeben – on the liturgical dimension of our redemption is so constructive. We are to be freed for worship because it is in this liberation for the giving of proper glory to God that we receive more fully that freedom to give proper attention to creation itself, and especially to God-imaging humanity in its responsibility for its own communal life and its life in community with the rest of the material order.

Here, then, is a crucial link between glorification and justice. Anatolios's reworking of Anselm with help from Cabasilas allows us to rethink the essential theological definitions of justice in terms of what is appropriately to be given in any context whatever: justice is the adequate response of the agent to the claim upon them of the gift that the other represents and embodies. It is not to do with deserving or achievement but a gift appropriate to the unchanging nature of what we encounter: the other bears for us the fundamental character of a gift from God and an invitation from God in their character as reflecting the eternal Logos, who in turn reflects the eternal Source. In human beings that reflection can be called ‘image’ since it shares most fully in the act of loving intelligence that is the agency of the Son/Word; but it is important to remember that the entire created order carries the imprint of that loving intelligence and so mediates the divine gift. To see and act ‘justly’ is to respond as if to the self-giving of God as this is embodied in the world we inhabit. In our response, we ‘glorify’ what we encounter in the sense that we acknowledge and celebrate its rootedness in God and also actively fulfill and enhance its capacity to show and bestow life. When Jesus in St John's Gospel (5:41–4) charges his opponents with seeking glory from one another, he reminds them that it is only as glorified by God, as recipients of divine gift, that we are set free for the work of healing and restoration: the exchange of ‘glory’ simply between finite beings cannot open out on to the landscape of uncontainable exchange that is the trinitarian glorification into which Jesus draws his followers. To be glorified in and with Jesus, to be included in the eternal mutuality of Father and Son, is to be acknowledged by the Creator as reflecting the divine mystery and inexhaustibility and to be made able to perceive that inexhaustible depth in whatever and whoever we share the world with. We grow into the freedom to see and act justly as we grow in this awareness of the depth within and without us, the unborn, unconfined reality of divine love.

For all the apparently abstract nature of these attempts to clarify the grammar of trinitarian glorification and its overflow in us, the practical implications are immediate and significant. The theological framework offered by Anatolios and by Scheeben before him, in this reconfiguration of the language of divine justice and satisfaction, provides a theological hinterland for a renewed discourse of human rights that escapes from the confines of a model based in entitlement and moves us towards a paradigm that is focused both on human dignity and on the principle that what needs releasing in us is the capacity for an indefinitely expanding circle of mutuality in which life is given and received, honored and enriched. In such a paradigm, the starting point is recognition in any and every other of the active gift of God. But if we approach this with the theological picture just outlined, we shall understand that recognizing the other as God's gift does not mean categorizing them as a passive recipient of our benevolence. To be the embodiment of divine gift is to be involved in the divine action: when I attend to and seek to serve the other, it is in the expectation that this interaction will release the other's capacity for actively giving life – not primarily to me as a ‘benefactor’ (which would be a form of closed reciprocity) but to an indefinite set of others, with whom both I and the immediate other are always already bound up in the network of created interaction and interdependence. If the do ut des principle is at work here, it is not simply about a return expected for myself but about the empowering of a gift that may go in any number of directions and will return to me as giver only through the totality of this interdependence. I work to build the giving capacity of the other and I do not know where or how it will return, since it will work only through the continuing flow of life in the totality. To connect this with the theological model we outlined, this is how the eternal glorification of the Father by Son and Spirit is reflected: the mutual gift of divine life in eternity is not a matter of some equal exchange of ‘content’ but of a mutuality always overflowing into what is ‘other to the other’.

The ‘right’ of any human subject is thus the capacity built into their human dignity as divine image for life-giving – including the gift of calling one another to judgment, inviting one another to conversion. The ‘right’ of the poor, the abused, the silenced, is not simply the claim of redress for their suffering but the hope and expectation that they will be released into their full human capacity to share life with others and bring others alive. Redress is an intrinsic aspect of this; we should not forget this, or overlay it with any sentimental and premature rhetoric about forgiveness. To think about justice in the broader sense I am seeking to explore is not to deny or ignore the need for basic things like the apportioning of responsibility, the appropriate rectification of loss and injury, the protection of the sufferer and so on. But the proper honoring of human ‘right’, the recognition of the jus belonging to all human subjects, goes beyond this, requiring a just society to enable not merely to compensate. In other words, justice includes but does not stop with ordinary legal redress and protection, and a fully coherent understanding of a just and ‘lawful’ society entails the building of a culture in which the perspective of nurturing and releasing human capacity is always in view. And this also involves, as noted already, attending to how a culture allows and responds to the naming of injustice and offense, and the call for liberation. Part of the freedom to give life is the freedom to challenge what restricts or injures life: the voice of those who have been silenced needs to be audible so as to bring into view the sterility that comes from injustice. It names not only the suffering of the oppressed but also the deprivation of the oppressor or the indifferent that arises from a situation of abuse and suppression.

