Free Will and the Imago Dei
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Prometheus Moulding Man from Clay, by Constantin Hansen, AD 1858 |
God made man with the potential of perfection, created in the Image of God, which is reflected in our human freedom. To create us to become perfect, so that we might be perfected in love, God had to make it possible for us to also reject Him. Love is an action of the will.
Man chose against God, so the Image within man’s nature was marred, the likeness of God (the free action accomplished by the will) was lost.
Man’s purpose, which was found in his design as a reflection of God, was lost in the rejection of God. Our life, which was a gift from God and imparted by His Breath, was also marred, shortened, and could no longer reflect the fullness of God’s will - it would not be eternal, abundant, or transcendent over the material world.
Adam's freedom now always tends towards sin and against the Perfection of God’s Image, and his will is expressed in our natural wills, which proceeds thought, rational cognition, and language.
We inherit the capacity and propensity to sin in Adam, the human prototype and origin of our shared human nature, which means that the will we express is our own, in that we express it and are dependent upon it for life, but that we are not the ones who originated it.
Our personalities are the result of our human nature (innate in our physical composition), our will to live, for power, for sexuality, which accumulates decisions, forms our future choices, and determines our memories (which is the internal reflection of our outward experiences, reflected and refracted in our mind/nous).
Therefore, our human will arises from man’s common nature in the personhood of Adam. While will emanates from personhood, our primal will originates in the person of another, which is the difference between our inherited (gnomic) and free will (personal).
St. Maximus Confessor taught that Christ had a human will, but not the inherited, natural, broken will of Adam - Therefore, Christ’s will arose in His own Person, was completely attuned with the Will of the Father, and could have expressed self-will, but chose not to, and thus was an expression of human perfection and able to “recapitulate” (literally, “to re-head”) the human race to God.
This is why the Orthodox Church expresses that Christ had two wills, one fully God and an expression of the Second Person of the Trinity, the Logos and Son, and the other was a fully human will. The human will is not evident because it was always expressed with God’s Will, and thus can not externally be differentiated from God’s Will. It was also effectively argued by the Father’s of the Syriac Tradition, which has a non-essential (non-Platonic) anthropological view (which sees the human person as a materially and causally receiving compound without an essential ousaic nature), that it was therefore not expressed, and that “self-will”, which is commonly understood as the human will, was a result of the Fall, and was therefore not present within Christ, who was, while a full expression of humanity, was a compound of body and soul formed around the essential and indivisible Person of the Son. It was then argued that Christ had only one will, one observable expression of action, and therefore, if expressing a human will, was expressing it as compound of the will of the single person. In this way, the Syriac Tradition affirmed that will issues from person, implying “logos” and cognition, and is not primarily an expression of impersonal “nature”.
In the sense of causality, therefore, to say that will precedes personality is correct, just as it precedes thought.
The Cappadocians insisted that God commanded man to "become god”. If we see this in terms of energy, expressed action, this entails our wills willing as God wills, and our actions to be aligned with God’s actions. This restores our purpose, which was created in the Image and Likeness of God and commanded to obey God. The call to obedience and divination are one and the same call. Thus, through surrender, obedience and submission to God’s will, cooperating with God, we become “gods by grace”, which, in no sense, alters our reality as created or separated from the essential being of God.
Our broken wills keep us from doing this, from acting in harmony with God’s will, our wills naturally choosing what is not of God. Our own will is then the opposite of salvation.
To unite with the Will of God and the Works of God, the believer must make a choice, exerting his free will. Because of man’s “double-mindedness”, his inherited and broken gnomic will, then the will of the believer must constantly choose, based upon what has been revealed, not upon what is “natural”. This work must be constantly done throughout life so as to maintain this state of submission and cooperation up until death. This is why “he that endures until the end shall be saved!”
As the will is trained to do good through good habits, the process becomes simpler, and thus, the process of obedience to God is described as an ascent. It could just as easily be described as a “descent”, for man’s relationship with God becomes more obedient, more oriented towards repentance, more pliable and open to change, which makes man able to live life as God intended living according to his original purpose.
It is in this sense, not in any other, that man becomes God, as he emulates and become one in action with God’s will. This oneness of action accomplishes God’s Will, which has already been revealed to us perfectly in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. To do God’s Will is to live within our purpose, and to live within our purpose is our mandate of authority, our primary point of attractiveness to others, and the balance point upon which family love and social harmony become a moving icon of the heavens. This living harmony, mirroring the heavenly order of Christ’s throne room, was the original understanding of Christian Enonomy, and was thought to be the reflective value of icons, although this meaning was increasingly lost after the political triumph of iconodulia and the popular philosophy turned more towards an apology of the objects of veneration, rather than the function of actions to picture reality.
This is the outward manifestation. Inwardly, there is no change in essence, only in energy/action, and it is this that is the difference within the relationship. In relationship, we are, through Christ, as Christ is to God - we are gods relationally through grace. While we never can become joined to the Trinity, we can, through God’s work of redemption and unconditional, unlimited love for us, be treated as and relate to God the Father in the Son. This is how we are “joint heirs with Christ”, and how we can cry “Abba Father”, receiving the “spirit of adoption”.
We are kept in God’s love and held in life eternally by God’s Grace, His Presence, experiencing it either as Heaven or Hell, but we experience it according to our experience with God’s will: aligned and submitted to it, receiving it as life and light within ourselves, or closed to and rejecting it, experiencing it as external fire of torment, loneliness and alienation!
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