We are made in the image of God. This is the central anthropological claim of the Judeo-Christian tradition. But its familiarity can sometimes keep us from contemplating its meaning and applying it to our lives. The image of God that we are presented with in Genesis 1 has a great deal to teach us about ourselves and how we should actively image God. In other words, contemplating the image of God according to Genesis 1:26-2:3 can disclose what it means to be made in that image, according to Genesis 1:27.
Let’s consider how our manner of giving our attention, of being present to things — objects, people, ideas and tasks — can conform to the image of God according to Genesis 1 or depart from that image according to the logic of the Fall in Genesis 3. These texts have a great deal to tell us about acting and being fully human in an era where digital distractions vie for our attention.
God, the creator of good things
The hallmark of creation is Goodness: “And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness” (Gn 1:3-4). This verse invites us to contemplate what this simple structure reveals.
First, the things God creates are good. Therefore, we, too, are good.
Secondly, it reveals that God is himself good. The point may seem too obvious to warrant comment, but all too often in the ancient world the gods were not portrayed as being good, and their creations were ad hoc, self-serving and violent. In Genesis, the creatures that God makes good are expressions of God’s own goodness.
Thirdly, then, consider how profound is the statement that the almighty, transcendent deity, Goodness himself, looks at a creature, sees it, and sees that it is good, even very good (cf. Gn 1:31). God attends to the particular creatures in their turns — light, the earth and sea, vegetation, the heavenly bodies, birds and fishes, and the animals — and beholds and acknowledges their goodness. God beholds the whole thing as “very good” (Gn 1:31). God has given creation good existence; the gift is truly given, such that God’s own goodness inheres in the creature.
Genesis implies, then, an analogy of goodness, corresponding to the analogy of being. God exists in himself and, necessarily, we exist insofar as we have received the gift of being from God. So the sentences, “God exists” and “I exist” use the term not univocally but analogously. My existence is unlike God’s, but it is also like God’s. More pointedly, God in some way shares his existence with us; our existing is a participation in God’s existence. Similarly, God creates the creature as good in a manner analogous to his own goodness because God expresses, communicates and even shares and cultivates his own goodness within us.
Our freedom and the call to love
As humans, the goodness proper to our nature includes our reason, as itself a participation in the divine Logos by which we are made. And it is because we have reason that we, like God, can behold a creature or even God himself, and “see it, that it is good.” But once we perceive the goodness inhering in a creature or in God, we are immediately obliged to revere that goodness. So, we can see how reason implies morality since our rational capacity makes us uniquely responsible to see and acknowledge, to revere and cultivate the goodness in the other. Reason and morality, then, are prerequisite to authentic human freedom and the capacity and obligation to love.
In fact, Genesis’ motif of goodness evokes precisely God’s love. Love is both the perception of and delight in the goodness inherent in the other and the willing of the other’s good. Lacking either delight or willing the other’s good implies something less than love. A young man may be infatuated with a woman because he perceives goodness in her, but if that delight is not accompanied by willing her good, then his delight is unworthy of the name of love. Conversely, if willing the other’s good is not accompanied by delighting in the goodness within the other, it would be hard to call such “benevolence” real love: dutiful altruism, perhaps, but not love. Perfect love entails both true feeling and willing the other’s objective good.
To broaden our scope, in fact, Genesis 2 describes Adam’s active imaging of God in love. God puts Adam into a garden, and what is a garden other than a place of delight (“Eden” means delight), where one cultivates the goodness of lower creation to make it a place of still greater delight? A vegetarian, Adam takes dominion over the animals by naming them, but this Edenic state suggests profound harmony and the absence of death or violence. However, it is finally when he sees the woman that he perceives her goodness and responds in joyful poetry. Moreover, he acknowledges the obligation he owes her that follows on receiving her goodness, as he celebrates leaving mother and father behind to be joined to his wife interminably (cf. Gn 2:23-24, cf. Mk 10:6-9).
GENESIS 1:26-31 AND 2:1-4
26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." 29 And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day.
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation.
4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.
