There are questions that never grow old; they barely change their guise. One of them runs through history like a taut, almost dangerous thread:  “God created man in his own image and  likeness”  (Genesis 1:26–27).

The phrase—which continues to unsettle me each time I reread it—belongs to Genesis, but perhaps it doesn’t entirely belong to any one book. It is, rather, a persistent question, an open wound in the human conscience.

Because if the God of monotheism—and the absolute principle of other spiritual traditions—is invisible, infinite, formless, and limitless, what kind of mirror is man? A faithful reflection, an illusion… or perhaps an intrusion, a usurper?

Perhaps much of philosophy—and literature as well—has been nothing more than a long attempt to answer that uncomfortable uncertainty.

I. The mirror that does not reflect a face

Jewish tradition was the first to be suspicious of the overly simplistic answers offered by polytheism. It forbade images of God not out of aesthetic austerity, but out of metaphysical clarity. To attribute form to God—Maimonides would say with almost surgical precision—is to diminish him.

The “image,” then, cannot be visible. It must be something more subtle and demanding: moral intelligence, responsibility, freedom, the capacity to respond. There, man is not a portrait, but a possibility.

However, the suspicion persists. Because even intelligence seems too meager a likeness for one who proclaims himself omnipotent. And then, on the margins, the Gnostic hypothesis appears, ever tempting: what if the world were not the work of the supreme God? What if the “image” we bear were that of a lesser craftsman, a clumsy or ignorant demiurge?

The systems of Valentinus and Basilides—whose modern nostalgia reappears in visionary artists like William Blake—introduce a fascinating crack: man is no longer an image, but a fragment; he does not reflect God, but remembers him.

Salvation then ceases to be obedience or grace and becomes knowledge: awakening, remembering, freeing oneself from the burden of the material world and recovering the divine spark that we carry within.

II. The face that enters the mirror

Faced with this temptation to break away, Christianity introduces a bolder assertion than any Gnosticism: there are not two gods, nor two worlds. The same God who creates is the same God who saves. And, even more: He makes Himself visible.

In the letters of Saint Paul there appears a phrase that rearranges the whole question: Christ is  “image of the invisible God”  (Letter to the Colossians 1:15; cf. 2 Corinthians 4:4).

The face exists, it is Jesus Christ, and he has entered the mirror without breaking it.

It is not a pious metaphor, but an ontological statement: the invisible has become visible without ceasing to be infinite, and the human has not been destroyed by that contact, but elevated.

Here the Christian tradition becomes especially precise. Saint Augustine of Hippo places the divine image in the soul—memory, understanding, and will—as a trace of the Trinity (De Trinitate, books IX–XIV). Saint Thomas Aquinas goes further: he distinguishes between nature, grace, and glory; the image not only exists, but can be restored, grow, and perfected (Summa Theologica, I, q. 93).

The image, therefore, is not a static fact: it is a vocation in progress towards a face.

III. The Return of Iconoclasm: Islam, the Orient, and the Reformation

The Quran insists on the absolute transcendence of God. Man is not God’s image in the strict sense, but rather his representative: guardian, vicar, servant. There is no mirror—or rather, the mirror should not be confused with the face.

In certain Eastern traditions, moreover, the very problem of the image seems to become blurred. The Hindu Brahman—absolute and impersonal reality—, the personal Īśvara of some Vedic currents, or the Tao as an ineffable principle suggest forms of the divine that perhaps cannot be conceived as a face, but rather as participation in an order or ground of being.

There the mirror becomes more diffuse: not so much a reflection of a figure as immersion in a presence.

With the Reformation, the issue becomes more dramatic. For Martin Luther, the divine image has been deeply wounded by sin (Commentary on Genesis; On the Servitude of the Will, 1525); for John Calvin it remains, yes, but deformed (Institutes of the Christian Religion, I, XV).

The mirror exists, although it no longer reflects clearly.

Salvation does not consist in rebuilding it by our own strength, but in allowing God to restore it by pure grace.

However, even in that wound remains an intuition shared with the Catholic tradition: man is not self-sufficient. Likeness is not a conquest, but a gift.

IV. The Reverse Side of Genesis: The Hidden Face Within

But there is also another inversion—agnostic or openly atheist—of the question:  the great modern reverse of Genesis .

Xenophanes had already ironically suggested that if horses had gods, they would imagine them as resembling horses (Fragments DK B15–B16). Much later, Ludwig Feuerbach would formulate this suspicion systematically: it would not be God who creates man in his image, but man who projects onto God his longings for justice, immortality, and fulfillment (The Essence of Christianity, 1841).

