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. . .Man created “in the image” is the person capable of manifesting God in the extent to which his nature allows itself to be penetrated by deifying grace. Thus the image— which is inalienable—can become similar or dissimilar, to the extreme limits: that of union with God, when deified man shows in himself by grace what God is by nature, according to the expression of St. Maximus; or indeed that of the extremity of falling-away which Plotinus called “the place of dissimilarity” (topos tes anomoiotetos), placing it in the gloomy abyss of Hades. These are the two extremes between which the personal destiny of man may veer in the working-out of his salvation, which is already realized in hope for everyone in the incarnate Image of the God who willed to create man in His own image

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