The Fall: Becoming like God in the wrong way
The fall is tragically ironic. In Genesis 1, humans, made in the image of God, were given dominion over all lower creation. In Genesis 3, a serpent dupes and subjects them: With the promise to become like God, he deprives them of communion with the God who lovingly creates goodness. The image, given to them in creation, is marred, and they become like God in the wrong way, partakers of the serpent’s subtle, wicked seizure of power rather than of God’s loving dominion.
Eve sees and desires a real good — being like God — but she fails to see that this good was already given and can be more fully realized through loving obedience rather than trying to seize divine prerogative for herself. Only through imaging God as a creature in free subordination to the creator can we image God properly; attempting to image God without accepting our creaturely status images God in some way, but it is a way that vitiates our nature and therefore the image in us. The social result is that they can no longer look on each other with innocent love, beholding the goodness in the other without disordered desire, dissimulation, or the will to dominate, but their own wickedness transforms their gaze such that nakedness is now a source of shame.
We are made in the image of God and for the destiny of growing into the likeness of God. Part of our imaging God is to see, delight in and revere the goodness in others. Our loving service of creatures is analogous and habituates us to our hope for beatitude in eternally beholding God’s goodness. On the other hand, the fall not only alienates us from God but entails an attempt to become like God on the wrong terms, terms that reject our creaturely status and instead involve the seizure of power. These dynamics play out in our manner of being present to others.
Our modern crisis of distraction
God is transcendent, infinite. As such, not only does God know all things, but his attention is infinite; no amount of attention given to one thing lessens his attention to everything else. In other words, God is infinitely present to every molecule, atom, particle in the universe. In Genesis 1, God considers each creation as they come about, and as God beholds them, the text leads the reader to behold them and contemplate the goodness of creation, one part at a time. But in fact, God, in his unity and simplicity, sees, perceives, acknowledges, delights in and reveres the goodness of all creation wholly and simultaneously (Gn 1:31).
One of the greatest temptations, especially in times of stress and change, is that we can be drawn into an endless search for more information to take control of our future.
We are called to imitate this gaze, but we can do so in a wrong way, a way that rejects our creaturely status, reflecting our fallen proclivity to mistrust God and to seize divine prerogatives. In our mass consumption of information, we try to be present to a vast amount of creation simultaneously or in rapid succession, but in so doing, we fail to be present to any of it. The dynamics of this tendency are many. We can dissociate from our immediate circumstances and obligations, fleeing stress but neglecting our immediate realities and responsibility to love. We can indulge in idle curiosity, a term that was traditionally viewed as a snare for the soul (curiositas) but which society has transformed into a virtue. We can excite our senses in ways unchaste, gruesome or merely cheap; dopamine is a powerful drug only a screen swipe away.
One of the greatest temptations, especially in times of stress and change, is that we can be drawn into an endless search for more information to take control of our future. Moving and buying a new home? How much time might we spend on researching lenders, housing market trends, the Fed’s plans and school districts, or running numbers and plotting out various scenarios and contingency plans? Or, in politics, how much time do we spend keeping abreast of national and international news developments? How many stories about the same event do we consume, and how often is it for mastering talking points or confirming our pre-existing perspectives rather than gaining insight or reconsidering what is good and just?
Now, each of these examples is inevitable to a degree, unless we make the happy decision of fleeing the world for a life of religious contemplation. Parents must take responsibility for their households, and members of a republic and world power must take responsibility for the nation’s domestic and international politics. But there comes a point where our time spent consuming data no longer corresponds to our responsibility to make rational and just decisions.
Obsessing over information can be a way of trying to take control, of refusing to trust God. “Let me just run the numbers again” can be a way of reassuring ourselves that everything will be okay, that we can master our own destiny. “Just one more article” can help us seek refuge as our hopes fail or reassure us that the other side is as ignorant or wicked as we thought; that we have rightly perceived good and evil. We must take responsibility, but we must also be realistic about our limitations and manage our attention accordingly. Grasping for control over our destinies or the narrative of right and wrong is a fool’s errand; theologically, we can see how we attempt to mitigate our creaturely vulnerability or seize divine prerogative rather than entrust ourselves to the creator. We must, instead, trust God and be faithful to our immediate realities, their goodness, and our attendant obligations.
