Image & Likeness of God

Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, says Genesis, and the Fathers made much of the two words. From St Irenaeus on, many read the image as what every human being has by creation, reason, freedom, the capacity for communion with God, and the likeness as what the image is for, becoming like God, which is theosis. We possess the one by creation, one of them wrote, and acquire the other by free choice. Not all the Fathers divided the words so, but all taught that the image is darkened by sin and never destroyed, and that Christ, the true Image of the Father, came to restore it. The image is not a part of the person but the whole person, body and soul, and the Church acts on it: at the Liturgy the deacon censes the icons and then the people, because they are icons too.