Thus the grounding of a theological ethics in the theology of ‘glorification’ developed by Anatolios makes possible a re-setting of some aspects of our social vision. If, as many theologians would agree, we need some probing of the discourse of human rights as it is commonly practised, we need a deepened analysis of the idea of human dignity; and if that analysis has at its centre the doctrine of the divine image in human existence, we need in turn a fuller clarity about what the divine image ‘images’. The theological structure Anatolios opens up begins from the principle that the means of our healing is the enactment in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of the eternal recognition by God of God: the Father generates the life of the Son and (since there is no other source for that life, as the anathemas of Nicaea explicitly declare) recognizes in the Son the life that is ‘his’, as the Son recognizes in the Father the life that is eternally given to himself. Each thus establishes the other's identity, each lives solely through the other's life; each ‘glorifies’ the other in the sense that they affirm and manifest what is to be loved and adored in each other. They do perfect ‘justice’ to each other, not only by giving each other what is due but by realizing through their mutual relatedness each other's unique mode of living divinely – which also entails realizing their distinct modes of breathing or uttering the Spirit.

In the incarnate life of Jesus, God the Father is presented with the reflection of the paternal gift in the human existence of the incarnate Son (grounded in the reflection of the paternal gift that is the divine existence of the Logos); God recognizes God in and through the life of Jesus and – as Anatolios argues – especially in that aspect of the incarnate life which has to do with Jesus's grieving solidarity with our sinful captivity and his embrace of the consequence of human rebellion against God in the rejection that culminates in the cross. The divine justice is ‘satisfied’ not by an artificial stratagem that permits a bare transfer of nominal culpability, as in the most unreflective forms of substitutionary theory, but by God's ‘reiteration’ in history of the eternal recognition and glorification of the Son. The Father sees the Son doing the Father's own work in the human identity of Jesus, and the incarnate Son sees the nature of the Father's everlasting gift, and enacts this in the mortal life of Jesus (cf. Jn 5:19–23). The incarnate Son glorifies the Father ‘justly’, gives the Father what is due in adoration and obedience, embodying the divine will for mercy and healing. The Father responds ‘justly’ in acknowledging the humanity thus reconstituted in Jesus' words, acts and sufferings as imaging the eternal divine gift. ‘Only look on us as found in him’: this phrase, from a well-known Anglican eucharistic hymn, expresses the prayer to be ‘recognized’ in this way by God. God loves God's self in the eternal Word, and so too in what the eternal Word structures and indwells –in creation: and especially in the human nature restored in its freedom for God and one another that is the life of the Word made flesh.

And so, to bring this back to the ethical and social focus of this stage of our discussion, our theosis involves being seen by God as if we were God – being re-formed in the divine likeness; it involves being gifted by God with the capacity to see God in one another; and it involves the freedom to see others in and on behalf of God in a way that similarly re-forms what is possible for them. We are set free to acknowledge and realize the ‘right’ of one another, in the sense of grasping what is the appropriate stance to take towards them, and (so far as humanly possible) seeing in them what God sees, and willing for them what God wills in virtue of God's own recognition of the divine image in them. The deified life, in other words, is a constant re-embodiment of what is going on in the life of Jesus; a ‘filial’ life, not only in regard to the sharing of Jesus' relation with God the Father, fundamental as that is, but in regard to the restoration of filial hope and possibility for others, as part of the ‘imaging’ that is the Son's eternal and incarnate identity. And this also bears, as Anatolios suggests, on the spirituality of vicarious repentance or transforming solidarity, the spirituality that expresses the divine freedom to identify with what is other – in this case, what is other because of its lostness and lack of wholeness. If the heart of the divine freedom is to be uncontainable gift, bestowing itself without reserve so as to find itself fully in the other, this is the pattern that is enacted first in the Father's relation to the coeternal Son and Spirit, and second in the divine love of the created order which holds it faithfully in being as the finite reflection of the eternal; and then in the specific narrative of Jesus' identification with the godless and excluded, refusing any duality between himself and those in need of healing (a theme, it is worth noting, already at work in Hebrew Scripture, in the prayers of Moses – Ex. 32:32, discussed, with its context, in detail by Anatolios – and David −2 Sam. 24:17 – for example). And this is the pattern to which the believer's life is to be conformed.