The holy art of attention
Our appropriate and virtuous manner of imaging divine presence is the inverse of the attempt to seize power. God is infinitely present to everything, and we are tempted to be present to many things at once. But we thrive and imitate the creator’s attention as creatures when we are wholly present to one thing at a time. God alone can be wholly present to everything at once, but in giving our whole attention to one thing — person, object, task or idea — and in perceiving, acknowledging and revering the goodness in that one thing, our attention to that one thing is more analogous to God’s.
Rather than seizing power, we can allow ourselves to be seized by the goodness of a creature or, indeed, of the creator. In being so enamored, we gaze at that one thing as God gazes: as the creator gazes at his creation in love or as the persons of the Trinity gaze at each other in love. As God comprehends all goodness, we can study and contemplate goodness, participating in God’s own knowledge of goodness. This vision corresponds to the vision of Genesis: the beatitude God envisions for us; Adam’s vision, lovingly attending to his garden and the woman; and even the vision with which God himself sees. In contemplating a creature’s goodness, we, too, can glimpse God’s delight in creation as “very good” (Gn 1:31).
We thrive and imitate the Creator’s attention as creatures when we are wholly present to one thing at a time.
This singleness of attention corresponds to what psychologists refer to as a state of flow. We thrive and are far more fulfilled by and effective in our tasks if we’re wholly absorbed in them; not that we should be so focused on our tasks as to resent being distracted from them. That would be pride in or idolatry of lower goods. Rather, as creatures we are necessarily subject to being called away from one delight or task to a higher or more urgent obligation, which then merits our undivided attention. How many saints are known for their humility, in being willingly and cheerfully called from their urgent obligations to attend wholly to the person before them?
These principles apply to every area of life — from gardening to professional lives to private study — but perhaps most vividly to the domestic church. Spouses owe each other frequent, undivided attention, the continued cultivation of the other’s growth, and delight itself. As parents, we naturally delight in our children and their milestones as they realize their capacities: first smiles, words and steps; learning to read, study or create. Correspondingly, children have a natural desire for parents’ attention, guidance and praise: our seeing them, that they are good; our cultivation of their excellences; and our delight in their developing agency. This attention is life-giving, obligatory and one way whereby we image God’s love to them.
Consider the cultural cliché of alienated teenagers: how much filial disaffection results from parents’ failure to behold, cultivate and delight in the goodness in their children? In turn, how much of culture’s failure to see God’s goodness and love stems from parents’ failures to image it? The image of God in us is marred by sin, and this distortion is magnified by our jealousy of our time, our obsessions with our goals and our addictions to our diversions.
Learning to rest
Achieving the inner peace necessary to so image God must be found in prayer. We must return every morning and throughout the day to a position of creaturely trust and rest in God’s loving vision. We must give up distraction, attempts at control, and jealous claims to “our time” as though it is our own. Instead, we must look on “our time” as God’s gift to us to image him in love, in beholding and cultivating the goodness of the other.
Indeed, creation’s culmination in divine rest (Gn 2:2-3) implies as much. God models for us checking our preoccupation with temporal tasks. In such rest, our attention is freed to behold the creatures around us, to delight in their created goodness and to praise their good Creator. This reframing of created goods allows us to re-orient ourselves from the exigencies of temporal existence or the idleness of curiositas to rest in God and consider our eternal destiny; in other words, to use the created goods in reference to Goodness himself, rather than as means of satisfying our passions or taking control of our futures.
Rather than indulge in the whims of curiositas, let us give ourselves to studiositas, the habit of prolonged, serious and reflective attention to the other. This habit of studiositas in created goods reinforces our ability to pray and prepares us for the beatific vision, when we will be caught up in God’s own vision of himself, in simple, unchanging adoration of Goodness himself.
Questions for reflection
• How does God’s act of creation in Genesis 1 reveal our vocation to love? What are some of the ways we can live out this calling in our present circumstances?
• How does the Fall play out in our modern culture of distraction? What are some areas in our own lives where we seek knowledge and control in place of reliance on God’s love for us?
• Conversely, where do we find ourselves practicing holy attention, or “flow”? Where might the Holy Spirit be calling us to an increase in the virtue of studiasitas?