Karl Morrison: 'The image of God is one thing; what is contemplated in th eimage is another': Augustine's Paradoxes of Art and the Self"

In this paper, I address the seeming anomaly that Augustine of Hippo employed the paradoxes of art to decipher what it meant to have been made in the image of God, and still he regarded the use of actual objects of religious art with mistrust.  My main source will be his exegesis of "Know thyself" in De Trinitate.  I propose to outline Augustine's basic connections between making physical images and making images in the mind and heart.  Thereby, I plan to uncover the consistent framing structure behind the deceptively playful evidence of paradox.  Uniting contraries in expressing the same truth is a sign of cognitive dissonance and its revolution, often in analogy.  Augustine's skill in rhetoric gave him both skill in paradox and a keen sense of the limits of analogy.  He affirmed contraries as mutually reflective statements of truths that could not be proven by natural reason, and that could subvert it.  He also defended his conviction of the indelibility of the perceiving, thinking individual, both body and soul, and of the integrity of the individual as a creature of flesh, mind, and spirit from the Creation into the eternal hereafter.  In my title, I have used a quotation from Nikitas Stithatos (ca 100-ca 1090), as hesychast.  Some passages in Augustine state the same conclusion, though less axiomatically.  I have used this quotation as a reminder that the Byzantine tradition forming in Origen's doctrines was available to Augustine (at least in some Latin translations) and took quite a different turn in the road from the individualist direction Augustine followed, one that led self-knowing through transforming theosis to divinization instead of through sanctification to perfect humanity, each person refabricated, like a re-cast statue, with his/her memories and glorified flesh. Quite different conceptions of the articulations of Scriptural truth in verbal and in visual representations were at issue.