If this is the case, then the holy life is characterized most centrally by the recognition both of oneself and of God in the most needy or alienated other. In the Fourth Gospel (Jn 17:19), Jesus describes his forthcoming death as a self-consecration’ (hagiazein): he makes himself holy by identification with the criminal and outcast, by his readiness to be ‘recognized’ as one of them and his own recognition of them as his kindred (cf. Heb. 2:11–15). That recognition by Jesus – which takes the form of his execution on the cross – is simultaneously, as Hebrews implies, the sanctification of those with whom he identifies: his recognition of himself in them transforms what can be recognized in them. His glorification of the Father by his self-offering in adoration and obedience is also a ‘glorifying’ of his fellow human beings, especially those least obviously recognizable as showing the divine image. He grieves for and laments their condition and exposes himself to the results of that condition, to the ‘godlessness' of extreme abandonment and loss, and that solidarity in pain and shared contrition (the acknowledgement of failure, sin and loss) is the expression of Jesus' holiness, deliberately pursued in his willing encounter with the hellish reality of extreme violence, injustice, agony and guilt.

So there is no way of talking about the holiness of the believer without reckoning with this dimension. The believer's willing immersion in the risk of solidarity, the willingness to be numbered with those wounded both by their betrayal of God and by their betrayal by others, is the consequence of recognizing their ‘right’ in the sense we have been giving to the word here. Some modern theological critiques of rights language note the risk of obscuring the most significant truths about Christian ethics by providing a kind of moral carapace of self-defense by way of such language. But in the theological context we have been exploring, the opposite is true: talking theologically about rights is exposing ourselves to both the call and the judgment of God as well as giving thanks for the gift of ‘glorification’: theosis is indeed a cruciform matter, in which we are refused any moral standing that is exempt from the summons to recognition and identification, to standing with those in need or guilt. As Anatolios argues in his intriguing discussion of Girardian theory, this implies also that we must not deny our complicity in the world of scapegoating and rivalry; in naming this, we name ourselves as part of the situation, shaped by its constraints. It is a perspective that has something in common with Bonhoeffer's insistence in his Ethics on Stellvertretung, standing in the place of the other, speaking with and for them, as the basis of an active discipleship grounded in christological perspectives, and refusing the lure of an ideal of innocence; though it goes a bit further than Bonhoeffer in connecting this with the intratrinitarian pattern of recognition and being-in-the-other that we see in the divine life as revealed in the words of the Farewell Discourses. The activities of the ‘holy’ community, in this perspective, are to be understood as the disciplines that connect us again and again with the wholeness of the world we inhabit as the place where God is to be recognized and served. We are, in the church's liturgical action, re-formed in solidarity with our human and non-human neighbors in creation; we are stripped of our pretensions to a self-generated and self-protected security, a defense against the neighbor's claims. Anatolios makes the connection of this with the liberation theology of Jon Sobrino and others very clear in his last chapter, but rightly insists that all this happens in the context of a radical renewal of our awareness of the gift of ‘glorification’ in the common life of the sacramental body. We must put off the self-made armor of mutual isolation and be reclothed in Christ – a recurring image not only in the New Testament, as in 2 Corinthians 3–5 but also in baptismal language in the early church. And in this renewal of our minds (Rom. 12:2), what is happening is that we are being changed into the likeness of Christ, ‘from one degree of glory to another’ (2 Cor. 3:18).

