Man as God First Made Him

In the beginning wickedness did not exist. Nor does it exist even now in those who are holy, nor does it belong in any way to their nature. But later on people began to think it up and to work it out, to their own harm. That is how they also came to invent idols, treating what did not exist as though it did. For God, the Maker of all and King of all, whose being is beyond all substance and beyond human discovery, is good and surpassingly noble. So through his own Word, our Savior Jesus Christ, he made the human race after his own image. Through this likeness to himself he made man able to see and know the things that really are, and he gave him also an idea and knowledge even of his own eternity. His purpose was that man, keeping his nature unspoiled, should never depart from his idea of God or draw back from fellowship with the holy ones. Instead, having the grace of the one who gave it, and having also God’s own power from the Word of the Father, he was to rejoice and have fellowship with God, living the life of immortality, unharmed and truly blessed. For since nothing hinders his knowledge of God, he always beholds, by his purity, the Image of the Father, God the Word, after whose image he himself was made. He is filled with awe as he contemplates the Providence that reaches through the Word to the whole universe. He is raised above the things of the senses and every bodily appearance, and by the power of his mind he clings to the divine things in the heavens, the things known to the mind alone. [a]

For when the human mind has no dealings with bodies, and has none of their cravings mixed into it from outside, but is wholly above them, dwelling with itself as it was made at the beginning, then it rises above the things of the senses and all human things and is lifted up on high. Seeing the Word, it sees in him the Father of the Word as well. It takes delight in contemplating him, and it is renewed by its longing for him. This is exactly how the Holy Scriptures describe the first man created, the one who was called Adam in Hebrew. At the beginning, they say, his mind was turned toward God with a freedom untroubled by shame, and he kept company with the holy ones in that contemplation of the things known to the mind which he enjoyed in the place where he lived, the place the holy Moses called, in a figure, a garden. So purity of soul is enough by itself to reflect God, as the Lord also says: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”