What Is the Image of God? — Augustine on the Imago Dei
⏱ 13 min read
You learned the phrase early. Made in the image of God. It came on a Sunday-school sticker, or in the opening pages of a youth-group Bible study, or in a wedding sermon a long time ago — and it has sat, for most of your adult life, in the back of your mind as a thing you would defend if pressed but cannot quite feel on a Tuesday afternoon at the kitchen sink. The doctrine is doctrinally clear. The everyday weight of it has gone thin. And the thinness is uncomfortable, because the woman at the kitchen sink does not look, in any obvious sense, like the image of anything dignified, let alone the image of God Himself.
This is the question Augustine spent twenty years writing into. On the Trinity — the long, slow Latin work he laboured on from his late forties through his middle sixties — is the most patient theological treatment in the Western tradition of what it actually means that the human being is imago Dei, the image of God. Augustine’s answer is not the modern bumper-sticker version. It is more interior, more contemplative, and more useful to the woman at the kitchen sink than any glossier formulation. His best language for the imago Dei, though, is not in the systematic On the Trinity. It is in the prayer at the start of Confessions, where he names — in three short, devastating passages — what it means to be a creature made for God and what that making is for. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries a similar slow form into daily companionship, if you would like a place to take this practice after the article. For now — read slowly. The question what is the image of God deserves more than the Sunday-school version.
Augustine’s working claim, threaded across both Confessions and On the Trinity, is that the image of God in you is not primarily a thing you have. It is a thing you are oriented toward. The image-of-God-ness of the human being is, in Augustine’s hands, less a static endowment than a dynamic vocation — the soul’s whole structure is built to find its true rest, its true thought, its true love in God Himself, and the imago Dei is what the soul looks like when it is moving in that direction. The image is not on your forehead. It is in the orientation of your loves.
The first passage: made for Thyself
“Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”
— Augustine, Confessions
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
This is the third sentence of the entire Confessions, and it is the most condensed thing Augustine ever wrote about the imago Dei. The whole doctrine is in those two clauses. Thou madest us for Thyself. That is the image of God in you, in one sentence. You were not made for yourself. You were not made for your work, your marriage, your motherhood, your good causes, your spiritual achievement, your reputation. You were made for Him. The for is the whole doctrine. The image of God in the human being is the structural fact that she is made for God in the same way the eye is made for light — not as an arbitrary endowment but as the orientation of the whole creature toward the One who made her.
This is the line that, if you let it, will quietly reorder your sense of what it means to bear God’s image. The modern reading of imago Dei often goes in the direction of dignity-as-attribute: you are made in the image of God therefore you have inherent worth. The dignity reading is true and was, indeed, the doctrinal foundation of every Christian human-rights argument from the early church through the abolition of slavery through the modern declarations. Augustine does not deny it. He goes deeper. The dignity is real because the orientation is real. You have worth because you are for God — and what you are for is what you are like. The image is the orientation. The dignity is the consequence.
Our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee. That is the second half of the same claim. The restlessness of the human heart is not a defect of the human being. It is, in Augustine’s account, the diagnostic signature of the imago Dei in you. A creature made for God who is not at rest in God will be restless by structure, the way a homing pigeon is restless when it has not yet been allowed to fly home. The restlessness is not failure. It is evidence — evidence that you are not made for the things that have failed to satisfy you, evidence that you are made for the One who has not yet been allowed to be your rest. The image of God in the human being announces itself, in this life, most often as the unrest of being for someone you have not yet rested in. (For the woman whose restlessness has become its own felt weight, the matched slow read of Augustine’s famous line is at my heart is restless until it rests in you — Augustine, slowly read. And for the modern Christian woman who has been told her need for rest is itself a failure of devotion, what the Bible says about self-care walks the scriptural grounds.)
Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise. Notice the verb. Awakest. The capacity to delight in God is not produced by you; it is awakened in you. The image of God in the human being is not a thing you maintain by spiritual effort. It is a sleeping structure that He awakens, by His own initiative, slowly, over years, into the active form of itself. Your part is not the awakening. Your part is the not-sleeping-through-the-awakening when it comes. The image of God in you is more like a seed than a statue. The seed is intact whether you tend it or not. The whole question is whether you are letting Him do the tending.
The second passage: the light of my heart
“Thou light of my heart, Thou bread of my inmost soul, Thou Power who givest vigour to my mind, who quickenest my thoughts, I loved Thee not.”
— Augustine, Confessions
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
This is the most piercing of the three passages, because of the last four words. Augustine is naming the four most internal facts of the human being — the light of the heart, the bread of the inmost soul, the power that gives vigour to the mind, the One who quickens the thoughts — and confessing that each of them is God Himself. The whole interior life of the human being, in Augustine’s account, is sustained by the God whose image she bears. You do not light your own heart. You do not feed your own inmost soul. You do not generate the vigour of your own mind. You do not quicken your own thoughts. The four most intimate functions of being a human being are, in Augustine’s account, the continuous work of the One whose image you are.
This is the line that does the structural theology underneath the doctrine of the imago Dei. You bear the image of God because He is the light of your heart. You bear the image of God because He is the bread of your inmost soul. You bear the image of God because He is the power that gives vigour to your mind. The image is not a tattoo on the soul. It is the ongoing dependence of the soul on the One whose presence sustains it, moment to moment, breath to breath. The image-of-God-ness of the woman at the kitchen sink is the simple fact that she is being held in being, this very moment, by the One she was made for, and the holding is so constant and so quiet that she has stopped noticing it.
I loved Thee not. Augustine ends the sentence with the devastating admission. Notice what he is doing. He is not flagellating himself. He is naming the gap between what God has been to him — light, bread, power, quickener — and what he had returned in answer. The four attributes of divine sustenance have been continuous. The love-back has not been. The image of God in him has been intact the whole time; the love that the image was made to direct toward its Original has been absent. The grief in those four words is the precise grief of a creature who realises, at thirty-three, that she has been ignoring the One her whole structure is for. (For the woman who has been at this kind of slow self-examination and does not have a page to put the first sentence on, Christian self-care: 20 ideas that aren’t bubble baths is the wider letter to the depleted, and inductive Bible study for beginners walks a slower way of reading scripture from the inside out.)
For the modern Christian woman, this is the passage that turns the doctrine into worship. What is the image of God in you? It is, in Augustine’s account, the structural fact that the One who sustains your every interior moment is the One you are for. The doctrine is intimate. The doctrine is also, in the same breath, an invitation. The light of your heart, the bread of your inmost soul, the power that gives vigour to your mind — He is the One you have been made to know, to love, to delight in. The image of God in you is the ongoing fact that He is doing the work. Your part is the slow turning of your love toward Him.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of slow turning. A short passage each day, room for the small response — the awakening Augustine names — and no demand to perform the imago Dei you are slowly receiving the active form of.
A somatic for the image of God
Pause here. Augustine’s vocabulary has a body to it, and the body is one of the places the imago Dei is most easily felt before the mind catches up.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let both feet press flat to the floor. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the eyes lower — not closed, just lowered. Notice the slight settling of the body. Now, on the next breath, do not think the words but rather receive them, slowly, in the centre of the chest: He made me for Himself. He is the light of my heart. He is the bread of my inmost soul. He sustains me, this very breath. Each phrase on its own exhale. Not as a performance, not as a thing to feel. As the simple report of what is already true, what your body has been carrying the whole time, and what the imago Dei in you has been quietly oriented toward since the moment you were knit together.
Do this three times. Then let the awareness rest, for a moment, on the recognition that the dignity you have been hoping to feel about yourself is not produced by the rehearsal. It is the slow body-and-soul reception of what was already true. The chest opens a little. The shoulders lower. The breath goes deeper. That is the body learning what Augustine had spent a lifetime articulating — that the image of God in the human being is, at its deepest, the body and the soul’s continuous dependence on the One who made them both for Himself.