This juxtaposition of glory with solidarity in human guilt and disaster is one of the most deeply counter-intuitive themes in Christian theology and ethics, but it is incontestably implied in the model of glorification we have been considering. In the divine life, we are invited to contemplate a difference that is dependent on nothing but the relation of generation between Source and Word – a difference that is therefore more radical than anything we can imagine from a finite point of view (that is, this is not a difference where we can say that x is like y in this or that respect and unlike in other respect) and yet at the same time a difference with no barrier to mutual recognition. Recognizing the ‘self’ in the other is where we start in understanding the trinitarian life of God; and that eternal recognition, which is also the fulfilled and perfect enactment of each of the hypostases, and thus the reflection to one another of abundance and beauty, is in turn enacted in the world's history. Because it is lived out in this world of alienation and violence, it becomes a uniquely costly enterprise for the incarnate Word: the otherness in which the Word must find and recognize both itself and its Source is an otherness of destructive will, an ingrained resistance to the divine love which seeks to cut itself off from recognition and recognizability. For the incarnate Word to live out the ‘glorifying’ recognition of the other which is the Word's eternal act is for the Word to inhabit the very place where the pressure is strongest to exclude and deny the divine agency, to inhabit the ‘godlessness’ of the human heart and experience in his own human sensibility the pain of loss and estrangement. In plainer terms, for the Word incarnate to be faithfully what the Word eternally is means the bearing of the consequence of sin and failure, in internal grief and external agony. And so for those called into the Body of Christ, ‘called out’ of the world of guilt, rivalry and refusal, the living of the ‘deified’ life of adoptive intimacy with the Father entails the continuation of that costly ‘refusal of refusal’, the readiness precisely to abandon the imagined distance of holy living and to recover the calling to inhabit the world of refusal and bear the pain of it in prayer and service and the constant remembrance of glory.

‘Imaging’ the holiness of God is thus inseparable from the solidarity, the representative or vicarious acceptance of unity with sinful, divided and lost humanity, which is the incarnate Word's way of actualizing in history the trinitarian life of mutual recognition. Is this to give way to the problematic trinitiarian pluralism that has been castigated by some recent theological writing, notably that of Karen Kilby? I think not. The criticism has been directed at a trinitarian pluralism which is in danger of being arbitrarily speculative and anthropomorphic, even mythological. But we have not here been discussing solidarity as a something that is exemplified in eminent degree in the trinitarian life, as if this were the ideal version of communal justice. If we take seriously the language of St John's Gospel, we cannot avoid some account of real mutuality in the divine life: each hypostasis actively constitutes the life of the others, and, since there are no contingent differentiating factors involved, each is simply itself in, for and with the others, in the timeless circulation of an overflowing eternal love and intelligence never contained in any kind of closed reciprocity. What that might mean in the life of God is – to put it mildly – elusive, or, more properly, impossible to conceptualize fully, though not nonsensical to talk about. It should be clear that what we are talking about where God is concerned is not a much improved variety of intersubjectivity, but something to do with the basic ‘grammar’ of divine life as interactive and convergent unity, neither a single identity variously conceived nor a plurality perfectly harmonized. The scriptural language of mutual ‘glorification’ tells us at least that each divine hypostasis enacts its fullness and bliss in reflecting what is bestowed and bestowing life to be reflected. The human virtue of solidarity we are thinking about is therefore not a human mode of reflecting divine harmony in the simplistic way that ‘social’ trinitarianism sometimes suggests. We could not use the vocabulary of solidarity to describe the trinitarian life itself. But what we ‘image’ is the divine act of finding identity in the other – which for us, as for any finite subject, means being delivered from the slavery of self-definition and self-protection. Holy solidarity is both the ground of Christian ethical action (the voluntary self-dispossession of following the other-directedness of Christ's action and passion) and the form itself of that action (standing in the same jeopardy as the lost and sinful, being vulnerable to their pain or darkness, literally and physically taking risks alongside them for their temporal and eternal well-being).

I have outlined already how this kind of theological ethic of solidarity might inflect and transform the use we make in our ethics of the notion of rights. There is nothing untheological about making claims for the universal dignity of human beings in God's image and thus for the expectation that all will be treated with justice and respect; nothing crypto-secularist about working for straightforward legal guarantees of protection and redress for all. But an ethic which stopped there would fail to represent the truth that the divine image is not a ‘characteristic’ to be respected but a capacity for a certain kind of action, the action of embracing solidarity and the risk that attends it. We do not simply serve the image in another, we seek to release it – to ‘glorify’ the divine gift that is there, to make this perceptible in whatever measure we can, and in that glorification and release to find fresh hope for ourselves. Deification is irreducibly a shared process, therefore, one in which we are being ‘changed from one degree of glory to another’ in and by our solidarity in Christ and in no other way. To regard deifying grace as an individual gift is to misunderstand it radically.