In this reading, the Face ceases to be a revelation and becomes a projection; the mirror no longer reflects transcendence, but rather returns—enlarged, sublimated—the image of the one who looks.  A mirror of the mirror.

Modernity will then slowly shift the problem inward, toward the inner self. It is no longer so much a question of discovering the face of God, but of finding a supposed divinity hidden within the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche takes this inversion to its ultimate consequences. After proclaiming the  “death of God”  (The Gay Science, §125), man is left suspended before an abyss: either he accepts the void, or he tries to occupy the place of the absent one.

The Nietzschean superman (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883–1885) is not exactly a divine man, but rather a creator of values: someone who no longer receives meaning from above, but intends to produce it himself.

From there, certain modern currents —from some Promethean humanisms to certain transhumanist and posthumanist fantasies— have dreamed of a man emancipated from all transcendence, absolute master of himself, capable even of redesigning his own nature, of  “killing death”  and, consequently, of becoming divine.

There is, perhaps, an unexpected Gnostic resonance in it: the promise of salvation through self-transformation, of overcoming natural limits, of a humanity seeking to redeem itself.

But here the old question reappears:

What happens when the mirror tries to become a face?

Carl Gustav Jung will shift the question to the psychological interior: the image of God as an archetype, as a profound figure inscribed in the human soul (Aion, 1951; Answer to Job, 1952).

The problem is no longer whether God has a form, but whether man can reconcile himself with the deepest image of himself, the one in which—in a fragmentary and symbolic way—the divine is also reflected.

Salvation then becomes an internal process: integrating fractures, reconciling opposites, shaping a personal whole. But a risk also arises: if everything happens internally, the mirror may cease to reflect a true face.

Later, Oswald Spengler introduces another, no less unsettling, suspicion: perhaps we not only imagine God, but each civilization imagines the divine from a unique sensibility. His theory of “cultural souls”—Apollonian, magical, Faustian—suggests that every religious experience is born embodied in a specific historical form, inseparable from a way of looking at the world (The Decline of the West, vol. I–II, 1918–1922).

However, this does not necessarily invalidate the religious question; perhaps it compels us to formulate it with greater humility. There may be a difference between the potential underlying truth and the symbolic, cultural, and historical forms that clothe it. The fact that religions speak different languages ​​does not necessarily prove that what they speak of does not exist.

Perhaps religions are nothing more than different wellheads on the same well from which each culture lowers its own cauldron in search of common water.

The difficult question—and perhaps unsolvable without an act of faith, or without a renunciation of it—is whether these differences mean that there is nothing at the bottom of the well or whether, precisely, they suggest the opposite: that we all try to name, clumsily and partially, something that exceeds us.

Perhaps the difference between believers and non-believers lies not so much in the existence of the well as in whether one believes that the cauldron has ever touched water.

And it’s reasonable to suspect that, even when we think we’ve found it, we’ll still be arguing about its taste.

Simone Weil proposed another path—more humble and closer to mystical Christianity—(Gravity and Grace, 1947): we are not made in God’s image through fullness, but through the capacity to empty ourselves. Likeness to God does not consist in possessing, but in yielding space. Not so much in digging and possessing a well as in  becoming a well ourselves : becoming depth, availability, thirst, and welcome.

It is the emptiness it reflects.

V. Conclusion: between the mirror and the face; the image as a promise

Traditions diverge, but all revolve around the same tension: man as a being oriented towards the divine, although incapable of fully encompassing it.

Perhaps the phrase from Genesis is not a description, but a promise. It doesn’t say what we are in a finished form, but what we are called to become.

Being the image of God does not mean already resembling Him, but being able to become like Him.

The ancient Christian intuition continues to resonate here—from the Eastern Fathers to certain contemporary formulations—: God became man so that man could participate, in some way, in the divine.

In the Christian tradition, this lost likeness is not recovered through secret knowledge, nor through Promethean self-sufficiency, nor even through purely inner exploration, but by contemplating a concrete face: that of Jesus.

The problem—or perhaps the hope—is that contemplating a face does not yet equate to resembling it.

Who can be like Christ?

Perhaps all spiritual life is nothing but the effort, always incomplete, to approach an impossible likeness.

Finally, it can be said—without completely closing the mystery—:

If God is invisible, the only true image will always be, in some way, an image in progress.

Between the mirror and the face, between what we are and what we are called to be, opens up that unsettling space where human freedom dwells.

And perhaps there—not in the possession of certainty, but in that living tension—is where the image of God is fleetingly glimpsed: not as a finished portrait, but as a face still on its way.

Or perhaps like the trembling reflection of the deep water of that well over which, for centuries, we have continued to lean to ask ourselves if Someone is looking back at us.