The third passage: trembling and kindling
“I trembled for fear, and again kindled with hope, and with rejoicing in Thy mercy, O Father; and all issued forth both by mine eyes and voice, when Thy good Spirit turning unto us, said, O ye sons of men, how long slow of heart?”
— Augustine, Confessions
This is the smallest of the three passages and the one most easily missed in a quick reading. Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Augustine is describing a moment — one of the small private moments in the long arc of his conversion — in which the Spirit turned unto us and the imago Dei in him answered. I trembled for fear, and again kindled with hope. Notice the dual response. The image of God in him registered the nearness of God by trembling and by kindling. The trembling is the reverence; the kindling is the love. These are not opposed. They are the two motions of a creature recognising the One she is for. The reverent fear and the rising hope are the same response, registered in the body and the soul at the same instant, by a creature whose imago Dei is finally being awakened to its own orientation.
This is the passage that, for the modern Christian woman, will slowly recover what the bumper-sticker version of imago Dei has lost. The image of God in you is not a piece of static moral worth that the modern world will or will not honour. It is the responsive structure of a soul made for God, and the response is not optional. When the Spirit turns toward such a soul, the soul trembles, and kindles, and rejoices. The response is the imago Dei in action. The dignity is real because the responsiveness is real. (For a slow daily companion to this kind of body-and-soul reading, a beginner study Bible for women is the quiet entry-point for the woman starting back at the beginning without embarrassment.)
All issued forth both by mine eyes and voice. That phrase is doing precise work. The response of the imago Dei in Augustine, in this small private moment, was both by mine eyes and voice — the tears and the words. The soul, when it finally recognises the One it is for, responds with the whole of itself. The eyes weep. The voice speaks. The body kindles. The mind, the affections, the will all turn together. The image of God in the human being is the whole creature turning toward her Original, not a single faculty of her doing so. This is why the modern fragmenting of devotion into the mental-only or the emotional-only or the bodily-only versions has felt unsatisfying. The imago Dei is integrated, and Augustine’s prayer is the slow recovery of the integration.
O ye sons of men, how long slow of heart? Augustine ends the passage with the Spirit’s question — and the question is the same question that has been quietly asked of you, often, in the long stretches of your own walk. How long slow of heart? Not as a rebuke. As an invitation. The imago Dei in you has been slow. The Spirit is patient. The slow-of-heartness is not the contradiction of the image; it is the present condition of the image-bearer who has not yet been fully awakened. The awakening is what the question is for. The how long is the gentle naming of the gap that the rest of your life is for closing.
What this image-bearing will look like over a year
Augustine took years to enter the active form of the imago Dei he is naming. The first month of slow reading feels like learning a new vocabulary. The third month, the vocabulary begins to feel less foreign. By the end of the first year, the woman who has been daily turning toward the One she was made for has not become a more polished version of herself. She has become more herself — the imago Dei in her, slowly awakened, moving toward its Original, kindling in the small private moments when the Spirit turns unto her. The dignity she had been hoping to feel about herself is now the unforced background of who she is. She does not have to argue herself into worth. She is for God, and the for-ness has begun to settle into the centre of her.
The hard days will still come. The dignity will hold differently — not as a thing she has to defend on a Tuesday afternoon, but as the simple ongoing fact that she is held in being by the One whose image she bears. The waves will still come. The image-bearer will respond differently. (For the sibling articles in this contemplative-fathers series, see who am I in Christ — Murray on abiding identity and what is my identity in Christ — Owen on the indwelling Christ.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each day, a short passage and room for the slow turning Augustine names — the small daily awakening of the imago Dei toward the One you were made for.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Augustine’s slow vocabulary — made for Thyself, light of my heart, bread of my inmost soul, trembling and kindling — into a daily companion built for the woman whose question what is the image of God in me is, at last, ready to stop being doctrinal and start being daily lived.