Which is why it is so essential to link this discussion with liturgical practice. ‘Doxological contrition’ is, it seems, both the condition and the consequence of our standing in Christ: the gift of the Spirit is the gift of a displacement of our fearful self-protection so that we may have boldness towards God; and this displacement allows us to grow in the freedom to recognize and to identify, to stand more definitively with those who are or sense themselves to be cut off from transforming love. Hence the paradoxical nature of the liturgical gathering, called ‘out’ (as the word ekklesia implies) only to be reconnected to the compromised and vulnerable world. And there is an echo here also of the familiar paradox of the monastic, especially the eremitical, vocation, separated from all so as to be united with all. If the Eucharist is simply a matter of some supposed solidarity with Christ that does not result in solidarity with the world Christ is healing or glorifying, it is fatally incomplete. We are invited ‘away’ from our routine preoccupations (Mk 6:31) into a defined and boundaried liturgical space/time where we can resume our basic identity as united with Jesus as recipients of divine ‘glorification’; but that resumed, rediscovered identity is the life of a divine agency that lives both from and for the other – the eternal divine other, but also the other encountered on all sides within the created order, especially the other trapped in an otherness beyond dialectical exchange and transfiguration, the other who is caught in a place where glory is neither received nor given. In worship, above all in eucharistic worship, believers stand in and for such others by standing in Christ; and if their identity in Christ is renewed in those terms, they will exercise that identity in the same spirit of identification with, and grateful hospitality towards the alienated other. To be called ‘away’ is to be called deeper into the glorifying activity that is the trinitarian life itself, as lived in the radically receptive mode of filial love that belongs to the Word in time and eternity.

‘Glorification’ is what we are saved for: that is the central conviction argued in Anatolios's study. It is our liturgical participation in the mutually constitutive gift of life between the trinitarian persons; but that gift, refracted in the world of time and space, is intrinsically a bestowal of, and recognition of dignity in, the lost, guilty and helpless other. It is embodied not simply in the fact of the incarnation but in the identification of the incarnate Word with the sinful and the ‘insulted and injured’, carrying our griefs and the losses we have incurred by our refusal of the glory offered us. And so those who engage with the incarnate Word through the drawing of the Spirit are involved in the same act of identification, through which the self-bestowing life that is God's extends to the lost and transforms them also into channels of glorification.

Because this ‘constitutive gift’ is necessarily, in God, to be thought of as entirely ‘formed’ by its direction towards and constituting of the other, we can say of it, in the context of Anatolios's reading of Anselm, that it is ‘just’; it responds to the other in a manner wholly ‘apt’ or ‘adequate’. It is in this sense that we can say that the incarnate Word's life (including the Word's death) satisfies the justice of God, though in a sense rather different from that which prevails in more familiar (and more modern) theologies of substitution. But when we mortal subjects are caught up through Christ in the eternal ‘justice’ of this mutual gift, our actions towards the rest of creation as well as towards the divine Source are ‘just’, the acknowledgement and enactment of what is rightly due; they acknowledge and are formed by what is there to be responded to in each finite situation – which is the self-bestowing act of God. This is how we most properly speak about inalienable and intrinsic dignity in creatures, and in a very particular sense about the dignity proper to human subjects as made in the divine image, made, that is, to enact as fully as a finite agent can the lifegiving or glorifying love that is infinitely real in the Trinity. The divine action is to be met in every creature, certainly; but human agents have the liberty to be loving and intelligent participants in the exchange of life that is God, to be agents of release and enrichment to the rest of creation as well as receiving that release and enrichment for themselves. Delivered by their incorporation into Christ's Body from the illusions of self-creation and self-protection that erode the fullness of life, they are able to step into the work of honoring and healing what they encounter around them. They become ‘liturgists’ of creation, endowed with the grace to work at reconnecting God and God's world; they do so by the literal liturgical act of standing before God with and for all those who are still imprisoned by sin and suffering, and by the consequent, inseparable activity of living in solidarity with and service to the well-being and fruitful interdependence of the created order.

A theology grounded in the ‘glorification’ that Anatolios explores is thus one that allows a development and enrichment of our theological ethics, and a fuller account of the dignity intrinsic to humanity as embodying the divine image. To the extent that it connects a theology of the image with the eternal exchange that is the divine life, it allows us to see the image as realized or received in the exercise of attentive and lifegiving identification with the other – the human and the non-human other. Because it sees our transfiguration and re-creation as re-appropriated and re-established constantly in the liturgical act of identification with Christ, it offers a resource for a social and environmental ethic in which liturgy is a central category. At the end of his book, Anatolios writes: ‘Such glorification and opposition to the dishonor of any human being certainly include addressing the basic material needs and protecting the fundamental rights of human beings but also transcend these basic requirements and extend to the recognition and celebration of the divine glory manifested uniquely in each human person’.1 This modest contribution to a response to the book is simply a note towards the further development of a theology of the divine image that will re-shape our understanding of those needs and rights in a more consistently theological framework.